A compilation of the best reviews by the best tv and cinema critics anywhere on the internet on films and programs of lasting cultural significance.

 

Tales From the Cold War

Still from Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg, director.

“We gain our experiences of life in the form of catastrophe,” said Bertold Brecht in his discussion of the detective novel. Catastrophes give us insight into our society: its depressions, revolutions, and wars. Yet as we follow the unfolding narrative, Brecht goes on, “we sense that somebody must have done something to precipitate the catastrophe. So, who did what? The murder has taken place. What transpired beforehand? What situation resulted? Now, we might be able to work it out.”

Brecht’s observation applies equally well to Cold War spy stories such as Deutschland ’83 and The Americans. Reading detective — or spy — fiction can be likened to interpreting the catastrophes of our age.

Writing in the 1930s, Brecht didn’t have to search hard for catastrophes to decipher. Hunger and mass unemployment were followed by the high-tech inferno of modern war, with its Zyklon B, Operation Gomorrah, Fat Man, and Little Boy.

The postwar era saw capitalism’s destructive forces revved up further, but primarily as potential energy, so to speak, without kinetic release. Possible catastrophe lurks in the form of greenhouse gases — whose perverse quality is that they unleash catastrophe invisibly, gradually, primarily in the future, and through capricious feedback effects — and in nuclear warheads, awaiting orders in their silos.

Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is set in the early 1960s, when the downing of Gary Powers’s U-2, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Berlin Crisis were fresh in the public’s mind. Another such moment was the early 1980s, when the European rollout of Cruise and Pershing missiles — mobile, highly accurate, and supersonic — threatened to give NATO first strike capability.

Western propaganda never stops trumpeting that GDR’s Stasi was ruthless, terrible and ubiquitous, but they conveniently forget to mention the contaminated context in which this nation existed, and the embarrassing fact the West installed, endorsed and supported scores of genuinely bloodthirsty regimes that really terrorized their populations, none of which could apply to life in the GDR. Such state of affairs continues to this day, despite the usual disclaimers.

This phase of the Cold War forms the historical backdrop to the television shows Deutschland ’83, directed by Edward Berger and Samira Radsi, and Joe Weisberg’s The Americans. The former opens where the latter closes, with Reagan’s 1983 “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in which he defended the siting of Cruise and Pershing missiles, which had begun that year, and prayed that “those who live in that totalitarian darkness will discover the joy of knowing God.”

The moral absolutism of Reagan’s prayer is the secret of Cold War nostalgia. George W. Bush invoked it when attempting to create an image of new enemies in the Middle East. The world during the Cold War was “dangerous,” he gibbered, “and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was.”

It’s no surprise that the nostalgia aroused by Bridge of Spies is palatable to neocons. One reviewer reveled in its evocation of the “moral clarity” of the Cold War era, in particular that all forces of the US establishment — the FBI, the CIA, the judge, and Gary Powers — are portrayed “looking better than the communists.” Nostalgia is also for victory. “We won the Cold War,” the same reviewer gloats, and it’s “nice to see Hollywood get another piece of the story.”

The film’s imagined 1950s, after all, is a conservative’s wet dream. In the US, Stepford wives fawn over their hero husbands, and no black people cross the screen. In the Soviet bloc, state officials and soldiers are callous or duplicitous; torture is wantonly practiced; and all colors appear to have been expropriated from the screen, leaving the Soviets portrayed only in shades of grey.

Shades of grey are likewise absent in the politics of Bridge of Spies. It is liberal agitprop, reenacting the pivotal manoeuvre of Cold War liberalism: train the spotlight on one’s staunch and self-righteous support for liberal values while accommodating conservative forces and conjuring up humanitarian reasons for expanding Washington’s imperial clout.

The hero of Bridge of Spies, Irish-American lawyer James Donovan (played by Tom Hanks), talks the liberal talk but accepts that his country is run by security-paranoid conservatives. Although he tries to secure his goals — notably, to spare Soviet spy Rudolf Abel from execution — by following rational-universal legal rules, ultimately he can only achieve them through pandering to a conservative logic of “national security.”

At the heart of Bridge of Spies is a defense of constitutional patriotism. “What makes us both Americans?” asks Donovan of the German-extracted CIA agent Hoffman. The film’s emphatic answer: rules. The constitution. What Spielberg and his protagonist fail to see is that constitutional patriotism is the lifeblood of conservative anticommunism.

Only a few short years before Abel (played captivatingly by Mark Rylance) was brought to trial, constitutional patriotism had been recruited by President Truman and Senator McCarthy to justify anti-socialist witch-hunting and the suspension of the rule of law. Abel himself fell victim to this. He was secretly held in solitary confinement for seven weeks, without meaningful access to counsel. Although the movie’s makers emphasize that Bridge of Spies is based on a true story, this scene, unsurprisingly, didn’t make the cut.

The Bridge of Spies manifesto is that the United States is at heart a liberal nation. Read between the lines, however, and a different message can be discerned: Cold War liberalism supplied the ingredients from which neoconservatism was fashioned.

The Enemy Camp

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]either neoconservative nor liberal worldviews are conducive to classy spy drama. If the enemy is painted as godless, Reagan’s absolutism makes sense. But this leaves scant room for psychological drama or moral ambiguity.

Intelligent spy drama tends to thrive on realism rather than on liberal or neoconservative dogma. Realism, wary of universalism, zealotry, and crusades, morally relativist and ideologically flexible, came into its own during détente. In the face of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, particularly since the Iraq debacle, its fortunes have risen, making the 2010s a fitting moment for spy drama to revisit the Cold War.

For spy drama to spur critical reflection and go beyond mere “cinema of action” — in which the viewer continually pursues the superficial question “What will happen next?” — the story must force the viewer to instead ask “What am I seeing?”. In order to ask this question, people and states must be shown to the viewer in their full complexity.

Both Deutschland ’83 and The Americans attempt this. The critical conceit in both shows is that the central characters hail from, and are loyal to, the enemy camp — KGB agents, and an army officer turned Stasi spy, respectively — yet they are human, even admirable.

As a literary device this pays dividends. It enables The Americans to explore the grey zones between selflessness and manipulation in marriage, politics, and the workplace, portraying the conflicting allegiances, subterfuges, and betrayals in love and friendship across (and in analogy with) the Cold War divide.

In its boundary-pushing spin on the espionage genre, The Americans has deservedly won acclaim. But in its close-focus tracking of individual agents, it partakes in the spy genre’s characteristic depoliticization of international relations — presented as a game with stylized rules, conventions, and set pieces; hunter and hunted, all played out in a high-speed blur.

Whereas The Americans sets up a loose analogy between personal and international relations, Deutschland ’83 presents characters as representatives of broad social forces. The principal social force is the East German (GDR) state, with a particular focus on the Stasi’s foreign intelligence wing.

The Stasi was an organization charged with gathering data on the cogs of the GDR state and economy, ensuring they continue to turn. The organization’s phalanxes of officers, bureaucrats, and goons infiltrated every aspect of East German life: vetting promotions to elite positions, sowing strife among dissident groups, and generating an air of paranoia in the interest of social control.

Less well known is that the Stasi also ran the foreign intelligence service, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA). If the Stasi had a glamor wing, this was it. Whereas most Stasi departments, presided over by the ogreish Erich Mielke, were dedicated to deploying massive state power to crush domestic dissent, the HVA slipped its agents into enemy territory where they had to live on their wits, risking a life behind bars if they took a wrong step. Spymaster-in-chief was the erudite, brilliant, and elusive Markus Wolf. In the GDR, if his name came up at all, it was in hushed tones — even after he had stepped down, for reasons obscure, in 1986.

The HVA planted sleepers in West Germany (the former FRG) with ease, exploiting the FRG’s assertion of political rights over the GDR, which accorded the right of FRG citizenship to all East Germans. But getting an agent close to West German generals in order to overhear what they and the Americans were planning was a trickier proposition.

Deutschland-83

This is the central plot line of Deutschland ’83. It follows a young border guard, Martin Rauch, whose loyalties are to the GDR, to his equally patriotic girlfriend Annett, and to his mother Ingrid. But Ingrid is suffering from kidney failure and in dire need of what East Germans called “Vitamin B” — from beziehungen meaning “connections” —  in order to secure the transplant she urgently requires.

Ingrid’s sister Leonora, who works for the Stasi, knows this, and hears of the impending military aide appointment of a West German soldier, who bears a physical resemblance to Martin. The Stasi is looking for someone to infiltrate this post, and Leonora recommends Martin. He resists, despite promises by Leonora to exploit her connections to secure a kidney transplant for Ingrid. Ultimately she and her Stasi comrades — in a risibly implausible move — drug and kidnap him and whisk him off to work as a spy.

After this clunky opening, the plot is whipped along by the standard high voltage of the spy genre: nail-biting action sequences; the hero, tense and vigilant; agents never far away (in one hotel scene, half the workforce seems to be on spy duty for one power or other); and the arts and science of espionage — the gadgets and gizmos, codes and handovers, smoke and mirrors.

Two devices in Deutschland ’83 add piquancy and humor to the standard format. One is that serendipity — Martin’s resemblance to the West German aide — has decreed haste. Martin is catapulted untrained into position. In a sense, this is apprenticeship drama, but in which our novice hero’s slightest slip can blow his cover, endangering his own freedom and his mother’s life.

The other is that we see Western society as exotic, through “enemy” eyes. Thus, Martin’s undercover comrades must explain to him what a safe is: “capitalists like to buy things but are worried other people might steal them.” And they give him a Stasi-eyed take on the secret luxury of life in the West: “no one pays attention to you — here they call that freedom.”

Like The Americans, the psychological drama in Deutschland ’83 revolves around the protagonists’ double lives and how the two worlds they inhabit seep into one another or collide explosively. Both series are also about loyalty — the protagonists are internally divided between their “authentic” and professional roles. When characters must choose between allegiance to partner and family, or to career, cause, and state, loyalties are tested and falter.

Deutschland ’83 makes much of this potential. Matters of loyalty gain a sharp edge for Martin when he is instructed to seduce a NATO general’s personal assistant. If he falls in love, even a little, is it “authentic?” Should Annett forgive transgressions on grounds of patriotism? These scenes are perfectly plausible, given Markus Wolf’s notorious real-life reliance upon “Romeo” agents. The Stasi used the tactic against dissidents on the domestic front too, notoriously in the case of Vera Lengsfeld. (Its use against political activists by British undercover police has also attracted attention.)

Apart from the drama of divided loyalties, both shows also speak to ideology and the political present. A review of The Americans asked rhetorically: “When else have we seen ‘nice-looking fictional Marxist-Leninists’ portrayed with relative sympathy on American television?” There is something thrilling, it adds, “about watching Soviet agents outsmart the FBI every Wednesday night.”

One could quibble with aspects of this claim. For instance, the FBI is portrayed by The Americans much as their KGB counterparts: averagely decent people doing their job efficiently enough and only venturing off the legal piste when sorely provoked. Yet it does convey the gut appeal of the series to leftists.

Similar sentiments apply to Deutschland ’83, but the show goes further than The Americans in two respects. One is that its portrayal of East Germany is fine-toned and detailed.

One could cavil at its presentation of the GDR/Soviets as fighting dirtier than their Western rivals; the complicity of the Stasi with Carlos the Jackal is laid on too thick; and Soviet atrocities, rather than Western ones, tend to be highlighted. Yet on the whole the GDR comes across not as a totalitarian twilight zone but as a functioning country peopled (Stasi officers apart) by normal folk, whose state happened to have locked itself into an arms race that looks as absurd and inhuman from one side as from the other. The justifications trotted out on both sides follow the same mantra: “in the interests of national security.”

The portrayal of everyday East German life is achieved with accuracy and a certain lightness, highlighting, for instance, the popularity of naturism (when Annett and her second suitor, Thomas, get within ten meters of a lake all clothes are immediately off) and in the technology of the age (the response to a HVA officer’s bemused attitude to the personal computer: “but this, comrade, is the future!”). And even the Stasi officers and agents, though at times ruthless and Machiavellian, are no more so than, say, William Rawls (The Wire) or Frank Underwood (House of Cards).

Deutschland ’83 also goes further than The Americans in its depiction of the collision of social forces, of social movements, ideologies, and states, and the political and tactical divisions within each camp. Stasi officers clash over the evaluation of NATO troop movements and over the rise of the West German peace movement: some advocate assisting it; others worry that “the spark might jump over to our side and ignite a unified German movement.”

Among the West German peaceniks, debate roils as to whether to coordinate with their East German counterparts or to assume that Honecker, Mielke, Wolf and comrades are seeking a socialist-realist route to peace. US and FRG generals and politicians thrash out how to win nuclear war, if it indeed can be “won.” The German generals, on whose country nuclear bombs would fall, fear the fallout. Even the hawkish General Edel is uneasy: “God may have needed a week, but we’ll undo his work in a day.”

Meanwhile, West Germany’s generational Kulturkampf is condensed within General Edel’s own family: he, a choleric and authoritarian cold warrior versus his daughter (a hippie mystic) and his son (gay, rebellious, and raging at his father’s support for nuclear arms-wielding in pursuit of imperialist goals), leaving his wife to assume the futile role of domestic peacemaker (“This is a family, not geopolitical combat!”).

Yet despite its high-tension political clashes there is something exasperatingly bland about Deutschland ’83. This may reflect what one reviewer refers to as its soapesque qualities, but there is a politics to the dullness as well. As in The Americans, the “enemy hero” device is tame when the enemy is blond and has been comprehensively conquered. Deutschland ’83 is one thing; Pyongyang ’53, Vietnam ’73, or Mosul ’13 would be quite another.

Indeed, Deutschland ’83 exudes a cozy nostalgia for the Cold War and divided Germany — a time of excitement and fratricidal peril but which was (as we now know) en route to peace and reunited German normalcy. This nostalgia is fashioned through fastidious attention to period detail (the twin fears of nuclear Armageddon and AIDS; Martin’s elated discovery of the Walkman) and above all through the soundtrack.

The happy end delivers the fantasy of resolution. Wise heads prevail and bourgeois order is restored, with dramatic reconciliation mirroring geopolitical rapprochement. Just like the detective stories where the murder is always solved, in Deutschland ’83 the geopolitical tensions are overcome.

With all other contradictions effaced, we can reminisce upon the dark 1980s, an age of AIDS and nuclear saber-rattling but of blessedly averted catastrophe, untroubled by any hint of the dark side of German unification — for example the wage suppression imposed in the former GDR that was swiftly extended westward, enabling Germany’s unit labor-cost discrepancies to accumulate vis-à-vis weaker partners in the Euroland, a process that culminated in the Berlin-led sado-liberal evisceration of Greece as one moment within a renewed surge of empire building.

When Cold War–divided Germany becomes reclaimed for German-unified nostalgia, Deutschland ’83 loses its critical charge. The subliminal soothing message of Deutschland ’83 is that although life, and geopolitics, bring their hazards and perils, heroes of good will and stout heart, such as Comrade Rauch, will win the day.

In a sense this is classic spy drama, with its colliding social forces, moral uncertainties, and a degree of haziness as to who the good guys are. But with respect to the Brechtian deciphering of catastrophe mentioned above it doesn’t get much beyond political pulp fiction; it mainlines catharsis into anxious liberal veins.

The limitations of Bridge of Spies remind us of the substance to the claim that nowadays “if we want a critique of the culture, the only destination is TV.” But if so, The Americans and Deutschland ’83 fall short. Their apparent illumination of the murky undergrowth beneath the routine structures of high politics is appealing to be sure. They speak to the suspicion that behind the events that track across the newsfeed there are — as Brecht wrote of the detective genre — “other occurrences about which we are not told. These are the real occurrences. Only if we knew would we understand.”

It is a perception, Brecht adds, that speaks above all to intellectuals who “feel that they are objects and not subjects of history,” a situation of clue-sniffing angst that finds its ideal catharsis in the crime genre.

But the critical edge of The Americans and Deutschland ’83 is blunt in comparison to shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, or the first season of House of Cards. Each in its own way, these dig deeper into the catastrophe of bourgeois order: the compulsive imperatives of economic and political competition, with its gross inequalities, megalomanic obsessions, and spawning of corruption and violence.

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. His books on East Germany are published by Routledge, Peter Lang, and Manchester University Press.

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=By= Finian Cunningham

Academi, Blackwater, and Xe are all the same company. The flag is reputedly used by various Islamist groups.

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]IA-linked private “security” companies are fighting in Yemen for the US-backed Saudi military campaign. Al-Qaeda-affiliated mercenaries are also being deployed. Melding private firms with terror outfits should not surprise. It’s all part of illegal war making.

Western news media scarcely report on the conflict in Yemen, let alone the heavy deployment of Western mercenaries in the fighting there. In the occasional Western report on Al-Qaeda and related terror groups in Yemen, it is usually in the context of intermittent drone strikes carried out by the US, or with the narrative that these militants are “taking advantage” of the chaos “to expand” their presence in the Arabian Peninsula, as reported here by the Washington Post.

This bifurcated Western media view of Yemen belies a more accurate and meaningful perspective, which is that the US-backed Saudi bombing campaign is actually coordinated with an on-the-ground military force that comprises regular troops, private security firms and Al-Qaeda type mercenaries redeployed from Syria.

There can be little doubt in Syria – despite Western denials – that the so-called Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL)) jihadists and related Al-Qaeda brigades in Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Fateh, Ahrar ash-Sham and so on, have been infiltrated, weaponized and deployed for the objective of regime-change by the US and its allies. If that is true for Syria, then it is also true for Yemen. Indeed, the covert connection becomes even more apparent in Yemen.

Last November, the New York Times confirmed what many Yemeni sources had long been saying. That the US-backed Saudi military coalition trying to defeat a popular uprising was relying on mercenaries supplied by private security firms tightly associated with the Pentagon and the CIA.

The mercenaries were recruited by companies linked to Erik Prince, the former US Special Forces commando-turned businessman, who set up Blackwater Worldwide. The latter and its re-branded incarnations, Xe Services and Academi, remain a top private security contractor for the Pentagon, despite employees being convicted for massacring civilians while on duty in Iraq in 2007. In 2010, for example, the Obama administration awarded the contractor more than $200 million in security and CIA work.

Erik Prince, who is based primarily in Virginia where he runs other military training centers, set up a mercenary hub in the United Arab Emirates five years ago with full support from the royal rulers of the oil-rich state. The UAE Company took the name Reflex Responses or R2. The NY Times reported that some 400 mercenaries were dispatched from the Emirates’ training camps to take up assignment in Yemen. Hundreds more are being trained up back in the UAE for the same deployment.

This is just one stream of several “soldiers of fortune” going into Yemen to fight against the uprising led by Houthi rebels, who are in alliance with remnants of the national army. That insurgency succeeded in kicking out the US and Saudi-backed president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in early 2015. Hadi has been described as a foreign puppet, who presided over a corrupt regime of cronyism and vicious repression.

Since last March, the Saudis and other Persian Gulf Arab states have been bombing Yemen on a daily basis in order to overthrow the Houthi-led rebellion and reinstall the exiled Hadi.

Erik Prince © rightweb.irc-online.org

Washington and Britain have supplied warplanes and missiles, as well as logistics, in the Saudi-led campaign, which has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. The involvement of Blackwater-type mercenaries – closely associated with the Pentagon – can also be seen as another form of American contribution to the Saudi-led campaign.

The mercenaries sent from the UAE to Yemen are fighting alongside other mercenaries that the Saudis have reportedly enlisted from Sudan, Eritrea and Morocco. Most are former soldiers, who are paid up to $1,000 a week while serving in Yemen. Many of the Blackwater-connected fighters from the UAE are recruited from Latin America: El Salvador, Panama and primarily Colombia, which is considered to have good experience in counter-insurgency combat.

Also among the mercenaries are American, British, French and Australian nationals. They are reportedly deployed in formations along with regular troops from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE.

In recent months, the Houthi rebels (also known as Ansarullah) and their allies from the Yemeni army – who formed a united front called the Popular Committees – have inflicted heavy casualties on the US-Saudi coalition. Hundreds of troops have been reportedly killed in gun battles in the Yemeni provinces of Marib, in the east, and Taiz, to the west. The rebels’ use of Tochka ballistic missiles has had particularly devastating results.

So much so that it is reported that the Blackwater-affiliated mercenaries have “abandoned the Taiz front” after suffering heavy casualties over the last two months. “Most of the Blackwater operatives killed in Yemen were believed to be from Colombia and Argentina; however, there were also casualties from the United States, Australia and France,” Masdar News reports.

Into this murky mix are added extremist Sunni militants who have been dispatched to Yemen from Syria. They can be said to be closely related, if not fully integrated, with Al-Qaeda or IS in that they profess allegiance to a “caliphate” based on a fundamentalist Wahhabi, or Takfiri, ideology.

These militants began arriving in Yemen in large numbers within weeks of Russia’s military intervention in Syria beginning at the end of September, according to Yemeni Army spokesman Brigadier General Sharaf Luqman. Russian air power immediately began inflicting severe losses on the extremists there. Senior Yemeni military sources said that hundreds of IS-affiliated fighters were flown into Yemen’s southern port city of Aden onboard commercial aircraft belonging to Turkey, Qatar and the UAE.

Soon after the militants arrived, Aden residents said the city had descended into a reign of terror. The integrated relationship with the US-Saudi coalition can be deduced from the fact that Aden has served as a key forwarding military base for the coalition. Indeed, it was claimed by Yemen military sources that the newly arrived Takfiri militants were thence dispatched to the front lines in Taiz and Marib, where the Pentagon-affiliated mercenaries and Saudi troops were also assigned.

It is true that the Pentagon at times wages war on Al-Qaeda-related terrorists. The US airstrike in Libya on Friday, which killed some 40 IS operatives at an alleged training camp, is being trumpeted by Washington as a major blow against terrorism. And in Yemen since 2011, the CIA and Pentagon have killed many Al-Qaeda cadres in drone strikes, with the group’s leader being reportedly assassinated last June in a US operation.

Nevertheless, as the broader US-Saudi campaign in Yemen illustrates, the outsourcing of military services to private mercenaries in conjunction with terrorist militia is evidently an arm of covert force for Washington.

This is consistent with how the same groups have been deployed in Syria for the purpose of regime change there.

The blurring of lines between regular military, private security contractors with plush offices in Virginia and Abu Dhabi, and out-and-out terror groups is also appropriate. Given the nature of the illegal wars being waged, it all boils down to state-sponsored terrorism in the end.

 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.

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NSA Operations Center (NSOC) – Public Domain.

[dropcap]U[/dropcap]S lawmakers have launched an investigation following the discovery of unauthorized code in firewall software from Juniper Networks. The probe will examine the possibility that the software was altered by the National Security Agency.

Juniper warned its customers in December that a review of the code in their ScreenOS firewalls revealed an unauthorized “back door” into the software. The vulnerability was quickly patched, but questions about who inserted the illicit code remained unanswered.

Representative Will Hurd (R-Texas), who heads the technology subcommittee on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, initially investigated the breach over worries that government agencies ‒ many of which use Juniper products ‒ may have been compromised.

Read More: Researchers suspect NSA as FBI probes Juniper back door vulnerability

However, Hurd told Reuters on Thursday that the committee would also investigate the origins of the attack to find if any intelligence agency such as the NSA played a role. Back doors were first linked to NSA because of the similarity of the technique used in the vulnerability’s code.

The random number generator used in the code is called a Dual Elliptic Curve, which is a signature technique of the NSA. Juniper has said that it will remove the technique entirely in future versions of its software.

If the NSA was indeed behind the vulnerability, then the discussion around policy should change, the congressman told Reuters.

“How do we understand the vulnerabilities that created this problem and ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the future?” Hurd said. “I don’t think the government should be requesting anything that weakens the security of anything that is used by the federal government or American businesses.”

Top US intelligence and law enforcement officials have long asked for a “golden key” back door to be installed on all hardware in the country in order bypass encryption under pretenses of national security concerns.

Silicon Valley companies are fiercely opposed to putting their customer data at risk in such a way, arguing that any master back door could be exploited by cyber criminals and foreign intelligence agencies.

READ MORE: Not your ‘back door man’: Apple CEO rankles authorities who target encryption

“If the government lays a proper warrant on us today, then we will give the specific information that is requested, because we have to by law. In the case of encrypted information, we don’t have it to give,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said on ‘60 Minutes’ in December.

“If there’s a way to get in, then somebody will find a way to get in,” Cook continued. “There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door. But the reality is, if you put a back door in, that back door’s for everybody.”

Juniper discovered the unauthorized VPN-breaking code in December. It would give the attacker who infected the systems the ability to read email sent over connections that would appear secure. It’s unclear how the code entered Juniper’s systems to begin with.

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Azovs, at one of their assembly points. {CC BY-NC-ND by Atlantic Council}

By David Levine
wsws

1 February 2016

The 2016 Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law by US President Barack Obama late last year, did not include a previously expected ban against the funding of the Azov Regiment, a military organization that originated as a volunteer militia in May 2014 and was subsequently incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine.

The Azov Regiment is notorious for the openly white supremacist and anti-Semitic views of its members, and its use of the Wolfsangel, a swastika-like symbol once used by certain divisions of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, as well as its leading role in the Battle of Mariupol in May-June 2014. The regiment’s leader is Andriy Biletsky, a current member of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament) and also leader of the neo-Nazi Social-National Assembly. In a characteristic statement, Biletsky was quoted by the UK Telegraph last August as stating, “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

The 2016 Consolidated Appropriations Act includes a section entitled “Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative,” which appropriates $250 million “to provide assistance, including training; equipment; lethal weapons of a defensive nature; logistics support, supplies and services; sustainment; and intelligence support to the military and national security forces of Ukraine.. .” Additionally, the US is to spend at least $658.2 million on “bilateral economic assistance,” international security assistance,” “multilateral assistance,” and “export and investment assistance” for Ukraine in 2016. All this follows nearly $760 million in “security, programmatic, and technical assistance” and $2 billion in loan guarantees that the US has provided Ukraine since the February 2014 Maidan coup.

In June last year, the House of Representatives voted to amend the 2016 Department of Defense Appropriations Act so as to include the text, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” Representative John Conyers, Jr. (Democrat-Michigan) had introduced this proposal, pointing out that the magazine Foreign Affairs as well as other leading media organizations characterized the Azov Battalion as “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascist,” and arguing that “these groups run counter to American values.”

According to the Nation, the Defense Department subsequently began exerting pressure on the House Defense Appropriations Committee to withdraw the proposed amendment, arguing that the restriction was redundant. According to this specious line of reasoning, funding of the Azov Regiment should already be prohibited by the Leahy Law, which establishes that “No assistance shall be furnished … to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.” [Considering the stunning criminal record of the United States for almost a century, this is galactic-type hypocrisy.—Eds]

The Department of State explains on one of its official web sites that it “vets its assistance to foreign security forces, as well as certain Department of Defense training programs, to ensure that recipients have not committed gross human rights abuses. When the vetting process uncovers credible information that an individual or unit has committed a gross violation of human rights, US assistance is withheld.”

Reports published by Amnesty International in 2014 and 2015 gave evidence of widespread torture and summary executions in Ukraine but did not specifically name the Azov Regiment or its members as suspects. The UN also issued a report in 2014 accusing both sides of the Ukrainian civil war of committing acts of torture and attacks on civilian targets.

While Conyers’ amendment was widely reported in the media when it passed the House of Representatives in June last year, it was never subject to a vote in the Senate. The 2016 Department of Defense Appropriations Act was incorporated into the 2016 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which became law on December 18. The absence of the prohibition on funding for the Azov Regiment was first noted in the media by the Nation on January 14.

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ven without the intervention of the Department of Defense and the Senate’s rejection of the proposed amendment, the prohibition in question was a red herring and a fraud from the beginning. While the Azov Regiment and its leader have gained notoriety for the peculiarly repugnant, intensely hateful political positions of its leader and members, those positions distinguish them only superficially from the rest of the officers, special forces operatives, volunteers and mercenaries who have been leading Kiev’s war against the people of eastern Ukraine.

The fact that the Azov Regiment’s leader and at least some of its members participate in neo-Nazi politics does not apparently impede their ability to fight alongside other far-right Ukrainian nationalists who do not identify specifically as “fascist” or “neo-Nazi” but are nevertheless rabidly anti-Russian and generally identify with the political legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with the Nazis in World War II against the Soviet Union and took part in mass killings of civilians, including Jews and Poles. Such extreme nationalists represent the prevailing political tendency in the Ukrainian government today, and particularly its military leadership.

The Azov Regiment, which has approximately 1,000 members, is one of many subdivisions of the Ukrainian National Guard. The Ukrainian National Guard was re-established in March 2014, consists currently of approximately 60,000 servicemen, and has played a key role in the ongoing Ukrainian civil war.

In addition to the Azov Regiment, there are at least thirteen other special forces units of the Ukrainian National Guard, including Alfa, Bars, Donbas, Hepard, Kobra, Lavanda, Omeha, Skat, Skorpion, Tin, Tyhr, Veha, and Yahuar; as well as over 30 special forces units of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, of which the National Guard is itself a subdivision. There are also over 40 volunteer territorial defense battalions operating within the Ministry of Defense.

Among the various units and organizations participating in Kiev’s war should also be counted the Right Sector Volunteer Ukrainian Corps, which operates as an independent militia not subordinate to any branch of government; as well as mercenaries, special agents, advisers, and “instructors” from foreign countries.

According to an article published in the Daily Beast last July, in an interview for that publication, Sgt. Ivan Kharkiv of the Azov battalion “spoke about his battalion’s experience with US trainers and US volunteers quite fondly, even mentioning US volunteer engineers and medics that [were] still currently assisting them.”

Yaryna Ferentsevych, Press Officer of the US Embassy in Ukraine, also told the Daily Beast that “as far as we know,” there were no members of the Azov Regiment being trained by US forces. She explained, “Whether or not some may be in the lineup, that is possible. But frankly, you know, our vetting screens for human rights violations, not for ideology. Neo-Nazis, you know, can join the US army too. The battalions that are in question have been integrated as part of Ukraine’s National Guard, and so the idea is that they would be eligible for training, but in all honesty I cannot tell you if there are any on the list we train. There were not any in the first rotation as far as I am aware.”

Capt. Steven Modugno, US Army Public Affairs Officer from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which trains Ukrainian forces in Yavoriv, also told the Daily Beast that he didn’t know whether they had trained any members of the Azov Regiment, but that they had trained the Hepard (“Cheetah”) and Yahuar (“Jaguar”) regiments, which also belong to the Ukrainian National Guard.

The United States has been supplying military hardware to Ukraine since last March, and US instructors have been training Ukrainian National Guard units since April last year. As of December 2015, approximately 400 American military instructors, as well as military instructors from Canada, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom, were training Ukrainian military servicemen at the Yavoriv Training Center in Lviv Region. American instructors are also teaching Ukrainian special operations forces in Khmelnytsky Region. Instructors from the United States have also been sent to Ukraine to train special police units analogous to US SWAT teams. NATO troops have been participating in joint military exercises in Western Ukraine. And, according to “hacktivist” organization Cyber-Berkut, American specialists have been sent to Kiev to train their Ukrainian counterparts in methods of psychological warfare and disinformation.

The author is a specialist writer working for wsws.org, an information organ of the Social Equality Party. 

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