Trump To Ukraine- Your Rare Earth Minerals Or Your Life

On February 28, 2025, Career Extortionist Donald John Trump got unexpected resistance from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump had summoned Zelensky to the White House to sign an agreement to hand over to the U.S. (presumably U.S. corporations in favor with Trump) half the revenues from Ukraine's natural resources- the minerals, oil, natural gas. In return for- basically nothing. No guarantee of military aid, intelligence aid, nothing. Just a typical Trump move, vague rhetoric, nothing enforceable. Nothing Trump has any intention of enforcing. [1]

Trump's shakedown attempt failed, so far. Zelensky was describing his view of the history of the war with Russia. Trump didn't want to hear it. He laid into Zelensky, saying he doesn't have "the cards," meaning he's playing with a weak hand, while Trump held the, well, trump card of U.S. war support. (Recall that Trump in his previous go at being president, briefly delayed delivering military supplies to Ukraine in a clumsy effort to get information on the corrupt Biden family doings in Ukraine, which pro-Democratic Party media dismissed as "dirt" without mentioning the outrageous, openly corrupt deal that Biden son Hunter got from Ukrainian gas company Burisma- a seat on the corporate board for $50,000 a MONTH, for several years. That's a multi-million dollar not very well disguised bribe to the Biden family. Incredibly dishonest hiding of the facts by Democratic Party politicians and their media allies. Oh, and Trump was actually impeached by the Democrats for that delay. Needless to say, the Republicans, who have memories as long as their party symbol, the elephant, never forgot or forgave.)

In yesterday's meeting, Trump rebuked Zelensky for being "very disrespectful," and "you're not being thankful, and that's not a nice thing." (Trump always accuses people who stand up to him of being "not nice," and worse.) Trump's vice president, the slippery opportunist J.D. Vance, jumped on Zelensky, with an accusatory rhetorical question, "have you said thank you once," and then revealed a festering grudge, denouncing Zelensky for "campaigning for the opposition" (that is, Biden) last October. (Of course "campaigning for" is a matter of interpretation. Don't trust Vance's.)

Trump bellowed at Zelensky that he was losing the war, and using the fact that the Ukrainian military is dependent on U.S. weapons and ordnance, armaments that Europe cannot manufacture as leverage, his ranting made clear that Ukraine had no choice but to give in to Trump's extortion.

Or so Trump thought, and evidently had previously calculated.

Zelensky didn't back down, however, so he was effectively thrown out of the White House in front of the assembled media. The schedule joint lunch didn't happen.

Conveniently on hand outside the White House to verbally excoriate Zelensky was Trump's number one Senate stooge, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He rabidly attacked Zelensky, and insisted Zelensky would have to go unless he changed his attitude. (Graham often thinks he has the right to choose the heads of other nations' governments, a consistent imperialist impulse.) Among the things Trump's barking dog Graham said about Zelensky was "The way he confronted the President was over the top." All Zelensky did was try to talk back to Trump, a major offense when dealing with an Emperor-King.

 

Meanwhile USAID had cut off an infrastructure program in Ukraine, all USAID programs having been cancelled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the reactionary Florida Cuban Trump plucked from the Senate for a cabinet post, and Elon Musk and the fake "Department" Trump created, DOGE, for "Department Of Government Efficiency." A deceptive name for what should be called Artificial Department Of Government Dismantling Or Destruction, ADOGOD.

After leaving the meeting where he was dressed down by Trump and Vance, Zelensky posted Thank-Yous to Trump, America, and the American people, on Trump hitman Elon Musk's propaganda site, X (formerly Twitter). Zelensky has thanked the U.S. and Europe innumerable times during the war.

On Ukraine, Trump is right that it cannot win the war. However the way he wants to end it mirrors what he did in Afghanistan, when he negotiated with the Taliban, cutting the Afghan government completely out of the process, and leaving it to his successor, Biden, to pull the rug out from under the client regime that depended on the U.S. for its survival. That regime collapsed as soon as the U.S. hastily retreated, or "cut and ran," an oft-used expression in U.S. discourse by war mongers but was strangely absent in the Afghan case, when it perfectly applied in a very literal sense. The result of handing over that country to the medieval and deranged Taliban has been awful for the Afghan people, and especially horrendous for Afghan women, who are now banned from employment and education and virtually imprisoned as housework and breeding slaves in their homes. 

But Trump cannot totally cut the Ukrainian government out of the picture as it is much stronger than the Afghan regime and unlike that regime, has the support of its population which supports the war effort except in the eastern portions of the country, which seceded after the U.S. coup and was bombed and shelled by the Kyiv regime, which waged war on it, Russia supporting the secessionists. Europe also support Kyiv, although it will not be able to manufacture weapons and ordnance of the type and in the quantities the U.S. has been supplying. Hence Trump's arm-twisting of the Ukrainians.

Unfortunately the U.S. put Ukraine in this difficult position. Just a few days after the Russian invasion in February 2022, Putin initiated negotiations with Zelensky about an agreement to end the war, which at that point Russia's thrust to Kyiv was grinding to a halt. The U.S. immediately stopped that. British prime minister at the time Boris "Bojo The Clown" Johnson" immediately rushed to Kyiv to pull Zelensky away from the negotiation path. The talks with Russia were promising. 

Then Ukraine went on  to achieve victories in the war. In the fall of 2022 Ukraine was at its high point of military success. This isn't mere hindsight. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest U.S. military officer,  general Mark Milley, said at that time that it wouldn't get better for Ukraine and this was the time to seek an end to the war. [2]

However, then-president Joe Biden was always an aggressive war monger in Ukraine for years. He rejected that option. So he doomed Ukraine to ultimate defeat. (As Obama's vice president, he pushed for weapons to be sent to Ukraine, but Obama demurred, opting for just training missions.)

There are larger ways in which the U.S. painted Ukraine into this corner. There was the U.S.-instigated fascist led coup of 2014, ordered by Obama, with high U.S. officials on the ground in Kyiv agitating, most notoriously Victoria Nuland of the State Department, and people like (now dead) U.S. Senator and rabid militarist John McCain.

And then there's the original sin. President George "Bush The Younger" Bush in 2008 strong-armed NATO, over objections from Germany and France, into declaring that Georgia and Ukraine would be brought into NATO. Russia immediately howled that this was intolerable. (The German chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, says she knew this would never fly with Russia, but being a U.S. lapdog, as are all bourgeois European "leaders," she went along with the U.S. diktat.)

Most of the U.S. imperialist elite, being drunk on its power as usual, thought they could just shove it down Russia's throat, just as they had shoved down two earlier NATO expansions after the collapse of the Soviet Union down Russia's throat, betraying a promise made to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last, ill-fated head of the U.S.S.R., that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east" in return for the Soviets not to stand in the way of the absorption of East Germany by West Germany. (So-called "reunification," although by that time East Germany was a very different country from West Germany, just as Austria is different from Germany, regardless of the fact that all speak German. Hell, the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a bunch of other places all speak English. They're far from identical places.) William "Bill" Clinton expanded NATO in 1999, followed by another expansion by Bush and the notorious declaration at that 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, NATO having already planted its flag that far east. NATO was created as an anti-Soviet military alliance by the U.S., with the obligation on the U.S. to go to war with the U.S.S.R. if that nation attacked any NATO member.

Why is bringing Ukraine into NATO a red line for Russia? Because the U.S. could put nuclear ballistic missiles in that country, as it has nuclear weapons all over Europe, which could annihilate the Russian government and key targets in a few minutes. No one enjoys having a loaded gun pointed at one's head, even if the person holding the gun purrs that it's strictly for self-defense! That is a form of coercive leverage. Moreover, imagine if China overthrew the government of Canada and Mexico, and brought one of those countries into an anti-U.S. military bloc. The U.S. wouldn't wait 8 years to invade, as Russia did after the 2014 U.S. coup. It would invade in 8 days!

UK prime minister tried to make up for the Trump gang's brutal treatment of Zelensky the next day, March 1st, warmly welcoming him with a crowd to provide cheers. The U.S. move to abandon Ukraine also go the backs up of people in Ukraine.

The fact is, in various ways, Trump is effectively forcing Europe to move towards independence from the U.S., finally, 80 year after the end of World War II in 1945. Not that that's Trump's intent, just a positive byproduct of his hostile and economically destructive actions. (Did someone say, "Tariffs"?) So while the Democratic Party and the U.S. imperialist elite are aghast at Trump's baseball bat whacks at the U.S. alliance system, which the U.S. has totally dominated, I think it's about time that system broke down. I'm an anti-imperialist, you see. Because all empires are in fact criminal enterprises that use violence, the threat of violence, and various forms of coercion to subjugate other peoples and economically exploit them and their resources, often to extreme degrees. Empires are not "glorious," contrary to their propagandists, including many so-called historians.
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CODA AND FOOTNOTE 

In a sense, Trump's bullying of Ukraine is far from unique in U.S. imperialist history. It's just a throwback to 19th century type imperialism, which was cruder than what we've come to expect, at least in appearance. We did have the unprovoked invasion of Iraq by George Bush, and thousands of assassinations (including of Americans, some in the U.S.) by Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama.

But with Trump, you have a person who is a bully, with the power of the most powerful position on earth. That is not a happy combination. Oh, and he's currently using that power to deconstruct pieces of the U.S. government, including the IRS. That alone with make the Federal deficit worse. The pretend deficit hawks of the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) are onboard with that. The Trump-Musk regime has already fired several thousand IRS employees, including some in enforcement.

Every dollar spent on the IRS brings in more than a dollar in revenue. Every dollar spent auditing the rich brings in $6 in revenue. Those audits are now being virtually eliminated.

This is just greedy rich people cutting their taxes. While doing this, they and the lying corporate media pretend that the deficit is caused by Social Security and Medicare. That is one gigantic BIG LIE. Social Security and Medicare run annual SURPLUSES. Yes, by 2035 Social Security is expected to take in less in payroll tax contributions than it pays out. So it will make up the difference by tapping into its gigantic multi-trillion dollar trust fund. Big deal. That is not "bankruptcy," as demagogic politicians and dishonest media propagandists call it. And here's an easy fix: remove the cap on income subject to FICA tax so people who make millions a year in income (even a billion in some cases!) pay the tax on their full income. Right now poor people pay FICA starting on the first dollar of wages. (Unlike the income tax, there is no standard deduction under FICA.)

Those annual Social Security trust fund surpluses are spent by the government on other activities to reduce the annual deficit. Treasury bonds are placed in the trust fund in return. Of course those bonds then have to be paid off eventually, with interest, with other Federal revenue- income taxes, fees, tariffs, asset seizures ("forfeitures"), whatever.

This years-long attack on Social Security as the cause of deficits indicates that the rich oligarchs won't be satisfied until their taxes are set at zero, and they get even more hundreds of billions in government welfare than they already do every year. (Notice "welfare" is a dirty word in the U.S., and is only applied to the pittances grudgingly allotted to the very poor, mostly women with children, who are painted as undeserving parasites.)

Alright, this went off on some tangents, but they are connected and important to be aware of. I share my knowledge for free.

1] Speaking of Trump extortion, he recently extorted $15 million from the cowards running Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, a major pillar of the corporate propaganda system. ABC paid Trump to settle a completely meritless suit Trump brought for "libel," because on-air host George Stephanopoulos (a former Clinton regime figure) said Trump had committed rape. In the civil suit that one of Trump's rape victim's brought and won against Trump, the jury found that a sexual assault occurred, which the judge said was tantamount to rape. So this was an eminently defensible case for ABC. 

This is on the cowardly corporate execs. Or maybe cowardly misses the point. Disney, like all giant corporations, needs the goodwill of the Federal government to avoid friction in its obsessive drive for maximum profits lest that government throw sand in the corporate gears. Many regulations affect corporations. And these large corporations are rapacious in buying other corporations- which the U.S. Department of Justice can oppose by filing anti-trust suits to block the intended mergers. As in fact the Trump DOJ is doing right now to stop Hewlett-Packard Enterprises from buying Juniper Networks.

I guess the execs at those companies forgot to bribe Trump with campaign donations and/or gifts to his "Inauguration Fund." Or maybe Trump just didn't notice what the DOJ is doing. The Biden regime DOJ started objecting to the proposed merger in November 2024, a full 10 months after the merger was announced in January 2024, with an anticipated completion date in a year. Seems like a long time to wait to raise an objection. But the DOJ didn't file suit in court until January 30 of 2025, the eleventh day of Trump's latest term as president. Idiosyncratic for Trump, who makes a point of doing the opposite of whatever his Democratic predecessors did.

2] "U.S. scrambles to reassure Ukraine after Milley comments on negotiations," Politico, Nov. 14, 2022, for example.
 

 

 

 

The Revenge of ISIS?

A few weeks ago the U.S. proudly dropped the "largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal" on a cave complex to kill some ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan. The bomb apparently killed a few of them, and was used to gain a tactical advantage.

Now a huge truck bomb was set off adjacent to the "Green Zone" in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, near the German embassy. So far, 90 people, mostly just passersby, including women and children, have been killed, and about 400 wounded. No claim of responsibility has been issued. The Taliban have denied it was them. One report claims a group "affiliated with" the Taliban may have committed the atrocity.

Usually ISIS likes to brag about its crimes. So maybe it wasn't them. But I suspect it may have been their response to the Big Bomb dropped on them earlier by the U.S. Time will possibly tell.

Sometimes various terrorists decide after a particularly gruesome atrocity that the PR or "optics" as the U.S. nomenklatura refers to the public impression, is bad. So they keep quiet.

Among the wounded were eleven U.S. "contractors." That means they work for a company hired by the U.S. to do various tasks. Sometimes "contractor" is a euphemism for hired, mercenary killer.

Chickens Come Home To Roost In Saudi Arabia With 3 Suicide Bombings

The feudalistic regime of the House of Saud, which arrogated to itself the right to claim ownership of an entire country constituting most of the land area of the Arabian peninsula, just experienced some blowback for its spreading globally of a noxious, intolerant, extremist religious ideology, Wahhabism. The blowback came in the form of three suicide bombers, who struck in three separate Saudi cities near the end of the "holy" month of Ramadan.

One bomber took out four Saudi security guards with him, and wounded five more, outside "the prophet's mosque" in Medina, "the second holiest city in Islam," as the catechism goes. Another bomber, a Pakistani man who came to Saudi Arabia 12 years ago to work as a driver, according to the Saudi regime, blew himself up outside the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, wounding two guards. The third bomber targeted a mosque in the predominantly Shiite city of Qatif. (Wahhabism and its terrorist spawn are Sunni. Both the Saudi regime and ISIS persecute Shias. The regime executed a leading Shiite cleric in January for leading protests for more rights and democracy, and ISIS considers Shiites "apostates," abandoners of Islam, and worthy of death.)

This is far from the first time people even more extreme than the Saudis have violently attacked the regime. There have been other attacks on religious sites, shootouts with state security, and assassinations.

So repression, even the extreme repression of a Saudi Arabia, cannot totally suppress attacks by determined zealots willing to sacrifice themselves or take great risks. This is one reason the eventual overthrow of vicious regimes does not result in humane new orders. It is the fanatics who have the gumption, will, and commitment to fight repressive regimes. The decent, moral people are cowed, imprisoned, driven into exile, or killed.

All across the world, cancerous offspring of Wahhabism have sprouted. First came Al-Qaeda, then various Taliban organizations and movements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose military aided and abetted the creation of terrorist organizations to use against India, and provides a haven for the Taliban, policies that in recent years have come back to bite them. (Frankenstein's monster slipping out of the control of the creator.)

In the Philippines there is Abu Sayyef, founded by a veteran of the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistai anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan instigated by Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski and vigorously pursued by the Reagan regime in the 1980s.

Another of the numerous Sunni jihadist organizations is Jemaah Islamiyah, which also operates in the Philippines, and in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

Indonesia, the major country in that region, is also the site of Islamist terrorist activities, such as the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002 that targeted Australian and other tourists and killed 202 people. (A lot fewer than the approximately one million Indonesians murdered in the CIA-inspired anti-communist military pogrom of 1965.) Members of Jemaah Islamiyah were convicted in the bombings.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has wreaked havoc. (The brutality of the various Nigerian military regimes led directly to radicalizing Boko Haram.)

In Libya there is a war on against ISIS by Libyans fighting back.

In Bangladesh, the regime's tolerance of Islamofascists murdering bloggers, writers, and secularists by hacking them to death with machetes has suddenly come with a price tag, as Islamofascists just attacked foreigners in a restaurant. This is not only scaring off tourists, but is causing foreign clothing companies to consider taking their production business out of the country to saver slave-wage states.

Other attacks in just the last few days include a truck bombing in Baghdad that slaughtered over 200 people so far, and the first attack in Malaysia credited to ISIS, a grenade lobbed at a club that wounded 8 people. [1]

Egypt's tourism industry has been devastated by Islamofascist attacks there, including the destruction of two airliners in flight so far, first a Russian one, then an Egyptian.

In Turkey, the most recent bombing there, in the Istanbul airport by armed suicide bombers, is being blamed on ISIS, even though ISIS hasn't boasted its responsibility, which they usually do. (NPR and other media have been claiming the attack "has the hallmarks of ISIS" or even "all the hallmarks of ISIS." No it doesn't. Which doesn't mean ISIS didn't do it, of course.)

So while ISIS is being systematically squeezed geographically in Iraq, where it declared its "caliphate," and is being fought by the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, fanatics inspired by it have been undertaking attacks on civilians around the world.

We can expect this situation to last for years. Which is great news for the U.S. political elites of both parties, and the secret police/military combine. That combine sought and deliberately created a never-ending "war on terrorism" in order to gain huge increases in both funds and powers. They initiated this operation, with malice aforethought, by arranging to allow al-Qaeda operatives to hijack planes on September 11, 2001. In order to create "another Pearl Harbor," in the words of one of the seminal planning documents for this criminal enterprise, agents of the U.S. deep state planted demolition charges in three steel structures at the World Trade Center and detonated them on that day, as has been proven beyond doubt by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, an organization of 2,000 experts.

Thus the program to Create a More Perfect Police State continues, under both Democratic and Republican regimes.

1]  "Toll climbs to more than 200 in Islamic State’s worst-ever bomb attack on civilians," Washington Post, July 4, 2016.  "Islamic State launches first successful attack in Malaysia," CNN, July 4, 2016.

Suicide bomber goes up in cloud of smoke in Medina, presumably ascending to paradise and his reward of an orgy with waiting virgins.

What Happens When One Nobel Peace Prize Winner Bombs Another Nobel Peace Prize Winner?

Well, one thing that doesn't happen is the Norwegian Nobel Committee doesn't revoke the prize. [1]

Barack Obama (Nobel Peace Prize 2009) the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, is ultimately responsible for (and for all we currently know, had foreknowledge of) the war crime bombing of the hospital run by the Swiss-based charity Médecins Sans Frontières (Nobel Peace Prize 1999) or MSF- Doctors Without Borders- in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 2nd.

What does happen is that, five days after the crime, a few hours after the victims public call for an investigation under the terms of the Geneva Convention, the Bomber-in-Chief calls to apologize, and trots out his official mouthpiece (a fratboy type named Josh Earnest) to inform the world of the apology. Which is supposed to get the Nobelist and his military off the hook morally. Hey, he said he was sorry! And besides, the attackers are going to investigate themselves. What more could a reasonable person possibly want?

You can shoot up a hospital operating room and still be a respectable felllow.

Meanwhile, the death toll in the attack has apparently more than doubled. The confirmed dead number 22; 12 medical personnel and 10 patients, including 3 children. MSF has announced that another 24 of its people are missing. We should presume them dead, now that six days have passed since the savage assault.

If you find it spooky that a Nobelist would kill Nobelists, consider this: the official designation for the type of warplane that committed the crime, the AC-130U gunship, is “Spooky II.” [2]

1] The Nobel Committee consists of five people appointed by the Norwegian parliament to award the five Nobel prizes established by Swedish industrialist, armaments maker, and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel in his will. A sixth prize, the Sham Nobel, is in “economics” and was created by ideological hustlers piggybacking on the prestige of the real Nobels. It was established 73 years after Nobel's death by the Swedish central bank, which gave money to the Nobel foundation to administer it.

2] It's also referred to as “Spectre.” Ooh, so scary. See among numerous sources, “USAF Project Gunship II, The Aviation Zone, “Home of the Heavies,” a military fetishism site.

 More barrels, the better to butcher you with.

WikiLeaks Invites Obama to Bomb It

In effect, that is. It's certainly not their intent to be subjected to a murderous U.S. attack.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization and website founded by Julian Assange, offered a $50,000 reward for military records of the U.S. war crime of bombing the Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 2^nd. [1] And they asked for some very specific material that the U.S. no doubt will refuse to release. Here's their ask:

“The AC-130 records its attacks with high resolution gun cameras. According to military procedure, this footage should have been retained along with the cockpit audio. A post-massacre inquiry report referred to as an ‘AR 15-6’ should have also been commissioned. We are raising a U.S. $50,000 bounty to obtain the footage, the cockpit audio, the inquiry report and other relevant materials.” [2] [3]

Wow! Talk about tickling the throat of the tiger. That sure got the attention of the U.S., I'll bet.

The U.S. has already taken extreme measures to destroy WikiLeaks. It arranged for credit card companies and Paypal to bar donations to WikiLeaks. It has launched numerous computer attacks against the organization and unleashed the whole panoply of secret police repressive and close surveillance against the group. Most notoriously, it arranged a long-running criminal “investigation” of Assange by Sweden, and now has him trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Ecuador has granted Assange political asylum, a decision Britain refuses to respect. It has a police cordon around the Embassy, and planted a listening device inside, violating diplomatic sovereignty. And the U.S. has a secret indictment of Assange. It is licking its chops waiting for an opportunity to seize him and imprison him for decades, if not life. There is an ongoing grand jury “investigation” of WikiLeaks, a standard political repression weapon the U.S. uses.

WikiLeaks incited the enduring hatred of the U.S. government and some U.S. elites (a number of whom publicly called for Assange's murder) by exposing, among other things, one of the most blood chilling U.S. war crimes, the murder of Reuters journalists in Iraq by a murderous U.S. helicopter crew, who also fired on a van full of children whose father had stopped to aid the journalists after they had been gunned down in the street.

WikiLeaks was given the helicopter's video and audio recording of the murders anonymously by U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning, who was turned in by FBI secret police informer Adrian Lamo, in whom Manning unwisely confided in online. Manning was then kept naked for a year in a Marine brig (despite being an Army private), court-martialed, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. The murderers of course suffered no consequences at all. [See the collateral murder video.]

The U.S. is used to getting its way and will break any law to get it.

It took the extreme measure of forcing down the presidential plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales and had it searched when it suspected that Edward Snowden was onboard. Snowden is the man who exposed some of the massive NSA global surveillance programs.

To show their displeasure with al-Jazeera, the Qatari news outfit, they bombed its offices four times in Kabul and Baghdad, and kidnapped one of its employees, who they imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, where they tried to force him to be a spy inside al-Jazeera for them.

Considering the U.S.' willingness to commit any crime, I have an idea! Why not a drone strike on the Ecuadorean embassy in London? It's the next logical step after bombing a hospital run by an internationally renowned organization. What do you think, Barack? It's not like you'd be technically bombing London. The embassy is Ecuadorean national territory by law. You could always say it was a “mistake,” issue an “apology,” and announce an “investigation” afterwards if the squawking got too loud.
Ecuador does have a left-wing government now, after all. And the president is (falsely) accused of attacking press “freedom.” You could say bombing their embassy strikes a blow for freedom. That's no more far-fetched than a lot of U.S. propaganda, such as support for fascist death squad terror states is “defending freedom and democracy.”

But Obama did “apologize” to Médecins Sans Frontières....five days after the war crime, and a few hours after MSF publicly called for an independent of the crime under the Geneva Convention. Guess he thought he could dissuade them with a “sorry.”

1] “Afghanistan: MSF staff killed and hospital partially destroyed in Kunduz,” and “Kunduz Hospital Airstrike,” Médecins Sans Frontières.

2] “Wikileaks Offers to Pay $50,000 for Kunduz Bombing Footage,” Time magazine, October 8, 2015. You could go to the WikiLeaks website, but the U.S. government will trap your IP address and plant spyware and maybe worse on your computer. You could try using the Tor browser and a vpn, but there's no guarantee that would provide absolute protection. I suppose you could use a computer in an Internet cafe or library, so it won't be your computer- but if you use your actual name to use it, they might find out your name, depending on how fanatical they are. (Pretty fanatical, generally speaking.) Living in a global police state gets to be a real pain in the ass....

Interestingly, Time referred to WikiLeaks as “Transparency activist group Wikileaks” I was surprised by that non-derogatory, accurate description from a U.S. establishment media organ.

3] The AC-130 is the murderous flying gunship the U.S. unleashed on the hospital- it has also been used in El Salvador, Vietnam, and other poor countries victimized by the U.S., generally against people who have no defense against it. It is a cargo plane reconfigured with rapid-fire cannons to blow people on the ground to bits. It also carries air-to-ground missiles. There are plans to add a laser weapon. It also helped murder 4,000 Panamanians when the U.S. invaded that country on the orders of Bush the Elder.
There's an amoral description of the plane and its history at Wikipedia.

Standard weapons are two 20mm cannons, a 25mm Gatling gun that fires 1,800 rounds per minute, a 40mm cannon that fires 100 rounds a minute, and a large 105mm cannon that can fire 10 shells a minute. It is also packed with various surveillance and electronic equipment. See Federation of American Scientists for specs.

My, what Big Bullets you Butchers have! 40mm munitions on the flying abattoir.

AC-130 gunship with air to ground 
missiles on wingpod.

Lockheed Martin manufactures the killer aircraft. Note cannons protruding from fuselage.

Black Americans can enjoy the benefits of 

slaughtering people too.

You've come a long way, Baby- 

you've got your own gun now.

  That's what I call progress!

 After awhile one does gets blase about butchery.

 Blast away, Boys!

Obama won't unleash this on ISIS or on Assad's forces- but a hospital makes a perfect target. Hospitals can't shoot back!

[Scroll down to earlier essays for details on the hospital bombing and its aftermath, and the ever-changing series of smarmy U.S. lies.]

U.S. Military Changes Its Story- Again- On Bombing Doctors Without Borders Hospital

As I covered in my previous essay (below this one), the U.S. military committed a vicious war crime on Saturday (October 2) when it unleashed an hour-long aerial bombardment of a hospital run by the French humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières- MSF) in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Commencing immediately afterwards, the U.S. military has cycled through a number of bogus, sickening lies. This is the same behavior we see after every atrocity it commits. It starts with flat denials, then like a criminal under police interrogation, digs itself in deeper and deeper with changing versions that obliquely acknowledge bits of reality while twisting them to try and craft "innocent" explanations. But the contradictions and facts pile up and inevitably trap the lying criminal.

The latest story was trotted out by the U.S./NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John Campbell. The previous tale was that U.S. airpower was supporting U.S. Special Forces troops fighting the Taliban in Kunduz. Now he says it was Afghan soldiers who called in the air attack. (The U.S. at first denied it attacked the hospital at all. Who, us? Wasn't us!)

You'd think it wouldn't take several days to ascertain just who called in the strike. The whole thing stinks of slimy prevarication. Of course, when at first you deny the strike at all, that kind of dents your credibility.

Campbell, delivering the latest clumsy lies to reporters at the Pentagon, relegated the murders of medical personnel and patients to half a sentence- the last half too. And he refused to acknowledge they were medical personnel and patients, referring only to "civilians." Here's the quote, which has gotten wide play in U.S. media:

"We have now learned that on October 3, Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from U.S. forces," he said. "An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat, and several innocent civilians were accidentally struck."

Yeah, that can happen when you attack a hospital. And get him: "We have now learned." Like the U.S. command are just a bunch of passive witnesses, not perpetrators who ordered the commission of a war crime. They're just trying to figure this out. What, somebody claims their hospital was bombed? When did you say this was? Couldn't have been us, because that's not who we are.

And Campbell still won't even admit it's wrong to attack a hospital!

"If errors were committed, we will acknowledge them. We will hold those responsible accountable, and we will take steps to ensure mistakes are not repeated."

IF errors were committed! (Forget about "crimes.")

Of course the MSF hospital wasn't a Taliban position. Although it apparently was an "enemy position," meaning that MSF is regarded as an enemy. Firing from the hospital is a complete fabrication, and probably no more than 1% of the world's population believe that.

MSF had a worthy reply to Campbell's smarmy, grotesque statement:

"Today the U.S. government has admitted [finally!]  that it was their airstrike that hit our hospital in Kunduz and killed 22 patients and MSF staff," the statement read. "Their description of the attack keeps changing -- from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government. 

"The reality is the U.S. dropped those bombs. The U.S. hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and MSF staff. The U.S. military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition. There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the U.S. and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical."

This isn't going away as quickly as the U.S. military and it's Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, no doubt calculated it would. That's because part of the international and even U.S. media aren't playing along. (Despicably, such propaganda fonts as NPR and Yahoo! "News" are acting as auxiliary propagandists for the Pentagon- for the most part in NPR's case, and entirely in Yahoo's, which actually rewrote a Reuters piece to drain it of all human detail for a coldly distant and exiguous account.) MSF has been able to get their people into the media. Even Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General who is supposed to be a U.S. puppet, has strongly denounced the attack.

Here's a key fact from MSF. The hospital is actually located in the middle of a compound, surrounded by other buildings. Only the hospital was attacked. Furthermore, the operating room and intensive care unit were specifically blasted. Helpless patients were burned alive in their beds.

This belies the claim of some kind of accident. It certainly puts the lie to the claim that the Taliban were firing from the hospital. They would have had to be in buildings along the perimeter of the compound. 

The New York Times already let slip in a map they published that the street fighting was nowhere near the hospital compound. (See essay below.) We also know from the surviving staff that there was no fighting in the vicinity.

General Campbell, man of great heart that he is, offered his "deepest condolences." This follows a statement concocted by Pentagon propagandists and dumped on the world in Campbell's name October 3:

"While we work to thoroughly examine the incident and determine what happened, my thoughts and prayers are with those affected."

You already know "what happened," because YOU DID IT. And "my thoughts and prayers are with those affected," is standard boilerplate of the most banal and common kind. In fact, the parents of the murderer who shot to death nine people at an Oregon community college last Thursday issued the exact same words, "our thoughts and prayers are with" the families etc. That exact language, "our thoughts and prayers are with," are routinely trotted out after tragedies and crimes in America. The fact that it is mere boilerplate proves the insincerity of the issuers of the statements.

And what could be more distincing and minimizing than referring to the victims as "those affected"? That sounds like people caught in a traffic jam: "We are doing routine maintenance and we apologize to all those affected and thank you for your patience" while we conduct our "investigations." 

The U.S. wants everyone to know that they're conducting not one, not two, but THREE, count 'em, three "investigations." (NPR Pentagon transmission belt Tom Bowman for one made sure we knew this.) So rest assured! The Pentagon is investigating (itself), NATO (which is just the U.S. and the ducks that line up behind it) is investigating, and the Afghanistan government is investigating. You know, the people who falsely claim the Taliban were shooting at them from the hospital. The ones who hate MSF, who planted pistols in another MSF hospital in Helmand province a few years ago and raided it with British forces in tow, arresting staff. That Afghanistan government. I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of this.

Campbell made sure to repeat to the assembled scribes at the Pentagon the news of the triple "investigations." So who can doubt their seriousness? And if three investigations all find the same thing, it must be right. Right?

I could list all the past Pentagon and U.S. whitewashes- OOPS, I meant to say "investigations"- that were, let us say, less than convincing. But an exhaustive list would take up quite a bit of time to compile. So we'll let that go.

I would just reiterate a point that should be too obvious to need making- accused parties shouldn't be investigating themselves. 

MSF has been repeatedly calling for an actually independent investigation.

Chiming in with the Pentagon killers, Obama's chief mouthpiece, Josh Earnest, emitted the predictable disgusting lies which are the precise opposite of reality, claiming, absurdly, against centuries of evidence, that:

"There is no country in the world and no military in the world that goes to greater lengths and places a higher premium on avoiding civilian casualties than the United States Department of Defense." 

Oh. You could have fooled me.

Let's see: the Iraq invasion (est. dead at least 105,000 up to 1 million), Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (combined dead 4-5 million), razing of hundreds of cities in World War II, two atomic bombings- I think that's enough to make the point.

But that's funny. I thought the Israeli army has no equal in avoiding killing civilians. At least that's what the Israelis always say after every assault on Gaza. (Excuse me, I mean every time they "mow the lawn," as they call the culling of the Palestinian population.)

As for the destroyed hospital, that was the only trauma care facility in that part of Afghanistan. So far the U.S. hasn't offered to pay to rebuild it. Or offered to pay compensation for the 22 innocent people it murdered. (12 medical staff and 10 patients, including 3 children. Plus 37 people wounded.) So more people will die from lack of medical care in the future. (No victim of the U.S. ever gets a dime without suing. And of the tiny minority who manage to sue, most lose in U.S. courts.)

Nation-building, U.S. style!

[Quotations source: "Civilians 'accidentally struck' in Afghan hospital bombing, U.S. commander says," CNN, October 6, 2015.]

Why Did the U.S. Launch a Sustained Aerial Bombardment of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital?

In the latest in an unending series of U.S. atrocities (a series that goes back to the nation's founding, actually), the U.S. military launched an hour-long aerial bombardment of a hospital run by the French humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The aerial bombardment, which lasted an hour, commenced in the middle of the night around 2 am local time on October 3rd. The duration and repetitive nature of the attack is important to keep in mind, as the Western media is using the words“bombed” and “bombing,” which implies a single strike, even a single munition. This misimpression slides right into the “accident” alibi lie, which is sure to come next.

After days of evasions and lies in which the U.S. military denied it bombed the hospital, while simultaneously contradicting itself by saying maybe the hospital was “collateral damage,” and putting it about that there was fighting with the Taliban “in the area of the hospital,” a claim seized on and repeated by media, implying right next to the hospital, by noon (Washington, D.C. time) on October 5 the U.S. government domestic propaganda radio network NPR announced that the U.S. military admitted it bombed the hospital, justifying it by saying that their Afghan proteges had requested the strike. The Afghans have been falsely claiming that the Taliban were firing from the hospital. (None other than NPR's own Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman pointed out the day before that even if true, attacking the hospital would still be illegal and possibly a war crime. MSF has vigorously denied the claim. If armed men took over one of their facilities they would have ceased operations there, they explained.) [1]

The Afghans propped up by the West as a putative government apparently have it in for MSF, Several years ago they arranged to plant a couple of pistols in an MSF hospital in Helmand province, which they then proceeded to raid along with British troops, arresting staff. Maybe they can't stand the example MSF sets of providing medical services to the Afghan population, something the “government” utterly fails to do. (Hell, they don't even provide care for their own wounded troops! And the scum who run the military hospitals steals the medicines and supplies and sell them, according to bourgeois media reports.)

The U.S. media luckily has a useful distraction they can focus on- the killings of 9 people last week in Oregon by an unhappy asshole. This, 5 days later, is still a much bigger story than the story of the MSF hospital bombing, done not by a lone malcontent, but by the United States Government.

[Another egregious atrocity barely mentioned at all in the U.S. was the Saudi bombing of a wedding party in Yemen last week, killing 130 people, In fact it was bombed twice- with U.S.-supplied warplanes and munitions. This is part of a more than 6 month old terror campaign which has targeted markets, mosques, and homes, killing over 1,000 civilians so far, with U.S. support and virtual silence by the U.S. media. The Iran bogeyman is invoked as justification. But man, we're getting the full sad violin treatment for 9 people shot in Oregon.]

Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, Barack Obama, acts as if he is a mere bystander to all this, with no responsibility. This is a common dodge with him. He did the same with climate change, granting Shell Oil drilling rights in the Arctic while simultaneously giving a speech about how something must be done about climate change. Or decrying mass incarceration as if he himself has no power or responsibility for how many people are locked up. The pattern is he commits a crime or immoral act, and then exhorts others to remedy the “problem,”

His War Secretary, Ashton Carter, has been uttering vague and anodyne statements.

But let us back up and review the evidence that from the start demonstrated this was obviously a premeditated, deliberate assault, and not an “accident” or “mistake,” words already being bandied about (such as by the New York Times, still the premiere voice of the American bourgeois establishment).

The following facts are all from early BBC reports, which dribbled in over the first few hours after the crime. NPR and most U.S. media ignored these facts, at least at first:

-MSF repeatedly provided the precise GPS coordinates of the hospital to all sides in the conflict prior to the attack, including on September 27. Once the bombing commenced, frantic calls were made to NATO in Kabul and even to Washington. The bombing continued for another half hour anyway.

-The bombing occurred for an hour at 15 minute intervals.

-The U.S. military provided no explanation or apology to MSF.

-The U.S. military issued smarmy, ambiguous statements about them bombing “in the area” and “there may have been collateral damage,” obviously hedging and keeping their options open about whether they would go with a full-fledged, brazen denial, or an “oops, sorry, it was an accident” cover story. In fact, NPR reported just hours after the attack that “the U.S. is investigating whether” the U.S. bombed the hospital. What, you don't even know what you bomb? With all your “precision” targeting and “surgical” bombing? In fact, if you're doing close-in air support of ground operations, you're going to be quite accurate.

It looked at first as if the U.S. took advantage of the “cover of war” to attack an institution it has some beef against. My immediate suspicion was that the U.S. thought (or feared) that MSF was treating wounded Taliban. This hunch had added weight later by part of a New York Times article on the attack. [2] Here are paragraphs 20 and 21 of the article, a safe place to relegate a possible motive to:

“Accounts differed as to whether there had been fighting around the hospital that might have precipitated the strike. Three hospital employees, an aide who was wounded in the bombing and two nurses who emerged unscathed, said that there had been no fighting in the hospital’s immediate vicinity and no Taliban fighters in the hospital.

“But a Kunduz police spokesman, Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, said Taliban fighters had entered the hospital and were using it as a firing position. The hospital treated the wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked Afghan security forces. In a Twitter post, Arjan Hehenkamp, director of Doctors Without Borders in the Netherlands, denied that Taliban fighters had been in the hospital, saying that only staff, patients and caretakers had been inside. [My emphasis.]”

The article also mentions that the Afghans used attack helicopters in Kunduz, so it's possible the Afghans were the criminal attackers. But paragraph five cites an anonymous U.S. official saying that “the attack may have been carried out by an American AC-130 gunship that was supporting Special Operations forces on the ground in Kunduz,” in the Times words. And U.S. Special Forces are notorious for their unrestrained, immoral violence and ruthlessness. And the scale of damage, coupled with the duration of the attack, would point towards the AC-130 gunship, an extremely destructive “weapons platform.”

Moreover, the fact that the U.S. wasn't vociferously denying that they did it, and instead pointed their fingers at the Afghans, was in and of itself almost proof positive that the U.S. military were the culprits.

In this context it bears remembering the times the U.S. attacked al-Jazeera offices from the air. George Bush was even going to bomb their headquarters in Doha, Qatar, until Tony Blair (British prime minister at the time and accomplice to Bush's invasion of Iraq) talked him out of it.

Oh, just thought I'd mention; bombing a hospital is a war crime. It's even prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, a treaty the U.S. is a signatory to. On the other hand, the U.S.' signature on a piece of paper is worth the same as a piece of paper- namely zilch. We see that constantly, for example in its violation of the anti-torture treaty it signed. And its conduct during its Indochina war. And its atrocites against civilians just about whenever it wages war. All that is so routine and unremarked upon that it is actually forgotten. Indeed, I saw no mention of the statutorily criminal nature of attacking a hospital in any establishment media reporting- not BBC, NY Times, Reuters, etc. They don't want people to know it's a war crime.

But what a nitpicking cavil that all is, eh?

But the NY Times should get credit for another article that describes what actually happened inside the hospital as the bombs rained down and burned people alive in their beds, the “human story” that is essential to get through to people and provoke the necessary emotional reaction. [3]

The story quotes the local head of MSF in that part of Afghanistan:

“Over the next hour, witnesses said, what unfolded was a relentless air assault that put patients, doctors and the Kunduz hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders at the center of a bull’s-eye, leaving no possibility of escape.

“The bombing began at 2:08 a.m. and continued until 3:15, Mr. Nagarathnam said. 'The bombs hit and then we heard the plane circle around,' he added. 'There was a pause, and then more bombs hit. The main hospital building was engulfed in flames,' he said.”

Meanwhile, Obama Sheds Crocodile Tears

 The adept politician Barack Obama immediately made the obvious (and cynical) political move one would expect from a competent political boss. He issued a statement (didn't show his face) referring to “the tragic incident” and announced he would say nothing more pending the U.S. military's own verdict on what it did or didn't do: “we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy,” the statement emitted from the White House in his name read.

So the U.S. military, the probably perpetrators of the attack, will be investigating itself. I would venture to say, just as a general principle, that having the accused do the investigating of the allegations against themselves, is probably not the best way to arrive at the truth. Wouldn't you agree?

But self-investigating by guilty state parties is standard procedure in the U.S., whether its police murders of citizens, U.S. war crimes, or whatever. The only exceptions arise out of the competition for power between the Democratic Party faction of the political elite and the Republican Party one. So there you can get a partisan inquisition type investigation with a political motive, such as the Benghazi “investigations” by the Republicans in Congress.

That's not to say there are never useful genuine investigations here. But the results of those are generally put on a shelf to gather dust, such as the investigation into the Attica prison massacre ordered by then-New York State Governor and plutocrat Nelson Rockefeller (of the Rockefeller oil fortune) or the Kerner Commission report on racial unrest, or the report that rightly called the police repression around the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago a “police riot.” Those don't matter because they are ignored. By the time they come out, the issue is cold, at least in the establishment media's eyes.

Finally, here are accounts from MSF's website:

Twelve staff members and at least seven patients, including three children, were killed; 37 people were injured including 19 staff members. This attack constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law. [The death toll is now 22.]

The bombing took place despite the fact that MSF had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to Coalition and Afghan military and civilian officials as recently as Tuesday 29 September, to avoid that the hospital be hit. As is routine practice for MSF in conflict areas, MSF had communicated the exact location of the hospital to all parties to the conflict.

 

From 2:08 AM until 3:15 AM local time today, MSF’s trauma hospital in Kunduz was hit by a series of aerial bombing raids at approximately 15 minute intervals. The main central hospital building, housing the intensive care unit, emergency rooms, and physiotherapy ward, was repeatedly hit very precisely during each aerial raid, while surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched.

 

“The bombs hit and then we heard the plane circle round,” said Heman Nagarathnam, MSF Head of Programmes in northern Afghanistan. “There was a pause, and then more bombs hit. This happened again and again. When I made it out from the office, the main hospital building was engulfed in flames. Those people that could had moved quickly to the building’s two bunkers to seek safety. But patients who were unable to escape burned to death as they lay in their beds.” [4]

In fact, MSF probably provides more health care for Afghans than their so-called government, or the foreign “nation builders.” Here's their brief description:

MSF is an international medical organisation and first worked in Afghanistan in 1980. MSF opened Kunduz Trauma Centre in August 2011 to provide high quality, free medical and surgical care to victims of trauma such as traffic accidents, as well as those with conflict related injuries from bomb blasts or gunshots. In Afghanistan, MSF supports the Ministry of Public Health in Ahmad Shah Baba hospital in eastern Kabul, Dasht-e-Barchi maternity in western Kabul and Boost hospital in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province. In Khost, in the east of the country, MSF runs a maternity hospital. MSF relies only on private funding for its work in Afghanistan and does not accept money from any government.

 

As for the tremendous harm the U.S. has done to the populace by attacking the hospital in Kunduz, MSF notes:

MSF’s hospital is the only facility of its kind in the north-eastern region of Afghanistan. For four years it has been providing free high level life- and limb-saving trauma care. In 2014, more than 22,000 patients received care at the hospital and more than 5,900 surgeries were performed.

So the U.S. just took out “the only facility” in an entire region of the country where critical trauma care can be had. (Perhaps they meant the only free facility- but knowing Afghanistan, probably not. Outside of Kabul, Afghanistan is a very primitive society in every respect.)

But if you're wondering what MSF's crime was, here it is, in their own statement:

“MSF treats all people according to their medical needs and does not make any distinctions based on a patient’s ethnicity, religious beliefs or political affiliation.”
Which of course is unacceptable to the U.S. Because in the immortal words of the former Emperor Bush: “Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists.” And being “with us” requires that you be hostile to all those the U.S. is hostile to.

If you know what's good for you.

That is the ethos of a gangster empire.


1] The New York Times published a map showing the location of the hospital and the locations of fighting that we were intended to be duped were “near” the hospital. Even though the Times omitted a scale of distance on the left hand map, you can see by counting the blocks that the skirmishes were quite far from the hospital. As the map makes clear, the Taliban were nowhere near the hospital. Judging by the block lines visible on the map on the left, it appears they were at least a half mile away.

 The New York Times|Source: Doctors Without Borders (Location of hospital); Satellite image by DigitalGlobe via Bing Maps

2] “Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan,” New York Times website, October 3, 2015.

3] “Survivors Tell of Kunduz Hospital in Flames,” New York Times website, October 3, 2015.

4] “Afghanistan: 'I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable.'” Médecins Sans Frontières,

"Afghanistan: MSF demands explanations after deadly airstrikes hit hospital in Kunduz."

"Afghanistan: MSF staff killed and hospital partially destroyed in Kunduz,”