By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 9/20/24

On March 7, 2022, two weeks after Moscow entered the civil war in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News from Moldova that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft. 

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then also backed the no-fly zone. But within days the Pentagon shot down the idea as it engaged in a consequential battle with the State Department and members of Congress to prevent a direct NATO military confrontation with Russia that could unleash history’s most unimaginable horrors.

A no-fly zone “could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. 

President Joe Biden was caught in the middle of the fray. Pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and the press corps was unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war.

Biden ultimately sided with the Defense Department, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin  backed him up:

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia.”

(The administration plan was, and apparently still is, to bring down the Russian government through a proxy counteroffensive and an economic and information war, not a direct military one.)

Blinken, who stepped out of line to speak above the heads of the president and the Pentagon, lost that round. It’s surprising he kept his job. But he survived and now he’s come back for more. 

Relentless 

Blinken’s recklessness emerged yet again last week when he peddled a story — eagerly picked up by The Guardian and The New York Times — that Biden would approve a British request to fire its Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia.

The Guardian story on Sept. 11 said: 

“The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia, with a decision understood to have already been made in private.

Speaking in Kyiv alongside the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, Blinken said the US had ‘from day one’ been willing to adapt its policy as the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine changed. ‘We will continue to do this,’ he emphasised.”

To fire British Storm Shadows, Ukraine would have to depend on British technical soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to actually launch them and on U.S. geolocation technology. German Chancellor Olaf Shulz revealed those British soldiers are already in Ukraine.

In other words, it would be a NATO attack on Russia, dressed up as a Ukrainian one. It would mean the U.S. and Britain were at war with Moscow, something Blinken seems to want and said was going to happen. 

The next day Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that launching such missiles into Russia “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

Nevertheless, The New York Times ran a story on the same day with the headline: “Biden Poised to Approve Ukraine’s Use of Long-Range Western Weapons in Russia.” 

The Guardian added:

“British government sources indicated that a decision had already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia, although it is not expected to be publicly announced on Friday when Starmer meets Biden in Washington DC.”

Blinken’s words evidently raised British Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s hopes that he would satisfy his desire to strike Russia with his nation’s arsenal of long-range missiles, despite Putin saying that meant direct war with NATO.

Blinken and the British are trying to lead us to the brink. 

Sanity in Arlington

Except that the Pentagon, the purveyor of the most monstrous violence in world history, has pulled the world back from it. 

For at least the second time — publicly known — the Department of War secured peace from neocon recklessness fronted by Blinken. 

Starmer was sent back on his chartered British Airways flight from the White House meeting licking his wounds. He’d evidently been led by Blinken to believe that it was a done deal: the U.S. would let Britain attack Russia with its long-range missiles using U.S. technology — even if the U.S. wouldn’t allow its own long-range ATACMS to be used. 

The Times of London reported that Biden withholding approval “surprised British officials who had listened closely to hints from Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, that America was edging towards authorising Storm Shadow, an Anglo-French weapon which relies on American GPS guidance systems.”

Starmer’s mania to strike Russia illustrates the British elite’s continuing pathological hatred of Russia, extending back centuries, compared to a perhaps more tempered, though determined, American geostrategic rivalry with Moscow. 

Biden’s Limits With the Neocons 

Biden has proven himself a supreme warmonger, his advocacy for the illegal invasion of Iraq and his complicity in the genocide in Gaza as the most egregious examples. 

Like the two presidents before him, Biden allowed neocons to worm themselves into positions of power in his administration. But the extent to which Biden himself is a neocon, as opposed to a traditional warmonger, is subject to question.

As a creature of Washington of more than half a century, he seems to respect the military’s judgement about military matters and, on his good days, understands that even America has limits. 

Barack Obama let Hillary Clinton, the “Queen of Warmongers,” bring Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland into his administration. Donald Trump let neocons John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into his.  And Biden has Blinken (and for a time Nuland too.)

Instead of banishing these people, they are allowed to linger and drag the U.S. into evermore perilous failures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind a mountain of squandered dollars and an ocean of blood.

As a careerist, Blinken said what he had to say to get to where he is. Obama in 2015 wisely decided against arming Ukraine after the Nuland and Biden-led 2014 coup because he did not want to antagonize Russia, for whom he said Ukraine was a vital interest, while it was not for the U.S. Obama also feared U.S. arms would fall into the hands of “thugs” — meaning neo-Nazi Azov types, whom Obama was well aware of.

Blinken at the time was Obama’s deputy secretary of state.  To support the president’s position, he told a conference in Berlin:

“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door. It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

But once he was freed of the restraints of Obama, he joined Biden’s aggressive Ukraine policy at the top of the State Department. From that position, and with a power vacuum in the White House because of Biden’s dementia, Blinken has been openly pushing the neocon agenda, laid out plainly in the 2000 report of the Project for a New American Century. 

And what is that agenda? In another age, before it became a dirty word, it would have been proudly proclaimed as imperialism. It contains all of the hubris and sense of invincibility and impunity of any empire in history.

PNAC plainly promulgates that no power or alliance of powers will be allowed to rise up to stand in the way of the neocons’ mad quest to harness American power to achieve world domination. An alliance of powers such as that of China, Russia and the BRICS countries, which has only accelerated in opposition to unhinged, neoconservative adventurism.

No matter the many disasters piling up, notably Iraq, Palestine and now Ukraine, the neocons are undeterred and unrestrained. It’s about power and murder but it is made palatable to themselves with flowery language about America saving the world for democracy.

Their belief in their own supremacy, cloaked in an American flag, remains fanatic, no matter the death and destruction they cause. They do not understand that American power has limits and to test that, they risk everything.

In 2019, Blinken teamed up with arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan to write a Washington Post op-ed arguing for more aggressive use of U.S. power abroad and against U.S. domestic trends towards non-interventionism.

With Kagan’s wife Nuland out of the Biden Administration and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan crucially siding with the realists, Blinken has emerged as the undisputed leader of who George H.W. Bush called the “crazies in the basement.”

That was 30 years ago. The neocons are in the penthouse now and only the restraint of the Pentagon and Sullivan’s persuasion brought Biden back from the brink.

This time.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

Apparently Mr. Karaganov just isn’t going to let this insanity about nuclear options go. He’s still at it. – Natylie

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/12/24

The respected Russian intellectual Sergey Karaganov, who serves as the honorary chairman of Russia’s influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and is also an academic supervisor at the Higher School of Economics’ School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs, is once again talking about nukes. He made global headlines last year after he proposed a nuclear first strike against Europe, which was responded to here, and just gave an interview to Kommersant about updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine.

Although the preceding hyperlinked response supported this proposal at the time, upon further reflection, it’s clear that it won’t deter the West for the reasons that’ll now be explained. The current doctrine enumerates four scenarios in which nukes can be used, which include threats to the existence of the state and large-scale conventional aggression. Karaganov believes that they should be used “in the event of any encroachment on our territory and our citizens” in a nod to Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk.

While he’s sure to have his share of supporters among the hawks at home and Russia’s most passionate supporters abroad, they’re all overlooking a few “inconvenient facts”. First, any encroachment of Russian territory can be framed as threatening the existence of the state if the Commander-in-Chief truly wants to use nukes in response, but the current one won’t resort to radical measures as explained here. Basically, Putin has worked hard to avoid World War III by miscalculation, and he won’t get careless now.

The second point is that the aforementioned calculations are already in force for a reason regardless of however anyone feels about this since dropping nukes in response to what the government officially considers to be an act of terrorism in Kursk is grossly disproportionate. Not only that, but it would suggest that Russia can’t conventionally respond to territorial incursions due to presumed weakness, which isn’t the case seeing as how it just launched a counteroffensive to expel Ukraine from that region.  

Third, even if the doctrine was changed according to Karaganov’s vision, it’s unlikely to specify the targets and scale of Russia’s nuclear response since the exact circumstances can’t be known in advance. If decisionmakers were legally compelled by a revised doctrine to use nukes no matter what, then they might opt to drop them on their own territory or just across the border in order to avoid escalating. This observation segues into the fourth point about why their hands shouldn’t be tied in the first place.

Mandating a nuclear response to any cross-border encroachment whatsoever can lead to Russia’s adversaries manipulating it into using such weapons exactly as Lukashenko warned last month that Ukraine sought to do through its invasion of Kursk. It was explained here that “China and India would be under immense pressure to distance themselves from Russia, not just by the West, but also for appearance’s sake since they wouldn’t want to legitimize the use of nuclear weapons by their rivals.”

And finally, Russia can already employ discreet channels to convey its intent to use nuclear weapons in circumstances other than its publicly stated ones (or per a novel interpretation thereof as was touched upon in the first point), so updating its nuclear doctrine is pretty much only a soft power exercise. All that it would do is send a strong message of intent, albeit one which ties decisionmakers’ hands in arguably counterproductive ways and which could be easily manipulated as explained.

***

September 11, 2024

Enemies must realize Russia could go nuclear – ex-Kremlin adviser

The existing doctrine is outdated and does not serve as a deterrent, Sergey Karaganov has said

https://www.rt.com/russia/603875-russia-ready-use-nuclear-weapons

[See also: “Political scientist Sergei Karaganov on the change in Russia’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons”: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7059257]

Russia’s nuclear doctrine urgently needs to be revised to allow a nuclear response to any major military aggression against the country, former Kremlin adviser Sergey Karaganov stated on Wednesday.

The former foreign policy adviser to the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration told the Kommersant daily that the existing document is “woefully outdated” and no longer serves as an effective deterrent.

Adopted in 2020, Russia’s nuclear doctrine does not provide for pre-emptive nuclear strikes and envisages the use of nuclear weapons only in “exceptional cases” in the face of a “threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the country. According to Karaganov, this approach has rendered it nearly useless and has effectively “excluded” the nuclear deterrence factor from Russia’s military and foreign policy arsenal.

“We have allowed the situation to deteriorate to a point when our adversaries believe we will not use nuclear weapons under any circumstances,” the political scientist said. “Having nuclear weapons without being able to convince your enemies that you are ready to use them is suicide.”

A failure to have an effective nuclear deterrent policy “would plunge the world into a series of wars that would inevitably turn nuclear and end up with the World War III,” Karaganov believes, adding that this could happen “within the span of several years.”

“The main goal of a doctrine should be in convincing all current and future enemies that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons.”

His words came amid the continued Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region and Kiev’s attempts to receive permission for the use of Western long-range missiles to strike deep inside the country.

“It’s high time we stated that any massive strikes against our territory give us a right to respond with a nuclear strike,” Karaganov insists. He also called on Moscow to clearly define the “nuclear escalation” steps in the next doctrine to leave Russia’s adversaries no room for doubt about whether it is ready to use its nuclear arsenal and when.

President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated a more reserved position on the issue. Talking to Karaganov at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the president said that Russia was “not brandishing” nuclear weapons and expressed hope that “it will never come” to a nuclear exchange between Moscow and the West.

Moscow “has no reasons to even think about” using nuclear weapons, he said at the time, calling on Russian officials to not even “touch upon” the subject of nuclear weapons unless absolutely necessary.

Later in June, Putin also said that Russia did not “need a preventive strike yet, because the enemy is guaranteed to be destroyed in a retaliatory strike.” He did not rule out changes to the doctrine, though.

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, 9/19/24

Most Americans approached last weekend thinking about how they would spend the much-anticipated end of the work week with their friends and family.

Few realize how close they came to actualizing the scenario so horrifyingly spelled out in Annie Jacobsen’s alarming must-read book, Nuclear War: A Scenario.

72 minutes.

That is all it takes to end the world as we know it.

That is less time than most movies playing at the local cinema.

Most people could not drive to the local home improvement store to buy the materials needed to do the little repairs around the home that usually wait for the weekend.

Walk the dogs?

Play with the kids?

Forget about it.

72 minutes.

And everything you thought you lived your life for would be dead.

And if you survived?

To quote Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors would envy the dead.”

Ukraine, together with many of its NATO allies, has been asking for permission from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to be able to employ precision-guided long-range weapons systems provided by these countries against targets deep inside Russia.

On Sept. 6, at a meeting of the Ramstein Contact Group, a forum where U.S.-NATO military support to Ukraine is coordinated, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally appealed to the group for more weapons support from its Western allies and called on allies to allow Ukraine to use the weapons they provided to strike deeper inside Russia.

Zelensky Seeks ‘Long-Range Capability’

 Zelensky and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, on Sept. 6. (DoD/Chad J. McNeeley)

“We need to have this long-range capability,” Zelensky said, addressing the attendees, who included U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin,

“not only on the divided territory of Ukraine but also on Russian territory so that Russia is motivated to seek peace. We need to make Russian cities, and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”

Secretary Austin, in comments made afterwards, said he didn’t think the use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russia would help end the war, adding that he expected the conflict would be resolved through negotiations. Moreover, Austin noted, Ukraine had its own weapons capable of attacking targets well beyond the range of the British Storm Shadow cruise missile.

Despite Austin’s pushback, President Joe Biden appeared to be on track to give Zelensky the green light he was looking for regarding the use of British-provided Storm Shadow cruise missiles and U.S.-provided long-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles for strikes on Russian soil.

On Sept. 11, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, visited Ukraine, where they held meetings with Zelensky and his newly appointed foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha. 

Blinken & Lammy in Ukraine

Blinken and Lammy, on right side of table in center, meeting with Sybiha, opposite them, in Kiev on Sept. 11. (State Department/Chuck Kennedy

Blinken and Lammy, however, failed to make the announcement the Ukrainians were waiting with bated breath to hear. Instead, Blinken and Lammy reiterated the full support of their respective nations to Ukraine’s victory, adding that they would adapt their support to meet Ukrainian needs. “The bottom line is this: We want Ukraine to win,” Blinken said after his meeting with Zelensky.

The stage was now set for Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, to fly to Washington, D.C., last Friday, where he would meet with Biden and jointly agree to give Ukraine permission to use Storm Shadow and ATACMS against targets inside Russia.

Starmer Goes to Washington

Starmer with members of the press on his way to Washington last Friday. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Russia has long made it clear that it would view any nation which authorized the use of its weapons to strike Russia as a direct party to the conflict. 

In comments to the media in Russia  last Thursday — one day before the Biden-Starmer meeting at the White House — Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear that any lifting of the restrictions on Ukrainian use of U.S.- and U.K.-provided long-range weapons would change “the very essence of the conflict.”  He said:

“This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, European countries are fighting Russia. And if this is the case, then…we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, speaking after Putin’s announcement, noted that the Russian president’s words were “extremely clear” and that they had reached their intended audience — U.S. President Biden. 

Biden didn’t seem happy about the message. In responding to a question from reporters prior to his meeting with Prime Minister Starmer at the White House about what he thought about Putin’s warning, Biden snapped angrily, “I don’t think much about Vladimir Putin.”

Putin in a meeting in Moscow last week.  (Kremlin)

The evidence suggests otherwise.

At a White House press conference that same day, Robbie Gramer, the White House correspondent for Politico, asked John Kirby, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, “Do you take Putin at his words that strikes into Russian territory by U.S. — or British — or French-made missiles would actually expand the war?”

Kirby’s response was telling in many ways. “It’s hard to take anything coming out of Putin’s face at his word.  But this is not rhetoric that we haven’t heard from him before, so there’s really not a lot new there.”

Gramer followed up: “So, in other words, you know, in the deliberations about this long-range strike, threats from Putin are not a big factor for you guys in your deliberations on this?”

“Well,” Kirby responded,

“you didn’t let me finish the answer, so let me try…I never said, nor have I — would we ever say that we don’t take Mr. Putin’s threats seriously.  When he starts brandishing the nuclear sword, for instance, yeah, we take that seriously, and we constantly monitor that kind of activity.  He obviously has proven capable of aggression. 

He has obviously proven capable of escalation over the last, now, going on three years. So, yeah, we take these comments seriously, but it is not something that we haven’t heard before.  So, we take note of it.  Got it.  We have our own calculus for what we decide to provide to Ukraine and what not.  And I think I’d leave it there.”

Just to drive the point home, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, told the Security Council last Friday that NATO would “be a direct party to hostilities against a nuclear power,” if it allowed Ukraine to use longer range weapons against Russia. “You shouldn’t forget about this and think about the consequences,” he declared.

‘Don’t Play With Fire’

Nebenzia in June. (UN Photo/Manuel Elías)

The finishing touches on driving home the seriousness of Putin’s warning was left to the Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov. Speaking to the Russian media also last Friday Antonov said he was surprised that many American officials believed that 

“if there is a conflict, it will not spread to the territory of the United States of America. I am constantly trying to convey to them one thesis that the Americans will not be able to sit it out behind the waters of this ocean. This war will affect everyone, so we constantly say – do not play with this rhetoric.”

Putin’s words had caught the attention of several former U.S. government officials, who had called Antonov for clarification.

“Yesterday’s statements from Vladimir Putin were weighed very carefully here. Several ex-officials called me asking to explain what actually stands behind those statements. I simply replied: ‘Don’t play with fire.’”

Antonov at Arlington National Cemetery in 2018, during a commemoration of the cooperation of U.S., Soviet and Allied armed forces during World War II. (U.S Army/ Elizabeth Fraser, Public domain)

Antonov’s sentiments were likely echoed through existing back-channel communications used by the Department of Defense and the C.I.A.

In the end, the message got through — Biden pulled back from giving Ukraine the permissions it sought.

Most Americans are unaware about how close they came to waking up Saturday morning, only to find that it was their last.

Ukraine Was Ready to Launch

Had Biden yielded to Starmer’s pressure (the British, together with Ukraine and several NATO nations, believed that Putin was bluffing), and signed off on the permission, Ukraine was prepared to launch strikes on Russia that night.

(British soldiers deployed in Ukraine would be needed to operate the Storm Shadows and they are already there, according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has refused to send similar weapons to Ukraine.)

Russia would likely have responded with conventional attacks on Kiev using new weapons, such as the Avangard hypersonic warhead, which would each deliver a blow equivalent to 26-28 tons of explosives.

Russia would also most likely have struck NATO targets in Poland and Romania where Ukrainian fighters are based. And, lastly, Russia would have struck British military targets, possibly including those on the British Isles.

This would prompt a NATO retaliation under Article 5, using a large number of NATO long-range strike weapons targeting Russian command and control, airfields, and ammunition storage facilities.

The Russian response would most likely involve the launching of more Avangard conventional warheads against NATO targets, including Ramstein airbase and NATO headquarters, as well as airbases from which strikes against Russia were launched.

NATO headquarters in Brussels. (NATO)

At this juncture the United States, using nuclear employment plans derived from a nuclear posture which emphasizes the pre-emptive use of low yield nuclear weapons to “escalate to deescalate”— i.e., force Russia to back down through a demonstration of capability — would authorize the use of one or more low-yield nuclear warheads against Russian targets on Russian soil.

But Russian doctrine has no capacity for engaging in a limited nuclear war. Instead, Russia would respond with a general nuclear retaliation targeting all of Europe and the United States.

Whatever U.S. strategic forces that survived this onslaught would be fired at Russia.

And then we all die.

72 minutes.

And the world ends.

We were one stroke of the pen away from this outcome on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024.

This isn’t a drill.

This isn’t an academic exercise.

This is the real world.

This is life or death.

This is your future held hostage by a madman in Kiev, backed by lunatics in Europe.

The question is — what are we going to do about it?

There is an election on Nov. 5 where the next commander-in-chief of the United States will be selected by “we, the people.”

This person will be the one holding the pen in any future scenario where life or death decisions that could manifest into a general nuclear war will be made.

It is incumbent upon we, the people, to make sure that Americans demand the candidates for this office articulate their policy vision regarding the war in Ukraine, the prospects of peace with Russia, and what they will do to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war.

But they won’t do that if we, the people, remain silent about the issue.

Stand up.

Speak out.

Demand to be heard.

72 minutes is all it takes to end life as we know it.

We almost all died over the weekend of Sept. 14-15, 2024.

What are we going to do to make sure that doesn’t happen again?

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 9/12/24

The following article was made possible by paid subscribers of The Dissenter. Become a subscriber with this special offer and support independent journalism on press freedom.

The civil liberties organization Defending Rights and Dissent sued the FBI and United States Justice Department for withholding records on WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. 

“For nearly a decade and a half, we’ve been trying to get at the truth about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks,” declared Chip Gibbons, the policy director for Defending Rights and Dissent. 

Gibbons added, “With the legal persecution of Julian Assange finally over, the FBI must come clean to the American people.”

On June 25, 2024, U.S. government attorneys submitted a plea agreement [PDF] in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands after Assange agreed to plead guilty to one conspiracy charge under the U.S. Espionage Act. 

Assange was released on bail from London’s Belmarsh prison, where he had been jailed for over five years while fighting a U.S. extradition request. He flew on a charter flight to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory where a plea hearing was held.

The plea agreement marked the end of a U.S. campaign to target and suppress Assange and WikiLeaks that spanned 14 years and first intensified after WikiLeaks published documents from U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning that exposed crimes committed in U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as U.S. complicity in human rights abuses in dozens of countries around the world. 

“As soon as we began publishing newsworthy stories about US war crimes in 2010, we know the US government responded to what was one of most consequential journalistic revelations of the 21st century by spying on and trying to criminalize First Amendment-protected journalism,” stated WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson.  

Hrafnsson continued, “While WikiLeaks has fought for transparency, the U.S. government has cloaked its war on journalism in secrecy. That’s why Defending Rights & Dissent’s lawsuit is so important, as it will help unmask the FBI’s efforts to criminalize journalism.”

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On June 27, Defending Rights and Dissent requested [PDF] “all records created, maintained, or in the custody of the FBI that mention or reference: WikiLeaks; Julian Assange.”

The FBI separated the request into two requests—one for files mentioning “WikiLeaks,” one for files mentioning Julian Assange. And by August 19, the organization was informed by the FBI that it would take around five and a half years (2,010 days) to “complete action.” 

Previously, on June 22, 2021, Defending Rights and Dissent submitted a nearly identical request. It took the FBI two years to respond and notify the organization that the documents could not be provided because there was a “law enforcement” proceeding that was pending against Assange. 

The FBI became involved in pursuing an investigation against Assange and WikiLeaks in December 2010. 

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In 2011, FBI agents and prosecutors flew to Iceland to investigate what they claimed was a cyber attack against Iceland’s government systems. But as Iceland Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson told the Associated Press in 2013, it became clear that the FBI agents and prosecutors came to Iceland to “frame” Assange and WikiLeaks. 

The FBI was interested in interviewing Sigurdur Thordarson, a serial liar and sociopath who embezzled funds from the WikiLeaks store and sexually preyed on underage boys. As I recount in my book “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange,” Thordarson subsequently became an FBI informant or cooperating witness.  

“When I learned about it, I demanded that Icelandic police cease all cooperation and made it clear that people interviewed or interrogated in Iceland should be interrogated by Icelandic police,” Jónasson added. 

A little more than a year before the U.S. government’s prosecution against Assange collapsed, the FBI approached three journalists who had worked with Assange but had a falling-out with him. Each refused to help U.S. prosecutors further their attack on journalism. 

“The decision to respond to reporting on U.S. war crimes with foreign counterintelligence investigations, criminal prosecutions, and dirty tricks continues to cast a dark shadow over our First Amendment right to press freedom,” Gibbons said.

Gibbons concluded, “We will work tirelessly to see that all files documenting how the FBI criminalized and investigated journalism are made available to the public.”

Russia Matters, 9/20/24

1. Rossiiskaya Gazeta has just published an interview with the head of Russia’s Central Test Site, in which he vowed that this facility, which hosted more than 200 nuclear detonations before 1990, is ready to resume testing at any moment. In the interview with this Russian government daily, Rear Adm. Andrei Sinitsyn states at least thrice that this Novaya Zemlya archipelago-based facility is ready for resuming tests. “If the order is given, we will begin tests at any moment,” the admiral stated. “If the task is set to resume testing, it will be completed within the specified time frame,” he vowed.  “The test site is ready to resume full-scale testing activities,” he said.¹ Sinitsyn’s interview is apparently meant to contribute to the Russian military-political leadership’s continued effort to dissuade the U.S. and its allies from approving Ukraine’s use of Western-made long-range missiles against targets inside “mainland Russia,” as well to exercise general pressure on the U.S. and allies as they ponder the amount and types of continued military aid to Ukraine. The interview was published less than a week after Vladimir Putin warned that if NATO countries allow Ukraine to use their long-range missiles for such strikes, it would mean that these countries “are at war with Russia.” Russia “will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us,” according to Putin, who has earlier said that Russia will resume nuclear tests if the U.S. does.*
2. The number of Ukrainians and Russians killed or wounded in the war has reached roughly one million, WSJ reported, citing Ukrainian and Western estimates. Ukraine’s and Russia’s casualties are estimated to have totaled 480,000 and 600,000, respectively, this daily reported. Mobilization for the Ukrainian army, which is expected to help compensate for its personnel losses, is on track, but it would take another three months before the newly-trained troops could make an impact on the battlefield, head of the defense committee of Ukraine’s parliament, Oleksandr Zavitnevych, told the FT. One obstacle for this recruitment campaign is that Ukraine has lost at least 10 million people to occupation or as refugees in the past decade, according to Ukrainian government estimates cited by WSJ. About one year ago, U.S. officials estimated that the total number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded since the war in Ukraine began was nearing half a million, according to NYT. Thus, if these latest estimates are accurate, then casualties have doubled in about one year.
3. Russian authorities have reportedly ordered their armed forces to push Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region by mid-October 2024 and to establish a “buffer zone” into Ukrainian border areas along the international border with Russia in northeastern Ukraine by the end of October, according to ISW. It has also been reported by The Guardian that Russia’s military had anticipated a possible Ukrainian advance into the southwestern Kursk region for months prior to the actual incursion in early August.
4. Ukraine’s electricity deficit this winter could reach as much as 6GW, around a third of anticipated peak demand, according to the IEA. “It’s time for everybody to understand that this winter could be consequential in Ukraine,” Fatih Birol, director-general of this agency, told the FT. Half of all Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed, roughly equivalent to the capacity of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, according to FT. 
5. U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic party’s presidential nominee, will hold separate meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sept. 26 to discuss what he calls Ukraine’s “victory plan.” Zelenskyy has refused to disclose the plan, which he also wants to share with Donald Trump. The Ukrainian leader did disclose that “most of the decisions on the plan depend” on Biden, and that these decisions need to be made in October to December, according to Ukrainska Pravda. Zelenskyy’s decision to focus on obtaining Biden’s support during his visit to the U.S. is understandable, given that a potential Trump administration’s approach to ending the war calls for a “demilitarized zone” on Ukrainian territory and a guarantee of its neutrality, according to Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance.