US EXCEPTIONALISM

nvestigative journalist and academic Alan MacLeod, often associated with FAIR.org and Mintpress, brings this unsavory (but amply expected) business to the public’s attention. Of course, you won’t see this on MSNBC or CNN, or the NYTimes. Nor on PBS Newshour. What a swell guy this fellow Luis Kutner was. Impeccably liberaloid, but a fervent Zionist, he apparently developed a progressive cover for his real work helping imperialism’s major projects and agencies, and working as a “human rights lawyer” for world known fascists and reactionary figures. His sordid links with the CIA and the FBI are well documented. The CIA-controlled Wikipedia itself is clear (well it cannot be denied and Wiki needs to maintain some credibility anyhow) about Kutner’s repellent character. It says matter-of factly that he was known for, “Snitching on Fred Hampton and reporting him to the FBI, leading to Hampton’s eventual assassination in Chicago. Development of the living will and advocacy of world habeas corpus.” Kutner eventually won the post of Chief Justice of the World Court of Human Rights, itself another propaganda tool in the Cold War and thereater like Amnesty International and HRW used to shame and embroil people and institutions marked as “enemies” by the US State Department.

PAUL DOBSON—Speaking with self-declared ‘interim president’ Juan Guaidó on a weekly digital broadcast called Aló Embajador (Hello Ambassador) last Thursday, US Charge d’Affaires to Venezuela James Story manifested that sanctions relief would be a “mistake” under current conditions.

The Colombia-based diplomat went on to explain that the Biden White House would only consider a policy shift upon receiving “irreversible,” “conclusive” and “fundamental changes” from Caracas. While Washington’s representative offered no further details on what these changes may entail, Guaidó has previously established President Nicolás Maduro’s resignation, alongside new presidential elections, as preconditions for sanctions relief.

Story’s statements come amidst speculation over whether Biden plans to continue Donald Trump’s aggressive stance towards Venezuela or heed to domestic and international pressure for sanctions relief.

The blockade, which has hampered Caracas’s Covid-19 vaccination efforts and caused severe fuel and diesel shortages, has been condemned by a range of international actors, including United Nations General Secretary Antonio Guterres, Pope Francis, and most recently UN Special Rapporteur on the Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures Alena Douhan, who described it as “devastating” and “illegal” after visiting the country.

STEPHEN GOWANS—If this plays out as it has in the past, the news media will report that the US intelligence community has concluded that the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the pandemic. The key qualifier that the conclusion is based on no proof, will be quickly passed over and eventually forgotten, and the reality that the conclusion came from the intelligence community will be adduced as its substantiation, as if US spooks are impartial arbiters of all questions of consequence, and not part of a state apparatus that has a vested interest in discrediting a country Washington deems a near-peer competitor.

Former CIA case officer Ralph McGehee’s view of his former employer suggests what outcome we can expect from Biden’s ‘find me some evidence’ order to the intelligence community. “The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a Central Intelligence Agency,” McGehee said. Instead, “it is the covert action arm of the president’s foreign policy advisers” whose role is “reporting ‘intelligence’ justifying” the president’s positions and activities. The CIA “shapes its intelligence … to support presidential policy.” McGehee concluded that disinformation is a large part of the intelligence community’s ambit, and the US population is “the primary target audience of its lies.”  

THE GRAYZONE—The wording of the JCS plan was changed to read “when authorized by the President” at Eisenhower’s insistence to provide that only conventional means could be used at least initially for defense of the islands, while leaving open the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons if that failed.

But the Joint Chiefs were not finished. In a paper presented to Eisenhower on September 6, the chiefs proposed that they be authorized to “oppose any major attack on Taiwan and attack mainland bases with all CINPAC force that can be brought to bear” in the event of “an emergency arising from an attack on Taiwan and the offshore islands moving so rapidly that it would not permit consultations with the President…”

Further, they asked for the authority to respond to a “major landing attack on offshore islands,” by “[u]se of atomic weapons and U.S. air attack in support of [Chinese Nationalist] Air Force…as necessary, only as approved by the President.” Eisenhower approved the paper with those qualifiers. 

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