Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 252

Chris Hedges Interviews Matthew Hoh About Status of Afghanistan War; Jimmy Dore Deconstructs CNN’s Whitewashing of Libyan War

Image courtesy of Dandelion Salad blog

 

On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges takes an in-depth look at the 16-year-old conflict in Afghanistan with Matthew Hoh, a Marine Corps veteran and diplomat who resigned his State Department post in Afghanistan in protest over the war. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the decades of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

Watch this important interview here:

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/chris-hedges-and-matthew-hoh-afghanistan-war-keeps-going-because-the-money-keeps-flowing-in/

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A few days ago, Jimmy Dore did a show deconstructing how misleading a recent CNN segment on what’s going on in Libya was.   CNN started it’s timeline after the overthrow of Qaddafi and conveniently left out how the various militias fighting for control of the country emerged and who has been backing them.

As Dore shows, it’s not like this important contextual information isn’t out there.  Hillary Clinton’s emails, which were voluntarily released at the beginning of 2016, revealed that the desire to overthrow the Qaddafi government (which had always allowed women’s rights and had achieved the highest standard of living in all of Africa with a welfare state that would put Scandinavia to shame) was primarily driven by then-French president Nicholas Sarkozy who wanted to acquire control of Libyan oil, maintain influence in the former French colonies of Africa, and to stop Qaddafi’s plan to establish a gold-backed currency that would have provided African economic independence.   The emails also show that western special ops agents were in country at the beginning of the protests, creating provocations.   Genocide by NATO-backed “rebels” against black Libyans who were considered to be loyal to Qaddafi are also documented.

Watch Dore’s brilliant critique of the CNN report here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECko3KDC2w8

Trump & Putin’s Meeting at the G20 Summit Results in Ceasefire Agreement for Southwest Syria; China & Russia Issue Joint Statement re Tensions on Korean Peninsula; Iraq Government Declares Victory Over ISIS in Mosul; New Academic Study Says Hillary Lost Vo

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the their bilateral meeting at the G20 in Hamburg, Germany July 7, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Carlos Barria

Trump and Putin finally met for the first time at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany this past Friday.  And, while it can’t be characterized as a major breakthrough, it did manage to exceed the paltry expectations that many had, myself included.   First, it was noted by Tillerson that the two leaders seemed to have a good rapport and the meeting went well past the allotted time of 30 minutes, clocking in at around 2 hours and 15 minutes.   Reportedly, the issues of alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential election, Ukraine, cyber-security, terrorism and Syria were all addressed.  The last of which resulted in a ceasefire in the southwestern area of Syria.  But those who rely upon the corporate media or even the pseudo-alternative media (e.g. Huffington Post) would be hard-pressed to know this since most of the coverage mentioned the allegations of Russian hacking being discussed but either omitted the part about the Syria ceasefire or buried it at the bottom of the article.

Did the editors of these outlets think that the ceasefire was not newsworthy?

One of the few outlets that did headline the Syria ceasefire development was the Associated Press:

HAMBURG, Germany (AP) — The United States and Russia struck an agreement Friday on a cease-fire in southwest Syria, crowning President Donald Trump’s first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is the first U.S.-Russian effort under Trump’s presidency to stem Syria’s six-year civil war.

The cease-fire goes into effect Sunday at noon Damascus time, according to U.S. officials and the Jordanian government, which is also involved in the deal.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who accompanied Trump in his meeting with Putin, said the understanding is designed to reduce violence in an area of Syria near Jordan’s border that is critical to the U.S. ally’s security.

It’s a “very complicated part of the Syrian battlefield,” Tillerson told reporters after the U.S. and Russian leaders met for more than two hours on the sidelines of a global summit in Hamburg, Germany.

Of the agreement, he said, “I think this is our first indication of the U.S. and Russia being able to work together in Syria.”

It should be remembered, however, that the Obama administration, working via then-Secretary of State John Kerry, also worked out a ceasefire deal in Syria with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov last September, which was later torpedoed by the Pentagon’s “accidental” bombing of a heavily monitored airbase where Syrian army troops had been stationed for a long period of time.

Given how zealous members of the deep state have been to sabotage any move by Trump toward detente by keeping the empty accusations of Russiagate at high pitch, folks should be very cautious in their optimism for the long-term success of this recently agreed ceasefire.   Attempts to sabotage it will likely become obvious in the near future.

Ex-CIA analyst and expert on Russia/Soviet Union, Ray McGovern, reminds readers of this in his analysis of the Putin-Trump meeting and the Syria ceasefire at Consortium News:

With the ceasefire in tatters, Kerry publicly complained on Sept. 29, 2016: “Syria is as complicated as anything I’ve ever seen in public life, in the sense that there are probably about six wars or so going on at the same time – Kurd against Kurd, Kurd against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sunni, Shia, everybody against ISIL, people against Assad, Nusra [Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate]. This is as mixed-up sectarian and civil war and strategic and proxies, so it’s very, very difficult to be able to align forces.”

Only in December 2016, in an interview with Matt Viser of the Boston Globe, did Kerry admit that his efforts to deal with the Russians had been thwarted by then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter – as well as all those forces he found so difficult to align.

“Unfortunately we had divisions within our own ranks that made the implementation [of the ceasefire agreement] extremely hard to accomplish,” Kerry said. “But it … could have worked. … The fact is we had an agreement with Russia … a joint cooperative effort.

“Now we had people in our government who were bitterly opposed to doing that,” he said. “I regret that. I think that was a mistake. I think you’d have a different situation there conceivably now if we’d been able to do that.”

….As the new U.S.-Russia agreed-upon ceasefire goes into effect on Sunday, Putin will be eager to see if this time Trump, unlike Obama, can make a ceasefire in Syria stick; or whether, like Obama, Trump will be unable to prevent it from being sabotaged by Washington’s deep-state actors.

According to Democracy Now!, so far the ceasefire appears to be holding since it went into effect on Sunday afternoon:

Monitoring groups say a ceasefire brokered by Trump and Putin for parts of southwest Syria does appear to be holding, as a new round of U.N.-sponsored peace talks open today in Geneva. The territory covered by the ceasefire includes rebel-held areas of Daraa, where opposition officials say weeks of intense bombing by the Syrian government stopped after the ceasefire took effect Sunday. However, fighting continues in other parts of the country, including in Raqqa, where the journalistic group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently says 23 civilians were killed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and shelling by U.S.-backed forces over the weekend.

As journalist and geopolitical analyst, Pepe Escobar, pointed out in his thoughts on the meeting, this was actually only one in a series of diplomatically critical meetings that Putin participated in.  Several days earlier Putin met with Chinese leader Xi on which they agreed upon several important geopolitical points:

And then, there’s the big story of the G-20 in Hamburg, which actually started three days earlier in Moscow, in a full-fledged official summit between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi repeatedly extolled the “strategic alliance”, or “the fast-growing, pragmatic cooperation”, or even the “special character” of China’s ties with Russia.

Putin once again pledged to support the New Silk Roads, or One Belt, One Road initiative (Obor), “by all means”, which includes its interpenetration with the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU).

The Russian Direct Investment Fund and the China Development Bank established a joint $10 billion investment fund.

Gazprom and China’s CNPC signed a key agreement for the starting date of gas deliveries via the Power of Siberia pipeline; December 20, 2019, according to Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller. And that will be followed by the construction of Power of Siberia-2.

They kept discussing a military cooperation roadmap.

And at a closed Kremlin meeting the night before their official summit, in which they clinched yet another proverbial raft of deals worth billions of dollars, Putin and Xi developed a common North Korea strategy; “dialogue and negotiation”, coupled with firm opposition to the THAAD missile system being installed in South Korea.

Alexander Mercouris has posted the entire Joint Statement by Russia and China on the North Korean situation, along with his own comments, here.

Just prior to Xi’s meeting with Putin,  the Chinese leader proclaimed the best period of Sino-Russian relations in history in an interview with the Russian state media outlet TASS.   The comments were reported in the Chinese media outlet Xinhua as follows:

BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday said China-Russia relations are at their “best time in history,” and expressed hope the Group of 20 major economies (G20) will continue their support for multilateral free trade and leadership in innovation-driven growth.

….China and Russia have built high-level political and strategic mutual trust, Xi said, noting that China and Russia have completely resolved their border issues left over from history, turning the 4,300-km boundary line into a bond of friendship between the two peoples.

“Our two countries have built a high level of political and strategic trust,” Xi said, adding that the two nations are each other’s most trustworthy strategic partners.

“I believe the visit will lend new impetus to the growth of bilateral relations,” said Xi.

Xi said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin both think China and Russia should deepen economic and trade cooperation so as to reinforce their interests bond and better benefit the two peoples.

“Economic cooperation and trade is the most wide-ranging area in our practical cooperation and enjoys great potential,” Xi said, adding that the structure of China-Russia economic cooperation and trade continues to improve and quite a few new areas of growth have emerged.

China is also set to play a dominant role in the re-construction of Syria as reported yesterday by Syria’s state media outlet SANA:

Syrian Ambassador in Beijing Imad Mustafa said that Chinese companies are expected to play a big role in the reconstruction phase in Syria after the end of the crisis, pointing out that the Syrian government will give top priority to Chinese companies in investment and reconstruction opportunities.

Media Recklessness

Stephen Cohen gives his commentary on the Hamburg meeting in an interview with Tucker Carlson, lamenting the corporate media’s narrative of constantly demonizing Putin and Russia and creating an atmosphere in which any attempt by President Trump to constructively work together with Russia on mutual interests and to decrease tensions between the world’s nuclear superpowers is either pilloried and sabotaged or ignored.   Watch the 5-minute video here

The excellent foreign policy journalist Max Blumenthal goes over the history of the corporate media’s dangerously disingenuous coverage of the war in Syria as well as U.S.-Russia relations.  Watch the video or read the transcript here.

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The Duran reports , along with other media outlets, that the Iraqi government has now regained full control over the ISIS stronghold of Mosul:

The Iraqi army has won the battle of Mosul.  Though ISIS has resisted with fierce determination, and has held the Iraqi army off for 9 months, the last buildings in Mosul’s Old City still under ISIS control have now been freed.

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Reason Magazine has written an article about an academic study done by a political science professor at Boston University and a law professor at University of Minnesota, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen, showing that Hillary Clinton’s support of war policies cost her support in areas that were most affected by military casualties in America’s myriad wars:

A new study attributes Donald Trump’s victory last year to communities hit hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters, the authors suggest, saw Trump as an “opportunity to express that anger at both political parties.”

The paper—written by Douglas Kriner, a political scientist at Boston University, and Francis Shen, a law professor at the University of Minnesota—provides powerful lessons about the electoral viability of principled non-intervention, a stance that Trump was able to emulate somewhat on the campaign trail but so far has been incapable of putting into practice.

 

The study, available at SSRN, found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” The statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had suffered “even a modestly lower casualty rate,” all three could have flipped to Hillary Clinton, making her the president. The study controlled for party identification, comparing Trump’s performance in the communities selected to Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012. It also controlled for other relevant factors, including median family income, college education, race, the percentage of a community that is rural, and even how many veterans there were.

“Even after including all of these demographic control variables, the relationship between a county’s casualty rate and Trump’s electoral performance remains positive and statistically significant,” the paper noted. “Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Spotlight on Corporate Media Malfeasance on Syria, Russia, etc.; A Few Facts About Russia; Leader of Afghan Taliban Says U.S. Occupation is Main Obstacle to Peace; Trump & Putin to Meet at G20

Seymour Hersh

Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published a report detailing how President Trump ordered the Tomahawk missile strike in Syria this past April even though he received reporting from his intelligence and military advisers that stated there was no concrete evidence at the time that the Assad government was guilty of a sarin (or any intentional chemical) attack in the rebel town of Khan Sheikhoun.  Hersh wrote:

The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.“

…..To the dismay of many senior members of his national security team, Trump could not be swayed over the next 48 hours of intense briefings and decision-making. In a series of interviews, I learned of the total disconnect between the president and many of his military advisers and intelligence officials, as well as officers on the ground in the region who had an entirely different understanding of the nature of Syria’s attack on Khan Sheikhoun. I was provided with evidence of that disconnect, in the form of transcripts of real-time communications, immediately following the Syrian attack on April 4. In an important pre-strike process known as deconfliction, U.S. and Russian officers routinely supply one another with advance details of planned flight paths and target coordinates, to ensure that there is no risk of collision or accidental encounter (the Russians speak on behalf of the Syrian military). This information is supplied daily to the American AWACS surveillance planes that monitor the flights once airborne. Deconfliction’s success and importance can be measured by the fact that there has yet to be one collision, or even a near miss, among the high-powered supersonic American, Allied, Russian and Syrian fighter bombers.

Read Hersh’s full article at Die Welt.   While nothing in this article should be a surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time, it is nonetheless important to have the details and confirmation from a reputable journalistic source like Hersh.   It’s a sad commentary that this kind of investigative reporting has become so rare in the U.S.  One must ask themselves why, after the Bush administration ended, Hersh has had to publish at the London Review of Books and Die Welt.

Moving right along on the topic of pathetic mainstream (corporate) media in the U.S., Glenn Greenwald has written another great primer on the latest installment of horrible reporting on Russia and “Russiagate.”  Since it never ends, the few good journalists have to keep track of the misinformation and counter it on a regular basis.   In this latest piece, Greenwald discusses the larger context of the recent resignations of 3 journalists at CNN – one a Pulitzer Prize winner who was formerly a regular for the NYT – due to sloppy journalistic practices in writing an article that relied on one anonymous source with respect to allegations that Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci was tied to a Russian investment bank that was being probed by Congress.  The story turned out to be bogus and, as I noted previously, the concept of due diligence in contemporary corporate reporting is apparently considered to be out of fashion, something only pedantic un-hip nerd types and old maids who purse their lips would insist on.

From Greenwald:

In announcing the resignation of the three journalists — Thomas Frank, who wrote the story (not the same Thomas Frank who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”); Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from the New York Times; and Lex Haris, head of a new investigative unit — CNN said that “standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.” The resignations follow CNN’s Friday night retraction of the story, in which it apologized to Scaramucci.

….BUT CNN IS hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.

Read Greenwald’s entire skewering of the corporate media’s reporting here.

But, as a producer at CNN admitted in a recent video, there is no proof of any of the Russiagate accusations but it is constantly hammered on at the media outlet because it gets great ratings.  Watch the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdP8TiKY8dE

But CNN isn’t the only mainstream outlet that’s finally being forced to acknowledge it’s less than stellar journalistic record on “Russiagate.”  As Robert Parry reports, the New York Times just issued a retraction of its repeated claim that all 17 intelligence agencies signed off on the “assessment” – note that an assessment is not at all the same thing as an intelligence estimate.  In fact, only the CIA, NSA, FBI and the DNI signed off on the estimate earlier this year about Russia’s supposed hacking of the election.  Furthermore, only a handful of cherry-picked analysts from those few agencies contributed to the assessment.

On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

The Times’ grudging correction was vindication for some Russia-gate skeptics who had questioned the claim of a full-scale intelligence assessment, which would usually take the form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a product that seeks out the views of the entire Intelligence Community and includes dissents.

The reality of a more narrowly based Russia-gate assessment was admitted in May by President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan in sworn congressional testimony.

Parry has just been awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism for his steady and astute reporting and analysis at Consortium News.   He was awarded the prize in London on June 27th by another iconic journalist (whom I’ve admired since reading his book Heroes in college), John Pilger.  Here is an excerpt of Pilger’s comments when he presented Parry with the award:

There are too many awards for journalism. Too many simply celebrate the status quo. The idea that journalists ought to challenge the status quo — what Orwell called Newspeak and Robert Parry calls “groupthink” — is becoming increasingly rare.

 

More than a generation ago, a space opened up for a journalism that dissented from the groupthink and flourished briefly and often tenuously in the press and broadcasting. Today, that space has almost closed in the so-called mainstream media. The best journalists have become – often against their will – dissidents.

The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism recognizes these honorable exceptions. It is very different from other prizes. Let me quote in full why we give this award:

“The Gellhorn Prize is in honor of one of the 20th century’s greatest reporters. It is awarded to a journalist whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth – a truth validated by powerful facts that expose what Martha Gellhorn called ‘official drivel.’ She meant establishment propaganda.”

Martha was renowned as a war reporter. Her dispatches from Spain in the 1930s and D-Day in 1944 are classics. But she was more than that. As both a reporter and a committed humanitarian, she was a pioneer: one of the first in Vietnam to report what she called “a new kind of war against civilians”: a precursor to the wars of today.

She was the reason I was sent to Vietnam as a reporter. My editor had spread across his desk her articles that had run in the Guardian and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A headline read, “Targeting the people.” For that series, she was placed on a blacklist by the U.S. military and never allowed to return to South Vietnam.

She and I became good friends. Indeed, all my fellow judges of the Martha Gellhorn Prize  – Sandy and Shirlee Matthews, James Fox, Jeremy Harding — have that in common. We keep her memory.

She was indefatigable. She would call very early in the morning and open up the conversation with one of her favourite expressions – “I smell a rat.”

Martha Gellhorn – this is what a real journalist looks like

When, in 1990, President George Bush Senior invaded Panama on the pretext of nabbing his old CIA buddy General Noriega, the embedded media made almost no mention of civilian suffering. My phone rang. “I smell a rat,” said a familiar voice.

Within 24 hours Martha was on a plane to Panama. She was then in her 80s.  She went straight to the barrios of Panama City, and walked from door to door, interviewing ordinary people. That was the way she worked – in apartheid South Africa, in the favelas of Brazil, in the villages of Vietnam.

She estimated that the American bombing and invasion of Panama had killed at least 6,000 people.

She flew to Washington and stood up at a press conference at the Pentagon and asked a general: “Why did you kill so many people then lie about it?”

Imagine that question being asked today.  And that is what we are honoring this evening. Truth-telling, and the courage to find out, to ask the forbidden question.

Robert Parry is a very distinguished honorable exception.

Read the full speech here.

Speaking of war reporting.   Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has written a great piece on how corporate media outlets all characterize the U.S. as being the hapless humanitarian that is constantly being “sucked into” or “stumbling into” wars against its will.   They are mediasplaining to us rubes how the political class in Washington consists of a bunch of well-meaning clowns who bumble around not knowing what to do with all that humanitarian concern welling out of them so they are slipping and sliding around and if others get hurt, well, gee shucks, we’re just a great big well-meaning dufus.

“Sliding,” “stumbling,” ”sucked into,” “dragged into,” ”drawn into”: The US is always reluctantly—and without a plan—falling backward into bombing and occupying. The US didn’t enter the conflict in Syria in September 2014 deliberately; it was forced into it by outside actors. The US didn’t arm and fund anti-Assad rebels for four years to the tune of $1 billion a year as part of a broader strategy for the region; it did so as a result of some unknown geopolitical dark matter.

When US empire isn’t reluctant, it’s benevolent. “Initially motivated by humanitarian impulse,” Foreign Policy‘s Emile Simpson (6/21/17)  insisted, “the United States and its Western allies achieved regime change in Libya and attempted it in Syria, by backing rebels in each case.”

“At least in recent decades, American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy,” the New York Times editorial board (2/7/17) swooned.

“Every American president since at least the 1970s,” Washington Post’s Philip Rucker (5/2/17) declared, “has used his office to champion human rights and democratic values around the world.” Interpreting US policymakers’ motives is permitted, so long as the conclusion is never critical.

Johnson goes on to contrast this with how other nations’ actions are characterized, like Russia.

Russia isn’t “drawn into” Crimea; it has a secret “Crimea takeover plot” (BBC, 3/9/15). Putin doesn’t “stumble into” Syria; he has a “Long-Term Strategy” there (Foreign Affairs, 3/15/16). Military adventurism by other countries is part of a well-planned agenda, while US intervention is at best reluctant, and at worst bumfuzzled—Barney Fife with 8,000 Abrams tanks and 19 aircraft carriers.

Johnson’s full article can be read here.

 

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I’ve noted a lot of polls, surveys and statistics that have come my way recently that readers may find interesting or enlightening about the Russian economy or Russian attitudes toward various things.

1) According to Russia’s Finance Ministry, Russians’ real incomes rose by 3% in May;

2) Despite that increase – and Russia’s official exit from recession this year – many Russians still worry about wages, the economy overall, and health care – which is undergoing a process of streamlining and reform that has prompted dissatisfaction in some quarters;

3) After suffering one of the worst mortality crises of any nation in peacetime during the 1990’s, Russia is enjoying its 3rd year in a row of natural population growth;

4) The vast majority of Russians – 86% – have no desire to leave Russia and relocate to another country;

5) Russians view the U.S. and Ukraine as the most hostile nations toward them and just over half see no sign of improvement in U.S.-Russia relations on the horizon.

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At the close of Ramadan recently, the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, declared that the main obstacle to peace in his country was the U.S. occupation:

“Americans should understand that continuation of war in Afghanistan, upsurge of bombardment … will never usher in success for them. The Afghans are not a people to kowtow to someone,” he said.

The fact is, all occupiers eventually pack up their tents and go home. The only variable is how long the occupier continues his folly and how much death and destruction he is going to be responsible for before the light bulb goes on.

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And to wrap up today’s post, it has been reported by Russia’s TASS news agency, that Putin and Trump will meet for the first time at the upcoming G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on July 7 – 8.   The AP further reports that some of Trump’s advisers say the president is eager for his first meeting with his Russian counterpart.

How the actual meeting goes between Trump, who is notoriously unpredictable, and the calm, cool and collected Putin (who doesn’t impress easily) is anyone’s guess.  Should be interesting to watch video of it.

 

U.S. Shootdown of Syrian Plane, Russia’s Response; Oliver Stone’s 4-Part Interview of Putin; Europeans Express Displeasure at Latest Round of Sanctions on Russia; Comey Says NYT Article False, But NYT Still “Newspaper of Record”?

(Photo: mashleymorgan/flickr/cc)

On Sunday, a U.S. fighter jet shot down a Syrian military plane over Raqqa.  In response, Russia has severed the deconfliction channel between the U.S. and Russian militaries and said any threatening and unauthorized aircraft in Syrian airspace could be targeted.  As Commondreams reports :

In what is being characterized as an act sure to further escalate already alarming tensions between the United States, Syria, and Russia, an American fighter jet shot down a Syrian warplane over Raqqa on Sunday, prompting Moscow to cut off its deconfliction channel with the U.S.

“As of June 19 this year, the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation has ended its interaction with the U.S. side under a memorandum for preventing incidents and providing for safe flights during operations in Syria and demands that the U.S. command carry out a careful investigation and report about its results and the measures taken,” a statement from Moscow reads.

The Defense Ministry continued:

The shooting down of a Syrian Air Force jet in Syria’s airspace is a cynical violation of Syria’s sovereignty. The US’ repeated combat operations under the guise of ‘combating terrorism’ against the legitimate armed forces of a UN member-state are a flagrant violation of international law, in addition to being actual military aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic.

The U.S. decision to shoot down the Syrian warplane—which, according to American officials, was retaliation against the plane’s bombing of nearby U.S.-backed ground troops—came “on the same day that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps launched several midrange missiles from inside Iran at targets in Syria, hoping to punish Islamic State forces responsible for last week’s terrorist attacks in Tehran,” the New York Times reported.

The move, the Times noted, marks “the first time the American military has downed a Syrian aircraft since the start of the civil war in 2011.”

The Pentagon issued a statement: “The coalition does not seek to fight Syrian regime, Russian, or pro-regime forces partnered with them, but will not hesitate to defend coalition or partner forces from any threat.”

According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon’s efforts to de-escalate following the strike do not appear to have been successful: “Russia says it will treat US-led coalition planes in Syria, west of the Euphrates, as targets after US downed Syrian jet.”

Here is what the Russian Defense Ministry said: “Any aircraft, including planes and drones of the international coalition, detected in the operation areas west of the Euphrates River by the Russian air forces will be followed by Russian ground-based air defense and air defense aircraft as air targets.”

Since then, CNN has reported that the U.S. has also shot down an Iranian drone near At Tanf in Syria.

Due to the recent progress that the Syrian army is making, with help from Iran and Russia, to retake most of the country from jihadists, this is likely a provocation designed to get Russia to overreact in the hopes that it will take its eye off the ball and the progress will be sabotaged.  Of course, the Russian leadership is not that stupid and Washington should know this by now.  Washington simply can’t accept that its unquestioned hegemony is coming to an end and consequently is flailing around dangerously.  For more context, Mike Whitney provided the following analysis over at Counterpunch:

On June 10, the Syrian Army blitzed across an arid stretch of countryside in southeastern Syria to reach the Iraqi border for the first time in three years. The move,  which caught US war-planners off guard, prevents US-backed rebels from moving north from al Tanf to join the fight against ISIS in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. More important, the move makes it impossible for Washington to achieve its broader strategic objective of consolidating its territorial gains into a contiguous landmass along the Euphrates River.  Washington wants to control the eastern part of the country so it can continue its attacks on the regime while overseeing the construction of gas pipelines from Qatar to Turkey. The prospects of that plan succeeding are now greatly in doubt due to the surprise advance of the SAA.

Aside from the humiliation of being caught flat-footed by a Syrian Army that has been battered by 6 consecutive years of war,  Washington has allowed loyalist troops to seize a swath of land that splits US proxies on the ground and establishes a critical land corridor connecting Damascus to Baghdad to Tehran, a Shia superhighway that allows for the transport of commercial goods, people and weapons from east to west. Washington wanted to avoid that linkage at all cost, but simply wasn’t prepared to respond. Now any attempt to reverse the situation will involve crossing SAA lines which increases the probability of a direct confrontation with Russia. This is why it is essential to pay attention to events on the ground as they take place. The US and Russia are basically cheek-to-jowl on a topsy-turvy battlefield where any miscalculation could have grave consequences.

This latest move by the Syria Army has only added to Washington’s frustration. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the creation of four “de-escalation zones”  on May 5, the so called Axis of Resistance (Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah) has been marching eastward along three parallel tracks with the clear intention of liberating cities captured by ISIS and reestablishing Syria’s sovereign borders.  It’s been a hard-fought slog, but the progress has been steady and ISIS has been pushed back or beaten wherever they’ve been met.

At the present pace, the fight against ISIS could be over in a matter of months, but that doesn’t mean the hostilities will end. No one really knows whether the Turks,  the Kurds or the US-backed militias will agree to withdraw from the territories they’ve captured during the war, but the general consensus seems to be that they won’t. In fact,  the US has actually  accelerated its operations in order to grab as much land as possible before ISIS is defeated. Here’s a clip from an article in the New York Times that helps to explain what’s going on:

“American-backed forces have begun an assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s hub in northern Syria, and signs are that they could capture the long-sought target with relative ease. Yet the militant group’s commanders, who have already withdrawn their toughest forces from the city, and most everyone else in Syria’s multifaceted war are looking ahead to an even more decisive battle in the south.

There, a complex confrontation is unfolding, with far more geopolitical import and risk. The Islamic State is expected to make its last stand not in Raqqa but in an area that encompasses the borders with Iraq and Jordan and much of Syria’s modest oil reserves, making it important in stabilizing Syria and influencing its neighboring countries.

Whoever lays claim to the sparsely populated area in this 21st-century version of the Great Game not only will take credit for seizing what is likely to be the Islamic State’s last patch of a territorial caliphate in Syria, but also will play an important role in determining Syria’s future and the postwar dynamics of the region.

With the stakes so high, the United States, Iran and Russia are all scrambling for advantage. They are building up their forces and proxy fighters and, increasingly, engaging in inflammatory clashes that threaten to escalate into a larger conflict…..

What is really at stake are even larger issues. Will the Syrian government re-establish control of the country all the way to its eastern borders? Will the desert straddling the Syrian-Iraqi border remain a no man’s land ripe for militant control? If not, who will dominate there — forces aligned with Iran, Russia or the United States? Which Syrian factions will wield the most influence?” (“Beyond Raqqa, an Even Bigger Battle to Defeat ISIS and Control Syria Looms”, New York Times)

Repeat: The outcome of the battle for east Syria will determine “the postwar dynamics of the region.”

Robert Parry, with his usual sharp eye, points out that not only is this an incredibly reckless move by the Pentagon but it is not in the U.S.’s long term interests:

The [recent Wall Street] Journal editorial criticized Trump for having no strategy beyond eradicating ISIS and adding: “Now is the time for thinking through such a strategy because Syria, Russia and Iran know what they want. Mr. Assad wants to reassert control over all of Syria, not a country divided into Alawite, Sunni and Kurdish parts. Iran wants a Shiite arc of influence from Tehran to Beirut. Mr. Putin will settle for a Mediterranean port and a demonstration that Russia can be trusted to stand by its allies, while America is unreliable. None of this is in the U.S. national interests.”

But why isn’t this in U.S. national interests? What’s wrong with a unified secular Syria that can begin to rebuild and repatriate refugees who have fled into Europe, destabilizing the Continent?

What’s the big problem with “a Shiite arc of influence”? The Shiites aren’t a threat to the United States or the West. The principal terror groups – Al Qaeda and ISIS – spring from the extremist Saudi version of Sunni Islam, known as Wahhabism. I realize that Israel and Saudi Arabia took aim at Syria in part to shatter “the Shiite arc,” but we have seen the horrific consequences of that strategy. How has the chaos that the Syrian war has unleashed benefited U.S. national interests?

And so what that Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean Sea? That is no threat to the United States, either.

But what is the alternative prescription from the Journal’s neocon editors? The editorial concludes: “The alternative would be to demonstrate that Mr. Assad, Iran and Russia will pay a higher price for their ambitions. This means refusing to back down from defending U.S. allies on the ground and responding if Russia aircraft or missiles attempt to take down U.S. planes. Our guess is that Russia doesn’t want a military engagement with the U.S. any more than the U.S. wants one with Russia, but Russia will keep pressing for advantage unless President Trump shows more firmness than his predecessor.”

So, rather than allow the Syrian government to restore some form of order across Syria, the neocons want the Trump administration to continue violating international law, which forbids military invasions of sovereign countries, and keep the bloodshed flowing. Beyond that, the neocons want the U.S. military to play chicken with the other nuclear-armed superpower on the assumption that Russia will back down.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how any of our interventions since WWII were really in the long-term interests of the average American.   And I certainly can’t fathom how risking a nuclear war over Syria would be.   But then, hey, maybe I’m the crazy one.

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As you may have heard, Oliver Stone did a lengthy and in-depth interview with Putin which aired as a 4-part series recently on Showtime.  As you may also have heard, Stone has taken a lot of heat for even attempting to allow Putin to speak at length for himself, put it out for public consumption and allow Americans to draw their own conclusions without the usual gatekeepers of how to think inserting themselves into it.  Of course, that is exactly what the NYT, Washington Post, and a plethora of talking heads who are passed off as journalists on the network and cable news shows did by shrieking condemnations of the series either through editorials or hostile interviews of Stone.  The subtext was always “if you’re a right-thinking person you will not bother watching this at all.  And if you do watch it, you should be ashamed to admit it in polite company.  It would sort of be like admitting you’re a pedophile or a long-time celibate.  Just don’t.”

One of the more serious and respectful interviews of Stone was by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!.   You can watch or read the transcript here:

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/14/oliver_stone_interviews_putin_on_us?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=f0ae52757f-Daily_Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-f0ae52757f-191485825

You can also watch the entire 4-part series by Stone here:

Part one https://vimeo.com/222012543

Part two https://vimeo.com/221567261

Part three https://vimeo.com/222016191

Part four https://vimeo.com/222019557

Transcript of The Putin Interviews here:

http://skyhorsepublishing.com/titles/13188-9781510733428-putin-interviews

Official Showtime series site:

http://www.sho.com/the-putin-interviews#/closed

Earlier this month, Robert Parry and Consortium News awarded Stone the Gary Webb award for courage in taking the flack for making controversial but necessary documentaries, including interviewing several leaders that Washington opposed (Huge Chavez, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, etc.) and allowing the other side of the story to be told.  Video and transcript of Stone’s remarks can be viewed here:

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/14/oliver-stone-receives-gary-webb-award/

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Last week, congress passed a new round of sanctions on Russia (and Iran) for interfering in the election, actions in Syria and Ukraine, the heat wave in the southwest, Mickey Rourke’s bad plastic surgery….oh, wait.  Sorry.  In any event,  Austria and Germany wasted no time in crying foul, stating that the U.S. had no right to interfere in Europe’s economic affairs with Russia, especially in regards to its energy deals with its neighbor.   Zerohedge had more details:

Less than a day after the Senate overwhelmingly voted to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin, on Thursday Germany and Austria – two of Russia’s biggest energy clients in Europe – slammed the latest U.S. sanctions against Moscow, saying they could affect European businesses involved in piping in Russian natural gas.

Gabriel and Kern also accused the U.S. of having ulterior motives in seeking to enforce the energy blockade, which they said is trying to help American natural gas suppliers at the expense of their Russian rivals. And they warned the threat of fining European companies participating in the Nord Stream 2 project “introduces a completely new, very negative dimension into European-American relations.”

In their forceful appeal, the two officials urged the United States to back off from linking the situation in Ukraine to the question of who can sell gas to Europe. “Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe, and not for the United States of America,” Kern and Gabriel said. The reason why Europe is angry Some Eastern European countries, including Poland and Ukraine, fear the loss of transit revenue if Russian gas supplies don’t pass through their territory anymore once the new pipeline is built.

Alexander Mercouris commented on Merkel’s remarks the next day reinforcing the criticisms of the sanctions:

Shortly after the joint statement of the German and Austrian foreign ministers angrily denouncing the new sanctions against Russia voted on by the US Senate, Angela Merkel has added her voice to the protest and is making her opposition to the latest sanctions clear.

In her usual Sphinx like way Merkel avoided making a statement herself.  However her views have been made known by her spokesman Steffen Seibert in a briefing earlier todayThere is considerable assent to the contents of this statement. The chancellor shares fears listed in the text……the case in hand are sanctions for Russia’s steps but which affect European companies.  It is inadmissible.Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s Foreign Minister who issued the joint statement criticising the Senate’s sanctions with the foreign minister of Austria yesterday, is a member of the SPD, whose Martin Schulz is challenging Merkel in the parliamentary elections in the autumn.  Gabriel moreover is known to be a strong supporter of close ties between Germany and Russia.  There was therefore some doubt about whether yesterday’s statement reflected the united opinion of the whole German government or that of just Gabriel and the SPD.Seibert’s comment on Merkel’s behalf settles the issue, and makes it clear that yesterday’s statement does reflect the united opinion of the whole German government.

Yesterday’s German-Austrian joint statement makes clear what is the cause of Germany’s anger.  It contains this paragraph:

To threaten companies from Germany, Austria and other European states with penalties on the U.S. market if they participate in natural gas projects such as Nord Stream 2 with Russia or finance them introduces a completely new and very negative quality into European-American relations.In other words, the Germans are willing to support sanctions against Russia provided they do not affect their economic interests.

Since the Germans consider Nord Stream 2 to be essential to their economic interests, they are reacting furiously against what they perceive to be US threats to derail the project by threatening penalties on their companies.

Does this mean that Europe may finally be getting a backbone when it comes to being led around by the nose by Washington when it’s against its own long-term interests?   Time will tell.

Meanwhile, Russia Matters (a project of Harvards’ Belfer Center) posted the following response from Gazprom as reported by Bloomberg:

Gazprom sees no impact from U.S. curbs on Nord Stream 2. Nord Stream 2 is a European project, developed in partnership with European companies that had already provided funding before the latest U.S. bill was approved, according to Alexander Medvedev, the deputy chief executive officer of Gazprom. The project is in compliance with all existing EU regulations, he said. (Bloomberg, 06.15.17)

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As exhibit 426 in my ongoing argument that The New York Times doesn’t deserve to be treated as the “newspaper of record,”  the recent testimony of James Comey before congress exposed something that was, for obvious reasons, little remarked upon by the NYT and other corporate media:  that the NYT had published an article that was largely balderdash.   The article relied on anonymous government sources claiming that members of the Trump presidential campaign had repeated contacts with Russian officials.   Journalist and former State Dept. official, James Carden stated in recent article at Consortium News:

For instance, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, former FBI Director James Comey cast doubt on a Feb. 14 New York Times report titled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.

”The article, which relied on “four current and former government officials,” said that “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election” and that “the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.”

Comey was asked about the report during an exchange with Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho.

RISCH:  I remember, you — you talked with us shortly after February 14th, when the New York Times wrote an article that suggested that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians. This is not factual. Do you recall that?

COMEY: Yes.

RISCH: OK. So — so, again, so the American people can understand this, that report by the New York Times was not true. Is that a fair statement?

COMEY: In — in the main, it was not true.

Later in the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, asked Comey: “Would it be fair to characterize that story as almost entirely wrong?” To which Comey replied: “Yes.”

Looks again like NYT didn’t do due diligence like real journalists are supposed to do.  Instead, they just took the word of government officials (anonymous ones at that) and ran with it as though it were correct.  Where have we seen this before?  How about with claims that Iraq had WMD?  How about the genocide that was claimed to be going on in Yugoslavia in 1999?  How about the Gulf of Tonkin incident?  How about Qaddafi ordering Libyan troops to commit mass rape while pumped up on Viagra and targeting civilians in 2011?  All of these turned out be bogus and in not one of these instances did the NYT sufficiently question the government narrative and rush to war.   Hey, it only resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction of entire countries.   Easy come, easy go when you’re the “newspaper of record.” 

New Photos Posted

Monument to Pushkin & his wife on Arbat Street, Moscow; photo by Natylie Baldwin, May 2017

Photos from my trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg last month have now been posted and can be viewed here:

http://natyliesbaldwin.com/photos-ii/

 

The Intercept Article – A Bombshell or a Dud?; Megyn Kelly’s Interview with Putin – the Final NBC Version & the Unedited Version; Delegation of Americans Return from Russia; Saudi-Qatar Conflict; Terrorist Attacks in Iran; Tillerson Instructed to Re-Engage

Kremlin Wall, Red Square, Moscow; photo by Natylie S. Baldwin

On this past Monday, The Intercept – an outlet I normally admire for Glenn Greenwald and others’ feisty journalism and independence of mind – published what purported to be a bombshell about Russian interference in our recent presidential election via a cyber-attack of county-level election officials in the U.S..  At last, there was supposed to be some actual documentary evidence provided by a whistle-blower at the NSA.

But within 24 hours, there had been much criticism of the article – the NSA document in question is an analysis and does not contain actual data or intelligence – as well as The Intercept’s sloppy methods in dealing with its source, who has already been arrested.

The Intercept article is here and the reader comments are worth perusing as well.

One critical analysis of the article is by military analyst Moon of Alabama who points out the following with respect to the significance of the leaked document:

The NSA “intelligence report” the Intercept publishes along the piece does NOT show that “Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack“. The document speaks of “cyber espionage operations” – i.e someone looked and maybe copied data but did not manipulate anything. Espionage via computer networks is something every nation in this world (and various private entities) do all the time. It is simply the collection of information. It is different from a “cyberattack” like Stuxnet which was intended to create large damage,

The “attack” by someone was standard spearfishing and some visual basic scripts to gain access to accounts of local election officials. Any minor criminal hacker uses similar means. No damage is mentioned in the NSA analysis. The elections were not compromised by this operation. The document notes explicitly (p.5) that the operation used some techniques that distinguish it from other known Russian military intelligence operations. It might have been done by someone else.

The reporters note that the document does not provide any raw intelligence. It is an analysis based on totally unknown material. It does [not] include any evidence for the claims it makes.

Moon of Alabama also discusses the serious lapses of the outlet in dealing with its source:

FBI search (pdf) and arrest warrant (pdf) applications unveil irresponsible behavior by the Intercept‘s reporters and editors which neglected all operational security trade-craft that might have prevented the revealing of the source. It leaves one scratching the head if this was intentional or just sheer incompetence. Either way – the incident confirms what skeptics had long determined: The Intercept is not a trustworthy outlet for leaking state secrets of public interests.

Julian Assange has defended the 25-year old NSA contracting employee who is the alleged leaker of the document and has publicly excoriated The Intercept for its negligence in protecting its source. Consequently, Wikileaks is offering a $10,000 reward for the exposure and firing of the “reporter” responsible for the bungling.  Assange told The Daily Beast:

“If the FBI affidavit is accurate the reporter concerned must be named, shamed and fired by whomever they work for to maintain industry standards,” Assange said via Twitter direct message through the WikiLeaks account on Tuesday.

“Source burning reporters are a menace,” he said. “They chill trust in all journalists which impedes public understanding.”

WikiLeaks offered a $10,000 reward for information “leading to the public exposure & termination” of the reporter.

 “It seems likely that the FBI affidavit refers to The Intercept, but not certain, hence we say ‘suspected Intercept reporter,’ said Assange. “But whomever this reporter was they are a menace not only to sources but to all journalists by decreasing the trust between sources and journalist and ultimately the public. Democracy dies in darkness.”

Readers can follow the links provided and draw their own conclusions.


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There has also been lots of buzz about Megyn Kelly’s new debut show on NBC and the exclusive interview she conducted with Vladimir Putin during the recently concluded St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.  The final edited version that was shown on NBC can be viewed here.

However, a longer version of the interview can be watched here in which it is clear that the version that appeared on NBC edited out a few things, which makes one wonder why they chose to do so.  Note that the last question in this version, which did not appear in the NBC version at all, has to do with Kelly’s conversations with Russians who all noted that Putin has brought Russia back to a respectable place and how the presidency for the last 17 years has affected him personally.  Putin’s answer is very insightful and humanizes Putin by providing some contextual background of who he is and his connection to the country he governs.   Even Kelly is not unmoved by it.

Another item left out of the NBC version is part of Putin’s answer to Kelly’s question about his response to those in the West who view Russia as a country lacking in democracy and human rights.   The partial answer that NBC omitted has Putin discussing the U.S. government’s response to the Occupy Wall Street movement and pointing out that Russian police have not resorted to the use of tear gas and other more serious weapons to quell protests.   Hmm.

In a conversation with the Today Show’s Willie Geist, Kelly acknowledged that she spent a good amount of time with Putin and that off-camera, Putin was warm, polite and personable.  Of course, on camera, in the more combative debate style interview, he was sharp and argumentative.  This is consistent with the characterization that many people who have actually interacted with Putin have provided – polite and honest but also intelligent, gets things done and doesn’t take any crap.   It’s a combination that makes him popular with the average Russian.  And if he were an American leader, it would no doubt make him popular with average Americans.

It’s why a majority of Russians are ready to re-elect Putin for another term as president, according to the independent Levada Center.

I must also add that, based on my conversations with Russians during both of my visits there, the majority of them do not view Putin as a dictator – they know what real dictators look and act like. Putin is considered a strong leader who gets things done.   This is not to say that Russians are totally uncritical of Putin either or that they are afraid to express any criticism of Putin – that was not my experience during either visit.   But this whole narrative that Americans are bombarded with from corporate media and mainstream politicians about Russia being an autocracy and Putin being some kind of new Stalin should be viewed very skeptically, to say the least.  From what I’ve been able to glean, most Russians would laugh at anyone who seriously tried to compare Putin to Stalin and would think them profoundly ignorant.

Speaking of my recent trip to Russia, my photos should be posted on the blog by next week.  

Brzezinski Exits; Russiagate & Back Channels; Eurasian Century Continues to Emerge

Visiting a Pakistani Army outpost in 1980, Mr. Brzezinski used the sights of a machine gun to look across the Afghan border. He supported billions in military aid for Islamic militants fighting invading Soviet troops in Afghanistan – this description is according to the NYT obituary on Zbig, but in actuality, he admitted in a 1998 interview with a French newspaper that he played a role in goading the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan in order to give the USSR its own “Vietnam” quagmire. 

On May 26th, Washington’s most famous Russophobe, Zbigniew Brzezinski, exited the stage at the age of 89, having wreaked much havoc on the world.  For further details on Zbig and why no one should be shedding any tears at the demise of this architect of hatred and mayhem, see my previous posts on his background and Grand Chessboard philosophy here and his most recent nonsense here reflecting a man who once was touted as a geopolitical genius in the nation’s capital but had been recently reduced to pathetic attempts to try to stay relevant, still claiming that Russia and China could be seduced away from their strategic partnership by the whispering of a few sweet nothings from the fetid breath of Washington’s political class.

Veteran investigative journalist, John Helmer, who had an advisory role in the Carter administration and had a front row seat to Zbig’s machinations, did a write-up of him here.

Perhaps Zbig can dust off a few seats next to him in the underworld for Kissinger, Cheney, Albright and other warmongers.

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Well, it’s been over 3 weeks since I made my trek to Russia for a working vacation and to report on what I saw, and now that I’ve returned to look at the American news cycle, it’s still all about how Russia hacked our democracy and is guilty of all sorts of shenanigans to take down America.

The first thing of note.  According to CNN’s May 23rd report on former CIA director John Brennan’s testimony before the Senate on this very topic, he could not say definitively that any contacts with any potential Russians amounted to collusion.   Furthermore James Clapper recently admitted that there was no full assessment on this topic by all 17 intelligence agencies as Americans had been initially led to believe, but that analysts were hand-picked from only 4 intel agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA and office of DNI).  This, of course, is the antithesis of an objective analysis.  As Robert Parry, notes:

Yet, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you “hand-pick” the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion. For instance, if the analysts were known to be hard-liners on Russia or supporters of Hillary Clinton, they could be expected to deliver the one-sided report that they did.

In any event, Brennan’s admission of no actual evidence follows Dianne Feinstein’s admission to Wolf Blitzer on CNN a few weeks back that, after a classified intelligence briefing on the matter, she was provided no evidence of collusion.  And that follows former DNI James Clapper admitting in an earlier interview in March that, as of January 20th of this year, there was no evidence of any actual wrongdoing in terms of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia to interfere in the election.

After 10 months of investigating, we still have no evidence for any of these claims being made and kept alive in the interests of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.  According to a recently released book on why Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed, called Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, members of her campaign began cooking up the blame-Russia excuse for her loss in the immediate aftermath of the concession.

And as Jimmy Dore has pointed out, no one ever defines what is meant by “collusion” and what criminal laws may have been broken by these shadowy activities that the Trump administration and Russia are accused of.   A recent article by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi sums up what a head-scratcher this whole inquiry has turned into:

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on This Week Sunday, and said some head-scratching things.

Clapper back in March told Meet the Press that when he issued a January 6th multiagency intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the election, the report didn’t include evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, essentially saying he hadn’t been aware of any such evidence up through January 20th, his last day in office.

On Sunday, he said that didn’t necessarily mean there was no such evidence, because sometimes he left it up to agency chiefs like former FBI Director James Comey to inform him about certain things.

“I left it to the judgment [of] Director Comey,” Clapper said, “to decide whether, when and what to tell me about counterintelligence investigations.”

Clapper said something similar when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Monday. In prepared remarks, he essentially said that there was nothing odd about his not being informed about the existence of an FBI counterintelligence investigation involving Donald Trump’s campaign.

Speaking generally, Clapper seemed to imply that the Trump-Russia-collusion scandal, the thing colloquially known as #Russiagate all over the world now, may have originated in information gleaned by the intelligence community, who in turn may have tipped off the FBI.

“When the intelligence community obtains information suggesting that a U.S. person is acting on behalf of a foreign power,” he said, “the standard procedure is to share that information with the lead investigatory body, which of course is the FBI.”

He went on, explaining that in such a situation, it wouldn’t be unusual for the DNI to not be informed about an FBI counterintelligence investigation.

“Given its sensitivity,” he said, “even the existence of a counterintelligence investigation’s closely held, including at the highest levels.”

In his Senate testimony, Clapper went out of his way to say this didn’t contradict his earlier statements. But if he’s not contradicting himself, he’s certainly added a layer of confusion to what is already the most confusing political scandal ever.

Back on March 5th, when Clapper gave that interview to Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, he sounded definitive on a number of counts.

Todd for instance asked Clapper if he would know if the FBI had a FISA court order for surveillance. Clapper answered unequivocally: “Yes.”

Clapper made it clear that he would have known if there were any kind of surveillance authority against “the president elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.”

Taibbi goes on to describe how Clapper’s interviewer on Meet the Press asked the question again, more than once, in order to ensure that Clapper understood the gravity of the question and would give a consistent answer.   He did the same with questions about knowledge of any evidence in support of the charge of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  Again, Clapper said he was aware of no such evidence at the time he left office.

Taibbi also points out logical inconsistencies in what Clapper has subsequently told both the Senate and the media and what recently fired FBI director James Comey has said.

Comey was saying that he hadn’t briefed the DNI because between January 20th, when Clapper left office, and March 16th, when former Indiana senator and now Trump appointee Dan Coats took office, the DNI position was unfilled.

But Comey had said the counterintelligence investigation dated back to July, when he was FBI director under a Democratic president. So what happened between July and January?

If Comey felt the existence of his investigation was so important that he he had to disclose it to DNI Coats on Coats’ first day in office, why didn’t he feel the same need to disclose the existence of an investigation to Clapper at any time between July and January?

Furthermore, how could the FBI participate in a joint assessment about Russian efforts to meddle in American elections and not tell Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs about what would seemingly be a highly germane counterintelligence investigation in that direction?

Again, prior to last week, Clapper had said he would know if there was a FISA warrant issued on this matter. But then on April 11th, law enforcement and government officials leaked – anonymously, as has been the case throughout most of this story – that the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant for surveillance of Trump associate Carter Page.

So what’s going on here?

Taibbi provides some theories from Washington insiders about what may explain these inconsistencies, but ultimately, no satisfactory answers are given in light of the gravity of the vague accusations and the constant barrage of innuendo.

But it’s our job in the media to be bothered by little details, and the strange timeline of the Trump-Russia investigation qualifies as a conspicuous loose end.

What exactly is the FBI investigating? Why was it kept secret from other intelligence chiefs, if that’s what happened? That matters, if we’re trying to gauge what happened last week.

….But when it comes to the collusion investigation, there are serious questions. A lot of our civil liberties protections and rules of press ethics are designed to prevent exactly this situation, in which a person lingers for extended periods of time under public suspicion without being aware of the exact nature, or origin, of the accusations.

It’s why liberal thinkers have traditionally abhorred secret courts, secret surveillance and secret evidence, and in the past would have reflexively discouraged the news media from printing the unverified or unverifiable charges emanating from such secret sources. But because it’s Donald Trump, no one seems to care.

We should care. The uncertainty has led to widespread public terror, mass media hysteria and excess, and possibly even panic in the White House itself, where, who knows, Trump may even have risked military confrontation with Russia in an effort to shake the collusion accusations. All of this is exacerbated by the constant stream of leaks and hints at mother lodes of evidence that are just around the corner. It’s quite literally driving the country crazy.

Not only is it driving the country crazy, it is conveniently taking coverage away from pressing domestic issues that need to be addressed, such as increasing poverty, health care, and failing infrastructure (among others) and it is also preventing any chance of decreasing tensions with the world’s other nuclear superpower.

Now, the talk is about Jared Kushner and others allegedly wanting to set up a back channel of communication with Russia. According to Alexander Mercouris’ analysis, the back channel was an idea apparently intended to facilitate the discussion of actions in Syria and was never followed up on.

This leak alleges that in early December at a meeting with Russian ambassador Kislyak in Trump Tower which General Michael Flynn also attended Kushner discussed with Kislyak the setting up of a back channel between General Flynn and the Russians.

The idea apparently was that Flynn would use this back channel to discuss with the Russians the conflict in Syria and other security issues.

….There is no suggestion here that the back channel was intended to discuss possible collusion between the Trump team and the Russians relating to the US political process.  Of course by this point the election was over, so this proposal for a back channel can have no bearing on the allegations of secret collusion during the election between the Trump campaign and the Russians, which are the subject of the Russiagate investigation.

And the implication is, of course, that the establishment of such a back channel, had it occurred, is necessarily a bad and nefarious thing.  A little history lesson is in order here.   John Kennedy set up a back channel of communication with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and that back channel came in very handy when dealing with the Cuban Missile crisis.  Some even plausibly claim that that back channel enabled the de-escalation of the crisis and prevented a nuclear war.

Establishing as much direct communication as possible between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, especially during times of high tension, is a GOOD thing.  Any rational person whose brain is not irredeemably compromised by pathological partisanship should be able to recognize this.

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Meanwhile, Russia is putting its head down and continuing on with its plans to participate in the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) plan for peaceful trade and infrastructure investment spearheaded by China. Two of the most knowledgeable writers on the OBOR initiative, F. William Engdahl and Pepe Escobar, have each recently published articles providing additional insights and updates on the plan’s progress, which could make the 21st century the Eurasian Century – supplanting the world hegemony that Washington has enjoyed since 1945.

Engdahl’s piece describes the failure of Washington’s plan to divide Russia and China (a plan advocated by both Henry Kissinger and the late Brzezinski, as noted above) and focuses in on the decision of the Nixon administration to take the U.S. off the gold standard, in violation of the Bretton Woods framework, as the beginning of Washington’s gradual decline:

It’s very essential in my view to appreciate where the post-1944 development of America’s role in the world went seriously wrong. The grandiose project dubbed by Henry Luce in 1941 as the American Century, if I were to pick a date, began its twilight on August 15, 1971.

That was the point in time a 44-year-old Under-Secretary of the Treasury for International Monetary Affairs named Paul Volcker convinced a clueless President Richard Milhous Nixon that the treaty obligations of the 1944 Bretton Woods Treaty on a postwar Gold Exchange Standard should be simply ignored. Volcker rejected the express mandate of the Bretton Woods Treaty which would have seen a devaluation of the dollar in order to rebalance world major currencies. By 1971 the economies of war-ravaged countries such as Japan, Germany and France had rebuilt at a significantly higher level of efficiency than the US.

A devaluation of the dollar would have given a major boost to US industrial exports and eased the export of dollar inflation in the world arising from Lyndon Johnson’s huge Vietnam War budget deficits. The de-industrialization of the USA could have thereby been avoided. Wall Street would hear none of that. Their mantra in effect was, “Nothin’ personal, just bizness…” The banks began the destruction of the American industrial base in favor of cheap labor and ultra-high-profit manufacture abroad.

Instead of correcting that at a point it could have had an enormously positive economic effect, Volcker advised Nixon to in effect spit on America’s international treaty obligations and to brazenly dare the world to do something about it. On Volcker’s advice, Nixon simply ripped the treaty in shreds and ended Federal Reserve redemption of dollars held by foreign central banks for US gold reserves. The US dollar overnight was no longer “as good as gold.”

….The American Century is crumbling before our eyes, and has been doing so for the near-five decades since August, 1971. That willful ignoring of the health of the economy of the United States over decades has created a vast moral, political and economic vacuum in the world today.

Into that vacuum other nations outside Washington’s NATO control are building what I have termed a Eurasian Century, a very lawful and positive response to an increasingly totalitarian Washington role in the world.

The contrast between what China, together with Russia, and the other nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Eurasia are doing to build up their common economic space, and what the United States, Britain and other NATO nations are doing to destroy, could not be more stark.

Read the full article here

Escobar’s article covered the recently-convened “Belt and Road Forum” which took place in Beijing where the Chinese president followed his usual custom of the past several years when he invites Putin to an important forum – he placed him right at his side.  It’s the kind of move that seasoned international observers know is not done willy-nilly.

History will record the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing marked the juncture where the 21st century New Silk Roads assumed their full character of Globalization 2.0, or “inclusive globalization,” as defined by President Xi Jinping in Davos earlier this year.I have dealt with the monumental stakes here and here. Terminology, of course, remains a minor problem. What was once defined as One Belt, One Road (OBOR) is now promoted as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Much is still somewhat lost in translation in English, what matters is that Xi has managed to imprint the myriad possibilities inbuilt in the concept especially across the Global South.

….President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were guests of honor at the forum – alongside leaders such as Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev and Turkey’s Erdogan. At a business breakfast discussion, Xi seated Putin to his right and Lavrov to his left.

At a Leaders Roundtable summit on the second day of the forum – a sort of Silk Road United Nations, with the microphones open equally to all – Putin touched on a key point; the symbiosis, formalized since 2015, between OBOR/BRI and the Russia-driven Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), currently formed by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia.

As Putin said, “some 50 European, Asian and Latin American states” are interested in cooperation with the EEU. While the EEU and China are discussing their own, wide-ranging trade/economic deal, the EEU is also consulting, among others, with Iran, India, Serbia, Singapore, and Egypt.

But it was during his speech at the inaugural session of the forum that Putin managed to distill what amounts to a concentrate of Russian foreign policy.

Here are the key topics.

– Through “integration formats like the EEU, OBOR, the SCO, and ASEAN, we can build the foundation for a larger Eurasian partnership.”

– There is now a “unique opportunity to create a common cooperation framework from the Atlantic to the Pacific – for the first time in history.” Essentially, this is what Putin himself had once proposed – then shunned by EU/NATO – even before Xi announced OBOR in 2013.

– “Russia is not only willing to be a reliable trading partner but also seeks to invest in the creation of joint ventures and new production capacities in partnering states, to invest in industrial facilities, sales, and services.”

– Russia is investing in building “a system of modern and well-connected transport corridors,” “expanding the capacity of the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the Trans-Siberian Railway, investing significant resources into improvements to the Northeast Passage.”

– And then, looking at the Big Picture, “the infrastructure projects within the EEU and the One Belt, One Road initiative in conjunction with the Northeast Passage can completely reconfigure transportation on the Eurasian continent.”

– Putin expects “newly established financial institutions like the New Development Bank (BRICS Development Bank) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to offer a supporting hand to private investors.”

And then, the clincher, fully aligned with Xi’s vision; “Greater Eurasia is not an abstract geopolitical arrangement but, without exaggeration, a truly civilization-wide project looking toward the future.”

Read the full article here

Washington doesn’t seem to have a constructive or even workable policy to deal with this.  Instead, it is humiliating itself with its Nora Desmond act on the world stage.

St. Petersburg II – Denouement

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St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral, St. Petersburg; photo courtesy of saint-petersburg.com



NOTE:  The part of this dispatch regarding the visit to the Monument to the Siege of Leningrad first appeared at Consortium News on May 17, 2017.  

 

St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral

 

Our second day of sightseeing began with a pretty blue and white church called the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral, located only a couple of blocks away from where we are staying.  It was often used by sailors and naval officers who would come to pray and receive blessings before embarking on an assignment or journey.  The main church was open only at certain times and was mainly for the seafaring folks.  Another smaller church building off to the side was open at all times and received anyone.

 

The church is still in use and a section is cordoned off for tourists and sightseers in which they can view the magnificent interior of gold and artwork.  Only churchgoers are allowed to go beyond this point.  I watched Russians light candles and pray.  One woman kissed an icon as is customary in the Russian Orthodox religion.

 

Church on Spilled Blood

 

We then made our way over to the Church on Spilled Blood, which I’d been anxious to visit so I could see the interior.  On my last visit I’d seen the splendid outer part of the church but didn’t have time to go inside.  I’d heard that the mosaic artwork on the inside was amazing and was determined to see it this time.

 

Since this was a Sunday and the weather was unusually gorgeous, the church was packed, so I kept my visit shorter than I normally would have as trying to maneuver my way within crowds tends to wear me out. But I was not disappointed by the church’s interior.  The rich imagery on the walls and ceiling was beautiful, along with the set of marble steps that led to the altar and the canopy that covered the actual spot where czar Alexander II had fallen when he was assassinated in 1881.  The church was built as a memorial to him.

Church on Spilled Blood, Built at site of reformist Czar Alexandaer II’s 1881 assassination. St. Petersburg, Russia; Photo by Natylie S. Baldwin, 2015

 

Monument to Siege of Leningrad

 

We entered the monument from the back.  There is a large semi-circle with eternal flame torches at intervals and embedded sculptures of Lenin’s face, and other symbols of the Soviet era.  The monument was built in the post-war period so the Soviet iconography is understandable.  In the middle is a sculpture of a soldier, a half-naked woman looking forlorn into the distance, and another woman collapsed on the ground with a dead boy in her arms.

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This sculpture is in the middle of the semi-circle.  You can see one of the eternal flame torches in the background; photo courtesy of saint-petersburg.com. 

 

There are several concentric steps that follow the semi-circle and I sat down on one of them and took in the feel of the area. Classical style music played in the background with a woman’s haunting voice singing in Russian. It was explained to me that it was a semi-circle instead of a full-circle to represent the fact the city was not completely surrounded and ultimately not defeated.

 

I finally got up and went through the opening in the semi-circle and came out to the front where a tall column with 1941 and 1945 on it stood with a large statue of two soldiers in front of it.

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The front of the Monument to the Siege of Leningrad; photo courtesy of saint-petersburg.com

 

There are several statues on either side of the front part of the monument of figures, from soldiers to civilians, who labored to assist in alleviating the suffering of the siege and defending the city.  Soldiers and civilians helped to put out fires, retrieve un-exploded ordnance from buildings, repair damage, and built the road of life over a frozen body of water to evacuate civilians and transport supplies.

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One of a set of statues on the sides of the monument in the front; photo courtesy of saint-petersburg.com.

 

The siege lasted 872 days (September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944), resulting in an estimated 1.2 million deaths, mostly from starvation and freezing, and some from bombing and illness.  Most were buried in mass graves, the largest of which was Piskarevskoye Cemetery, which received around 500,000 bodies.  An accurate accounting of deaths is complicated by the fact that many unregistered refugees had fled to Leningrad before the siege to escape the advancing Nazi army.

 

According to Wikipedia, by the end of the siege:

 

Only 700,000 people were left alive of a 3.5 million pre-war population. Among them were soldiers, workers, surviving children and women. Of the 700,000 survivors, about 300,000 were soldiers who came from other parts of the country to help in the besieged city.

We decided to go into the small museum attached to the Monument, which consisted of one large room.  As you walk in after paying for your ticket, you see a series of glass cases that each contain artifacts from the siege with explanatory panels in both Russian and English.  Mike and I noted the Soviet propaganda style language used in the panels.  He said that if the museum had been done today, the language would be different.  In any event, the basic information was readily understandable, if one ignored the glory-to-the-Soviet style wording.

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On one wall was a large movie screen on which was projected a constant loop of 2 films that ran approximately 10 minutes each.  One was footage of the siege in general and how it affected the residents and what the soldiers and civilians did to defend against it.  The second film focused on the massive deaths, including era footage of people pulling wrapped up corpses in make-shift sleds through the snow to the nearest mass pit for burial.

 

In the center of the exhibit was a large square sculptured map of the city with the outline of the area that was surrounded by the Germans lit up in red.

 

On one wall was information about the designer of the monument, which included photos of him in both youth and old age.

 

When we emerged from the darkness of the museum and monument, the sun was bright and it was probably one of the warmest days of the year in St. Petersburg.

 

On the walk back to the car, I told Mike that I didn’t think the average American could even begin to fathom this level of suffering.  With the exception of a very small percentage of the population sent to fight our myriad and senseless conflicts, war is something that happens to other people somewhere else.  It’s an abstraction – or worse yet, fodder for entertainment.

 

Mike didn’t respond to my verbal stream-of-consciousness.  So we continued on in silence.

 

But it all made me ponder how spoiled Americans have been in this respect, with a vast ocean on either side and weak or friendly neighbors to the north and south. We have not experienced a war on our soil since the 1860’s and have not suffered an invasion since 1812.  I can’t help but think that this, along with our youth, goes a long way toward explaining our lack of perspective and humility as a nation. Only those without wisdom would characterize themselves as “exceptional” and “indispensable.”

Astoria Hotel where Hitler planned to celebrate the taking of Leningrad and had even reportedly sent out the invitations; St. Petersburg; Photo by Natylie S. Baldwin, 2015

Dinner with Mike’s Family

 

That evening we went to have dinner with Mike’s family.  It was my first time meeting his wife, Irina, but I remembered his two kids from my last visit in October of 2015.  I chatted with his 18-year old daughter, Dasha, who is a bright student, proficient in English, who has spent time in the U.S. and is also learning Chinese.  His 13-year old son, Tim, is a gifted athlete and hopes to one day become a professional soccer player.  Tim is definitely the more taciturn of the two.

 

While Mike and Irina finished cooking dinner in the kitchen, Dasha showed us around their small but stylishly designed apartment, which I remember Mike telling me the last time had been a communal apartment during the Soviet era – in fact, he had grown up in this apartment, but his family lived in only one of the rooms and shared the kitchen and bathroom with a couple other families who each had one of the other rooms.

 

Finally, the meal was ready and we all sat down to eat.  Toward the end of the meal, Mike’s darling little dog came around to my end of the table.  I patted her head and Mike encouraged me to give her a couple of scraps from the remnants of my pork chop, which I did.  Needless to say, I had a new best friend.

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This concludes my series of dispatches from Russia.  I’ll be returning to the States on Saturday evening.

 

St. Petersburg

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia; photo by Natylie Baldwin

Thursday – The Train Ride

 

It was a nice modern train we were taking to St. Petersburg, but my first impressions were marred due to the fact that my travel companion was engaged in a heated argument with a man who’d whisked our bags onto his little cart after we got out of our taxi and led us through the station and onto the train.  He had told us no price ahead of time and we had just paid him 1,000 rubles – the equivalent of a little over $15 – when he demanded over 3 times that much.  What he was asking for was the salary many Russians earn in a week or two.

 

At one point he looked at me, clearly hoping that I was the “nicer” one and would give in. I did feel bad for him – he had no top teeth.  But he obviously thought he’d ensnared a couple of rich Americans who had money to burn and wouldn’t know any better.  Even if I’d wanted to give in to his con, I simply didn’t have that much to spare.  I looked away.

 

Finally, some employees from the train convinced him to leave.  Not long after the train departed the station, an attendant came around to take food and drink orders.  I chose the fish and salad and paid her.  About 10 minutes later I was presented with about 3 bites of barely warmed over salmon, a sprig of lettuce and 2 cherry tomatoes.  I looked up at the attendant, as if to say, “This is a joke, right?”  Any moment she’ll break out in laughter and pull the real meal from the cart.

 

No such luck, so I dipped into one of my bags for some supplemental snacks. Fritos and a Trader Joe’s rice crispy treat bar would have to get me through the 4 hours it would take to reach our destination.

 

After settling in, I looked out the window to watch the scenery.  I saw a lot of open land, with birch forests and salt marshes.  There was a stretch where dachas dotted the landscape, some so diminutive and colorful they reminded me of dollhouses.

 

When we finally arrived in St Petersburg, we headed straight for a restaurant.  We plowed through the crowds, dragging our luggage, on a mission for real food.  After scarfing down a meal of meat, buckwheat and veggies, we continued on to the apartment a friend of mine owns in the city and dealt with a series of logistical challenges, such as getting keys copied, figuring out how to connect to the internet, buying bottled water (you can’t drink the water in the city due to the age of the pipes), etc.  We finally checked all of these off by Friday and could begin to enjoy the culture and history of St. Petersburg.

 

Saturday – Day One of Sightseeing

 

We originally planned to visit the Hermitage today but since the weather was nice we decided to go sightseeing instead.

 

My friend and liaison, Mike (Mikhail), a native of the city known as The Venice of the North, drove us around to some key landmarks.  One of these was a park that included the Immortal Flame, which commemorates the February Revolution. The Immortal Flame was framed with an abundance of roses that had been recently laid down. An older man on a bike stopped for a moment to pay his respects there, while a pair of young women quietly snapped photos with their phones.  I walked around with my camera and saw families on picnics and couples strolling by.

 

We then stopped at Paul’s Palace (officially called Mikhailovsky Castle) and toured the courtyard which had a black metal statue of Paul at one end.  I decided to take a short rest on a set of steps leading up to a large doorway (one of 4 on different sides of the courtyard) to wait for a group of teenagers congregated in front of the statue to move on with their guide so I could get closer and maybe take a picture.

 

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Me on the steps in the courtyard of Paul’s Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia

After a short walk near the Aurora ship on the dock of the Neva river, we stopped for lunch at a Georgian restaurant at the request of my travel companion who had a hankering for Caucasian cuisine.  The restaurant was named after a Georgian painter of the primitivist school and the interior was elaborate, with a mural on one wall exemplifying his style, a fountain and fancy furniture.  Mike, who has the gift of gab, kept us entertained with anecdotes and jokes.  I should also add that he has helped smooth out the rough spots since we’ve gotten here – like how to get a wi-fi connection where we’re staying, showing us where the nearest grocery store and cafes are located, and arranging a few of my interviews.

St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the 3rd largest cathedral in the world, St. Petersburg; photo by Natylie Baldwin

The big finale for our day’s sightseeing was a river boat ride throughout the Neva, which is surrounded by numerous architectural delights, such as the Winter Palace (aka the Hermitage), the Peter and Paul Fortress where the remains of the last imperial family are interred, the Admiralty building, and numerous other historical buildings.  It was cold and windy, especially on the first leg of the ride, but well worth it.

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View from the Neva River at night, St. Petersburg; photo courtesy of Getty images

 

My First Interview

 

I was tired from the day’s outing but had my first formal interview on the Russian Revolution scheduled with an 86-year old retired engineer who’d worked in the shipping industry. This was part of my project to interview a cross-section of Russians (i.e. any who would be willing to talk to me) to get their views on the 1917 Revolutions since it was the centennial anniversary.

 

I had formulated a series of questions to ask my interview subjects:  were the Revolutions overall positive or negative for Russia and why, what did they think of Nicolas II, Lenin, Stalin, etc.

 

This gentleman had given interesting answers about the Revolutions, his assessment of Nicolas was typical – he was weak, incompetent and completely ill-equipped to deal with the historical moment he’d been faced with, and he offered some thought-provoking points about Lenin, though he clearly was not a fan of the Bolshevik leader.

 

However, he lingered a long time on the issue of Stalin, elaborating more on this question than any of the others.  At one point, his hands gripped the corners of the table.  I was debating whether to ask if anyone in his family had been affected by the mass repressions.  I’ve had these kinds of conflicts during interviews before when a potentially difficult issue is being addressed.  On the one hand, it is a legitimate question in terms of my research, but another part of me cringes when a question goes beyond discussing something in the abstract and crosses over into personal territory that will dredge up something painful.

 

As it turns out, my dilemma resolved itself.  He began the story on his own about how his father had been taken away in the night when he was 7 years old.  His parents had decided not to wake him to say goodbye.  When he got up the next morning and went to his parents’ room, his father was simply gone and the bookshelves had been sealed off with wax.  The rest of the family was exiled to a city far away from Leningrad.  They were originally told that his father had been imprisoned incommunicado, but they found out years later that he’d actually been executed on the charge of conspiring against “Comrade Stalin.”

 

I was mystified by the sealing off of the bookshelves and asked if there was any explanation for this.  He explained that his father was a talented mathematician and geologist, had written several books and had a leadership role in several scientific societies.  When an individual was arrested, any items of particular value were confiscated.  Since his father was an intellectual and a writer, his books were taken and the bookshelves rendered unusable.

 

Before I realized it, 2 1/2 hours had gone by since we arrived at his apartment.  I recall one moment, after we’d gotten through the worst parts of the interview, looking out the window at the first signs of dusk.  The clock beside the window indicated it was 9:30 pm.

 

As we concluded our discussion, I expressed my condolences for what had happened to his family and my appreciation of his taking the time to talk with me about such a painful subject.  He admitted that it was painful but that it needed to be talked about.  He wanted to ask me a few questions as well.  I realize that many Russians have very few, if any, interactions with Americans and when they do encounter one they are often curious and inquisitive.  So I’m no longer surprised when this occurs. He asked me about certain aspects of what happened on 9/11 and what priority Americans currently placed on countering Islamic terrorism.

 

On the way back to the apartment, Mike and I discussed the interview and the difficult history of Russia in the 20th century.  He told me that many Russians expressed shock when the archives were opened up during Glasnost and the ugly truth of the Stalin era started to come out into the open.  But he said that he’d known about it because his grandfather had told him of the repressions when he was 15.  Mike lamented how crazy it was for the leadership of a country to kill and imprison the most intelligent, educated and talented members of society – the very ones who had the skills to contribute to the nation’s development.  The next day, after he’d thought about it some more, he told me: “We have a very complicated history and it becomes hard to love a country when you know about such bad things.  But it is still our country and we have to learn to do that.”

 

 

The Russian Revolution, Stalin’s Crimes and the Day the US and Red Armies Met Up at Elbe

I met my guide Natalia outside of the apartment at 10:00 am to begin our all-day tour of Moscow. We went around the corner to the bus stop across the street from the American Embassy.  The bus took us close to our first destination of the day:  the Gulag Museum.

 

The Gulag Museum is a large red rectangular building with numerous windows covered with closed wooden shutters.  This is the first unsettling clue of what awaits inside.

 

The Museum, which was moved to this area from its former location closer to central Moscow a couple of years ago, is now open to individual visitors for self-guided tours, whereas before only group tours were accommodated.  Natalia explained to me that this new iteration of the Museum was more elaborate, having been designed by professionals for a more realist atmosphere and the addition of more artifacts from the actual prison camps.

 

The atmosphere, including dim lighting and dirge-like music in some areas, was certainly evocative and creepy.  In the first room was a large four-sided frame with about 8 to 10 actual doors from Gulag cells affixed to three of the four sides.  Each door included a card, in both Russian and English, stating which camp the door was from. The worn and pock-marked doors were made of wood, metal, or a combination of both. Most had a small square window that opened out in the middle, presumably for the passing of food.  All had sliding bars and heavy locks.  The fourth side of the frame was open and I could see the interior of the doors – the side the prisoners saw for hours, months or years – that is, when they weren’t toiling in the extreme cold.

 

Standing in that dark entryway and gazing into the enclosed space with those doors, I was overcome with a sudden wave of nausea and had to sit down for a minute before continuing on with the exhibit.  I had requested to visit this museum for educational reasons but wondered how much of this I’d be able to get through before wanting to bolt. Ultimately, I was able to push myself on for about an hour.

 

Various artifacts from the Gulag prisons could be seen hanging on the walls of this same room, such as a prisoner’s shirt, a small lantern from a cell, metal beds and benches, and a pair of handcuffs.

 

On one wall was a schematic illustration of one of the gulag prison camps before it was constructed.

 

In the next room were several glass cases.  One displayed fragments of letters written by the prisoners on cloth, typically parts of clothing, as they were provided no paper. Another displayed pieces of wood with messages written on them by the prisoners, demonstrating their need to communicate with anyone who might see it.  One case had items that had been made by some female prisoners, such as a utility box and shoes, constructed from whatever materials they could get their hands on.

 

In another room was a long table with photos and biographies of prisoners who survived the camps and wrote about it.  A copy of some of the books written appeared in front of the author’s picture.  Of course, the most recognizable was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

 

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Solzhenitsyn

 

The second to last room I was in had 3 video screen displays on one wall.  The middle screen had a continually scrolling list in white against a black background of the names of those who’d been executed directly during the Great Purge of 1936-38.  This would have been 700,000 to 750,000 people out of the 1.5 million that were arrested during that period.

 

The screen on the left had photos and a brief description of certain prisoners along with the dates of their arrest and execution.  These people were engineers, teachers, military officers and other average people – all of whom had been declared “enemies of the people.” I stopped to study the faces of a few of these individuals – one man in particular stood out to me because of his sad eyes.  I wondered if the photos were taken at the time of arrest (did he know his fate?) or if they were just everyday photos that may have been available.

 

The screen on the right had portions of actual lists of those to be arrested and executed projected on to it.

 

The last room I was in had a large television with video interviews playing of several elderly people who’d survived the prisons, discussing their ordeals, particularly their feelings about what life was like after they were released, including the process of becoming “rehabilitated.” After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and gradually released all of the prisoners, shutting down the Gulags and implementing a program of re-integration.  Khrushchev later admitted that he’d had much blood on his hands from the Stalin era, but that he and many others knew that if they resisted they would have also been executed without a second thought.

 

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Nikita Khrushchev

 

I remembered one of the explanatory panels in the exhibit stated that Stalin’s goal was to “destroy the possibility of political opposition, to nip non-conformity in the bud.”

 

Natalia and I sat on the bench in front of the television talking about the video when a young man from Kazakhstan briefly joined in our discussion.  Upon realizing that I was American he politely asked me some things about the United States, including Guantanamo prison.  I answered his questions as best I could. He also mentioned that there were people in Kazakhstan – a part of the Soviet Union at the time – who lived in the old buildings there that had constituted some of the Gulag prisons.  When Natalia and I expressed surprise at this, he simply replied that the buildings were sturdy so people put them to use.

 

We finally left the museum, both of us spent emotionally and spiritually.  We went over to the old Arbat street, a charming area that had been closed to auto traffic in the 1990’s and turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare with shops, gardens, restaurants and sculptures.  We passed by the Pushkin monument comprised of statues of the poet and his wife, across the street from the house they had lived in.

 

We stopped for lunch at a Russian buffet style restaurant and I asked Natalia her opinions about the Revolution, what alternatives (if any) might have prevented the Bolshevik coup in October of 1917 and the subsequent repressions, culminating in Stalin’s concentration camps and mass murder.  We discussed Nicholas II’s tragic incompetence and whether the February Revolution, led by social democrats, would have had potential if it had been allowed to run its course.

 

We also talked about the Monument to Victims of Repression, aka The Wall of Grief, which will commemorate Stalin’s victims.  I had originally requested to see this monument as part of the tour but was told that it would not open until October 13th, which is the officially designated day of remembrance for victims of repression in Russia.

 

Reportedly, Putin played a key role in getting this monument approved. Despite Western depictions of Putin as a dictator, he must arbitrate among different powerful factions when making his decisions.  I imagine there were some factions that weren’t too keen on this monument.

 

400 artists competed for the opportunity to design the monument.  The winner, Georgy Frangulyan, has designed a bronze wall that will have the names and figures of the victims.  The Wall of Grief monument will cost around 400 million rubles and will be placed in the center of Moscow at the intersection of Sakharov Avenue (named after the famed Soviet dissident Andrey Sakharov) and the Garden Ring.  The history director of the Gulag Museum is overseeing the project.

 

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Image of what the Monument to Victims of Repression will look like upon completion.  Photo courtesy of Press Service of Russia’s State Museum of GULAG.   https://www.rt.com/politics/317172-putin-orders-to-erect-monument/

 

 

I, of course, have my own opinions of Stalin – that he was likely a psychopath as well as a product of the Revolutionary milieu of his time that believed that the ends justified the means with regard to violence – but I believe it’s ultimately up to the Russian people to morally reconcile this part of their past, just like it’s up to the American people to morally reconcile the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans as the price of expanding and developing our nation.  If Washington unveiled an officially supported monument acknowledging the Native Americans and the victims of slavery, it would represent an important step forward.

 

After lunch, we visited a park where the Elbe Monument was located.  Dedicated in April of last year, the Elbe Monument commemorates the meeting up of the US and Soviet armies on a broken bridge over the Elbe River near Torgau in Germany on April 25, 1945.  Some iconic images of the meeting are below:

 

 

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The monument was much smaller than I expected and was one of several sculptures by the same artist at this location.  Right next to the Elbe Monument is a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln shaking hands with his contemporary Alexander II.  Alexander II, the reformist Czar, freed the serfs in Russia in 1861 and Lincoln freed the slaves by 1865. Alexander II had also sent naval support to the Union during the Civil War.  Both were later assassinated.

 

We then took the Metro to another part of Moscow to go to the history museum that had a special exhibit on the Russian Revolution  A bright young man guided us through the exhibit while Natalia translated.  We concluded with an interesting conversation among the three of us about what might have averted the Revolution, Lenin’s motivations, what fueled his fanaticism, and whether he knowingly received assistance from the Germans for his journey from western Europe back to Russia in April of 1917 after which the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government.  Subsequently, the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with Germany under terms that were widely seen as humiliating to Russia.

 

Overall it was a fulfilling but exhausting day and I was glad to get back to the apartment so I could fall onto the bed.  Later, I would begin processing what I had seen and learned.

 

Tomorrow we leave Moscow and go on to St. Petersburg by train.