Chris Hedges's Blog, page 601

Migrant Caravan Reaches the Border in Mass Asylum Bid

TIJUANA, Mexico—Packed into five old school buses, hundreds of Central American migrants arrived at the U.S. border Sunday for a rally, to be followed by a planned mass attempt to apply for asylum, in a direct challenge to the Trump administration.

The migrants, many traveling with children, left a downtown Tijuana shelter where they had been staying. Police with flashing lights escorted the buses to a cross-border rally at a Pacific Ocean beach, with supporters gathering on both sides of security fencing.

Asked how he felt as he boarded the bus, Nefi Hernandez of Honduras replied, “Nervous.” He said he intended to seek asylum with his wife and infant daughter, who was born on the journey through Mexico.

President Donald Trump and members of his Cabinet have been tracking the caravan of migrants, calling it a threat to the U.S. since it started March 25 in the Mexican city of Tapachula, near the Guatemala border.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the caravan “a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system,” pledging to send more immigration judges to the border to resolve cases if needed.

Trump administration officials have railed against what they call “catch-and-release” policies that allow people requesting asylum to be released from custody into the U.S. while their claims make their way through the courts in a process that can last a year.

The arrival at San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing, the nation’s busiest, marked the end of a monthlong journey by foot, freight train and bus for the migrants, many of whom said they feared for their safety in their homes.

Hernandez, 24, said a gang in his hometown of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, threatened to kill him and his family if he did not sell drugs.

Jose Cazares, 31, said he faced death threats in the Honduran city of Yoro because a gang member suspected of killing the mother of his children learned one of Cazares’ sons reported the crime to police.

But the travelers faced an uncertain future as they prepared to turn themselves in and face asylum. U.S. immigration lawyers conducted free legal workshops for the group, warning them they face possible separation from their children and detention for many months.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said that asylum claims will be resolved “efficiently and expeditiously” but that the asylum-seekers should seek it in the first safe country they reach, including Mexico.

She warned that any asylum seekers making false claims to U.S. authorities could be prosecuted, as could anyone who assists or coaches immigrants on making false claims.

Administration officials and their allies claim that asylum fraud is growing and that many who seek it are coached on how to do so.

Asylum-seekers are typically held up to three days at the border and then turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If they pass an asylum officer’s initial screening, they may be detained or released into the U.S. with ankle monitors.

The San Ysidro crossing may be unable to take asylum-seekers if it faces too many at once, forcing people to wait in Mexico until it has more room, according to Pete Flores, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s San Diego field office director. Flores said earlier this month that the port can hold about 300 people temporarily.

Maria de Los Angeles, 17, said she felt confident after speaking with an attorney that U.S. authorities would release while her case wends its way through court because she was traveling alone with her 1-year-old son. She hoped to move in with a sister in San Francisco.

She said she fled her home in Jutiapa, Honduras, because the father of her son threatened to kill her and their child.

“I’m fired up to go because I believe in God and I believe everything will work out,” she said.

Sprint Deal With T-Mobile May Hurt Consumers, Cost Jobs

NEW YORK—T-Mobile and Sprint announced Sunday that they reached an agreement to combine into a new company that would reshape the U.S. wireless landscape by reducing it to three major cellphone providers.

The deal would help the companies slash costs and could make them a stronger competitor to larger AT&T and Verizon. But consumers might see higher prices because the combined company would not have to offer as many promotions to lure customers.

The proposed all-stock deal values Sprint at about $59 billion and the combined company at $146 billion, including debt. Without debt, the combined company is valued at $26.5 billion.

It comes after Sprint dropped its bid for T-Mobile more than three years ago following concerns by the Obama administration about wireless competition. The two were poised to combine in October, but that deal was called off, too.

Sprint and its owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, have long been looking for a deal as the company struggles to compete on its own.

Sprint has a lot of debt and has posted a string of annual losses. The company has cut costs and made itself more attractive to customers, BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk says, but it hasn’t invested enough in its network and doesn’t have enough airwave rights for quality service in rural areas.

T-Mobile, meanwhile, has been on a yearslong streak of adding customers. After the government nixed AT&T’s attempt to buy the company in 2011, T-Mobile led the way in many consumer-friendly changes, such as ditching two-year contracts and bringing back unlimited data plans. Consumers are paying less for cellphone service thanks to T-Mobile’s influence on the industry and the resultant price wars.

“T-Mobile does not need a merger with Sprint to succeed, but Sprint might need one to survive,” Piecyk wrote in a research note.

But MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said T-Mobile’s momentum is slowing, which may explain why the company and its parent, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, “have warmed to the idea of a merger sooner rather than later.”

The supersized company would have nearly as many wireless subscribers as Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile and Sprint could save money by merging their networks and closing stores.

The Communications Workers of America, a union for telecommunication workers, says the merger will cost at least 20,000 U.S. jobs and reduce competition in wireless, bringing higher prices.

But the cost savings could help the combined company build infrastructure and buy rights to the airwaves needed for faster “5G” service that is expected to be up in running within the next few years.

The deal will have to be reviewed by the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, the federal agency that oversees phone, broadcast TV and internet service.

National carriers had not been able to get a deal through under former President Barack Obama.

But the FCC in September deemed the wireless market “competitive” for the first time since 2009, which some analysts say could make it easier to present a deal. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, President Donald Trump’s appointee, has not criticized the idea of three national carriers rather than four, as his Democratic predecessor had.

The combined company still wouldn’t be able to fully compete as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast morph into communications-and-content giants.

Verizon and AT&T have been expanding their video-content businesses, while cable companies have been moving into wireless. That allows a single company to combine home and wireless internet and use content to support the communications businesses.

Comcast, the cable giant that finished buying NBCUniversal in 2013, offers customers wireless service by reselling access to Verizon’s network. So does another dominant cable company, Charter.

T-Mobile’s chief finance officer suggested last year that a deal in which Sprint and T-Mobile worked with Comcast and Charter would be “very, very exciting.” The cable companies could resell service from the combined company, perhaps getting better terms than the Verizon arrangement. That could lead to more customers getting a wireless and home internet bill from the same company.

AT&T and Verizon, meanwhile, are becoming more like media and cable companies. They are both testing a type of home wireless that could be as fast or faster than cable.

AT&T, the country’s biggest TV provider since its purchase of DirecTV, is facing a lawsuit from the Justice Department related to antitrust concerns over its deal for Time Warner, parent company of HBO, CNN and Warner Bros. movie studio. To lure wireless customers, AT&T offers discounts on DirecTV and could soon do so with HBO.

Verizon bought the once-pioneering internet companies Yahoo and AOL to jump-start its own media business. It hopes to compete with Facebook and Google for advertising dollars.

Kim Jong Un Says He’ll Give Up Nukes, If …

SEOUL, South Korea—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told his South Korean counterpart at their historic summit that he would be willing to give up his nuclear weapons if the U.S. commits to a formal end to the Korean War and a pledge not to attack the North, Seoul officials said Sunday.

Kim also vowed during his meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday to shut down the North’s nuclear test site in May and disclose the process to experts and journalists from South Korea and the United States, Seoul’s presidential office said.

While there are lingering questions about whether North Korea will ever decide to fully relinquish its nukes as it heads into negotiations with the U.S., Kim’s comments amount to the North’s most specific acknowledgement yet that “denuclearization” would constitute surrendering its weapons.

U.S. national security adviser John Bolton reacted coolly to word that Kim would abandon his weapons if the United States pledged not to invade.

Asked on CBS’ “Face the Nation” whether the U.S. would make such a promise, Bolton said: “Well, we’ve heard this before. This is — the North Korean propaganda playbook is an infinitely rich resource.”

“What we want to see from them is evidence that it’s real and not just rhetoric,” he added.

Seoul officials, who have shuttled between Pyongyang and Washington to broker talks between Kim and President Donald Trump that are expected in May or June, said Kim has expressed genuine interest in dealing away his nuclear weapons.

But there has been skepticism because North Korea for decades has been pushing a concept of “denuclearization” that bears no resemblance to the American definition. The North has long vowed to pursue nuclear development unless Washington removes its 28,500 troops from South Korea and the nuclear umbrella defending South Korea and Japan.

During their summit at a truce village on the border, Moon and Kim promised to work toward the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula but made no references to verification or timetables.

Kim also expressed optimism about his meeting with Trump, Moon’s spokesman Yoon Young-chan said.

“Once we start talking, the United States will know that I am not a person to launch nuclear weapons at South Korea, the Pacific or the United States,” Kim said, according to Yoon.

Yoon also quoted Kim as saying: “If we maintain frequent meetings and build trust with the United States and receive promises for an end to the war and a non-aggression treaty, then why would we need to live in difficulty by keeping our nuclear weapons?”

The Korean Peninsula technically remains in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War was halted with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

The closing of the nuclear test site would be a dramatic but likely symbolic event to set up Kim’s summit with Trump. North Korea already announced this month that it has suspended all tests of nuclear devices and intercontinental ballistic missiles and plans to close its nuclear testing ground.

Still, Adam Mount, a senior defense analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said Kim’s comments were significant because they are his most explicit acknowledgement yet that denuclearization means surrendering his nuclear weapons.

“Questions remain about whether Kim will agree to discuss other nuclear technology, fissile material and missiles. However, they imply a phased process with reciprocal concessions,” Mount said in an email. “It is not clear that the Trump administration will accept that kind of protracted program.”

Analysts reacted with skepticism to Kim’s previously announced plan to close down the test site at Punggye-ri, saying the northernmost tunnel had already become too unstable to use for underground detonations anyway following the country’s sixth and most powerful test blast in September.

In his conversation with Moon, Kim denied that he would be merely clearing out damaged goods, saying the site also has two new tunnels that are larger than previous testing facilities, Yoon said.

Some analysts see Moon’s agreement with Kim at the summit as a disappointment, citing the lack of references to verification and timeframes and also the absence of a definition on what would constitute a “complete” denuclearization of the peninsula.

But Patrick McEachern, a former State Department analyst now with the Washington-based Wilson Center, said it was still meaningful that Moon extracted a commitment from Kim to complete denuclearization, which marked a significant change from Kim’s previous public demand to expand his arsenal of nuclear weapons in number and quality.

“The public conversation should now shift from speculation on whether North Korea would consider denuclearization to how South Korea and the United States can advance this denuclearization pledge in concrete steps in light of North Korea’s reciprocal demands for concrete steps toward an eventual peace agreement,” McEachern said in an email.

North Korea has invited the outside world to witness the dismantling of its nuclear facilities before. In June 2008, international broadcasters were allowed to air the demolition of a cooling tower at the Nyongbyon reactor site, a year after the North reached an agreement with the U.S. and four other nations to disable its nuclear facilities in return for an aid package worth about $400 million.

But the deal eventually collapsed after North Korea refused to accept U.S.-proposed verification methods, and the country went on to conduct its second nuclear test detonation in May 2009.

Yoon said Kim also revealed plans to sync its time zone with South Korea’s. The Koreas had used the same time zone for decades before the North created its own “Pyongyang Time” in 2015 by setting the clock 30 minutes behind South Korea and Japan.

Yoon said the North’s decision to return to Seoul’s time zone was aimed at facilitating communication with South Korea and the U.S.

Pompeo: U.S. Stands With Israel Against Iran

TEL AVIV, Israel—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday gave a warm boost of support to Israel in its standoff against Iran, saying “the United States is with Israel in this fight.”

Pompeo has been using the Middle East leg of his first trip abroad as America’s top diplomat to call for concerted international action to punish Iran for its missile programs.

The tough line was welcomed in Israel, which considers Iran its greatest threat and has been leading calls for the international community to revise its 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. He arrived after visiting Saudi Arabia, another fierce rival of Iran.

“We remain deeply concerned about Iran’s dangerous escalation of threats to Israel and the region and Iran’s ambition to dominate the Middle East remains,” Pompeo said after a nearly two-hour meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The United States is with Israel in this fight.”

Israel has called for tough international action against Iran, citing its hostile rhetoric, support for anti-Israel militant groups and development of long-range missiles.

It also has complained the 2015 nuclear deal does not do enough to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear-weapons capability, and expressed growing concerns about Iran’s involvement in the civil war in neighboring Syria. It says it will not allow Iran to establish a permanent military presence in Syria, fearing the Iranians will launch attacks.

President Donald Trump is to decide by May 12 whether to remain in the nuclear deal. Pompeo repeated the Trump position that “if we can’t fix it, he is going to withdraw.”

Netanyahu welcomed the tough U.S. line.

“Iran must be stopped, its quest for a nuclear bomb must be stopped, its aggression must be stopped and we’re committed to stopping it together,” he said.

Netanyahu also welcomed the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and the scheduled move of its embassy from Tel Aviv on May 14. Pompeo said the U.S. is “incredibly proud” of the embassy move.

The Palestinians, who claim Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem as their capital, have harshly criticized the U.S. move and all but cut off ties with the White House.

Earlier in Saudi Arabia, Pompeo also took aim at Iran.

“Iran destabilizes this entire region,” Pompeo said in brief remarks to journalists with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir.

He also urged the Saudis and their neighbors to resolve a festering dispute with Qatar that U.S. officials say Iran is exploiting to boost its influence in the region, including in Yemen and Syria.

Pompeo on Sunday met with Saudi King Salman, whose country, along with Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, is embroiled in a row with Qatar that had hobbled Gulf Arab unity and frustrated the U.S. as it seeks to blunt growing Iranian assertiveness.

“I think they would all agree that it’s in everyone’s best interests that the Gulf states all figure out how to be together,” Pompeo told reporters as he traveled to Israel. “We’ve got a common challenge in Iran I think they all recognize that. We’re hopeful that they will in their own way figure out their dispute between them.”

The ex-CIA chief arrived in Riyadh a day earlier, shortly after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fired missiles at Saudi Arabia’s southern city of Jizan, killing one person and underscoring what U.S. officials said is a growing threat emanating from Iran.

Senior U.S. officials traveling with Pompeo blamed Iran for smuggling the missiles into Yemen.

They said the incident highlighted the importance of the Trump administration’s push to counter Iran in the region. Iran has also provided crucial support to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Al-Jubeir said the kingdom “supports the policy of the Trump administration against Iran and to improve the terms of the nuclear agreement with Iran.”

Pompeo’s meetings in Saudi Arabia and Israel, to be followed by discussions in Jordan, come just weeks ahead of several key dates that could bring further volatility to the region.

Trump has set a May 12 deadline to decide whether to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, something he appears likely to do despite heavy pressure to stay in from European and other parties.

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said that she discussed the deal with her French and German counterparts. It said they agreed that the deal should remain intact, even while addressing shortcomings.

The countries “agreed that there were important elements that the deal does not cover, but which we need to address — including ballistic missiles, what happens when the deal expires, and Iran’s destabilizing regional activity,” the statement said.

On May 14 comes the U.S. Embassy move, marking a significant shift in decades of American policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.

The next day the Palestinians will mark the anniversary of what they term the “catastrophe,” when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that surrounded Israel’s creation.

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire during recent protests along border between Israel and Gaza. Those protests, spearheaded by the Islamic militant Hamas movement, are expected to peak on May 15.

Also looming over the trip is uncertainty over Trump’s policy on Syria, which has shifted between a speedy all-out withdrawal of American forces and leaving a lasting footprint to deter Iran from completing a land bridge from Tehran to Beirut.

Pompeo also is taking a leading role in Trump’s preparations for an expected summit in May or early June with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Pompeo, while en route to Israel, was asked whether a U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal would complicate negotiations

“I don’t think Kim Jung Un is staring at the Iran deal and saying, ‘Oh goodness, if they get out of that deal, I won’t talk to the Americans anymore. There are higher priorities, things he is more concerned about than whether the Americans stay” in the accord, Pompeo said.

___

Associated Press writer Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Arms Embargo on Israel Is Needed as Military Unlawfully Kills and Maims Gaza Protesters

Israel is carrying out a murderous assault against protesting Palestinians, with its armed forces killing and maiming demonstrators who pose no imminent threat to them, Amnesty International revealed Friday, based on its latest research, as the “Great March of Return” protests continued in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military has killed 35 Palestinians and injured more than 5,500 others—some with what appear to be deliberately inflicted life-changing injuries—during the weekly Friday protests that began on 30 March.

Amnesty International has renewed its call on governments worldwide to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel following the country’s disproportionate response to mass demonstrations along the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel.

“For four weeks the world has watched in horror as Israeli snipers and other soldiers, in full-protective gear and behind the fence, have attacked Palestinian protesters with live ammunition and tear gas. Despite wide international condemnation, the Israeli army has not reversed its illegal orders to shoot unarmed protesters,” said Magdalena Mughrabi, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

“The time for symbolic statements of condemnation is now over. The international community must act concretely and stop the delivery of arms and military equipment to Israel. A failure to do so will continue to fuel serious human rights abuses against thousands of men, women and children suffering the consequences of life under Israel’s cruel blockade of Gaza. These people are merely protesting their unbearable conditions and demanding the right to return to their homes and towns in what is now Israel.”

The USA is by far Israel’s main supplier of military equipment and technology, with a commitment to provide $38 billion in military aid over the next 10 years. But other countries, including EU member states such as France, Germany, the UK and Italy, have licensed large volumes of military equipment for Israel.

Protesters shot from behind

In most of the fatal cases analysed by Amnesty International victims were shot in the upper body, including the head and the chest, some from behind. Eyewitness testimonies, video and photographic evidence suggest that many were deliberately killed or injured while posing no immediate threat to the Israeli soldiers.

Among the victims are 23-year-old football player Mohammad Khalil Obeid, who was shot in both knees as he filmed himself with his back towards the border fence at a protest east of al-Breij Camp on 30 March.

The video, published on social media, shows the moment he was shot. In the footage, he appears to be standing in an isolated area, far from the fence, and not seeming to pose any threat to the lives of Israeli soldiers. He is currently in need of a knee replacement operation to be able to walk again.

“As a Palestinian player my life has been destroyed… I was dreaming of playing football abroad, and to raise the Palestinian flag abroad [to show] that we are not terrorists,” he told Amnesty International.

“We wanted to convey our message to all organizations, countries and heads of states so that they see what is happening to us, because no one would accept this anywhere in the world.”

Injuries not seen since the war

Doctors at the European and Shifa hospitals in Gaza City told Amnesty International that many of the serious injuries they have witnessed are to the lower limbs, including the knees, which are typical of war wounds that they have not observed since the 2014 Gaza conflict.

Many have suffered extreme bone and tissue damage, as well as large exit wounds measuring between 10 and 15mm, and will likely face further complications, infections and some form of physical disability, such as paralysis or amputation. Reports of the high number of injuries to the knees, which increase the probability of bullet fragmentation, are particularly disturbing. If true, they would suggest that the Israeli army is intentionally intending to inflict life-changing injuries.

Doctors also said that they have observed another type of devastating injury characterized by large internal cavities, plastic left inside the body but no exit wounds.

According to military experts as well as a forensic pathologist who reviewed photographs of injuries obtained by Amnesty International, many of the wounds observed by doctors in Gaza are consistent with those caused by high-velocity Israeli-manufactured Tavor rifles using 5.56mm military ammunition. Other wounds bear the hallmarks of US-manufactured M24 Remington sniper rifles shooting 7.62mm hunting ammunition, which expand and mushroom inside the body.

According to a recent statement by Médecins Sans Frontières, half of the over 500 patients admitted to its clinics were treated for injuries “where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone”. This information has been confirmed by humanitarian NGOs as well as testimonies collected from doctors by Palestinian human rights groups in Gaza.

“The nature of these injuries shows that Israeli soldiers are using high-velocity military weapons designed to cause maximum harm to Palestinian protesters that do not pose imminent threat to them. These apparently deliberate attempts to kill and main are deeply disturbing, not to mention completely illegal. Some of these cases appear to amount to wilful killing, a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime,” said Magdalena Mughrabi.

“Unless Israel ensures effective and independent investigations resulting in criminal prosecutions of those responsible, the International Criminal Court must open a formal investigation into these killings and serious injuries as possible war crimes and ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice.”

According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, as of 26 April, the total number of injured is estimated at 5,511 – 592 children, 192 women and 4,727 men – with 1,738 injuries from live ammunition. Approximately half of those admitted to hospitals suffered injuries to the legs and the knees, while 225 sustained injuries to the neck and head, 142 others were shot in the abdomen and pelvis, and 115 were injured in the chest and the back. So far, the injuries have resulted in 18 amputations.

Four children aged between 14 and 17 are among those killed due to injuries sustained during protests. Two journalists have also been shot dead, despite both wearing protective vests that clearly identified them as members of the press, while several others have been injured.

Gaza’s hospitals have struggled to cope with the large number of casualties due to shortages in medical supplies, electricity and fuel caused by the Israeli blockade and exacerbated by the intra-Palestinian divide. Meanwhile, Israel has been delaying or refusing the transfer of some patients in need of urgent specialized medical treatment available in other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories due to their participation in protests.

In one case documented by Amnesty International, 20-year-old journalist Yousef al-Kronz had his left leg amputated after the Israeli authorities denied him permission to travel to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank for urgent medical treatment. He was eventually allowed to leave for an operation to save his other leg following legal intervention by human rights groups.

Paramedics in Gaza have told Amnesty International of difficulties evacuating injured protesters due to the Israeli army firing tear gas canisters at them as well as near field hospitals.

Unlawful killings and life-changing injuries

The organizers of the “Great March of Return” have repeatedly stated that the protests are intended to be peaceful, and they have largely involved sit-ins, concerts, sports games, speeches and other peaceful activities.

Despite this, the Israeli army reinforced its forces – deploying tanks, military vehicles, soldiers and snipers along the Gaza fence – and gave orders to shoot anyone within several hundred metres of the fence.

While some protesters have attempted to approach the fence, threw stones in the direction of Israeli soldiers or burnt tyres, social media videos, as well as eyewitness testimonies gathered by Amnesty International, Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, show that Israeli soldiers shot unarmed protesters, bystanders, journalists and medical staff approximately 150-400m from the fence, where they did not pose any threat.

In a petition requesting that the Israeli Supreme Court order the Israeli army to stop using live ammunition to disperse protests, human rights groups Adalah and Al Mezan provided evidence of 12 videos published on social media showing unarmed protesters, including women and children, being shot by the Israeli army. In some cases, people were shot while waving the Palestinian flag or running away from the fence.

Video footage widely circulated on social media shows Abd Al-Fattah Abd Al-Nabi, aged 19, being shot on 30 March as he was running away from the fence while holding a tyre, with his back turned to Israeli soldiers. He was shot in the back of the head and died. On Friday 20  April, 14-year-old Mohammad Ayyoub was also killed by a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

Background

Over the last 11 years, civilians in the Gaza Strip have suffered the devastating consequences of Israel’s illegal blockade in addition to three wars. As a result, Gaza’s economy has sharply declined, leaving its population almost entirely dependent on international aid. Gaza now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world at 44%. Four years since the 2014 conflict, some 22,000 people remain displaced.

In January 2015, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court opened a preliminary examination of situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, specifically looking into allegations of crimes committed since 13 June 2014.

Amnesty International has also been calling on all states to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, as well as on Palestinian armed groups, with the aim of preventing violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by all sides.

Since 30 March, in addition to the protesters, seven other Palestinians have been killed by Israeli air strikes, artillery fire or live ammunition, including a farmer who was harvesting his land near the fence, and six members of Palestinian armed groups.

‘Heart of Nuba’ Filmmaker Kenneth Carlson on Meeting His Movie’s Villain (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer speaks with filmmaker Kenneth A. Carlson about his recent movie, “The Heart of Nuba.”

Scheer and Carlson discuss the politics of Nuba, located in the southern region of Sudan, and what inspired the documentarian to make a film about the persecuted tribe and the heroic American doctor Tom Catena.

Catena, with whom Carlson played football at Brown University, provides medical attention to hundreds of patients in the Nuba Mountains, a region under attack by the Sudanese government.

Carlson also talks about his interview with Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, whom he was able to meet through a neighbor in Santa Monica, Calif.  “How often does a filmmaker get to face the antagonist, the villain, of his or her film?” the filmmaker tells Scheer. “Very rarely. And I was able to do that.”

To learn more about the film, watch the following trailer:

Listen to the interview in the player above and read the full transcript below. Find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here and read Carlson’s piece about the film here.

Full transcript:

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Ken Carlson, who made an incredible movie called The Heart of Nuba. And if you don’t know where Nuba is, it’s the southern region of Sudan; not [South] Sudan, the southern region of Sudan. It’s a country ruled by a vicious and indicted war criminal, Omar al-Bashir. And there’s a couple of million people live in that area, who for whatever religious, ethnic reasons, are held in suspicion by the government, and they have minerals and oil under their land. And Ken, you went and made a documentary there. You’ve made a number of movies, features, documentaries; you made one that I think is incredible, called Go Tigers. I show it all the time to my students, about high school football; it preceded Friday Night Lights. And as I understand it, you’re making this movie, right, about Africa, about Sudan and the Nuba people, because of your playing football at Brown University. So why don’t you, why don’t we begin with that? Because it’s really about a guy that you played football with, who’s now a pivotal figure in all this.

Kenneth Carlson: Well, that’s true. Bob, it’s a pleasure to be here, and yes, all things lead back to, all things belong. So it’s all about football; you’re right, it is a connection, I haven’t really put that together with Go Tigers and The Heart of Nuba. Yes, this is a very personal story for me. This is a story about the only doctor in a region for about a million plus people. This is a resilient people, but a people that have been subject to great atrocities. There’s a conflict there that’s been going on for years, but it’s pretty much a conflict that is a war that has been picked by Omar Hassan al-Bashir. So I met Tom Catena back at Brown University; we both are classmates and teammates. In fact, we were on the same defensive line. Tom is a nose guard, he was All-American; I was an outside linebacker, I was not. He was ferocious, he was a monster on the gridiron, and he’s taken the same skill set, the same attributes, and applied it to what he’s doing now in the Nuba Mountains. So he is providing not only medical care, but hope to a large region that is suffering under the hands of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, as you said, that vicious dictator, the genocidaire that’s responsible for Darfur.

RS: What we do in these podcasts, basically, I feature what I call “American originals.” A few of them are Canadian, some are more recent immigrants. But generally a notion that out of this crazy-quilt of our culture, we get really special people. We get them for all sorts of reasons, but we have great diversity of ethnicity, and religions, and so forth. And Tom Catena, the reason I, I really—I see him more as an American original, and you are one yourself, a child of what, three generations of ministers and from Ohio. And you know, and yet you’ve come to make these movies, a great deal of—I shouldn’t say “yet,” you have come to make these movies of a great deal of social content and meaning. But in this case, here was a guy from—help me—

KC: Upstate New York.

RS: —upstate New York—

KC: Amsterdam, New York, near Albany.

RS: —and it’s in the movie, he goes home at one point for Christmas, he’s from a Catholic family. And he was a guy who in school studied engineering, and then he decided he would become a doctor. And for five years he went into the Navy, ‘cause that was a more affordable way to become a doctor; he’s obviously a very bright guy, very personable. But in the movie, you capture the sort of normalcy of Tom Catena. This was not a religious fanatic; this is not a guy who had, you know, extreme views of anything. He was a kind of a, you know, a happy-go-lucky football player. And as with you, and here we get to a certain serious side of religion, he had a kind of calling here. At a certain point, he decided he wanted to study medicine. And then when he got his degree, instead of becoming a suburban doctor making a lot of money and so forth, he chose to go work elsewhere where he was needed. So why don’t you catch us up on who is this Tom Catena that you played football with, and why did he take the path he took.

KC: We explain that in the film, but it’s really a pilgrimage for him, for all of us, I believe. Tom was, as I said, a monster on the gridiron. And, but he was, but a sweetheart of a guy. I mean, literally, he would lay out a quarterback through a bull rush, and then pick him up and dust him down and apologize for hitting him. I mean, that’s the kind of guy he was. When we all went out on Friday and Saturday nights, Tom would stay in and work, studying, and he had Bible study sometimes. But he was, as you said, not a pious guy that was reaching for martyrdom; he just simply was a decent human being. And you know, his humility on the football field—if you know anything about football, a nose guard is a position that fires out every play. And you never hear his name on the loudspeaker; the announcer never, you know, pays homage to the line. His play is about a collision every single, every single down. And not unlike that, he has applied those attributes to what he’s doing in the Nuba Mountains, but with no glory. I mean, he does not want glory; he wants no attention. We always thought Tom would do something special; we had no idea what was in order. And it’s, as I like to say, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to meeting a saint on this earth. He does not in any way, shape, or form want attention for it; he just wants to do the work, and he wants to provide help to these people that are, you know, in great need of. And he truly lives his life with the mantra, “Every life holds the promise of hope.” He truly believes that. And he could be making beaucoup bucks here in the United States, living a life of luxury with all the creature comforts, but he chooses to be in a war zone in a very difficult, remote part of the world, because he feels that is his calling, he feels that is his purpose. He had an epiphany when he was, after he graduated from Brown, and he has stuck to that, and it has led him to the Nuba Mountains. And he lives a life of great sacrifice and great service to better these people. And I hope I capture that in the film. And like I said, he wants no attention for it, not spotlight; he just wants to do the work ‘cause he feels that’s the right thing to do.

RS: Yeah, he didn’t even want your spotlight or the spotlight of your film—

KC: Not at all. He fought me on that. [Laughs]

RS: Yeah. And well, we should discuss that a little bit. But I mean, here—we should explain, there’s a couple of million people here, and he’s running the only hospital.

KC: We don’t know, there’s, the last time they did a census there was—never. So we don’t know if there’s 500,000; we know, we hear there’s over a million, they think it’s about a million and a half, but it’s hard to really, to calculate. But the bottom line is, there’s one hospital, it has 435 beds, and there’s one surgeon, there’s one physician, and that is Dr. Tom Catena. So we like to say he’s the last line of defense; he’s the only go-to there medically. So he is in harm’s way, he’s exposed, but he has a hell of a lot of work to do in an extremely remote and dangerous part of the world. I mean, there’s 435 beds, and each bed has about two people. Pediatric ward has three. So when he does rounds each and every day, he’s meeting somewhere between 700 and 800 people. Then he does a clinic after hours for about another hundred, 150 people, as you see in the film. So this man is, is courageous, he’s brave, he’s selfless, but he’s focused.

RS: I want to take it down to the human level. There’s a guy comes out of medical school, and it’s interesting in the film ‘cause he clearly does not want the attention. And he’s also clear that there’s something odd about that this doctor, in a Catholic hospital, is a white guy, right, from upstate New York. He ends up, I guess we can give it away, at the end of the movie he actually ends up marrying a local woman who is working at the hospital, a member of the Nuba tribe.

KC: Yep, as a nurse.

RS: As a nurse. And his pitch, all—there’s two points that I think, I mean, really drew me to this film. One is, you know, out of his religious conviction, his sense of human worth, every life has equal potential and meaning. So if he walks away and these people suffer, you know, then he’s saying their lives are worth less than, say, people in upstate New York, Amsterdam, New York, or wherever. He was very clear about that in this film; he gets tired, he gets angry, they’re being bombed, there’s a lot of suffering. It takes him weeks to get home for Christmas if he wants to do that. He gets malaria. You know, and it’s horrible; it’s horrible to see what these bombs do to people. I mean, here we see war now as a video game, and you shoot off these bombs. And when you watch Ken Carlson’s documentary, Heart of Nuba, you know—you know, there are scenes—you know, you remember, no, the arm comes off, the leg comes off. This kid, there’s one kid in there, I can’t get him out of my mind, in your movie. But he, Dr. Catena makes the point, he says look, his arm is gone, his leg is gone; this is an agricultural society; this kid, what is he going to do? Who’s going to take care of him? You know, I mean, it’s really heart-rendering. And yet, he’s there, and he doesn’t have the white man’s burden idea. He has just the opposite: if my work here has any worth, I have to help train the staff to take over my place. That’s one very big theme, that in order for this thing to endure, I have to replace myself with local people, and there’s a lot of that, the training of the people to run the hospital, and the nurses. And the other is this very powerful idea which we pay lip service to, that everybody’s life matters. But he’s really there. And he’s got malaria, and he—you know, I’ve had a bout of malaria, you know; it’s horrible. I had it in Cambodia, actually. And you know, the last thing you want to do is stick around; you want to get away, get treatment. And this guy really goes through a lot, and his house gets blown up—the whole thing, you know. And yet what’s driving it is not some abstract religious notion, but a very basic one—and he’s not preachy; just a very basic one. He says, look, if I walk away here, that means my life is more important than that kid’s, and I don’t believe that.

KC: That’s right. And he is all in; he believes that 100 percent, it’s not lip service, he’s not, he’s not acting. This is real. I mean, and Tom is an individual that will put others in front of himself, to the point where he literally is wearing down. I mean, he’s strong as ever, but we found out last year when he won the Aurora Prize in Yerevan, we insisted that he had a full physical done, and we found out he has two forms of tuberculosis. He has malaria, he just got pneumonia. He used to be 245 pounds on the gridiron, now he’s 140. We’re talking about 100 pounds lighter because all he can eat there is rice, beans, and sorghum. So he is putting himself forward in a physically, mentally—he is all in. And the toll that it takes on an individual is outrageous. But your point is that it is about the hospital, it’s about giving care, and it’s about the Nuban people. And what Tom made me promise, in order to make this film, is it can’t be about him. And I said, Tom, you’ve got to be my narrative through line, you have to be, you know, you are the reason I’m here, you know! And I will—he said, I need this to be about the Nuban people, the conflict, and their plight. And I agreed with that. And so as I was discovering in the field, that theme came up, that he was literally preparing them to take over the hospital: ownership for them. And that’s very powerful. It’s not about him, it’s about them, and he really lives that out to the nth degree each and every day. And when you see the film, I think that comes through. And I say this, though, with all sincerity, that it’s hard to capture. When you see this film, you see the graphic nature of it, you see the work; but you really can’t feel it, because you don’t understand how difficult it is, what he’s doing in a war zone.

RS: You largely shot this film, you had someone else working with you, but basically your crew that you had lined up originally bailed on you—

KC: Crew of two.

RS: Yeah. And you ended up doing a lot of photography yourself.

KC: And sound, yeah.

RS: And at one point you had guns at your head, a plane that had taken you to a spot wasn’t going to take off, and so forth. So there’s a great deal of risk that you took in this. And, I must say, and after the break we’ll get back to that, you actually went and met the dictator.

KC: That’s right.

RS: And I have to talk about that, because what we’re talking about is a group of people who, there’s religious dispute, we’ll discuss that, in the Sudan; not all the people—

KC: The resource curse.

RS: Right, that they have resources, and not only that, but they have different—you have some Muslims who are in this area, and then Christians, and so forth. What’s really fascinating about it is all this harm is inflicted by a dictator who’s been in power for decades. And at a critical moment, and after the break maybe we’ll even begin with how you came to do this, you met with him, after the first draft of the film was done, quite recently. [omission for station break] We’re back with Ken Carlson, the director, producer, writer—it was really pretty much a one-man operation of a really brave film, The Heart of Nuba. And Nuba’s an area, the southern part of Sudan, not to be confused with [South] Sudan, but Sudan, and run by a really vicious dictator, Omar al-Bashir. And after shooting this film, editing it and so forth, Ken Carlson got an invitation, a strange invitation to go, actually meet the man who was inflicting— I mean, he sends the planes that drop the bombs on these people. And we should describe, the people are living in a very primitive agricultural situation; their farm implements are quite primitive, and so forth—

KC: Mud huts.

RS: But there’s a great deal of joy and content, meaning to their lives, which the film Heart of Nuba, captures. So we come to really care a great deal about these people, and we see their interaction, which is incredibly loving and complex in, you know, in every respect. And as I say, the hero of this film, Dr. Tom Catena, actually marries into the village and is living there in the village as one of the people, and is accepted. But the man inflicting all of this evil upon it, this vicious dictator, is still in power. And the, basically, the human rights community, the world community, other states, have kind of been, dare I say it, indifferent to this. So why don’t you give us the larger picture and how you came—it’s not in the film, I think it should be in the film, but we can discuss that. But you actually came to spend  time face-to-face with this dictator after he had seen the film.

KC: Yeah. How often does a filmmaker get to face the antagonist, the villain, of his or her film? Very rarely. And I was able to do that. One of my neighbors, Don Burris, introduced me to this woman Jenna McElligott, who said: I know the president of Sudan, al-Bashir, and I’d love to introduce you to the majority leader, Mahdi Ibrahim—

RS: Wait a minute, one of your neighbors in—

KC: In Santa Monica.

RS: Santa Monica—

KC: Knew a woman that professed to know Bashir. Worked as a Catholic, a liaison between the Catholic Church and the Khartoum government 20-some years ago. And I took the meeting, and lo and behold, she said: I’d love to see the film. If I think it’s the right thing to do, I will introduce you to this Mahdi Ibrahim, the majority leader. And she saw it, she said: I will love to introduce you, I think it’s a powerful film and I think that he would actually help broker peace over there if we got it into the right hands. And that would be, ultimately, al-Bashir. So this man, Mahdi Ibrahim, flew out from Washington, D.C.; I met with him for lunch and sussed him out, vetted him. And I thought he would be worthy of showing the film, ‘cause you never know with the Khartoum government, you know, what you’re getting involved with. So I showed him the film in my home, and at the end he fell to his knees and he wept. And he flat-out said, I am shocked and I’m ashamed. I said, come on, you had to have known you’re bombing the Nuba Mountains and the—

RS: He’s a part of the government—

KC: He’s a part of the government, he’s the majority leader! I mean, he literally has the power—he’s the Paul Ryan of Khartoum. So he literally said, I will make this my mission, to stop the bombing, to get it to Bashir and to stop the bombing. I said, great, thank you. Didn’t think that that would happen, of course, because keep in mind this is this genocidal regime. Sure enough, within two weeks I get a call from Mahdi Ibrahim saying: I’m proud to say that the president has seen the film; he reacted in a similar way as I did, and he has given us this quote: The primary reason for the ceasefire that he has declared is The Heart of Nuba. You can only imagine how thrilled I was. But yet, I thought, is this really going to happen? I reached out to Dr. Tom Catena in the war zone, in the Nuba Mountains, and he in fact said, the bombing has stopped. So that’s how it happened. But keep in mind, this is a ceasefire; it’s temporary, it’s not a peace agreement. We know that at any moment it could erupt again, ‘cause this is a man wanted by the international criminal court. You know, he is most wanted for ten counts of war crimes. He said, he reached out and said, I would like to tell my side of the story. And I said, well, what does that entail? That means you need to come over here, and I am allowing you to interview me. So of course I asked my wife Katrina, is that OK? And she looked at me, like, are you crazy? But she said, this is part of the story, you can go. I thought about my children, is this the right thing to do? I enlisted Nicholas Kristof. I also had to send a letter in, same with Nicholas Kristof, who was going to accompany me. We had to admit wrongdoing by entering the country, for me twice, illegally. And I put that in letter form, sent it to The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof looked at it, gave it to Legal; he changed a few things, we sent our letters in together and they granted permission. Nicholas pulled out five days before hand because he was on his way to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un, which unfortunately didn’t happen, so I went on my own. And he, Bashir, wanted to prove to me that his side of the story needed to be told.

RS: Here you’ve got this dictator that has been in power forever, and he’s killing these people; you’ve made a documentary basically calling him a war criminal; and your doctor, Tom Catena, says, where is the international court? Where is the criminal, you know, where is justice against this criminal? No question, you don’t pull any punches in this documentary. And that’s the documentary this dictator looks at, where you’re calling him a war criminal, and then you decide that you can risk your life, ‘cause that’s what you’re doing, to go over there and interview him. And so you must be scared out of your mind, right?

KC: I’ve learned in my life to compartmentalize. That’s what I did when I shot this film in a war zone. I was able to take the fear or the reality out, and do my job. But this was actually more of a facing-evil type of situation for me. So yeah, when I went in, I thought, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve just admitted my guilt of entering his country illegally; I hear all the time that he detains people, they torture. So probably not the wisest decision that I’ve ever made, but it did bear quite a bit of fruit, and I’m glad that I, I’m thrilled that I did it. It was a surreal experience to be there interviewing, like I said, the villain, the antagonist of my film. But you know, keep in mind that at any moment this could have gone sideways. But the umbrella that I operated underneath was sanctions were being held over their heads. Obama had lifted, temporarily, sanctions in January of 2017. I was there in September, and the decision was going to be made by the Trump administration by October 12th, if these, the sanctions were going to be lifted permanently. So I knew that an international incident, especially one involving the United States, a filmmaker such as myself, would run that amok quickly. So I went there thinking that I had that, at least, at my back; but that’s not going to stop a genocidal maniac like that. But it did. And I was able to get out with a story.

RS: So you’re a filmmaker, and you got concerned about what’s happening in this area, make your film, but now you’re also taking the next step. You care—

KC: Absolutely.

RS: —and you want to do something about it. So you work with human rights groups, which hadn’t done quite what they should have been doing. So you become, well, you kind of organize around this film.

KC: That’s right. You know, we were not blessed to get into some of the large, the better-known film festivals. I knew—I mean, I’m an alum of these film festivals; I was crushed when it didn’t happen. But I knew after five months of fighting to get into, you know, these well-known festivals that I needed to mobilize. I needed to get, to create a human rights coalition, and I did that with Bonnie Abaunza, who is an activist that is well connected. And she helped me put together over 70 NGOs, entities in this coalition. And that has been the proverbial wind beneath my wings, that propelled me into the interview with Bashir. And I checked in with them, conference-called two times, and said, is this the way we should do it? Is this how I go about this? Is this the right thing to do? Are we stepping into the right—are they going to consider this propaganda? Are they going to take advantage of this? And they all had their opinions, but ultimately we decided that this was a rare opportunity, and we took advantage of it. And it has bared some fruit.

RS: Yeah, there is a ceasefire as we do this interview—

KC: There’s a ceasefire.

RS: —and it’s held, what, now, for a few months?

KC: It’s 14 months.

RS: Fourteen months!

KC: Fourteen months, it has. But like I said, it’s temporary. It could change. You understand that.

RS: I got it. That’s why people should watch the film. Because first of all, it not only could be continued in this area, but it’s typical of a lot of the mayhem in this world. People are being bombed in areas we don’t know about, by vicious dictators that we don’t know enough about. And you’ve actually made it a very human story. But most human of all, take me moment-by-moment. You get on a plane, and you’re going to go—I know this, ‘cause I mean I, you know, I’ve been in some—

KC: You’ve—you’ve lived this. I know you have.

RS: Well, I’ve been in different countries, I’ve been in, I was actually in North Korea at one point, I’ve been in lots of different places. But I know, I mean I’ll admit to being frightened out of my mind, under different circumstances. So I’m trying to see it, you get a, what, you get a plane in L.A. or something, and then—

KC: That was—yeah, that wasn’t that difficult. I mean, I was able to fly into Khartoum. I had to fly through Dubai, but that’s not that hard.

RS: No. And then you get there, and what, you’re met, and you’re taken to—

KC: I’m met by this Mahdi Ibrahim. And I had to give up my passport, which was a frightening thing, ‘cause we all know that is, that’s your currency in a foreign country. And I was taken to a hotel, and I thought, OK, this is exposure. What’s going to happen? And by the way, the trip to the hotel, we went through some abandoned warehouse district, and I thought OK, here—they’re not messing around. I mean, the first thing they’re going to do is take me into some warehouse, some empty space, and they’re going to interrogate me, they’re going to press their opinions on me. So I, you know, that was the first thing I had to get over. But it led up to, you know, I was there on a Friday night—

RS: You put it mildly. They could have tortured you and then killed you.

KC: That’s right. And they have a tendency, a proclivity, of doing so. I knew that was all a part of a reality, and I knew that I was, I had a wife to answer to, and three kids. And it was, so yeah, it was frightening. You know, I’ll readily admit it. And the day of, we were met by his henchmen at the gate of his palace, and these guys looked, you know, like thugs. And I thought, are we going to get in? And when I get in, is this where I’m going to remain? I mean, you just don’t know. But fortunately—

RS: So it’s you and a camera, right?

KC: I had one other individual that was with me as a cameraman. Then I had a sound team when I got there. And there were about 40 of his handlers there. And we filmed a little—filmed some trophies and some you know, some, ah, some things on some shelves, and they stopped us down quickly. And it was a very serious thing. And they sat us in these throne-like chairs; his throne was, of course, a little taller than mine. And, but they allowed me, I mean, they—I mean, I interviewed him for an hour and 15 minutes, and I asked some pressing questions. To his credit, he faced me. After seeing this film, he knew I was highly critical of him. You know, I don’t want to give any credit to that man, but the thought that he allowed it to happen—he wanted to tell his side of the story, and he thought that he could affect the film, so when we went to release it theatrically, when it got out there, his side of the story would be told. Well, the truth of it, his side of the story is a big lie.

RS: I saw the film at that stage. I know exactly what that film looked like. It was a devastating indictment of this dictator. No holds barred. I mean, it’s just flat-out, this guy ought to be in jail—

KC: It’s reality, Bob.

RS: Yes. But, no, but that’s what your film, your film really had, and Dr. Tom Catena—this guy is a war criminal, this guy should be held accountable, he’s killed innocent people, you know. And so the film cuts him no slack at all. It doesn’t say, well, maybe he had his reasons, or maybe he’s in a civil war, or the fog of war—no, no, no.

KC: It tells the truth.

RS: It said, these people have a primitive agricultural existence, and this guy sends jet planes over to bomb them, destroy them, kill them. And then we have this doctor trying to patch up their bodies when an arm and a leg have been blown off. And the poor five-year-old is gonna, how’s he going to live? So this is the guy that your film describes, all of that, without holding back—

KC: This is a genocidaire. This is a man responsible for Darfur.

RS: So, and then you are ushered in there. And he’s seen your film.

KC: Yeah.

RS: And so what are the first words? I mean, what do you—

KC: The first question was, you’re the commander in chief; you understand what’s happening militarily in this country and in other ones? Yes. He said, yes. I said, so then, you know that the Mother of Mercy Hospital was bombed in May of 2014? And he went—no. I mean, just, I knew at that point that we’re in for, as Hitler said, you know, the colossal lie. Lie big and lie often. And that’s what he did. And he, when I asked him things like, you’re a man of faith, yes? Of course. And so you pray often, yes? Yes, five times a day. Well, what do you pray for? And he just looked at me. And that stare—and I didn’t know what to expect. And then he went right into his rhetoric. Well, I pray for the hope and peace for the Sudanese people, and that we’d be a shining light, and blah blah blah blah blah. But there were moments there, when his jaw was clenched, that I thought he might go into something else, or he might say, you know what, you’re staying.

RS: Unfortunately—I hope when you screen the film you also show your interview with the dictator. I know you don’t have—

KC: One of the reasons we don’t, Bob, is because at the end of the film it kind of, it conveys the message that there’s been a ceasefire, don’t worry about it, the genocidal maniac actually was pretty nice, he allowed you to come back into the country—

RS: You’re saying if you included it, yeah—

KC: If we would have included it, it lets the viewer off the hook. And the bottom line is, this is very serious and it’s continuing. It’s not past tense.

RS: Right. But I just want to say, for people listening to this who go see the film, maybe, you know how when you issue the DVD or something, there are the outtakes—

KC: [Laughs] Yeah.

RS: And I want to tell you, as somebody who knows your work and knows your courage—I respect it more when you confront a dictator than I do when you’re playing a defensive position in football—but nonetheless, you know, I know you. And when I saw that scene where you’re going face-to-face with a dictator and confronting him with his war crimes, people should see that. And I hope you at least include it in the DVD version, because that took incredible guts. It really did. I mean, that’s not kidding around. We talk about, you know—yeah, you can confront a governor somewhere, or a head of a corporation, and yell at them, and you know, raise a question, and what are they going to do? Maybe the police will order you out, or something. You’re in there with a guy who could just look over at a henchman and your head is gone. You’re—you’re over.

KC: It’s the least I could do for the Nuban people and the love that I have for them, and certainly for my good friend Dr. Tom Catena; it’s the least I could do.

RS: There you go. That’s Ken Carlson. The film is Heart of Nuba. See it.

KC: And go to TheHeartofNuba.com if you want to get involved. If you want to help out, you can donate, you can write your congressman, we have templates there. You can get yourself involved in a peer-to-peer campaign. There are a lot of ways to get involved. Try to find a little bit of Tom Catena in each and every one of us.

RS: Thank you, Ken Carlson. Our producers are Rebecca Mooney and Joshua Scheer. Engineers are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz, with a great credit for Sebastian Grubaugh at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. Heart of Nuba is the film, Ken Carlson is the director, and check it out.

 

How the Neocons Shaped America’s Russia Phobia

This is the second part of a two-part article. See the first installment here.

In the months and years following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, the issue of Israel and its security would become so enmeshed in American policy as to become one and the same. The lesson of October 1973 that détente had succeeded in securing American and Soviet interests was anathema to the entire neoconservative agenda and revealed its true hand. At the time a majority of American Jews were not necessarily against better U.S.-Soviet relations. But with the forceful hammering of influential right-wing neoconservative pundits like Ben Wattenberg and Irving Kristol and the explosive manifestation of the Evangelical Christian Zionist movement, many of Israel’s liberal American supporters were persuaded to turn against détente for the first time. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation: “Analytically and objectively the American-Soviet cooperation in defusing both the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their own involvement in a crisis confrontation, may be judged a successful application of crisis management under détente.” But as Garthoff acknowledges, this success threatened “Israel’s jealously guarded freedom of action to determine unilaterally its own security requirements,” and set off alarm bells in Tel Aviv and Washington.

With Richard Nixon on the ropes with Watergate and Vietnam dragging to a conclusion, American foreign policy was open to external pressure and within a year would fall permanently into the hands of a coalition of pro-Israel neoconservative and right-wing defense industry lobbying groups. These groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Security Council and The Committee on the Present Danger would set about making American interests and their own personal crusade to control the greater Middle East interchangeable.

The issue of U.S. support for Israel, its neoconservative backers and its dedicated anti-Russian bias has a long and complicated history dating back long before Theodor Herzl’s 19th century Zionist Project. Zionism was not instilled in American thinking by Jews but by 16th and 17th century British Puritans whose sacred mission was to reestablish an ancient Kingdom of Israel and fulfill what they believed to be biblical prophecy based on the King James Version of the bible.

Britain’s Anglo/Israel movement found common cause with the British Empire’s 19th and early 20th century political goals of controlling the Middle East through Jewish resettlement of Palestine which culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This long-term plan of the British Empire continues on today through American policy and what has been dubbed the Zionist Project or the Yinon plan. Add the 700 million-strong worldwide Evangelical movement and its 70 million Christian Zionists in the United States and American foreign policy towards the Middle East becomes an apocalyptic confluence of covert agendas, ethnic grudges and religious feuds locked in permanent crisis.

It has been argued that the neoconservative’s slavish adherence to Israel makes neoconservatism an exclusively Jewish creation. Numerous neoconservative writers like the New York Times’ David Brooks tar critics of Israel as anti-Semites by accusing them of substituting the term “neoconservative” for “Jew.” Others argue that “neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement” with “close ties to the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic elements within Israel.”

Although clearly acting as a political front for Israel’s interests and an engine for permanent war, neoconservatism would never have succeeded as a political movement without the support and cooperation of powerful non-Jewish elites. New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind writes in The Nation in 2004, “Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse ‘farm teams’ including liberal Catholics … and  populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest. … With the exception of Middle East strategy … there is nothing particularly ‘Jewish’ about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons, the global strategy of today’s neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism.”

Add to that the abiding influence of Britain’s Imperial policy-makers following World War II—the British creation of Pakistan in 1947 and Israel in 1948—and the hidden hand of a global imperial strategy is revealed. Pakistan exists to keep the Russians out of Central Asia and Israel exists to keep the Russians out of the Middle East.

Whether American democracy could have survived the stresses put upon it by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the ongoing frauds posed by neoconservatism now poses an answerable question. It couldn’t. Fletcher School international law professor Michael Glennon maintains the creation of the national security state in 1947 as a second, double government effectively renders the question mute. He writes, “The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.”

The motion to kill détente and hobble Henry Kissinger’s balance of power or “realist” foreign policy quickly followed the 1973 war in the form of the anti-Soviet amendment to the Trade Act known as Jackson-Vanik. Sponsored by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio but engineered by Albert Wohlstetter acolyte Richard Perle, trade concessions and virtually anything regarding Moscow would be forever linked to the Zionist Project through Jewish emigration to Israel from the Soviet Union.

Supported by organized labor, traditional conservatives, liberals and neoconservatives, Jackson-Vanik hobbled efforts by the Nixon/Ford administration to slow the arms race and move towards a permanent easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. It removed control of American foreign policy from the President and Secretary of State while delivering it permanently into the hands of the old anti-Stalinist/Trotskyist neoconservatives.

Jackson-Vanik overcame liberal support for détente because of an intellectual dishonesty within the non-communist left that had been roiling America’s intelligentsia since the 1930s. That dishonesty had transformed left-wing Trotskyists into the CIA’s very own anti-Soviet cultural Cold Warriors and aligned them with the goals of the West’s right wing. By the 1950s their cause was not about left or right, or even liberal anti-Communism versus Stalinism. It was about exchanging a value system of laws and checks and balances for a system alien to America. As Frances Stonor Saunders describes in her book The Cultural Cold War, it was simply about grabbing power and keeping it. “‘It’s so corrupt, it doesn’t even know it,’ said [legendary Random House editor] Jason Epstein, in an uncompromising mood. ‘When these people talk about a “counter-intelligentsia”, what they do is to set up a false and corrupt value system to support whatever ideology they’re committed to at the time. The only thing they’re really committed to is power, and the introduction of Tzarist-Stalinist strategies in American politics. They’re so corrupt they probably don’t even know it. They’re little, lying apparatchiks. People who don’t believe in anything, who are only against something, shouldn’t go on crusades or start revolutions.'”

But neoconservatives did go on crusades and start revolutions and continued to corrupt the American political process until it was unrecognizable. In 1973 neoconservatives did not want the United States having better relations with Moscow and created Jackson-Vanik to obstruct it. But their ultimate goal, as explained by Janine Wedel in her 2009 study the Shadow Elite, was a Trotskyist dream: the complete transfer of power from an elected government representing the American people to what she referred to as a “new nomenklatura,” or “guardians of the national interest,” free from the restraints imposed by the laws of the nation. Wedel writes, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York and onetime neoconservative, suggested that this kind of suspension of the rules and processes was what motivated him to part ways with the movement in the 1980s: ‘They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about.’ ”

The synthesis of James Burnham’s Cold War ethos (established formally by Paul Nitze in his 1950 NSC-68) together with Trotskyism (espoused by the core neoconservatives) combined with this aggressive new support for Israel empowered America’s neoconservatives with a cult-like political influence over American decision-making that would only grow stronger with time.

As envisaged by James Burnham, the Cold War was a struggle for the world and would be fought with the kind of political subversion he’d learned to master as a leading member of Trotsky’s Fourth International. But joined to Israel by Burnham’s fellow Trotskyists and the underlying influence of British Israelism, it would enter an apocalyptic mythos and resist any and all efforts to bring it to an end. John B. Judis, former editor of the New Republic relates in a 1995 Foreign Affairs book review of the Rise of Neoconservatism by John Ehrman: “In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists or nationalists. … The neoconservatives who went through Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to ‘export democracy’ in [Joshua] Muravchik’s words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism.”

Through the eyes of the State Department’s Raymond Garthoff, the moves against détente in 1973 are viewed from the narrow perspective of a professional American diplomat. But according to Judis in his article titled “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution,” the legacy of NSC-68 and Trotskyism contributed to a form of apocalyptic thinking that would slowly exclude the professional policy-making process from the realm of empirical observation and replace it with a politicized mechanism for creating endless conflict. “The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left.”

In the end, Judis argues that the neoconservative success at using self-fulfilling prophecies to kill détente actually made the Cold War far more dangerous by encouraging the Soviet Union to undertake a military buildup and expand its influence which the neoconservatives then used as proof that their theories were correct. In effect, “Neoconservatism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It helped precipitate the crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations that it then claimed to uncover and respond to.”

Writing in the summer of 1995 with the Cold War finally ended and the storm passed, Judis considered neoconservatism as the subject of ridicule, describing key neoconservatives as merely political anachronisms and not the thriving political dynamo described by John Ehrman in his book. But in the end Ehrman turned out to be right, the neoconservative crusade had not come to a close with the end of the Cold War but had only entered a new and more dangerous phase.

How the Neocons Shaped America’s Russo Phobia

This is the second part of a two-part article. See the first installment here.

In the months and years following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, the issue of Israel and its security would become so enmeshed in American policy as to become one and the same. The lesson of October 1973 that détente had succeeded in securing American and Soviet interests was anathema to the entire neoconservative agenda and revealed its true hand. At the time a majority of American Jews were not necessarily against better U.S.-Soviet relations. But with the forceful hammering of influential right-wing neoconservative pundits like Ben Wattenberg and Irving Kristol and the explosive manifestation of the Evangelical Christian Zionist movement, many of Israel’s liberal American supporters were persuaded to turn against détente for the first time. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation: “Analytically and objectively the American-Soviet cooperation in defusing both the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their own involvement in a crisis confrontation, may be judged a successful application of crisis management under détente.” But as Garthoff acknowledges, this success threatened “Israel’s jealously guarded freedom of action to determine unilaterally its own security requirements,” and set off alarm bells in Tel Aviv and Washington.

With Richard Nixon on the ropes with Watergate and Vietnam dragging to a conclusion, American foreign policy was open to external pressure and within a year would fall permanently into the hands of a coalition of pro-Israel neoconservative and right-wing defense industry lobbying groups. These groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Security Council and The Committee on the Present Danger would set about to make American interests and their own personal crusade to control the greater Middle East interchangeable.

The issue of U.S. support for Israel, its neoconservative backers and its dedicated anti-Russian bias has a long and complicated history dating back long before Theodor Herzl’s 19th century Zionist Project. Zionism was not instilled in American thinking by Jews but by 16th and 17th century British Puritans whose sacred mission was to reestablish an ancient Kingdom of Israel and fulfill what they believed to be biblical prophecy based on the King James Version of the bible.

Britain’s Anglo/Israel movement found common cause with the British Empire’s 19th and early 20th century political goals of controlling the Middle East through Jewish resettlement of Palestine which culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This long-term plan of the British Empire continues on today through American policy and what has been dubbed the Zionist Project or the Yinon plan. Add the 700 million-strong worldwide Evangelical movement and its 70 million Christian Zionists in the United States and American foreign policy towards the Middle East becomes an apocalyptic confluence of covert agendas, ethnic grudges and religious feuds locked in permanent crisis.

It has been argued that the neoconservative’s slavish adherence to Israel makes neoconservatism an exclusively Jewish creation. Numerous neoconservative writers like the New York Times’ David Brooks tar critics of Israel as anti-Semites by accusing them of substituting the term “neoconservative” for “Jew.” Others argue that “neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement” with “close ties to the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic elements within Israel.”

Although clearly acting as a political front for Israel’s interests and an engine for permanent war, neoconservatism would never have succeeded as a political movement without the support and cooperation of powerful non-Jewish elites. New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind writes in The Nation in 2004, “Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse ‘farm teams’ including liberal Catholics … and  populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest. … With the exception of Middle East strategy … there is nothing particularly ‘Jewish’ about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons, the global strategy of today’s neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism.”

Add to that the abiding influence of Britain’s Imperial policy-makers following World War II—the British creation of Pakistan in 1947 and Israel in 1948—and the hidden hand of a global imperial strategy is revealed. Pakistan exists to keep the Russians out of Central Asia and Israel exists to keep the Russians out of the Middle East.

Whether American democracy could have survived the stresses put upon it by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the ongoing frauds posed by neoconservatism now poses an answerable question. It couldn’t. Fletcher School international law professor Michael Glennon maintains the creation of the national security state in 1947 as a second, double government effectively renders the question mute. He writes, “The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.”

The motion to kill détente and hobble Henry Kissinger’s balance of power or “realist” foreign policy quickly followed the 1973 war in the form of the anti-Soviet amendment to the Trade Act known as Jackson-Vanik. Sponsored by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio but engineered by Albert Wohlstetter acolyte Richard Perle, trade concessions and virtually anything regarding Moscow would be forever linked to the Zionist Project through Jewish emigration to Israel from the Soviet Union.

Supported by organized labor, traditional conservatives, liberals and neoconservatives, Jackson-Vanik hobbled efforts by the Nixon/Ford administration to slow the arms race and move towards a permanent easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. It removed control of American foreign policy from the President and Secretary of State while delivering it permanently into the hands of the old anti-Stalinist/Trotskyist neoconservatives.

Jackson-Vanik overcame liberal support for détente because of an intellectual dishonesty within the non-communist left that had been roiling America’s intelligentsia since the 1930s. That dishonesty had transformed left-wing Trotskyists into the CIA’s very own anti-Soviet cultural Cold Warriors and aligned them with the goals of the West’s right wing. By the 1950s their cause was not about left or right, or even liberal anti-Communism versus Stalinism. It was about exchanging a value system of laws and checks and balances for a system alien to America. As Frances Stonor Saunders describes in her book The Cultural Cold War, it was simply about grabbing power and keeping it. “‘It’s so corrupt, it doesn’t even know it,’ said [legendary Random House editor] Jason Epstein, in an uncompromising mood. ‘When these people talk about a “counter-intelligentsia”, what they do is to set up a false and corrupt value system to support whatever ideology they’re committed to at the time. The only thing they’re really committed to is power, and the introduction of Tzarist-Stalinist strategies in American politics. They’re so corrupt they probably don’t even know it. They’re little, lying apparatchiks. People who don’t believe in anything, who are only against something, shouldn’t go on crusades or start revolutions.'”

But neoconservatives did go on crusades and start revolutions and continued to corrupt the American political process until it was unrecognizable. In 1973 neoconservatives did not want the United States having better relations with Moscow and created Jackson-Vanik to obstruct it. But their ultimate goal, as explained by Janine Wedel in her 2009 study the Shadow Elite, was a Trotskyist dream: the complete transfer of power from an elected government representing the American people to what she referred to as a “new nomenklatura,” or “guardians of the national interest,” free from the restraints imposed by the laws of the nation. Wedel writes, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York and onetime neoconservative, suggested that this kind of suspension of the rules and processes was what motivated him to part ways with the movement in the 1980s: ‘They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about.'”

The synthesis of James Burnham’s Cold War ethos (established formally by Paul Nitze in his 1950 NSC-68) together with Trotskyism (espoused by the core neoconservatives) combined with this aggressive new support for Israel empowered America’s neoconservatives with a cult-like political influence over American decision-making that would only grow stronger with time.

As envisaged by James Burnham, the Cold War was a struggle for the world and would be fought with the kind of political subversion he’d learned to master as a leading member of Trotsky’s Fourth International. But joined to Israel by Burnham’s fellow Trotskyists and the underlying influence of British Israelism, it would enter an apocalyptic mythos and resist any and all efforts to bring it to an end. John B. Judis, former editor of the New Republic relates in a 1995 Foreign Affairs book review of the Rise of Neoconservatism by John Ehrman: “In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists or nationalists. … The neoconservatives who went through Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to ‘export democracy’ in [Joshua] Muravchik’s words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism.”

Through the eyes of the State Department’s Raymond Garthoff, the moves against détente in 1973 are viewed from the narrow perspective of a professional American diplomat. But according to Judis in his article titled “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution,” the legacy of NSC-68 and Trotskyism contributed to a form of apocalyptic thinking that would slowly exclude the professional policy-making process from the realm of empirical observation and replace it with a politicized mechanism for creating endless conflict. “The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left.”

In the end, Judis argues that the neoconservative success at using self-fulfilling prophecies to kill détente actually made the Cold War far more dangerous by encouraging the Soviet Union to undertake a military buildup and expand its influence which the neoconservatives then used as proof that their theories were correct. In effect, “Neoconservatism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It helped precipitate the crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations that it then claimed to uncover and respond to.”

Writing in the summer of 1995 with the Cold War finally ended and the storm passed, Judis considered neoconservatism as the subject of ridicule, describing key neoconservatives as merely political anachronisms and not the thriving political dynamo described by John Ehrman in his book. But in the end Ehrman turned out to be right, the neoconservative crusade had not come to a close with the end of the Cold War but had only entered a new and more dangerous phase.

U.S. Reaffirms ‘Ironclad Commitment’ to Defend South Korea

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis spoke on Saturday with their South Korean counterparts after the historic meeting between leaders of the two Koreas, and Trump said “things are going very well” as he prepares for an expected summit with the North’s Kim Jong Un.

Mattis and Defense Minister Song Young-moo said they were committed to “a diplomatic resolution that achieves complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of the North, according to the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman, Dana W. White. Mattis also reaffirmed “the ironclad U.S. commitment” to defend its ally “using the full spectrum of U.S. capabilities. ”

Trump tweeted Saturday that he had “a long and very good talk” with President Moon Jae-in. He also said he updated Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, about “the ongoing negotiations” for an anticipated summit with Kim, tentatively scheduled for May or early June.

Moon and Kim have pledged to seek a formal end to the Korean War, fought from 1950 to 1953, by year’s end and to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons. Trump has said he’s looking forward to the meeting with Kim and that it “should be quite something.”

“Things are going very well, time and location of meeting with North Korea is being set,” Trump tweeted. A statement from the White House describing the call between Trump and Moon also referred to the North’s future being contingent upon “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.”

Trump is claiming credit for the Korean summit, but now faces a burden in helping turn the Korean leaders’ bold but vague vision for peace into reality after more than six decades of hostility.

Trump must contend with suspicions about his own suitability to conduct that kind of war-and-peace negotiation and succeed where his predecessors have failed, and whether Kim really is willing to give up the nuclear weapons his nation took decades acquiring.

“It is still unclear whether North Korea still believes that it can have its cake and eat it too,” said Victor Cha, who until January had been in the running to become Trump’s choice for ambassador to South Korea.

At a White House news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, Trump basked in the afterglow of the meeting between Kim and Moon, and said he has a responsibility to try to achieve peace and denuclearization.

“And if I can’t do it, it’ll be a very tough time for a lot of countries, and a lot of people. It’s certainly something that I hope I can do for the world,” he said.

Moon and Kim have not specified what steps would be taken to formally end the war or eliminate nuclear weapons. Now the pressure to deliver results, at least on the allies’ side, has shifted to Trump.

The president pushed back against critics who say he’s being manipulated by Kim, who has abruptly shifted to diplomacy after last year’s full-scale push to become a nuclear power that could threaten the U.S. mainland.

“I don’t think he’s ever had this enthusiasm for somebody, for them wanting to make a deal,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “We’re not going to be played, OK. We’re going to hopefully make a deal. The United States in the past has been played like a fiddle.”

New Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who as CIA director met Kim four weeks ago in North Korea, told reporters in Brussels that he got the impression that Kim was “serious” about negotiating on denuclearization because of the Trump-led economic pressure campaign.

But Pompeo added a word of caution: “I am always careful. There is a lot of history here. Promises have been made, hopes have been raised and then dashed.”

North Korea has already called a halt to nuclear and long-range missile tests, which has helped dial down tensions significantly.

North Korea was hit with unprecedented economic restrictions during 2017, when the U.S. and North Korean leaders traded threats while Kim pushed his nation to the verge of being able to fire a nuclear-tipped missile at the U.S. mainland.

The diplomatic climate has changed dramatically this year, as Kim has ended his international seclusion, reaching out to South Korea, the U.S., and China.

Mattis has said the U.S. is “optimistic right now that there’s opportunity here that we have never enjoyed since 1950” and any progress will be up to the diplomats. He was referring to the year the Korean War broke out.

The fighting, which also involved China, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and ended with the declaration of an armistice, not a peace treaty. That has left the peninsula in a technical state of war for decades.

Plastic Particles Infest the Arctic

Plastic particles have colonised one of the last once-pristine oceans. German scientists sampled sea ice from five locations within the Arctic Circle and counted up to 12,000 microscopic particles per litre of ice.

They have even been able to identify the sources and piece together the journey to the icy fastness. Some tiny lumps of plastic detritus have made their way north from what has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling assembly of an estimated 80,000 tons of plastic floating in the ocean across a stretch of water bigger than France.

Other fragments, that began as paint and nylon, date from the invasion of increasingly ice-free Arctic summer waters by more freight ships, and more fishing vessels, the scientists report in the journal Nature Communications.

“During our work, we realised that more than half of the microplastic particles trapped in the ice were less than a twentieth of a millimetre wide, which means they could easily be ingested by Arctic micro-organisms like ciliates, but also by copepods,” said Ilka Peeken, a biologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute.

“No one can say for certain how harmful these tiny plastic particles are for marine life, or ultimately also for human beings.”

The researchers gathered their samples during three expeditions to the Arctic aboard the icebreaker Polarstern in the spring of 2014 and the summer of 2015, following an ice movement called the Transpolar Drift from Siberia as far as the Fram Strait where warm Atlantic water enters the polar ocean. The Transpolar Drift was first identified by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen aboard the Fram, late in the 19th century.

Microplastic particles are defined as 5mm or smaller, and many are measured in millionths of a metre. These are formed by the deterioration of larger pieces of plastic dumped into landfills in billions of tonnes, or released into the waterways and thus into the ocean.

Man-made synthetic polymers are effectively indestructible, and now represent a major source of marine pollution and a constant hazard to wildlife.

More than two-thirds of the particles measured 50 millionths of a metre or smaller. Some were as small as 11 micrometres – one sixth of the diameter of a human hair.

Multiple sources

The researchers identified 17 different types of plastic in the sea ice: from paints, nylon, polyester, cellulose acetate – used in cigarette filters – and the packaging materials polyethylene and polypropylene.

The guess is that the plastics endure in the sea ice for between two and 11 years before melting from their icy packaging in the Fram Strait, to begin sinking in deeper waters. One study recently found 6,500 bits of microplastic per kilogram sampled from the sea floor.

“This is an important finding because it means that they were always present in the water under the ice as it was growing, and drifting, within the Arctic Ocean,” said Jeremy Wilkinson, a sea ice physicist with the British Antarctic Survey, commenting on the study.

“Sea ice grows from the freezing of seawater directly onto the bottom of the ice (i.e. it grows vertically downwards), thus it was incorporating microplastic particles as it grew. It suggests that microplastics are now ubiquitous within the surface waters of the world’s oceans.  Nowhere is immune.”