v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Animals in War

 

 

George Packer writes in The Atlantic:

Animals die in large numbers in every war. Think of draft horses drowning in mud in the battlefields of France, or water buffalo machine-gunned from the air in Vietnamese rice paddies, or the tormented farm animals in Picasso’s Guernica. Their deaths are never counted in official casualty figures; almost all of them go unrecorded and unremembered. Animals are also targets in war, usually as a means to deprive an enemy of food and income. But in this war, animals have become Russian targets for no purpose other than sheer cruelty. Ukraine’s government has accused the Russian military of intentionally striking dog shelters and horse stables. Russian soldiers in retreat from the Kyiv region left behind the bullet-riddled corpses of not just cattle, horses, and goats, but even pet dogs. By killing animals, the invaders seem to be responding to all the pictures of Ukrainians with pets in bomb shelters and evacuation convoys. The Russians have identified yet another way to inflict pain on the Ukrainian people—not by starving them but by breaking their heart.

Something is uniquely unfair about the suffering that war inflicts on animals. They are the ultimate noncombatants. War has nothing to do with the world they inhabit. In their consciousness it has no meaning, not even the meaning of evil. A deer scorched by artillery fire has no understanding of the cause of its pain, and yet it gazes at the camera with immense stoicism. In Ukraine, this unfairness seems all the greater because, more than in most wars, animals in this war are not anonymous. Because of the intense bonds they share with human beings, and because their fate is seen widely on social media, they’ve become individuals to the outside world—unwitting protagonists in the drama.

Perhaps Ukrainians are no more animal-loving than other people. I imagine Russians back home take good care of their huskies and borzois. But the stories of animals in this war tell you something about the two sides. An invasion launched for the purpose of erasing an entire nation has dehumanized Russian soldiers so quickly and thoroughly that killing has become an end in itself; so, in retreat, they shoot kenneled dogs. And the country they came to destroy, in fighting for its life, has become one that extends solidarity and love beyond its human citizens.

Sometimes You Don't Want to Say you are Winning

From Elliot Cohen in the Atlantic and someone who I'd never think I'd be quoting:

The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.

Add to this the repeated tactical blundering visible on videos even to amateurs: vehicles bunched up on roads, no infantry covering the flanks, no closely coordinated artillery fire, no overhead support from helicopters, and panicky reactions to ambushes. The 1-to-1 ratio of vehicles destroyed to those captured or abandoned bespeaks an army that is unwilling to fight. Russia’s inability to concentrate its forces on one or two axes of attack, or to take a major city, is striking. So, too, are its massive problems in logistics and maintenance, carefully analyzed by technically qualified observers.

 

Coming Apart

An article that describes how Russia's disinformation machinery stopped functioning:

For decades now, Vladimir Putin has slowly, carefully, and stealthily curated online and offline networks of influence. These efforts have borne lucrative fruit, helping Russia become far more influential than a country so corrupt and institutionally fragile had any right to be. The Kremlin and its proxies had economic holdings across Europe and Africa that would shame some of the smaller 18th-century empires. It had a vast network of useful idiots that it helped get elected and could count on for support, and it controlled much of the day-to-day narrative in multiple countries through online disinformation. And many people had no idea.

While a few big events like the US’s 2016 election and the UK’s Brexit helped bring this meddling to light, many remained unaware or unwilling to accept that Putin’s disinformation machine was influencing them on a wide range of issues. Small groups of determined activists tried to convince the world that the Kremlin had infiltrated and manipulated the economies, politics, and psychology of much of the globe; these warnings were mostly met with silence or even ridicule.

All that changed the moment Russian boots touched Ukrainian soil. Almost overnight, the Western world became overwhelmingly aware of the Kremlin’s activities in these fields, shattering the illusions that allowed Putin’s alternative, Kremlin-controlled information ecosystem to exist outside its borders. As a result, the sophisticated disinformation machinery Putin spent decades cultivating collapsed within days.

Russia’s network of influence was as complex as it was sprawling. The Kremlin has spent millions in terms of dollars and hours in Europe alone, nurturing and fostering the populist right (Italy, Hungary, Slovenia), the far right (Austria, France, Slovakia), and even the far left (Cyprus, Greece, Germany). For years, elected politicians in these and other countries have been standing up for Russia’s interests and defending Russia’s transgressions, often peddling Putin’s narratives in the process. Meanwhile, on televisions, computers, and mobile screens across the globe, Kremlin-run media such as RT, Sputnik and a host of aligned blogs and “news” websites helped spread an alternative view of the real world. Though often marginal in terms of reach in and of themselves (with some notable exceptions, such as Sputnik Mundo), they performed a key role in spreading disinformation to audiences in and outside of Russia.

But the digital realm is where Russia found the most success in opening new fronts in its disinformation war. Social media, quasi-legitimate blogs, and bots reached ordinary people en masse all the time. With skill and care, Russian operatives tested and retested how best to polarize audiences. Using different platforms, content, and messaging, they built up a profile of users for their targeting purposes and then reflected back to them a picture of the world that would make them angry, frightened, and despairing—a picture that only exists online. For evidence of this, look no further than recent discourse in the West, where the Kremlin has been amplifying everything from climate denialism to the anti-vaxx movement to QAnon. All these things already existed but were the preserve of conspiracy theorists, quacks, and pranksters—now millions believe, in the face of reality, that climate change was made up by Green extremists, that “they” (whether it be Bill Gates, George Soros, or the World Economic Forum) are using vaccines to microchip people, that there's a satanic cabal of baby-eaters in Washington, or all of the above.

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The Chemical Frontier

 

Today, even in NYT how misinformation has permeated our society=let's hope that in coming days the Russians do not use chemical weapons on civilian or any populations:

Prominent social media users and conservative voices have amplified a baseless theory promoted by Russian state media accusing the United States of funding biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.

There is no evidence to support the claims, which President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department have all unequivocally denied.

There are biological laboratories inside Ukraine, and since 2005, the United States has provided backing to a number of institutions to prevent the production of biological weapons. But Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, and others have misleadingly cited remarks from American officials as proof that the labs are producing or conducting research on biological weapons.

“Out of nowhere, the Biden official in charge of Ukraine confirmed the story,” Mr. Carlson said on his program Thursday night. “Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state, casually mentioned in a Senate hearing on Tuesday that actually, yes, the Biden administration does fund a series of biolabs in Ukraine.”

Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, characterized Ms. Nuland’s remarks as a “serious admission.” Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former president, tweeted that her comments propelled the claim from “conspiracy theory to fact.”

Mr. Carlson also pointed to an interview with Robert Pope, the director of the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which helps countries in the former Soviet Union secure or eliminate nuclear and chemical weapons.

“As Pope put it, scientists are scientists, they don’t want to destroy all the bioweapons,” Mr. Carlson continued in his segment. “Instead, they’re using them to conduct new bioweapons research — that’s what he said.”

Mr. Carlson mischaracterized those remarks from Ms. Nuland and Mr. Pope.

In congressional testimony this week, Ms. Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, was asked by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, whether Ukraine has chemical or biological weapons.

“Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of,” she responded. “So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”

If there were a biological or chemical weapon attack inside Ukraine, Mr. Rubio asked, would there be any doubt that Russia was behind it?

“There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame the other guy what they’re planning to do themselves,” Ms. Nuland responded.

The State Department said Ms. Nuland was referring to Ukrainian diagnostic and biodefense laboratories during her testimony, which are different from biological weapons facilities. Rather, these biodefense laboratories counter biological threats throughout the country, the department said.

Mr. Rubio made the same clarification in another congressional hearing on Thursday, noting that “there’s a difference between a bioweapons facility and one that’s doing research.”

In referring to Mr. Pope on Thursday, Mr. Carlson was distorting a February interview Mr. Pope gave to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization and publication.

Mr. Pope had warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may damage laboratories in the country that conduct research and disease surveillance and are supported by the United States. He noted that some of the facilities may contain pathogens once used for Soviet-era bioweapons programs, but he emphasized that the Ukrainian labs currently did not have the ability to manufacture bioweapons.

“There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure for researching or producing biological weapons,” Mr. Pope said. “Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”In a March interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mr. Pope also echoed Ms. Nuland’s concerns about the laboratories falling into Russia’s hands. He spoke specifically about the Pentagon’s support of 14 veterinary laboratories that provide Ukraine with sampling and diagnostic abilities to detect infectious diseases.In a March interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mr. Pope also echoed Ms. Nuland’s concerns about the laboratories falling into Russia’s hands. He spoke specifically about the Pentagon’s support of 14 veterinary laboratories that provide Ukraine with sampling and diagnostic abilities to detect infectious diseases.

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We Turn a Corner

This morning while drinking our coffee I told my wife that we will look back at these last 4-5 days and consider it a new stage-probably more relevant for our children but much like 9/11 it will color the future in a different light. Here's an article from Richard Fontaine  at The Atlantic:

Just days ago, Russia was widely seen in Washington, D.C., and major European capitals as a sullen and revisionist power, led by a president discontented with his country’s place in the world, but who generally chose pragmatism and opportunism over blundering savagery. This sentiment has transformed overnight, and Moscow is now viewed by Western leaders as a clear and present danger. Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine is the obvious, but not the only, evidence. Russia threatened “military and political consequences” against Finland and Sweden should they join NATO, and put nuclear forces on alert. Just days ago, European leaders visited Moscow to discuss the international deal that sought to end his last territorial assault in Ukraine, in 2014. No more—governments now have no trust in or tolerance for the Putin regime.

The world’s economies, save China, have combined to inflict harm on the Russian economy with remarkable speed, fomenting a financial crisis and enacting restrictions on Russian imports that will touch all of its citizens. The sanctions on Russia’s central bank alone may well force the country into a default on its sovereign debt. Previous worries about risks that could hurt countries pulling out of COVID-induced recession have been cast aside. So too have concerns that economic upheaval could provoke unrest inside Russia, with unknown implications.

Germany’s long-underweight military role and low defense budgets are also things of the past. Olaf Scholz, the recently elected chancellor, announced a onetime increase in defense spending of 100 billion euros, and committed to spending 2 percent of German GDP on defense annually. As a result, Putin’s aggression accomplished in days what decades of haranguing by American presidents could not. “We must put a stop to warmongers like Putin,” Scholz said. “That requires strength of our own.” In security terms, this may well mark the birth of a new, post–post–Cold War Germany.

Neutrality is on the wane, too. Finland and Sweden are firmly aligned with the West and against Moscow, and the invasion may tip them into NATO membership. Policy makers in both countries are openly discussing the possibility—hence Moscow’s preemptive threat—and for the first time a majority of Finns favor joining the alliance. Even if Helsinki and Stockholm do not sign up as allies, they have already begun collaborating with NATO more closely than ever before. Both, for example, are sending arms to Ukraine.

Even neutral Switzerland—Switzerland!—will freeze Russian assets as a result of Moscow’s aggression. “Russia’s attack is an attack on freedom, an attack on democracy, an attack on the civil population, and an attack on the institutions of a free country,” the country’s president, Ignazio Cassis, said over the weekend. “This cannot be accepted.” Large-scale protests on the streets of Bern, expressing popular revulsion at the invasion, helped focus minds in a country that has essentially been militarily neutral since 1516.The sudden shifts extend beyond Europe. The sanctions now imposed on Russia are global, with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Singapore, and more joining the anti-aggression bloc. Turkey, which previously maintained warm relations with Russia, has denounced Moscow’s “unjust and unlawful war” and will block the passage of Russian warships through to the Black Sea. The UN General Assembly will convene an emergency session, for the first time in 40 years, to discuss the crisis.

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Nation-Building Fuckups

From Fintan O'toole in the NYRB on two books recently written about the US and Afghanistan:

The overlap between the failures of America’s own democracy and of its mission in Afghanistan is nowhere clearer than in the creation of a kleptocracy. One of the most basic functions of a democratic system is ensuring accountability for the use of public money. The Americans knew when they entered Afghanistan that corruption was already widespread. Their main response was to feed it with billions of taxpayers’ dollars. This was not naive or innocent. It too was policy. It was based on an article of faith for conservative Americans: trickle-down economics. If, in the US, you believed that it did not matter if some people became filthy rich by dubious means because some of their wealth would leak out to ordinary folk, why not apply that to Afghanistan?

In his SIGAR interview, Boucher said that it was better to funnel the vast sums of US aid to Afghan power brokers who “would probably take 20 percent for personal use” than to give it to “a bunch of expensive American experts.” He said, “I want it to disappear in Afghanistan, rather than in the Beltway. Probably in the end it is going to make sure that more of the money gets to some villager, maybe through five layers of corrupt officials, but still gets to some villager.”

Particularly striking here is Boucher’s assumption that genteel corruption is as endemic in Washington as the more flagrant kind is in Afghanistan. A democracy that cannot create accountability for the use of public money at home could not do so in a faraway society. This was also, for the entire project of building an Afghan democracy, ruinous. The villager who gets the last drops of aid after most of it has been filtered through five layers of corrupt officials knows all too well that he or she is not an equal citizen.

What was corrupted in all of this was the sense of an ending. “What,” as Major Joseph Claburn rather plaintively asked in 2011, “does it look like when it comes time for us to leave?” Because the ends being pursued were so ill-defined, the idea of an ending could not be fixed either. Twice—in 2003 and in 2014—the US officially declared an “end to combat operations” in Afghanistan. On neither occasion was this real or truthful or reflected on the ground. Finality, for the US, was something to be declared, not to be accomplished. Those who do not know what the last stage of their mission is will be outlasted, as America has been by the Taliban. It is an iron law that what cannot be concluded will be abandoned. That has been Afghanistan’s bitter fate.

Biden’s fate is to be the one who gave up the pretense of endless progress. It fell to the mournful man of compassion and empathy to deliver a heartless coup de grace. And even that parting shot was botched. It is a bleak commentary on the whole twenty-year episode that the US, on its departure, was almost as much in the dark as it had been on arrival, and no less concerned to keep up appearances. On July 23 Biden told his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani that the critical question was the “perception” that “things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.” He suggested that “there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”

Less than a month before Ghani fled from Kabul, the US could not break the long-established habit of valuing a positive story more than the realities revealed by its own intelligence reports. This attitude extended even to the plight of Afghans whose lives were known to be in danger because they had worked with the Americans. The White House delayed for months the process of getting them to safety because it wanted to maintain the fiction that Afghan government forces would hold out against the Taliban. The great cloud of unknowing enveloped even the obvious truth that the circular progression of the war was about to close in on itself, forming a great hollow 0.

What is also unknown is how much this failure of American democracy will recoil on the politics of the homeland. Defeat in war has been, for some nations, the beginning of radical political change. It prompts reflection on the nature of the political order that has failed so badly. But the problem with the defeat in Afghanistan may be that, for America, it does not matter enough to make such self-examination imperative. Malkasian concludes that “the bigger story is probably how little the war featured in national life. Failure or success, Afghanistan was unimportant. Less than 0.3 percent of the population, including diplomats and contractors, served there.”

This is not a national trauma like Vietnam. There will be no great Maya Lin memorial to the Americans who gave their lives, still less to the 200,000 or so Afghans and Pakistanis who died. (Whitlock writes that the US started to count Afghan civilian deaths only in 2005, but then abandoned the database “for unspecified reasons.”) The shame and terror of the botched withdrawal has already become mere fodder for the tribal warfare of American politics, with Donald Trump recasting his own abject surrender to the Taliban—when he went over the heads of the supposedly sovereign Afghan government to negotiate an unhindered withdrawal—as Biden’s fault, and moreover as the “dumbest move ever made in US history.”

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A Harbinger of Fascism

From the NYRB, Mitchell Abidor writes about Sade and Epstein:

It is impossible not to think of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices when reading Sade. In The 120 Days of Sodom, the age of the girls delivered to the libertines “was fixed between twelve and fifteen and anything above or below was ruthlessly rejected.” And in Aline and Valcour, two libertines “keep a seraglio of twelve young girls… of whom the oldest is not yet fifteen, and is replaced at the rate of one a month.”

Epstein’s plane was flippantly and familiarly known as the Lolita Express; in one reported incident, a twenty-three-year-old woman brought to him was rejected as too old. Like Sade, Epstein had hirelings to procure his victims. The financier’s procuresses lived well, as did those in Sade’s work, who in 120 Days received “thirty thousand francs—all expenses paid—for each subject found to their liking (it is extraordinary how much all this cost).”

The libertines in Sade, to quote Barthes, also “belong to the aristocracy, or more exactly (and more frequently) to the class of financiers, professionals, and prevaricators.” And like the victims of Epstein, those victimized and assaulted by Sade’s characters in his fiction, as by Sade himself in real life, “belong to the industrial and urban sub-proletariat.” The power differential that plays such an important part in the contemporary scandals is limned in the biography and writing of Sade. It was Camus who summed up the Sadeian universe as one of “power and hatred,” a term just as aptly applicable to Epstein’s world.

Epstein’s Caribbean island, to which young women were flown, his ranch, and his townhouse are a contemporary version of the castles in which Sade’s fictional and actual victims were assaulted. Just as in the case of Sade, where the will of the victims was ignored, their lives reduced to obeying the libertines’ orders, Epstein’s girls were at times referred to as his friend Ghislaine Maxwell’s “slave[s].” As the victims in the pages of Sade hear: “no one knows you are here… you’re already dead to the world and it is only for our pleasures that you are breathing now.”

According to court documents, Epstein “required different girls to be scheduled every day of the week,” just as 120 Days records the drawing up of a timetable to detail which victim will perform which act on which day. Epstein’s regimen recalls Sade’s character in Les Infortunes de la virtue who explains that “I make use of women from need, the same way one makes use of a chamber pot for a different need.”

Epstein carried on with virtual impunity until the final reckoning, like the libertine in Sade’s 120 Days who would “commit excesses that would have sent his head to the scaffold a thousand times were it not for his influence and his gold, which saved him from this fate a thousand times.” Sade’s books are a guidebook to, and prophecy of, the Epstein case.

In one important way, though, this looking-glass is reversible: it is Epstein who illuminates Sade and allows us to read the French aristocrat with a different eye. Sade lived his drives, and when imprisoned, he turned them into literature. That literature is still read and is still the subject of serious study. Some recent books, for example, have viewed Sade through the lens of queer theory, examining his vision of sex and death, once again placing him within the framework of Enlightenment thought.

But we might justly ask: Had Jeffrey Epstein lived and become a writer, would his literary output have enthralled us?

There is no indication that Epstein ever committed to paper his ideas and fantasies, as Sade did so obsessively. Sade, after all, viewed himself not just as a libertine, but as a philosopher of libertinism (one of his works was titled Philosophy in the Boudoir). His flights of fancy served to relieve the privations of his confinement, perhaps, but they were also the basis for an encompassing worldview like few others.

Unlike Sade, Epstein did not elevate his tastes into a principle. And that Epstein left no account suggests a consciousness of the legal jeopardy any such record would create. But if Epstein had done so, would anyone have dared write of him, as Breton did of Sade, that he was someone “for whom the freedom of morality was a matter of life and death”? For both men, the freedom of morality was, in actuality, a freedom from morality, a license to inflict pain on others.

There are two nouns Sade uses heavily in his novels that sum up the Sadeian universe: victime and scélérat, victim and villain. This is the only moral division of any significance in his works—and it perfectly summarizes the worlds of both Sade and Epstein. “Laws are null and void as concerns scoundrels,” wrote Sade, “for they do not reach he who is powerful, and he who is happy is not subject to them.” Both men acted and lived in accordance with that dictum.

If Beauvoir was right and Sade forces us to question “the true relationship between man and man,” then Epstein’s predations present us with an unalloyed vision of precisely how money and power twist those relations. To change that requires an utter rejection of Sade’s philosophical system, as succinctly expressed in a line from Justine: “My neighbor is nothing to me; there is not the least little relationship between him and me.”

We need not burn Sade, but neither should we praise him. His spirit still wanders among us, and we must use him to see why we have our Epsteins.

War Crimes are Crimes

 

From The Atlantic, Graeme Woods writes about the recent Trump decision to pardon American war criminals:

Two men accused of war crimes received presidential pardons on Friday, and a third had his demotion reversed. Donald Trump has earned jeers from predictable quarters: men and women in uniform who see these pardons as cheapening their oaths and dishonoring their service; fans of human rights and justice for victims; and, of course, people who simply dislike the president and consider his decisions defective by default.

Trump’s loudest defender is a Fox News correspondent, Pete Hegseth, who lobbied for these interventions and received advance word of them from Trump himself. Hegseth, a decorated veteran, argued that these men were betrayed by elements of the Department of Defense who hobble our “warfighters” with burdensome legal obligations. “If they make one tiny mistake,” Hegseth said on the air, “then a lawyer in the Pentagon is going to Monday-morning quarterback them.” The recipients of these pardons are “military heroes, accused or convicted of war crimes,” he claimed, correcting himself seconds later. “So-called war crimes.”

The backtracking wasn’t necessary: The actions these men were accused of most definitely qualify as war crimes. Killing three guys on a motorcycle when they are far away and carrying nothing more deadly than a cucumber—that’s a war crime. Killing old men and little girls with a sniper rifle is a war crime. Killing a prisoner with a hunting knife is a war crime. Waiting for an unarmed man to walk past you, then shooting him, is a war crime. Many of these actions, in addition to being unambiguous war crimes, just sound murderous and wicked on their face, which is probably why Hegseth almost never mentions them. He never goes into detail about the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was acquitted of murder but convicted of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter. His demotion, since reversed, was his only real punishment—but his fellow warfighters found his ways so sickening that they reported him to their commanders and conferred about how to manage the apparent psychopath in their midst. “The president believes it should be commanders on the ground making these decisions,” Hegseth said. “And ultimately the benefit of the doubt should go to the guys pulling the trigger, especially when [critics] view these killings as politically incorrect.”

 

Pieces Falling Together

From TalkingPoints.com blog:

As I signaled last night, the seemingly accidental redaction error in the Manafort legal filing combined with the news published mid-evening by The New York Times is one of the biggest revelations in more than two years of the Trump/Russia scandal. It’s bigger than the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, though the two cases can’t be fully understood without reference to each other. Just as importantly, these new revelations combined with earlier reports effectively end the debate about whether there was ‘collusion’ between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. There was. It wasn’t marginal. It was happening at the very top of the campaign. The campaign manager was secretly funneling campaign data and information to a Russian oligarch closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, someone who had no possible use for such information other than to use it in the Russian efforts to get Donald Trump elected President.

Let’s review the key details.

According to the Manafort court filing, the Special Counsel’s Office charged that Manafort had lied about sharing “polling data” about the 2016 campaign with his former Ukrainian deputy Konstantin Kilimnik, a man who US intelligence believes is himself tied to Russian intelligence. Given that Manafort had also told Kilimnik to offer briefings on the campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, it was a reasonable surmise that handing over the polling data was meant for Deripaska as well. Then yesterday mid-evening, The New York Times confirmed as much.

Here are the two crucial paragraphs (emphasis added).

Both Mr. Manafort and Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, transferred the data to Mr. Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, according to a person knowledgeable about the situation. Most of the data was public, but some of it was developed by a private polling firm working for the campaign, according to the person.

Mr. Manafort asked Mr. Gates to tell Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and who has claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money from a failed business venture, the person said. It is unclear whether Mr. Manafort was acting at the campaign’s behest or independently, trying to gain favor with someone to whom he was deeply in debt.

It seems like there’s a good chance this information stems from Rick Gates, if not from Gates himself. However that may be, Manafort allegedly gave instructions to hand the data to Deripaska. The first paragraph suggests a bit more detail. It says both men – Manafort and Gates – “transferred data to Mr. Kilimnik.” This suggests that there were multiple transfers, that both men were transferring data and that it was presumably an on-going process of transfer. It’s possible that that sentence is just clumsily worded and it actually refers just to both men being involved in a single transfer. Manafort gives the data to Gates with instructions to give it to Kilimnik with instructions to give it to Deripaska. But that’s doubtful. What’s crystal clear is that the transfer to Kilimnik came with explicit instructions to give the information to Deripaska. And that’s enough.

Deripaska is close to Putin and he has zero use for campaign data about a US election, other than to use it for the then on-going Russian campaign to elect Donald Trump. Remember too that Manafort was in dire financial straits and Deripaska was hunting him down to collect a $19 million debt. Just last week Time tracked down the man Deripaska tasked with getting his money from Manafort. “He owed us a lot of money,” Victor Boyarkin told Time. “And he was offering ways to pay it back … I came down on him hard.”

This is all pretty clear cut. We’re not talking about vague conversations in which quid pro quos or campaign cooperation could have happened. It did happen. Manafort appears to concede passing on the campaign data. The Times appears to have reliable sourcing confirming that the data came with the explicit instructions to pass it to Deripaska.

But none of this can be fully understood without murkier but now quite significant information first reported more than a year ago. Signals intercepts from mid-2016 about Manafort allegedly working with Russian intelligence to help the Trump campaign was one of the key factors that kicked off the investigation during the election. This goes back to the very beginning. Here’s a key paragraph from an August 2017 report from CNN.

CNN has learned that investigators became more suspicious when they turned up intercepted communications that US intelligence agencies collected among suspected Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort, who served as campaign chairman for three months, to coordinate information that could damage Hillary Clinton’s election prospects, the US officials say. The suspected operatives relayed what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians.

This is, to put it mildly, pretty damning information. But anyone familiar with intelligence work will quickly note that it can’t necessarily be taken at face value. Intelligence operatives will sometimes intentionally feed false information over channels they know are monitored. In other cases, people will boast about things that simply aren’t true. Maybe someone is friends with Manafort and wants to puff up their importance with their Russian intelligence handlers or associates. So they say that Manafort is coordinating with them when he’s not. These are real possibilities.

So while the evidence is important and looks bad, it has to be interpreted with caution. But now we appear to have clear cut evidence from the other side that Manafort was doing precisely what was claimed: passing on confidential campaign data to a high-level Russian oligarch who Manafort knew from long experience was closely tied to Putin and the Russian intelligence services. There’s really no question about whether there was collusion. We have it right here in front of us.

120 Years of being a US Colony

From Workers.org an anniversary that was not touted by the media:

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico during the Spanish-U.S. war, which ended with the U.S. capturing Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and Guam.

July 25, 1898, was the day when U.S. ships, commanded by General Nelson A. Miles under orders of President William McKinley, landed in Guánica on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico. However, little is said about May 12 of that year, when 11 U.S. military ships bombed San Juan on the northern coast. This fact is important to remember, since the apologists for colonization want to dismiss the violent nature of the U.S. invasion.

It was clear from the start what the U.S. had in store for Puerto Rico. This was exposed in a speech Gen. Miles gave in Ponce, just three days after the invasion.

“To the Inhabitants of Puerto Rico: In the prosecution of the war against the kingdom of Spain by the people of the United States, in the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity, its military forces have come to occupy the island of Puerto Rico. They come bearing the banner of freedom, inspired by a noble purpose to seek the enemies of our country and yours, and to destroy or capture all who are in armed resistance.” (Author’s emphasis) (enciclopediapr.org)

This ongoing destruction, in the form of persecution, torture, long imprisonment, repression and assassination of independence movement representatives, has been well documented throughout the history of the occupation of Puerto Rico.

Anniversaries of invasion

Since that July 25, several events have occurred on this disastrous anniversary, beginning with the July 25, 1952, proclamation of a “new” constitution by the first elected Puerto Rican governor under colonial rule, Luis Muñoz Marín. What had been an official holiday commemorating the U.S. invasion was then called “Constitution Day.”

But this farce, called the “Free Associated State” (Estado Libre Asociado) or Commonwealth, was another U.S. strategy.

The U.S. was in the middle of the Cold War and had to appear as a democratic nation. When it explicitly had a colony, it had to give yearly reports to the U.N. and was seen as an imperialist nation. Therefore, the ELA was established to give the illusion of a certain “sovereignty” in Puerto Rico.

This was the reason that Rafael Cancel Miranda, Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores and Andrés Figueroa Cordero went to the halls of the U.S. Congress in 1954 and fired at the ceiling to call attention to this farce.

Another crucial July 25 was the Massacre of Cerro Maravilla. In 1978, two young independentistas, Arnaldo Darío Rosado and Carlos Soto Arriví, were ready to call attention to the country’s colonial status on its 80th anniversary. But they were deceived by an undercover police agent, part of the repressive apparatus involving the FBI against the independence movement. When they arrived at Cerro Maravilla, they were killed in cold blood.

Now, on this July 25, 2018, Puerto Rico is facing the most important legal challenge to its political status. What is happening now is the culmination of the process of destruction of a people that began on the day of the U.S. invasion in 1898.

In 2016, the U.S. Congress, under President Obama, imposed the PROMESA Act to make Puerto Rico pay an illegitimate public debt of $74 billion. Since then, the Fiscal Control Board — whose seven unelected members were nominated by the same Congress — has been dictating severe austerity measures aimed at dismantling the economic and social base of Puerto Rico. The imposition of this board is like wolves taking care of sheep, since board members represent the economic forces that caused this debacle.

This July 25, the federal court assigned to cases involving PROMESA, under U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, will begin to hear several cases relating to the constitutionality of PROMESA and its Fiscal Control Board. In effect, it will deal with the island’s colonial status.

Whatever happens, one thing is indisputable: The colonial situation has now been exposed and is no longer simply an issue of the “independentistas.” In fact, the outcome of the hearing might just reaffirm the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 2016 Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle case. The court ruled then that “the sovereignty of Puerto Rico resides in the U.S. Congress” or, more clearly, that Puerto Rico is not a Free Associated State with any sovereign power, but an actual colony of the United States.