Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 165

Debbie Lerman: Government’s National Security Arm Took Charge During the Covid Response

National Security Council

By Debbie Lerman, Brownstone Institute, 11/3/22

Note: The National Security Council was created as a result of the 1947 National Security Act, which also created an unaccountable agency known as the CIA. Emphasis in article below is from the original. – Natylie

“It means our response to the Covid pandemic was led by groups and agencies that are in the business of responding to wars and terrorist threats, not public health crises or disease outbreaks.“

In previous articles I discussed the probability that Deborah Birx, the White House Coronoavirus Task Force Coordinator, was not a representative of the public health agencies but, rather, was appointed by the National Security Council. I now have proof that this was, indeed, the case. I have also uncovered documents that show:

As of March 13, 2020 the National Security Council (NSC) was officially in charge of the US government’s Covid policy.Starting on March 18, 2020, The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was officially in charge of the US government’s Covid response.The Covid Task Force Coordinator was brought in by the NSC

On March 11, 2020, at a Heritage Foundation Talk, Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, when discussing what the White House and NSC were doing about the virus, said: 

“We brought into the White House Debi Birx, a fantastic physician and ambassador from the State Department. We appreciate Secretary Pompeo immediately moving her over to the White House at our, well at the President’s, request.” (min. 21:43 – 21:56)

The National Security Council was in charge of our Covid Policy

An astonishing government document dated March 13, 2020 entitled: “PanCAP Adapted U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan” (PanCAP-A) (embedded at the end of this piece) reveals that United States policy in response to SARS-CoV-2 was set not by the public health agencies designated in pandemic preparedness protocols (Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act, PPD-44, BIA), but rather by the National Security Council, or NSC. 

This is the pandemic response org chart, from p. 9 of PanCAP-A, showing the NSC solely responsible for Covid policy:

What is the National Security Council?

According to its website, the NSC “is the President’s principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his or her senior advisors and cabinet officials.” 

The NSC does not include as regular attendees any representatives from public health-related agencies.  

It does include the President’s National Security Advisor, who is “the President’s most important source of policy advice on foreign and national security policy,” according to the White House Transition Project’s document for The National Security Advisor and Staff. “In some administrations,” the document continues, “foreign and national security policy making is essentially centralized in the hands of the NSC advisor with minimal input from cabinet-level departments such as State or Defense.” Furthermore, “there is little statutory or legal constraint (beyond budgetary limits) in how the role of NSC advisor is defined or how the NSC staff is organized and operates.” (pp. 1-2)

In other words, if the NSC is in charge of Covid response, it can pretty much decide and impose anything it wants without any constraints or oversight, as long as the President agrees, or at least lets them take the lead.

But what exactly is PanCAP-A, in which the NSC appears in such a surprising Covid-response leadership role?

PanCAP-A is the closest we have to a national Covid response plan

PanCAP-A stands for Pandemic Crisis Action Plan – Adapted. 

An exhaustive online search did not turn up the Pandemic Crisis Action Plan from 2018, which was apparently “adapted” to produce PanCAP-A. However, the existence of the original document is confirmed in various documents, including a statement on “Preparedness for COVID-19” presented to the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs on April 14, 2021. 

In this statement, Elizabeth Zimmerman, a former FEMA Administrator, who is sharing with the Senate Committee her findings on “The Initial Pandemic Response and Lessons Learned,” says she had trouble finding the government’s plan for the US response to Covid-19:

“In researching disaster response plans to refresh my memory for this hearing, I found several detailed plans that were publicly available and saw mention of plans and directives that were not publicly available. The time spent searching for these plans and directives was frustrating for an experienced emergency manager…” 

Then, in reference to the plans she was able to find, or knew about but may not have actually seen, she says:

“Following the Anthrax attacks in 2001, the federal government invested a lot of money on processes and plans centered on public health response – bioterrorism and pandemics in particular. … One of the latest plans, January 2017, is the Biological Incident Annex (BIA) to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans (FIOPs). The BIA is the federal organizing framework for responding and recovering from a range of biological threats, including pandemics. 

However, it was not publicly seen that these plans were being used during the onset of COVID-19 nor does it seem that there was a national COVID-19 response plan. 

Finally, she references the 2018 PanCAP, the adapted PanCAP, and then makes another surprising statement:

Also, there was a 2018 Pandemic Crisis Action Plan (PanCAP) that was customized for COVID-19 specifically and adopted in March 2020 by HHS and FEMA; the plan identified the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the Lead Federal Agency (LFA) with FEMA supporting for coordination. However, a mere five days after the national COVID-19 emergency was announced, FEMA became the LFA.” [BOLDFACE ADDED]

FEMA replaced HHS as the Lead Federal Agency, with no warning or preparation

What Zimmerman is saying here is that, in the PanCAP-A org chart, where the NSC is in charge of policy and the HHS is in charge of almost everything else – actually, FEMA is in charge of everything else.

This means that, in effect, starting on March 18, 2020, the HHS –which comprises the CDC, NIAID, NIH and other public-health-related agencies – had NO OFFICIAL LEADERSHIP ROLE in pandemic response – not in determining policy and not in implementing policy.

This is a staggering piece of information, considering that all pandemic preparedness plans, as Zimmerman notes, placed the Health and Human Services Agency (HHS) at the helm of pandemic response.

How was FEMA put in charge?

According to the Stafford Act, which “constitutes the statutory authority for most Federal disaster response activities especially as they pertain to FEMA and FEMA programs,” the disasters to which FEMA is empowered to respond include: 

“any natural catastrophe (including any hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, winddriven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought), or, regardless of cause, any fire, flood, or explosion, in any part of the United States, which in the determination of the President causes damage of sufficient severity and magnitude to warrant major disaster assistance under this Act to supplement the efforts and available resources of States, local governments, and disaster relief organizations in alleviating the damage, loss, hardship, or suffering caused thereby.”

Very clearly, FEMA is an agency neither designed nor intended to lead public health initiatives or the country’s response to disease outbreaks. 

Yet, as Zimmerman reported, on March 18, 2020, just five days after the official date of PanCAP-A, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was removed from its lead role in pandemic response, and FEMA was (at least operationally if not policy-wise) put in charge.

In a Congressional Research Service report from February 2022, entitled “FEMA’s Role in the COVID-19 Federal Pandemic Response,” the opening paragraph states:

“On March 13, 2020, President Donald J. Trump declared a nationwide emergency under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (the Stafford Act, P.L. 93-288 as amended), authorizing assistance administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Five days later, the President notified then-FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor that the agency would assume leadership of the federal pandemic response effort—the first known instance of FEMA serving in such a role for a public health incident.”

FEMA’s January 2021 COVID-19 Initial Assessment Report emphasizes how unusual this chain of events was:

“The agency’s response to COVID-19 has been unprecedented. When the White House directed FEMA to lead operations, COVID-19 became the first national pandemic response that FEMA has led since the agency was established in 1979. It was also the first time in U.S. history the President has declared a nationwide emergency under Section 501b of the Stafford Act and authorized Major Disaster Declarations for all states and territories for the same incident.” (p. 5)

A FEMA fact sheet from March 4, 2020 reveals that the agency was not given advanced warning of the enormous new responsibilities that would be thrust upon it just two weeks later:

“At this time, FEMA is not preparing an emergency declaration in addition to the Public Health Emergency declared by HHS on January 31, 2020.” (p. 2)

The table below is from a September 2021 report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Homeland Security, “Lessons Learned from FEMA’s Initial Response to COVID-19.” This document stresses that “The PanCAP-A did not address the changes that ensued when FEMA was designated the LFA. Furthermore, FEMA (and HHS) did not update the PanCAP-A or issue interim guidance addressing the changes in critical roles and responsibilities for each agency.” (p. 11)

BIA=Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans, January 2017

In other words, HHS – the agency designated by statute and experience to handle public health crises – was removed, and FEMA – the agency designated by statute and experience to “help people before, during and after disasters” like earthquakes and fires – was put in charge. But the pandemic planning document was not updated to reflect that change or how that change would affect the Covid response.

Why was FEMA suddenly and unexpectedly given this lead role? I would argue that the NSC wanted to ensure that no policy or response initiative emanating from the public health departments would play any role in the Covid response. Since FEMA had no planning documents or policies regarding disease or pandemic outbreaks, there would be nothing in the way of whatever the NSC wanted to do.

So what did the NSC want to do? PanCAP-A, in which the NSC takes the lead role in setting Covid policy, does not give a detailed answer, but does clearly place NSC policy above anything else that might contradict it.

What does PanCAP-A say?

On p. 1, under “Purpose” it states:

“This plan outlines the United States Government (USG) coordinated federal response activities for COVID-19 in the United States (U.S.). The President appointed the Vice President to lead the USG effort with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) serving as the Lead Federal Agency (LFA) consistent with the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 44.”

In other words, in accordance with a bunch of pandemic preparedness laws and directives, the HHS is the Lead Federal Agency in charge of pandemic response. 

As we move through the document, however, the roles and responsibilities of the HHS become increasingly muddled and diminished.

On p. 6 under “Senior Leader Intent” it says:

“The National Security Council (NSC) requested adaptation of the PanCAP to address the ongoing threat posed by COVID-19 in support of the Administration’s efforts to monitor, contain, and mitigate the spread of the virus. The plan builds on objectives that prepare the USG to implement broader community and healthcare-based mitigation measures…” [BOLDFACE ADDED]

In other words, everything the Pan-CAP-A says about how the HHS is planning to address the pandemic is “adapted” in favor of “objectives” that prepare the government to implement “broader measures.” 

On the next page, we get the exact same vague language under “Strategic Objectives,” which include implementing “broader community and healthcare-based mitigation measures.” A footnote tells us “These objectives were directed by the NSC Resilience DRG PCC on February 24, 2020.” [BOLDFACE ADDED]

What is the NSC Resilience DRG PCC? There is no explanation, appendix, or addendum, nor anything in the entire PanCAP-A to answer this question – a noteworthy omission, since it apparently defines the objectives upon which the entire US pandemic response is based.

Similarly, on p. 8 under “Concept of Operations,” we read:

“This concept of operations aligns interagency triggers to the CDC intervals for each phase and groups key federal actions according to response phase. It also layers in the COVID-19 Containment and Mitigation Strategy developed by the NSC.” [BOLDFACE ADDED]

There is no explanation or description of what the “Containment and Mitigation Strategy developed by the NSC” is referring to. 

Conclusion

Everything we thought we knew about the US government’s Covid response is upended in the Pandemic Crisis Action Plan – Adapted (PanCAP-A), which gave the NSC sole authority over policy, and the simultaneous Stafford Act declaration, which resulted in FEMA/DHS taking the lead role in its implementation.

This means the doctors on the White House Task Force who headed HHS departments – including Fauci, Redfield, and Collins, the heads of the CDC, NIAID and NIH – had no authority over determining or implementing Covid policy and were following the lead of the NSC and the DHS (Department of National Security), which is the department under which FEMA operates.

It means our response to the Covid pandemic was led by groups and agencies that are in the business of responding to wars and terrorist threats, not public health crises or disease outbreaks.

I believe that the national security authorities took control of the Covid pandemic response not just in the US but in many of our allied countries (the UK, Australia, Germany, Israel and others) because they knew SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered virus that leaked from a lab researching potential bioweapons.

Whether or not the “novel coronavirus” was in fact a highly lethal pathogen, it was a military threat because it was a potential bioweapon, and therefore it required a military-style response: strict lockdowns in anticipation of Warp Speed vaccine development. 

Furthermore, all of the seemingly nonsensical and unscientific policies – including mask mandates, mass testing and quarantines, using case counts to determine severity – were imposed in the service of the singular goal of fomenting fear in order to induce public acquiescence with the lockdown-until-vaccines policy.

And once the national security authorities were in charge, the entire biodefense industrial complex, consisting of national security and intelligence operatives, propaganda/psy-op (psychological operations) departments, pharmaceutical companies and affiliated government officials and NGOs assumed leadership roles.

Much research is needed to unearth more evidence in support of these hypotheses. The work continues.

Are Western Media Misinforming about Ukraine? – An interview with Eric Denécé

World Geostrategic Insights, 11/2/22

World Geostrategic Insights interview with Eric Denécé on an alleged totalitarianism of the Western media in presenting the war in Ukraine, the propaganda war machine set up by the Russians, Americans, and Ukrainians, and the prospects for an end to the conflict. 

Eric Denécé, PhD, HDR, is the Director and Founder of the French Centre for Intelligence Studies (CF2R). During his career, he previously served as: Naval Intelligence Officer (analyst) within the Strategic Evaluation Division at the Secretariat Général de la Défense Nationale (SGDN); Sales Export Engineer of Matra Defense; Director for Corporate Communications of NAVFCO (French Naval Defence Industry Advisory Group); Founder and Managing Director of Argos Engineering and Consulting Ltd, a Competitive Intelligence consulting company. 

Q1 – On Wikipedia, you are presented as “pro-Putin” and a “transmitter of his disinformation”. You are ostracized because of your statements on the war in Ukraine, such as “Responsibility for this appalling conflict is widely shared, and Ukrainian and Western provocations cannot be minimized or passed over in silence …. It is a conflict that should have been avoided and in which all actors involved, directly or indirectly, bear their share of responsibility.” Of course, your statements may be highly questionable, but it should be legitimate to express them. In this regard you also denounced that “the Western media have succeeded in establishing a real media totalitarianism, which aims to silence any dissenting voice, to prevent any criticism of Kiev, in particular by systematically passing off those who criticize its actions and those of the Americans as pro-Russian.”  Have we really entered a totalitarianism of thought? Is freedom of expression, typical of western democracies, becoming a collateral casualty of war? 

A1 – This is a very important issue. There is indeed in the presentation of this conflict, a real media totalitarianism of the West. As we observe every day, almost all the Western media and politicians have taken up the cause of Ukraine since 24 February 2022.

But in reality it started as early as the events of 2014 and the real coup that took place in Kiev against Yanukovych. While there was nothing respectable about this man and he was notoriously corrupt – even Vladimir Putin did not like him – he had been legitimately elected in an election supervised and validated by OSCE observers. Maidan is therefore the overthrow of a legal and legitimate regime with the support of Europe and the United States, less than a year before a new election that would have likely removed him from power. This illegal act led to Moscow’s reaction, which re-annexed Crimea to its territory. Similarly, it was Kiev’s discriminatory actions and then its military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass that provoked the Russians to step in. To deny these facts is to subscribe to a Western narrative that totally distorts historical reality.

Similarly, if Russia clearly attacked Ukraine at the beginning of 2022, it did so following a long process of American provocations (refusal to suspend the extension of NATO to the East, refusal to negotiate with Moscow a new security architecture in Europe) and Ukrainian provocations (launching of the offensive in the Donbass on 17 February). Washington knew that Ukraine was a “red line” for the Russians and that they would react. The United States is therefore just as responsible for this conflict as Moscow.

Of course, when one says such things, one is immediately accused of being pro-Russian and of relaying Kremlin propaganda. This is the argument with which Western politicians and media disqualify all those who try to present a version of the facts much closer to reality than their propaganda.

However, I do not seek to defend Russia, but to produce an analysis as objective as possible of the situation in order to find ways out of the crisis. It also seems essential to me to alert the public opinion on the major manipulation of the information which we are witnessing because of the American and Ukrainian Spin Doctors. But the latter and their European relays (politicians, media, pro-Ukrainian activists) do not want this discourse to be audible and are energetically working to stifle it.

I was a young intelligence officer during the Cold War and I have no illusions about the totalitarian Soviet system against which we fought and which collapsed.

However, in the last thirty years, things have changed. Russia is no longer the USSR. Yet everything is done to ensure that we continue to analyze it through the old prism of the Cold War. Thus, it is necessary to note that for thirty years, the West has not ceased to scorn the Russians, to lie to them, to impose sanctions on them and to give them lessons in “democracy”, while not applying them itself.

The vocation of an intelligence officer is to describe the world as it is and not as he would like it to be. This is why we are often qualified as Cassandras and not listened to by politicians. I make this quote from Jean Jaurès (Discours à la jeunesse, 1903) my own:

“Courage is going for the ideal and understanding the real…Courage is seeking the truth and telling it. Courage is not to suffer the law of the triumphant lie that passes and not to echo, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, the imbecilic applause and the fanatical booing.”

The example of the Ukrainian crisis is a perfect illustration. I have no doubt that in the years or decades to come, history will show that this crisis was deliberately provoked by the United States to weaken Moscow and that the vassalized Europeans obediently followed them to the detriment of their own interests.

Q2 – War propaganda is the use of true or false information to manipulate public opinion and evoke strong emotional reactions, such as fear, anger, guilt, admiration or outrage. It has been used throughout history, and particularly since World War 1, as a key tool of warfare and is also widely used by both sides in the conflict in Ukraine. According to a widespread narrative, Russia has perfected and uses an aggressive propaganda and misinformation machine through media control, censorship, socials, trolls, etc. Less emphasis, however, is given to the Ukrainian side’s war propaganda, which seems to have been very effective in gaining Western support. What is your opinion on the information and disinformation warfare in the Ukrainian conflict and propaganda techniques used by the warring sides? While the final outcome on the battlefield still seems uncertain, can we say that there is already a winner in the propaganda war?

A2 – War propaganda actually has even older origins. Julius Caesar already used it in the first century BC; Catholics and Protestants made extensive use of it during the European wars of religion and Napoleon and his British adversaries understood its importance. However, it has developed considerably with the entry of our societies into the information age since the mid-1990s. While propaganda and disinformation were for a long time mainly the work of totalitarian regimes (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Soviet Union), they are now systematically practiced by the United States, which prefers to speak of “information warfare”. We could observe this during the first Gulf War (1991), the NATO aggression against Serbia (1999), the invasion of Iraq (2003) in violation of the UN Security Council decision, the interventions in Libya and Syria (2011) and finally, the Ukrainian crisis (2014 and 2022). There has been a shift in their use over the past thirty years: propaganda and disinformation are used as much – if not more – by Western “democracies” as by authoritarian regimes. The United States, having a great deal of control over the world’s means of communication – both the channels and their content – orient the presentation of facts to their advantage in order to achieve their political objectives.

Therefore, to say that today Russian propaganda is raging is to smile. While it is undeniable that Moscow seeks to present the facts to its advantage, its actions have nothing in common with the real information war machine implemented by the Americans and the Ukrainians. For the first time in history, “democracies” lie and misinform more than authoritarian regimes, whether we like it or not.

In particular, we assume – obviously wrongly – that everything the Russians say is a lie and must be systematically rejected, but that everything the Ukrainians say is the pure truth and cannot be questioned. This is abysmally bad faith, but its purpose is to prevent any diplomatic resolution of this conflict, because one does not negotiate with a demonized opponent.

No one sanctioned the United States for having caused the death of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants through inhumane sanctions to make Baghdad comply, nor for having invaded Iraq in 2003 despite the UN veto and for having created chaos in that country. Nobody criticizes them either for the numerous collateral victims caused by their indiscriminate military interventions in the name of the “war on terrorism”, nor for having legally re-established torture and for having engaged in it on a large scale with the help of their allies…

But paradoxically, the West blames the Russians for blocking the export of Ukrainian wheat – information that is not even confirmed. All this reminds of the parable of the straw and the beam…

Q3 – How do you think this conflict will end? Is there still room for a ceasefire and diplomatic solution, and under what conditions? Or, as you recently stated, “the folly of politicians will drag us into a nuclear war”?

A3 – For the moment, it is necessary to distinguish the situation of the four actors involved.

For the United States, which set this trap for Russia in the hope of destabilizing it quickly, it is a half-victory. Washington has not achieved its main goal, but it has succeeded in domesticating Western Europe and making it an appendage of NATO. In addition, the United States has succeeded in permanently weakening competing European economies and is in the process of wiping out the Old World’s defense industry. However, the economic situation on the other side of the Atlantic is also very difficult (inflation), which may well lead to the defeat of the war-mongering Democrats in the mid-term elections in early November.

For Russia, which knowingly fell into the trap set by Washington, this is also a half-victory. Militarily, its initial action was partly a failure and it did not manage to win a decisive victory over the Ukrainian forces. Moreover, it is now cut off from Europe. However, it is not weakened as the West had hoped. Its economy is holding up very well, its revenues are growing despite the sanctions, many countries are refusing to associate themselves with Western policy and its internal cohesion has not suffered. Moreover, its army is far from being in disarray and time is on its side in the theater of operations.

For the European states, it is a major defeat, which has increased their dependence and their submission to the United States. Obedient to the American diktat, the countries of the Union have imposed sanctions on Moscow which are having a severe impact on their economy. They are therefore clearly playing against their own interests. They no longer have any will of their own, and therefore no sovereignty. Worse, while putting forward their “democratic values”, they have not hesitated to flout them by signing an important gas partnership with Azerbaijan, a bloodthirsty dictatorship which has been demonstrating for years its will to exterminate the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and which has attacked the Republic of Armenia without any noticeable reaction from the international community.

For Ukraine, this is a total defeat. The country is in a deplorable state, its infrastructure is destroyed, many inhabitants have fled abroad, part of its territory is occupied and the number of deaths and injuries in combat is particularly high. However, let us remember that before the beginning of this conflict, Ukraine was already a failed quasi-state, undermined by corruption and criminality, led by elites who – like Zelensky and his entourage – have never stopped enriching themselves to the detriment of the country’s development and the well-being of its population since independence (1991). Playing the Americans’ game has only accelerated the decomposition of this state.

The main event that could, in the short term, lead to a de-escalation, if not an end to the conflict, would be a change in American policy, with the arrival of a Republican majority in Congress. Since the Ukrainian army is totally on Western funding, a reduction or cessation of aid would cause it to collapse in a few weeks, pushing Kiev to negotiate with Moscow.

Finally, I do not believe in a nuclear war. Neither Moscow nor Washington wants it. But there is a risk that Kiev will act rashly to escalate the conflict. However, Russia and the United States are particularly vigilant about the risks of this uncontrollable regime getting out of control.

Meduza: Videos which appear to show the killing of Russian prisoners of war circulate online

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

Meduza, 11/19/22

Video clips which appear to show Ukrainian soldiers killing Russian prisoners began to circulate online on November 18. It’s unclear when or where the clips were filmed, and their authenticity is still unconfirmed. Russia has sent the clips to the UN and other human rights organizations. Ukraine has not yet commented on the situation.

During the night of November 18, videos allegedly showing Ukrainian soldiers killing Russian prisoners circulated on Internet channels. The clips first appeared on Ukrainian Telegram channels, and then pro-Russian users started to actively share them.

The authenticity of videos posted by independent sources has not been confirmed by independent sources. It’s not clear when they were made. Ukrainian opposition blogger Anatoly Shariy, who takes Russia’s side in the conflict, claims that he posted one of the videos on his private channel “a few days ago.”

In one of the videos, a group of soldiers, apparently in Russian Armed Forces uniforms, is taken prisoner in the courtyard of a home. An armed man then appears in the clip, there are audible gunshots, and the video cuts off abruptly.

A second clip, probably shot by a drone flying over the same courtyard, shows the bodies of 12 soldiers in the same uniform as in the first clip. It is unclear what happened in the time between when the two clips were filmed.

Russian pro-war Telegram channels claim that the videos were filmed in the town of Makiivka, outside of Svatove in the Luhansk region. They also claim that the Ukrainians in the clip are graduates of the Kharkiv National University of International Affairs and, allegedly, former contestants on the humor TV competition KVN.

Valery Fadeev, head of the Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights, called the incident “an emphatically provocative crime” and announced that he would inform the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, human rights organizations, and others – “2,000 addresses” in total.

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a case under the criminal code articles on murder of two or more people in connection with carrying out official duties, and mistreatment of prisoners of war.

Maria Zakharova, official spokesperson for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanded that international organizations “condemn this appalling crime and investigate it thoroughly.”

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that it is already studying the video, says RIA Novosti. Ukrainian representatives have not yet commented on the material.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said the footage “confirms the sadistic nature of the current Kyiv regime” and that such killings are “widespread practice among Ukrainian Armed Forces.” The Ministry also claims that “Ukrainian service members who surrendered this week are being held in accordance with all requirements of the Geneva Convention.”

On November 15, the UN Office of the the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that Ukrainian soldiers in Russian captivity are subject to widespread abuse and torture. The report cited 159 Ukrainians who were taken prisoner and who spoke to the staff of the UN OHCHR. The vast majority of them reported mistreatment. The report also mentions mistreatment of Russian soldiers and isolated cases of torture by Ukrainian soldiers.

Link to video is here. WARNING: video contains graphic and disturbing images.

Christopher Caldwell: Complications of the Ukraine War

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Christopher Caldwell, Claremont Review of Books, September 2022

The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 4, 2022, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on the topic of Russia.

According to what we hear from the White House and from the television networks, the issues at stake in the Ukraine War are simple. They concern the evil of Vladimir Putin, who woke up one morning and chose, whether out of sadism or insanity, to wreak unspeakable violence on his neighbors. Putin’s actions are described as an “unprovoked invasion” of a noble democracy by a corrupt autocracy. How we ought to respond is assumed to be a no-brainer. The United States has pledged vast quantities of its deadliest weaponry, along with aid that is likely to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and has brought large parts of the world economy—particularly in Europe—to a standstill.

Now, whenever people in power tell you something is a no-brainer, there’s a good chance that it’s a brainer. And the Ukraine War is more complicated than we’ve been led to assume.

There are reasons why the U.S. might want to project power into the Black Sea region. But we must not ignore that the politics of the region are extraordinarily complex, that the Ukraine conflict is full of paradoxes and optical illusions, and that the theater we are entering has been, over the past 150 years, the single most violent corner of the planet. And unless we learn to respect the complexity of the situation, we risk turning it into something more dangerous, both for Europeans and for ourselves. 

Historic Roots of the Conflict

Putin invaded Ukraine after the U.S. rejected his demand for a guarantee that Ukraine not join NATO. We don’t have to excuse Putin, but we should note that, until quite recently, having Ukraine in NATO was a prospect that struck even many American foreign policy thinkers as a bad idea. These included George Kennan, who was one of the architects of the NATO alliance when the Cold War began in the late 1940s. Kennan was still alert and active, at about 90 years of age, when NATO won the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s. And in 1997, during the Clinton administration, he warned that American plans to push NATO borders “smack up to those of Russia” was the “greatest mistake of the entire post–Cold War era.”

John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, is a forceful representative of Kennan’s viewpoint. Mearsheimer is skeptical of “idealist” crusades, like the one in Iraq that George W. Bush drew the country into in 2003. He thinks President Bush dramatically overestimated the degree to which the U.S. could spread its values and its institutions. In light of present events, he especially faults Bush’s push to bring the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO in 2008.

A lot of Americans in government at the time felt the same. One was William Burns, then President Bush’s ambassador in Moscow, now President Biden’s Director of Central Intelligence. In a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Burns wrote the following: 

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. [It would be seen] as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze. . . . It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

In thinking about why this would be the “brightest of all red lines,” consider why it was that the Ukraine problem didn’t get resolved at the end of the Cold War.

Russia is a vast country—the largest in the world. It’s not so much a country as an empire. Even today it has dozens of ethnic republics in it. Maybe you’ve heard of Chechnya or Tatarstan. But have you heard of Tuva? Or Mari-El? Or the Republic of Sakha? Sakha is four times the size of Texas, but it disappears inside of Russia. Back in the day, of course, this vast Russian empire was part of another empire, famously referred to by Ronald Reagan as the Evil Empire—that is, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There were 15 Soviet Republics, including Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Armenia, and Turkestan. And that bigger empire was part of an even bigger empire, which included the Eastern European “captive nations” of Poland and Hungary.

When Communism collapsed in the early 1990s, all these countries found their way to independence, most of them peacefully, some of them bloodily. But Ukraine, while nominally independent, remained bound to Russia in a number of informal ways—sometimes willingly, sometimes reluctantly. Russia kept its Black Sea fleet in Crimea, unmolested by Ukraine. Ukraine got cheap gas and desperately needed financial assistance. 

Why wasn’t Ukraine able to make a clean break? Not because it forgot to. Not for lack of can-do spirit. It was just a really hard problem. With the possible exception of Latvia, Ukraine was the most Russian of the non-Russian Soviet Republics. Russian has for a long time been the language of its big cities, of its high culture, and of certain important regions.

If you had to give a one-word answer to what this Ukraine War is about, you would probably say Crimea. Crimea is a peninsula jutting out into the middle of the Black Sea. It’s where the great powers of Europe fought the bloodiest war of the century between Napoleon and World War I. It is a defensive superweapon. The country that controls it dominates the Black Sea and can project its military force into Europe, the Middle East, and even the steppes of Eurasia. And since the 1700s, that country has been Russia. Crimea has been the home of Russia’s warm water fleet for 250 years. It is the key to Russia’s southern defenses.

Crimea found itself within the borders of Ukraine because in 1954, the year after Stalin died, his successor Nikita Khrushchev signed it over to Ukraine. Historians now hotly debate why he did that. But while Crimea was administratively Ukrainian, it was culturally Russian. It showed on several occasions that it was as eager to break with Ukrainian rule as Ukraine was to break with Russian rule. In a referendum in January 1991, 93 percent of the citizens of Crimea voted for autonomy from Ukraine. In 1994, 83 percent voted for the establishment of a dual Crimean/Russian citizenship. We’ll leave aside the referendum held after the Russians arrived in 2014, which resulted in a similar percentage but remains controversial.

Enter the United States

With the end of Communism, Ukraine was beset by two big problems. First, it was corrupt. It was run by post-Communist oligarchs in a way that very much resembled Russia. In many ways Ukraine was worse off. In Russia, Putin—whatever else you may think of him—was at least able to rebuff those oligarchs who sought direct political control. 

The second problem for Ukraine was that it was divided between a generally Russophile east and a generally Russophobe west. It was so divided, in fact, that Samuel Huntington devoted a long section in his book The Clash of Civilizations to the border between the two sections. But Huntington did not think that the line dividing them was civilizational. He wrote: “If civilization is what counts . . . the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries.”

The U.S. didn’t see things that way. It backed the Russophobe western Ukrainian side against the Russophile eastern Ukrainian side. This orientation took hold in the Bush administration, during the democracy promotion blitz that accompanied the Iraq War. And in 2004, the U.S. intervened in a crooked election, helping to sponsor and coordinate the so-called Orange Revolution. But the pivotal moment—the moment when the region began to tip into violence—came in early 2014 under more dubious circumstances.

The previous year, Ukrainian diplomats had negotiated a free trade deal with the European Union that would have cut out Russia. Russia then outbid the EU with its own deal—which included $15 billion in incentives for Ukraine and continued naval basing rights for Russia—and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich signed it. U.S.-backed protests broke out in Kiev’s main square, the Maidan, and in cities across the country. According to a speech made at the time by a State Department official, the U.S. had by that time spent $5 billion to influence Ukraine’s politics. And, considering that Ukraine then had a lower per capita income than Cuba, Jamaica, or Namibia, $5 billion could buy a lot of influence. An armory was raided, shootings near the Maidan left dozens of protesters dead, Yanukovich fled the country, and the U.S. played the central role in setting up a successor government. 

That the U.S. would meddle with Russia’s vital interests this way created problems almost immediately. Like every Ukrainian government since the end of the Cold War, Yanukovich’s government was corrupt. Unlike many of them, it was legitimately elected, and the U.S. helped to overthrow it.

That was the point when Russia invaded Crimea. “Took over” might be a better description, because there was no loss of life due to the military operation. You can call this a brutal and unprovoked invasion or a reaction to American crowding. We cannot read Putin’s mind. But it would not be evidence of insincerity or insanity if Putin considered the Ukrainian coup—or uprising—a threat. That is what any military historian of the region would have said. 

At the turn of the twentieth century, the strategist H.J. Mackinder called the expanse north of the Black Sea the “Geographical Pivot of History.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as National Security Advisor in the Carter administration, used the same “pivot” metaphor to describe Ukraine in his post–Cold War book The Grand Chessboard. “Without Ukraine,” Brzezinski wrote, “Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” 

The danger to Russia in 2014 was not just the loss of Russia’s largest naval base. It was that that naval base would be acquired by the world’s most sophisticated military power—a power that had shown itself to be Russia’s enemy and that would now sit, with all its weaponry, at Russia’s gateway to the world. When Russians describe Ukrainian membership in NATO as a mortal threat to their country’s survival, they are being sincere.

American and European leaders, although they deplored the Russian occupation of Crimea, seemed to understand that a Russia-controlled Crimea created a more stable equilibrium—and was more to the natives’ liking—than a Ukraine-controlled Crimea. President Obama mostly let sleeping dogs lie. So did President Trump. But they also made large transfers of advanced weaponry and military know-how to Ukraine. As a result, over time, a failed state defended by a ramshackle collection of oligarch-sponsored militias turned into the third-largest army in Europe—right behind Turkey and Russia—with a quarter million men under arms. 

Then, on November 10 last year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed a “strategic partnership” with Ukraine. It not only committed the U.S. to Ukraine’s full integration into NATO but also stressed Ukraine’s claim to Crimea. This was hubris. Now the Black Sea region’s problems, in all their complexity, risk being thrown into our lap.

Our Problems in Ukraine

When Russia invaded, the U.S. stood by its potential future ally, but without much sense of proportion and seemingly without much attention to the stakes. Let us conclude by discussing the complex military, economic, and political problems we face in dealing with the Ukraine War.

Military Problems

I’m not competent to predict who is going to win this war. But given that Russia is much more powerful than Ukraine—both economically and militarily—the need for U.S. assistance will be immense and indefinite, no matter the war’s outcome. Keeping Ukraine in this war has already come at a high cost in weapons for the U.S. and a high cost in lives for Ukraine. 

The U.S. is not just supporting Ukraine. It is fighting a war in Ukraine’s name. From early in the war, we have provided targeting information for drone strikes on Russian generals and missile attacks on Russian ships. Since this summer, the U.S. has been providing Ukraine with M142 HIMARS computer-targeted rocket artillery systems. Ukrainians may still be doing most of the dying, but the U.S. is responsible for most of the damage wrought on Russia’s troops.

This is a war with no natural stopping point. One can easily imagine scenarios in which winning might be more costly than losing. Should the U.S. pursue the war to ultimate victory, taking Crimea and admitting an ambivalent Ukraine into NATO, it will require a Korea-level military buildup to hold the ground taken. It will also change the West. The U.S.—for the first time—will have expanded NATO by conquest, occupying territories (Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine) that don’t want it there.

Economic Problems

American policymakers have launched an unprecedented type of economic warfare against Russia. They expect it to be just as effective as battlefield warfare, but to generate none of the hard feelings. At American urging, Russia has been cut off from the private-but-universal Brussels-based SWIFT system, which is used for international financial transfers. And the U.S. has frozen the hard currency reserves of the Russian central bank—roughly $284 billion.

Long-term, these actions carry risks for the U.S. Our economic power—particularly the dollar’s status as a reserve currency, which permits us to sustain deficits that would bankrupt others—depends on our carrying out our fiduciary responsibilities to international institutions, remembering that the money we are managing is not ours. If you are a banker who pockets his depositors’ money, those depositors will look for another bank. The danger to the United States is that not only Russia, but also China and India, will set up alternative systems through which to move their money.

Political Problems

Finally, we should have learned from the latter stages of George W. Bush’s administration that it is hard to build a forceful foreign policy on top of a wobbly domestic mandate. This is especially true of the Biden administration, which seems unable to distinguish between domestic policy and foreign policy. At the one-month mark after the Russian invasion, for instance, the White House sent a message in which President Biden proclaimed his commitment to those affected by the Russian invasion—“especially vulnerable populations such as women, children, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTQI+) persons, and persons with disabilities.” 

President Biden seems to view Russia’s conflict with Ukraine as one of autocracy versus democracy—the same framework he used to describe “MAGA Republicans” in his militaristically choreographed Philadelphia speech in early September. 

We should not overestimate how much Americans know or care about Russia and Ukraine. In August, the Pew Center published a study listing the top 15 issues motivating voters in the 2022 elections. Here are those issues in order: the economy, guns, crime, health care, voting rules, education, the Supreme Court, abortion, energy policy, immigration, foreign policy, big government, climate change, race and ethnicity, and the coronavirus. Ukraine doesn’t appear on the list, and generic foreign policy didn’t make the top ten. That doesn’t look like a level of voter buy-in sufficient for running such big economic and military risks. 

A dispassionate and honest discussion of Vladimir Putin’s conduct through the years would find much to criticize. Unfortunately, Putin’s name has been dragged into American politics primarily for the purpose of discrediting the presidency of Donald Trump. And the main thing Americans were told about Putin—that he and Trump colluded to steal the 2016 U.S. election—turned out to have no basis in fact. Since then, Congress has become as much an investigative body as a legislative chamber. Should Republicans end up with a majority in one or both houses of Congress next January, it would not be surprising if they investigated the allegation that President Biden’s family enriched itself by trading on his name with corrupt foreign elites—most prominently those in Ukraine. 

The largest problem America faces is distrust, both at home and abroad. Thus far the war’s most important world-historical surprise has been the failure of the U.S. to rally a critical mass of what it used to call “the world community” to punish Russia’s contestation of the American-led world order. In the past few decades the U.S. has developed a method of intervention against those it considers ideological adversaries. The U.S. first expresses moral misgivings about a country and then tries to rally other countries to pressure it economically and to isolate it until it relents. This time, India and China did not join us in isolating Russia. It seems they fear that this same machinery can easily be cranked up against them if they’re not careful. And in fact it is being cranked up against China.

Another factor is surely that, after the Iraq War, other countries have less trust in the judgment of the U.S. as to which territories are likely to be suitable candidates for “spreading democracy.” 

Finally, the big transformation that has been predicted for a generation now—that power would shift from the U.S. and Europe to Asia and other places—is now measurably underway. In the 1990s, between the Gulf War and the Iraq War, the U.S. and its Western European allies controlled 70 percent of world GDP; that number is now 43 percent. The West still does relatively well, but not so well that it can count on the rest of the world to rally behind it automatically. Whether in victory or defeat, Americans may be about to discover that you cannot run a twentieth century foreign policy with a twenty-first century society.

James Carden: November 1992: The Hinge of History

By James Carden. American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA), 11/8/22

Bill Clinton’s wholesale rejection of his predecessor’s Russia policy laid the groundwork for the current crisis between Russia and the West.

Understanding the history behind US policy toward Russia since the end of the Cold War has taken on renewed urgency in light of current events. As of this writing, the war in Ukraine, begun on February 24, 2022 has taken the lives of tens of thousands of people and has displaced million others in the largest wave of refugees on the European continent since the end of the Second World War. An understanding of how we arrived at this perilous moment takes on an even greater urgency in light of the real, if distant, possibility of nuclear war. International relations experts, including the realist scholar John J. Mearsheimer and the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock (1987-1991) agree that today’s crisis surpasses the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in its potential to bring the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. 

A review of American policy towards Russia in the immediate post-Soviet decade of the 1990s suggests that things didn’t have to be this way: Specific American policy choices (made with the acquiescence of America’s NATO allies in Europe) pursed over the course of that decade have led us to where we are today.

What we will find is that American policy wasn’t always marked by the hubris that later became its hallmark. In the years following the end of the Cold War (which Matlock has convincingly argued Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ended in his address on December 7, 1988 before the UN General Assembly) the US had an opportunity to pursue a policy towards Russia that was both magnanimous and prudential.

As was noted at the time by Princeton University scholar Stephen F. Cohen, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Union Treaty at a covert meeting in the forests of Belarus between the presidents of the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in December 1991, did not end the problems within the Soviet space, nor did it end the manifold issues between Russia and the United States.

For one thing, the wrapping up of Moscow’s politico-military domination of Eastern Europe and the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union was bound to be a messy business. The sudden end of the Union Treaty left millions of Russian citizens within the borders of what were now foreign, often unfriendly countries. As Cohen observed in November 1992, there was “the combustible combination of 25 million Russians living in former Soviet republics outside Russia and a Russian Army still encamped throughout those territories.”

“In one way or another,” wrote Cohen, “that army has already been involved in at least four civil wars outside Russia-in Moldova, Georgia, Tajikistan and the Armenian enclave of Nagorno- Karabakh in Azerbaijan.” Cohen went on to observe that, “Elsewhere, elements of the Russian military in Estonia and Latvia, where large Russian minorities have been disenfranchised, are itching for a fight. Meanwhile, none of the potentially explosive conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, the second largest former republic, have yet been resolved or even defused.”

So, as Cohen pointed out, within a year of the dissolution of the Union Treaty, the situation in Ukraine was already showing potential for conflict, after all, millions of ethnic Russians in Crimea and the Donbas now found themselves citizens of an entirely different country – and it was one which harbored rather different historical and cultural views from that of the Soviet Union.

The situation in Ukraine grated on the nerves of Russian nationalists who blamed Russian president Boris Yeltsin for his inept handling of the Soviet breakup. Russian nationalists in Crimea began to assert themselves as early as 1992, when the regional Crimean parliament declared independence from the new Ukrainian state. Russian Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn believed Yeltsin was duped by Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk’s promise during the negotiations in the Belavezha Forest that after the dissolution of the Union Treaty, a new kind of Union with “invisible borders, a single army and currency” would replace the old USSR.

Solzhenitsyn denounced the leaders of the new Ukrainian state for deceiving Yeltsin noting that the Ukraine nationalists now in charge “who in the past so staunchly opposed Communism, and…cursed Lenin” now, in an about-face, eagerly accepted “the false Leninist borders of Ukraine” including what he called “the Crimean dowry of the petty tyrant Khrushchev.”

Indeed, the disagreement over borders and the treatment of the ethnic Russian minority population within the new Ukrainian borders remains at the heart of the current controversy between the two nations. 

I. George H.W. Bush’s ‘Go Slow’ Policy

Given the unstable and indeed volatile situation on the ground in the countries of the former Soviet Union, the administration of US president George H.W. Bush crafted a Soviet-, and later, Russia- policy based on two pillars consisting of 1) a refusal to rub Russia’s diminished fortunes in its face and 2) an effort to avoid exacerbating the latent ethnic tensions within the former Soviet republics.

As Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker later wrote: “Time and again, President Bush demanded that we not dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. He simply wouldn’t hear of it.”

Concretely, Bush’s “go slow” policy meant that the US would not push one way or another with regard to the direction post-Soviet politics took. Bush’s emphasis was on avoiding a crisis rather than shaping the new reality.

Bush and his team recognized the world US and Soviet leaders had operated in since the end of the Second World War had changed irrevocably after Gorbachev’s UN Speech of December 7, 1988. Gorbachev abandoned the Marxist class struggle that for decades served as the basis for Soviet foreign policy. In place of that, Gorbachev declared that Eastern European states were free to choose their own paths, declaring “the compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice” as “a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.”

Gorbachev continued:

“…The next U.S. administration, headed by President-elect George Bush, will find in us a partner who is ready – without long pauses or backtracking – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness and good will, with a willingness to achieve concrete results working on the agenda which covers the main issues of Soviet-U.S. relations and world politics.”

Initially, Bush and his team were skeptical of Gorbachev. In his memoirs Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft dismissed the historic import of Gorbachev’s speech, writing that the speech “had established, with a largely rhetorical flourish, a heady atmosphere of optimism.” Scowcroft worried that Gorbachev would then be able to “exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.”

The caution with which Bush and his team treated Gorbachev was likewise extended to the newly or soon-to-be independent states in Eastern Europe. There was to be no dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. The diplomatic historian James Graham Wilson noted that Bush realized that a triumphalist approach on the part of the Americans might backfire. “Ok, so long as the programs do not smack of fomenting revolution,” Scowcroft wrote on a paper proposing ‘democratic dialogue’ in Eastern Europe.

Eventually, Bush accepted that Gorbachev was serious about reform and came to see him, as Reagan, Shultz and Matlock did: As a partner in ending the 40 year division of Europe.

A little known episode that took place at Camp David in November 1989, a month before the first summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev may have played a role in convincing Bush to overcome the skepticism of his advisers.

A young national security council aide named Condoleezza Rice invited two Russian specialists to Camp David to meet the Bush: Harvard University’s Richard Pipes, a leading neoconservative hardliner, and Princeton University’s Stephen F. Cohen, a leader of the “revisionist” school of Soviet history and author of a biography of Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin that Gorbachev had admired. Pipes and Cohen had a long, public history of opposing views and were frequent sparring partners on television and radio. At Camp David, Pipes and Cohen debated how the president might best approach Gorbachev at the upcoming summit in Malta. Pipes was, like Bush, a Republican and had served as an advisor on Soviet affairs to President Reagan. Cohen was a left-of-center critic of US policy and a longtime advocate for detente. Many years later, Cohen told me that after the debate, Bush asked that he sit next to him at lunch, and, seemingly rejecting Pipe’s hardline advice, told the room “Steve is my kind of Russianist.”

Subsequent events at Malta show that Bush took Cohen’s advice to heart. As Graham-Wilson notes, at Malta, “Bush wanted to avoid the impression that he was issuing orders to a defeated rival.” And according to the historian Joshua Shifrinson “Rather than trumpeting the collapse of the Soviet system for political points, the American transcript [of the meeting] suggests that Bush was willing to downplay changes in Soviet ideology if doing so would help maintain U.S.-Soviet relations writ large.”

***

Once the USSR fell, Bush and his team recognized the combustible reality on the ground. The most well-known expression of Bush’s policy towards the emerging post-Soviet states was made on August 1, 1991, during a speech to the Ukrainian Rada where he pledged that the US would take a hands off approach. Bush told the audience that the US “cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.”

Bush also warned he would “not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

Bush was bitterly criticized by Cold Warriors within his own party. William Safire, a neoconservative columnist for the New York Times, famously dubbed the speech “Chicken Kiev.” Yet, and tragically, nationalist impulses drove Kiev, in both 2004 and 2014, to ignore the votes cast by the Russian speaking citizens in the south and eastern parts of Ukraine. And more dangerously, political elites in Kiev also embarked on a mission to join the NATO alliance.

Matlock has said that he was “quite convinced that if Bush had been reelected he would not have [expanded NATO].”

But we will never know, because on Tuesday, November 3, 1992, Bush lost the presidency to Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.

I want to make one final point regarding Bush’s foreign policy. The wariness he evinced over stirring up the cauldron of parochial nationalism in the former USSR also manifested itself in his policy toward an emerging, analogous situation in the Balkans.

Yugoslavia, like the USSR, was a communist, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state that was, after 70 years, descending – thanks to nationalist tensions in Croatian, Bosnia, Slovenia and Serbia – into chaos. In Baker’s judgment, the war in the Balkans did not merit American intervention: “We don’t,” Baker once family quipped, “have a dog in this fight.” Baker also no doubt also understood the close historic, cultural and religious ties between Serbia and Russia and rightly felt that American attempts at shaping the post-Yugoslav reality on the ground would inevitably mean choosing sides and violating Bush’s cardinal rule against rubbing Russia’s diminished position in its face.

As we will see, the Bush approach toward both Russia and Yugoslavia was entirely rejected by the incoming Clinton administration – with disastrous results.

II. Clinton’s Wrong Turn

In the years following the 1992 US presidential election, Bush’s policy of respectful non-interference in post-Soviet affairs was replaced by a policy of micromanagement from Washington. The problem started early on. Clinton’s choice of foreign policy advisors proved the truth of the old dictum that “personnel is policy.” An old Clinton friend from his days at Oxford, Strobe Talbott, became the president’s principal advisor on Russia. And in short order, Talbott, and a team of officials from the State Department, CIA, Treasury and the National Security Council embarked on a series of trips throughout the former Soviet Union.

Dubbed “hello-goodbye” tours, Talbott and a team which included the young foreign service officer Victoria Nuland, a member of the most influential neoconservative family in Washington, currently serving in the Biden administration as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. The Talbott team traveled to 14 of the former Soviet republics. Talbott has written that his job was “to deliver to leaders of all the new independent states messages of American support for their sovereignty and willingness to help them resolve their disputes with each other and with Moscow.”

Their first trip to Kiev was in May 1993.

What was behind all this?

The answer is as sad and it is unsurprising: Votes. Clinton’s policy to expand NATO was calibrated to appeal to voters of Polish and Ukrainian descent in the American Rust Belt. It was politics that drove the policy – not US national security interests.

In a recent interview, Ambassador Matlock revealed that…

“The real reason that Clinton went for it [NATO expansion] was domestic politics. I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great mistake, and that if it continued, that certainly it would have to stop before it reached countries like Ukraine and Georgia, that this would be unacceptable to any Russian government, and that furthermore, that the expansion of NATO would undermine any chance for the development of democracy in Russia.”

Matlock continued:

“But why, when I came out of that testimony, a couple of people who were observing said, ‘Jack, why are you fighting against this?’ And I said, ‘Because I think it’s a bad idea.’ They said, ‘Look, Clinton wants to get reelected. He needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois; they all have a very strong East European…’ Many of these had become Reagan Democrats on East- West issues. They’re insisting that the Ukraine [NATO] expand to include Poland and eventually Ukraine. So, Clinton needs those to get reelected.”

Clearly then, NATO expansion was driven by Clinton’s political agenda. US national security interests didn’t enter into the equation. Clinton’s rejection of Bush’s “go slow” policy was a fateful error, and one that has helped to bring about the current proxy war between Russia and the West in Ukraine.

But if Clinton’s major mistake was pushing NATO expansion, a close runner up would be his policy toward the former Yugoslavia. Here again Clinton failed to take heed of Bush’s warning regarding “suicidal nationalism.” And indeed it might be fair to say that Clinton’s policy towards Serbia set the stage for what we are seeing in Ukraine.

Writing at the end of the 1990s, the late foreign affairs columnist William Pfaff observed that “The end of Soviet power encouraged Americans to think that history itself had validated American virtues and given the country a new mandate to improve the world, not by providing it with an edifying example, as once believed, but through action.”

And the hawkish ‘New Democrats’ who staffed and advised the Clinton administration found many an opportunity to flex American muscle in the new ‘unipolar world.’ Clinton and his national security team came quickly – after NATO’s intervention in Bosnia in 1995 – to take the efficacy and rightness of humanitarian intervention as an article of faith. The success of the Dayton Accords seemed to cement the idea that America was, after all, the indispensable nation.

As the historian David P. Calleo observed, the Clinton administration “had always sported a low-grade Wilsonian rhetoric that implied hegemonic ambitions,” it was only after Dayton that “the policy began to imitate the rhetoric.”

Clinton’s second intervention in the Balkans in 1999 set the template for what George W. Bush attempted in Iraq, and, later, what Barack Obama attempted in Libya and Syria. In the absence of U.N. sanction, Clinton launched a 78-day bombardment of Serbia, ostensibly undertaken to prevent what was said to be the looming slaughter of Albanian Kosovars by Serbian forces.

Kosovo, and later American interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, combined with the American-sponsored “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe in the 2000s, all fed Vladimir Putin’s paranoia about American intentions – and his fears of American-sponsored regime change in Moscow. As the novelist Joseph Heller once wrote: “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Russia’s reaction to Clinton’s policy, particularly with regard to its illegal bombing campaign over Serbia helped to feed the crisis from the other end: It is useful to recall that the precedent for Russia’s unilateral recognition of the breakaway republics of Dontesk and Luhansk made this past February was set by the US in February 2008 when the it unilaterally recognized the independence of Kosovo.

***

The “suicidal nationalism,” of which George HW Bush warned us, has long haunted Ukrainian politics, and in recent years has become its most dominant force thanks in no small part to the rhetorical financial and military assistance provided by presidents Clinton, Bush II, Obama and Trump.

Ukrainian nationalism bared its teeth during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, and then again during the violent coup d’etat of February 22, 2014. This last led directly to an 8 year war (April 6, 2014 – February 24, 2022) against the Russian speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk which killed over 13,000 people and displaced 1.3 million. The primary victims of that war, Russian speaking non-combatants, received little in the way of sympathy in the West.

In post-Maidan Ukraine, discriminatory language laws were instituted and an “anti-terror operation” aimed at the Donbas commenced under the direction the Washington’s hand picked prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

These moves by Kiev directly challenged Putin’s policy of protecting Russian minority populations abroad. The later refusal by Ukrainian presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky to implement the Minsk Protocols of 2015 was yet another sign that “suicidal nationalism” had taken hold in Kiev.

It then seems clear, in the light of history, that Bush’s prudential and cautious policy toward Russia was the correct one. Unfortunately, Clinton and his advisers, many of whom, worryingly, continue to hold sway over the policymaking process in Washington all these years later, rejected Bush’s approach.

The results speak for themselves.

Rajan Menon and Dan DePetris: Article 5 will never be a flip switch for war

NATO

By Rajan Menon and Dan DePetris, Responsible Statecraft, 11/17/22

On November 15, two Russian-made cruise missiles crossed into Poland, landing in the village of Przewodow, a village in the southeastern corner of the country, near the border with Ukraine, killing at least two people.

Preliminary investigations, as reported by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, indicate that the incident was caused by Ukraine’s missile defense systems, which sought to intercept an incoming Russian missile. But the event immediately created a storm of speculation, coming as it did on a day when the Russian military fired some 90 cruise missiles at energy installations and other sites throughout Ukraine, continuing a weeks-long attempt to devastate the Ukrainian economy as winter approaches.

The episode, though accidental, marks the first time the fighting in Ukraine has crossed into NATO territory. That, in turn, produced a tsunami of instant analysis about whether Poland would invoke Article 5 of the 1949 Washington Treaty that created NATO. Article 5 is important because it states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all.

Everyone should have taken a deep breath. In times like these, when emotions run high and scary scenarios abound, prudence is particularly important. Invoking Article 5 is an alliance decision—and even if it were invoked, each country has the right to determine how it will respond.

Article 5 is frequently labeled the North Atlantic Treaty’s most important clause—and with some justification. The collective defense commitment serves as the foundation of NATO’s deterrent power. It is designed to dissuade an adversary from even thinking about launching an attack against a member state for fear of having to fight an alliance that now includes 30 countries (compared to the Cold War highpoint of 16). To the alliance’s credit, the collective defense provision has worked as intended since 1949. The only time NATO has invoked the clause was after the 9/11 attacks, and that was largely as a demonstration of solidarity against a much weaker foe—a terrorist group, not a state.

Furthermore, putting NATO on a war footing isn’t as simple as flipping a switch—and that’s a good thing. The invocation of Article 5 doesn’t actually require all NATO countries to go into autopilot mode and rush into battle. Each member of the alliance has self-agency. The decision to act, and what exactly to do, lies entirely with individual states and may differ depending on any number of circumstances—and for good reason.

NATO’s commitment to collective defense was framed in a manner that would prevent events outside of its control from forcing the alliance into military action it may not wish to take. To preclude haste, the alliance’s charter gives each member state the leeway to act “as it deems necessary…to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” The term “action” is left open to interpretation: it could include the use of military force but also any number of responses short of war, including severing diplomatic relations with the offending state and imposing economic sanctions. The resort to force is not ruled out, but neither is it automatic.

Moreover, no treaty, however sacrosanct in Washington policy circles, supplants the U.S. Constitution. Even had Poland requested the invocation of Article 5 and NATO determined that military force was called for, President Biden could not have short-circuited American constitutional procedures. He would still need to approach the U.S. Congress, the branch with the sole authority to declare war or authorize the use of force, and make the case that war serves the U.S. interest. Bypassing these critical procedures, even to protect an ally, would be unconstitutional. 

What happened in Poland should remind us that war is inherently unpredictable and far more difficult to control than those who initiate and wage it assume. It can escalate, spread to places that were not in the fight when the guns began to fire, and produce unimaginable economic repercussions. The longer a war drags on, the more likely the law of unintended consequences will kick in.

The war in Ukraine illustrates this perfectly. It has lasted longer than anyone — certainly Vladimir Putin — anticipated and increased food and energy prices for countries, especially poor ones, thousands of miles away from Ukraine. There’s no reason to believe a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine is on the horizon; but there are several reasons to believe that more surprises await us—some that may harm people with no immediate connection to the conflict. This is reason enough to have provisions and procedures, such as Article 5, in place to put a brake on impulsive reactions. To their credit, President Biden and America’s NATO partners displayed this prudence by not jumping to a premature conclusion and, instead, urging patience until the facts became clear.

The larger lesson to be learned from what happened in Poland is that dialogue is an essential requirement during moments of tension. Washington and Moscow need to keep communications channels open even, or especially, during the worst of times. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has taken US-Russian relations to their lowest point in the post-Cold War era. As tempting as it may be to ostracize Russia, self-interest, even self-preservation, dictates clear and frequent communication in order to minimize misunderstandings and prevent isolated incidents from blooming into full-blown crises. It’s the kind of common sense which, fortunately, infuses Article 5.

TASS: Poll shows 60% of Russian businessmen see domestic demand decline as main problem

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TASS News Agency, 11/7/22

MOSCOW, November 7. /TASS/. Over 60% of Russian entrepreneurs pointed to the decline in domestic demand as the main problem they are up against now. This is according to a survey conducted by the office of the institute of Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs’ Rights among businessmen in October 2022.

The survey involved 5,760 entrepreneurs from all regions of the country. In particular, 74% of respondents belong to the micro business sector, 21% to small businesses, 3.4% to mid-sized businesses and 1.6% to large businesses. Twenty-three percent of respondents are engaged in in the non-food products sector, another 11% in food, 8% in catering, and 7.5% each in manufacturing, construction and building materials, 7.3% in the consumer services sector, 5.2% in agriculture and forestry, 3.9% in education, and 3.5% in the hotel and tourism business. Each of the other industries does not exceed a share of 3% of the total number of respondents.

“Sixty-four percent of entrepreneurs picked this particular factor as the thing that most negatively affect their business. The next ones in terms of severity are shortage of personnel (34.2%), shortage of working capital and cash gaps (28.9%), supply chain gaps (26.5 %), and the complexity of import delivery (19.1%),” the survey results reveal.

According to the report, the partial mobilization introduced in Russia did not affect the teams of the majority of respondents (66%), while 34% reported that part of their employees were called up.

“More than half (58.6%) of those whose employees were mobilized did not need to replace these employees, or a replacement was found very quickly, and only 19% could not find a replacement for drop-out employees so far,” the report says.

As the authors of the survey noted, 26.7% of respondents reported that they were unable to find analogues of critically important foreign products or services that are no longer supplied to Russia due to sanctions. However, the majority still managed to find new suppliers of the same (23.6%) or similar products, both in Russia (22.3%) and abroad (13.5%).

As for the impact of sanctions, entrepreneurs gave different assessments. More than half (55.4%) have fully adapted or continue to adapt to the West’s anti-Russia sanctions.

“That is, most of the community withstood the aftermath of the sanctions,” the institute’s office stated. Anyway, 10.5% of the polled participants said that they could not cope with the consequences of the sanctions, and 16.3% did not notice them at all. Regarding the assessment of the state of their own business, only 6% of respondents said that they had to close their businesses or will have to do so soon.

Support measures and government work

Among the state support measures already taken, the entrepreneurs most highly appreciated the moratorium on inspections (52.2%), reduction of rates of the simplified system of taxation and property tax rates in the regions (37.4%), soft loans for SMEs for backbone companies (23.9%), and the suspension of new requirements for labeling goods (22.7%). The survey’s authors noted that the respondents were allowed to give a multiple choice answer to this question.

The measures the entrepreneurs would like the government to take in the future include writing off part of taxes, cutting insurance premiums to 15% of the total salary, cheaper and more accessible revolving loans, as well as the freezing of tariffs for natural monopolies.

According to the poll, 40.9% of respondents believe that the government’s work in terms of import substitution and the development of domestic production in Russia is the right move. However, the respondents also note that the volume of measures taken is still insufficient, and 8% believe that the actions of the authorities have already significantly improved the situation.

Wyatt Reed: Italian Police Foil Deadly Plot by Neo-Nazis Linked to Ukraine’s Azov Battalion

Azov Battalion symbol

By Wyatt Reed, Sputnik, 11/15/22

The alleged plot to destroy various Italian targets — including a police station — appears to be the first attempted terror attack in Western Europe linked to Ukraine’s official Nazi military formations.

Police in Italy arrested four suspected neo-Nazis with links to Ukraine’s notorious Azov Battalion who were accused of plotting to carry out “violent acts” against both civilians and police, according to local media.

Photos released by police show the Nazi paraphernalia seized in around 30 raids on members of the “Order of Hagal” throughout the country included photos of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and t-shirts bearing the logo of Ukraine’s official Nazi regiment, the Azov Battalion.

“According to the investigators, the objective identified by the members of the Order of Hagal was the Marigliano [police] barracks,” Italian outlet Today Chronicle wrote Tuesday.

According to the Italian publication, one of the suspects wanted by police “disappeared” before he could be apprehended – a 27-year-old Ukrainian national named Anton Radomosky, who the outlet reported “would have offered his ‘intermediation’ between the Order of Hagal and neo-Nazi groups such as the Azov Battalion,” which they note “is particularly active in the context of the War in Donbass.”

Information published by ANSA, Italy’s leading news agency, indicates that Radomosky “is currently in Ukraine, and the investigation showed that he was in contact with the Azov Battalion.”

According to another Italian source, the “Ukrainian accomplice… wanted to cause an explosion in a shopping center.” Corriere Del Mezzogiorno indicated “the cell had contacts” with not only “Ukrainian ultranationalist formations such as the Azov Battalion,” but also the notorious Ukrainian “Right Sector” nazi militia.

The EU and Interpol have been fretting for months about the likelihood that weapons being shipped to Ukraine amid NATO’s proxy war on Russia will end up in criminal hands. As Interpol chief Jurgen Stock explained in early June, “Once the guns fall silent [in Ukraine], the illegal weapons will come. We know this from many other theaters of conflict. The criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them.”

Gilbert Doctorow: Cost of Living in Europe and Further Aid to Ukraine

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By Gilbert Doctorow, Blog, 11/6/22

The single largest contingent of readers of my essays is in the United States, and it is for their particular benefit that I open today’s piece with some concrete facts on how Europe’s self-imposed energy crisis resulting from the ban on import of Russian hydrocarbons is making it impossible for your average citizen of France, Belgium and many other countries in the EU to make ends meet. I hasten to add that the unworkable arithmetic of monthly household finance is day by day, week by week bringing us to the social unrest and political instability that I and others have been predicting ever since the trend lines on cost of living became clear some months ago.

I will not introduce official statistics, because when the going gets tough they tend to be presented in a very selective manner by the authorities. My ‘anecdotal’ evidence comes from the energy bills I am now receiving at my home in Brussels and from what friends and acquaintances in this country and in France tell me about their personal situations.

A couple of weeks ago, I received from Engie, the French based energy giant that owns Electrabel, the formerly independent Belgian electricity generator and distributor, a report on my annual electricity consumption for their accounting year ending on 7 October 2022. The total charges were 1807 euros, meaning 150 euros per month. In the same communication, they informed me that the new rates applied to the coming year will require a 285 euro debit from my bank each month. Presto, my electricity bill doubles!

Meanwhile, my latest delivery of 1,000 liters of heating oil for our house was invoiced at 1,500 euros, which is also virtually double what I paid for oil one year ago. And I consider myself lucky that I did not follow the advice of various heating specialists who visited my home a year ago for maintenance work on our furnace. They had suggested that we go ‘modern’ and convert from oil to natural gas, because for seniors like myself that spares us the necessity of monitoring the level of mazout remaining in our basement tank so as to place a delivery order on time. If you order too early, the minimum quantity of 1,000 liters will not fit and you are charged a premium for the delivery of a short order. If you order too late, the sludge at the bottom of the tank may feed into the system, blocking the filter on the way to the point of ignition and you have to bring in a repair man at the cost of several hundred euros. Natural gas, I was told, would spare us these inconveniences. Of course, today gas heating is not double but triple or more the cost it was a year ago, and friends who ‘went modern’ rue that decision. If there will be gas shortages this winter, which remains a possibility depending on the severity of the frosts ahead, these friends will also regret the inconvenience of heating cut-offs leaving them in the cold, literally and figuratively.

Again, to make sense of the heating oil figures, the 1,000 liters mentioned above heats my home for a period of 4 to 6 weeks in autumn, winter and early spring depending on how low the air temperature outside descends. So far this year, we have been very lucky temperature-wise in Western Europe this fall. But a nice drop to zero at night for a week or more later in this year can reduce substantially the staying power of 1,000 liters.

Lest my mention of these new costs sound like whining, let me assure the gentle reader that I personally have no problems meeting the costs. Now that the euro has fallen like a stone this year due to the shaky economy driven by the energy crisis and inflation, my U.S. social security checks each month are worth 20% more in local currency and my new additional energy costs are largely covered. My highlighting these figures and new ratios of cost is to bring to the fore how they affect the great majority of this country’s working population.

 It would be fair to say that the monthly take-home pay of 70% of Belgians after the 50% income tax is withheld comes to about 1,500 euros. Just for comparison, if this figure seems unduly low, the state pensions of many Belgians come to just a few hundred euros; and you have to have been very successful in your working career to receive a pension equivalent to those same 1,500 euros.

Let us assume that my electricity and heating costs are well above average because of the size of my home and the unimproved state of our insulation. Let us assume that these same 70% of the population have total energy costs now of 900 euros a month, or half of what I will be paying in effect. In a household where there is only one breadwinner, this would leave just 600 euros a month for food, apartment rent or mortgage payments and all other expenses. The arithmetic just doesn’t work. Your household budget will be in sharp deficit each month.

I have taken Belgium as my example, but I assure the reader that the numbers for income and outgo of the majority of the populations in neighboring European countries are not much different. That is true even in Germany despite its seeming prosperity. So what will the people do about it? At what point does public indignation and growing poverty spill over into social and political unrest?

In past essays, I pointed to France as a country with a long tradition of political volatility, a country where workers will go out on strike at the drop of the hat. Indeed, when Macron raised the tax on petrol in November 2018 we saw the voluble and politically threatening emergence of the gilets jaunes or Yellow Vests, a movement which for a couple of years stubbornly resisted all of the government’s measures at suppression. Today, after losing its parliamentary majority in the last elections, the Macron government is much weaker and understands that it cannot fight strike movements head on even if it briefly threatened to bring in the army and to forcibly send workers back to their jobs in the refineries and petrol distribution network. Accordingly, Macron has folded and now resorts to buying off strikers and other protesters. Their demands for salary hikes are not met, but they are quietly being given ‘premiums’ of several months pay to go back to work and shut up. So far that has been effective, but it is running up the ongoing budget deficits and may soon be unsustainable. It also places France in great dependence on Germany’s looking a blind eye at the fiscal irresponsibility of Paris and its violation of EU finance rules.

And so street demonstrations by tens of thousands of irate citizens against untenable increases in cost of living have arisen elsewhere in Europe. Even The Financial Times is today giving extensive coverage to yesterday’s march in downtown Rome which brought together the economic issue of unsustainable rises in energy costs and the political issue of the ongoing war in Ukraine and Europe’s failed policies in that regard. The banners read “End to Violence” and the overriding message was that Italy must work to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table, not feed the conflict by further deliveries of arms to Kiev. This is a movement that is sure to turn up in many other European cities in the coming weeks, and the European governments will be unable to ignore it.

Even in the United States, the worsening financial position of the government will likely force an abrupt change of policy on Ukraine after the Midterm Elections deprive the Democrats of control over Congress. Humanitarian instincts, concern for the growing death toll of Ukrainian males on the field of battle will have no role whatsoever in this revaluation of policy. It will be driven and it will be justified by the high and rising cost of federal government borrowing in pace with the rises in the prime rate to tame inflation, inflation that is in large part due to distortions in the global oil and gas markets that the sanctions on Russian energy are causing.

For the powers that be, in Europe and the United States, the only ‘bright spot’ in the immediate future may be that the Russians solve their problems for them by winning the war with lightning speed.

Zelensky is reported today in Western media as saying that 3 million people may be forced to evacuate Kiev if the Russian assault on the electricity generation and distribution proceeds at its current pace. Ukrainian authorities responsible for the national grid, say it may collapse in the near future. And so we may envision two developments that lead to the same conclusion of Kiev suing for peace: the flight of 9 million or more citizens to Western Europe where they threaten to overwhelm capacity of reception centers and so precipitate an armed push-back; and the disintegration of the Ukrainian fighting forces in the midst of national black-out.

Judicial Watch: Defense Department Records Reveal U.S. Funding of Anthrax Laboratory Activities in Ukraine

Judicial Watch Press Release, 11/10/22

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 345 pages of records from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a component of the U.S. Department of Defense, revealing that the United States funded anthrax laboratory activities in a Ukrainian biolab in 2018. Dozens of pages are completely redacted, and many others are heavily redacted. The records show over $11 million in funding for the Ukraine biolabs program in 2019.

The records were obtained in response to a February 28, 2022, Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for records regarding the funding of Black & Veatch involving work of any manner with biosafety laboratories in the country of Ukraine.

Three phases of work are discussed in the records, several of which are indicated to have occurred “on site” at the Ukrainian labs.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency provided a report titled “PACS [Pathogen Asset Control System] at the [redacted (b)(3), which exempts information from disclosure when a foreign government or international organization requests the withholding, or the national security official concerned has specified in regulations that the information’s release would have an adverse effect on the U.S. government’s ability to obtain similar information in the future] Phase 2 On-the-Job Training Report, December 11-13/December 26, 2018” The Executive Summary includes information regarding “on-site” activities, likely referring to a Ukrainian biolab:

PACS [Pathogen Asset Control System] on-the-job training was conducted for users of the [redacted (b)(3)] on December 11-13, under Phase 2 implementation activities, Anthrax Laboratory activities were conducted on December 28, 2018.PACS existing configuration and customization were checked jointly with the on-site PACS Working GroupPhase 1 implementation activities including progress and current status were reviewed; issues and problems discussed and resolved;Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for PACS use at [redacted (b)(3)] was updated to include Subculturing Operation process – the updated SOP submitted to the on-site Working Group.

The report provides a list of titles of “OJT [on-the-job training] Participants” with all participants names from Black & Veatch redacted, citing exemptions (b)(6) for personal privacy and (b)(3).

Senior Researcher Laboratory of Anacrobic Infections

Leading Researcher Laboratory of Anacrobic Infections

Senior Researcher Laboratory of Anacrobic Infections

Researcher Laboratory of Anacrobic Infections

Leading Veternarian Laboratory of Anacrobic Infections

Senior Researcher Laboratory of Bacterial Animal Diseases

Head of Anthrax Laboratory

Researcher Anthrax Laboratory

Senior Research Scientist Laboratory of Mycotoxicology

Leading Veternarian Laboratory of Mycotoxicology

Junior Researcher Laboratory of Leptospirosis

Laboratory Assistant Neuroinfection Laboratory

Research Scientist Sector of International Relationships and Geoinformation

A section titled “Future Activities” notes: “Phase 3 implementation agreed for March 2019.”

Included in the records is an Order for Supplies or Services dated August 1, 2019, is issued by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to Black and Veatch Special Projects Corp. The total amount of the contract award is $11,289,142.00. The order contains approximately 35 contract line items set forth in a statement of work (SOW), dated March 5, 2019, titled: “Electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance (EIDSS) and Pathogen Asset Control (PACS) Implementation” The statement of work, consisting of 24 pages, was not provided, nor was there an explanation for the withholding.

A report titled “PACS [Pathogen Asset Control] Implementation at the [redacted (b)(3)]. Phase 3 On-the-Job Training Report, November 28-29.2018” states in its Executive Summary:

B&V has completed the final stage of PACS implementation at the [redacted (b)(3)]. The site has been fully commissioned in operations of PACS functionality.PACS on-the-job training and on-site activities were conducted for users on November 28-29, 2018 under Phase 3 implementation activitiesPACS existing configuration and customization were checked jointly with the on-site PACS Working GroupPhase 2 implementation activities were reviewed; issues and problems discussed and resolved;

A report titled “PACS [Pathogen Asset Control] Implementation at the [redacted (b)(3)]. Phase 3 On-the-Job Training Report, April 3-5, 2019” has its Executive Summary and other portions redacted, citing FOIA exemptions (b)(4) trade secrets, (b)(5) interagency or intra-agency communications and/or attorney-client privilege.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency also provided a 2018 report titled “PACS [Pathogen Asset Control System] Implementation Plan at [redacted (b)(3)]. Phase 2 On-the-Job Training Report, September 25-27, 2018.” The Executive Summary includes: “PACS on-the-job training was conducted for users of the [redacted (b)(3)] on September 25-27, 2018, under Phase 2 implementation activities.”

A list of “OJT [on-the-job-training] Participants” from contractor Black & Veatch includes job descriptions but all names have been redacted through exemptions (b)(6) personal privacy and (b)(3). Some of those job descriptions include:

Head of Laboratory Virology

Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Control

Researcher of Pigs Diseases Research Laboratory

Scientist of Laboratory of Virology

Department of Avian Diseases

Researcher of Department of Avian Diseases

Laboratory for Biosafety, Quality Management

Engineer of the Laboratory for Biosafety, Quality Management

Laboratory of Biotechnology

Researcher of the Laboratory of Biotechnology

Head of the Brucellosis Laboratory

Senior Researcher of the Brucellosis Laboratory

Head of the Molecular Diagnostics and Control

Head of the Tuberculosis Laboratory

Researcher of Tuberculosis Laboratory

Researcher of the Laboratory of Virology

The report also contains a section titled “Future Activities:”

Read full press release here.