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Post by Admin on Apr 29, 2024 22:08:51 GMT
The US news site Axios reported on the 29th that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a telephone conversation with US President Biden on the 28th, expressed concern that the International Criminal Court (ICC) was about to issue an arrest warrant against him and begged him to prevent it. It was reported that. This is cited by multiple Israeli government officials.
Israel is a non-ICC member state and will not be extradited, but if the ICC issues arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant, and Military Chief of Staff Halevi over the ongoing fighting in the Palestinian autonomous region of Gaza since October last year, an international We are wary of deepening isolation.
The United States is also not a member of the ICC, and it is unclear whether Israel's efforts will be successful. The ICC has been investigating both Israel and the Islamic group Hamas for suspected war crimes since the 2014 large-scale fighting in Gaza.
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Post by Admin on May 2, 2024 10:57:38 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 6, 2024 18:32:24 GMT
Journalism may indeed be the first draft of history but that old chestnut can be misleading. Where it suggests a set-in-stone version of events, that first draft is really an unfolding detective story, revised and rewritten as we dig out better answers to the eternal questions of who, what, when, where, and how.
Two of my colleagues at RealClearInvestigations – Aaron Maté and Paul Sperry – recently recast one of the biggest stories of our time: America’s long, strange, and destructive entanglement with Ukraine.
As with all great investigative journalism, Maté and Sperry draw on a wide range of documents and insider accounts to reveal facts the powers-that-be have tried to conceal. While President Biden and many other leaders from both parties cast Ukraine as a bastion of democracy and a beacon of freedom, Maté and Sperry reveal how a decade of anti-democratic interference by Biden and other U.S. officials has led that country to the brink of destruction while corrupting America’s domestic politics.
Their reporting shows that Ukraine is not an independent democracy but a client state of America which has pushed Ukraine into ever-deepening conflict with Russia. It does not excuse Vladimir Putin’s illegal and murderous invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but it shows the massive escalation in a decade-long proxy war the two powers have been conducting on another nation’s soil.
Although this conflict stretches back decades and even centuries, Maté’s April 30 article starts in 2013. That’s when an uprising known as the Maidan movement was percolating in opposition to Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, who had delayed signing a trade pact with the European Union because he did not want to alienate Russia.
The Maidan movement was soon co-opted by ultra-nationalist groups, some of whose members “openly sported Nazi insignia.” But many American officials, including then-Vice President Biden, saw it as an opportunity to pull Ukraine from the influence of Russia and to undermine Putin.
High-ranking U.S. officials – including senior State Department official Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt – actively advised the movement, which staged a coup in 2014 by storming the Ukrainian parliament. Those same American officials were also involved in naming the new government.
Putin immediately moved to counter growing American influence on his border. Just days after the coup, Russia invaded and soon annexed Crimea. Russophile Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region followed suit. While Putin publicly told the Donbas forces to seek a diplomatic solution to their claims, American officials, including then-CIA Director John Brennan pushed Ukraine’s new government to armed conflict. As Maté wrote, Ukraine then “descended into a full-scale civil war. Thousands were killed and millions displaced in the ensuing conflict.”
As Putin issued threats that eventually turned into war, the U.S. tightened its grip on Ukraine. U.S. officials, including Biden, vetted appointments and dismissals in Kyiv, shaping, Maté reports, “the personnel and policies of subsequent Ukrainian governments, all while expanding its military and intelligence presence in Ukraine via the CIA and NATO.”
Sperry’s April 17 article changes our understanding of one of the most famous and consequential examples of U.S. meddling – Biden’s December 2015 threat to withhold $1 billion in aid if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. It has long been known that Shokin had launched multiple investigations into Burisma Holdings, the corruption-riddled energy giant that was paying Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars. After Shokin was fired, those probes went away.
After this quid pro quo came to light, the Obama administration said that Biden was just carrying out the policy wishes of our government and its European allies. Sperry’s reporting, however, indicates that the U.S. had no such concerns about Shokin in the months before Biden’s threat: “An Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee on Ukraine stated, ‘Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its [anti-corruption] reform agenda to justify a third [loan] guarantee.’”
Sperry also reports that one Biden advisor at the time was especially surprised by his boss’s action – Eric Ciaramella. On Jan. 21, 2016, Ambassador Pyatt emailed Ciaramella and other White House aides an article from the Ukrainian press – “U.S. loan guarantee conditional on Shokin’s dismissal.”
“Yikes,” Ciaramella responded. “I don’t recall this [the firing] coming up in our meeting with them,” he said, referring to an earlier White House meeting he hosted with top Ukrainian prosecutors.
The backstory Sperry brought to light would take on new significance three years later, when Ciaramella sparked Donald Trump’s first impeachment by complaining that the president had allegedly tried to condition Ukraine aid on an announcement that it was looking into Biden family corruption in that country – as well as Ukraine’s well documented efforts to interfere in the 2016 election in support of Hillary Clinton.
Sperry’s reporting suggests that the Trump impeachment was part of an effort to cover up Biden’s attempt to shield his family from the law. The strategy might have worked but for a strange stroke of fate, with the surfacing of a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop that detailed his family’s high-level influence peddling.
As Ukraine – a mid-sized country halfway around the world – played a key role in our 2016 and 2020 elections, so it promises to do the same in 2024. At first glance, its prominence seems amazing. Maté and Sperry, in far greater detail than I have summarized here, help us understand why.
Their dispatches are far from the last word. Future reporting will find still undiscovered facts, providing, one hopes, a clear sense of the past as it becomes history. Their work is also achingly relevant to the president as we witness the carnage in Ukraine. As Maté writes, “In claiming to defend Ukraine from Russian influence, Ukraine was subsumed by American influence” at incalculable cost.
Their reporting also reveals the tangled complexity of human affairs requires a healthy amount of cognitive dissonance. America’s support for Ukraine may be a necessary defense against Putin’s aggression. But it is also a recurrence of our long and now largely disavowed history of promoting regime change for seemingly noble reasons in far-flung corners of the world such as Guatemala, Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and other places. It is not the role of journalists to resolve this tension, but, as Maté and Sperry have, to detail it without fear or favor, so that others might.
J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @jpederzane.
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Post by Admin on May 8, 2024 15:18:46 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 9, 2024 0:17:05 GMT
President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt some shipments of American weapons to Israel – which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza – if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an exclusive interview on “Erin Burnett OutFront,” referring to 2,000-pound bombs that Biden paused shipments of last week.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said.
The president’s announcement that he was prepared to condition American weaponry on Israel’s actions amounts to a turning point in the seven-month conflict between Israel and Hamas. And his acknowledgement that American bombs had been used to kill civilians in Gaza was a stark recognition of the United States’ role in the war.
The president has come under extraordinary pressure, including from members of his own party, to limit shipments of arms amid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Until now, the president had resisted those calls and strongly supported Israel’s efforts to go after Hamas. Yet a looming invasion of Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than a million Palestinian civilians have been sheltering, appears to have shifted the president’s calculus.
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