The choice of President Joe Biden to head the CIA was received with bipartisan applause at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday. William J. Burns is a veteran of decades of skullduggery for American imperialism, in the course of a three-decade career at the State Department.
His 33 years in government, 1981-2014, included the Reagan administration, the first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the second Bush administration and the bulk of the Obama administration. During those years, the United States military invaded Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and US diplomats supervised paramilitary operations in many other countries, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ukraine, Georgia, Pakistan and much of Africa.
William Burns is sworn in before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. (Tom Brenner/Pool via AP) Burns played major roles in important theaters of conflict, serving three years as the US ambassador to Jordan and five years as US ambassador to Russia. In such posts, particularly, the State Department and the CIA are virtually interchangeable, both in personnel and in function. He was also at key positions in the State Department itself, particularly during the latter part of his career, which culminated in the number two position, deputy secretary of state, under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
In this position, Burns played the lead role 2013-2014 in secret talks with Iran, which set the stage for public talks in 2015 that led to the nuclear treaty signed the following year. By that time, Burns had left the State Department to head the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, itself one of the key institutions for the promotion of US foreign policy goals. (Named after its founder, Andrew Carnegie, the robber baron who once controlled the US steel industry, it has branches in Brussels, Moscow, Beirut, Delhi and Beijing, and acts as a reserve force for the State Department).
Despite the Republican denunciations of the Iran deal, none of the Republican senators on the Intelligence Committee made an issue of it during the hearing. Instead, there was fulsome praise for Burns as a veteran of the national-security apparatus who could be relied on by politicians of both parties. The New York Times described the session as “far more of a coronation than a confrontational question-and-answer session.”
The Republican vice chairman of the committee, Marco Rubio of Florida, praised Burns for his “lengthy and distinguished career” and said he would regard him “as a partner.” Roy Blunt of Missouri, chairman of the Republican conference, said he would vote to confirm Burns, in a vote expected next week.
In his prepared remarks to the committee, Burns laid special stress on US policy towards China, saying, “If confirmed, four crucial and interrelated priorities will shape my approach to leading CIA: China, technology, people and partnerships.” He laid less stress on what he described as “an aggressive Russia, a provocative North Korea and a hostile Iran,” indicating that these countries did not provide a challenge of the same dimensions as China to the assertion of US interests around the world.
He told the committee an “adversarial, predatory Chinese leadership poses our biggest geopolitical test,” adding that he would seek to expand the CIA’s recruitment of agents fluent in Mandarin. “This is not like the competition with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, which was primarily in security and ideological terms,” he said. “This is an adversary that is extraordinarily ambitious with technology and capable in economic terms as well.”
Burns, who speaks Russian, Arabic and French, said that Russia was a “declining power,” but added, “Putin’s Russia continues to demonstrate that declining powers can be just as disruptive as rising ones and can make use of asymmetrical tools, especially cybertools, to do that.”
It is noteworthy that despite the pretense of vast, unbridgeable differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, Biden’s nominees in the national-security area have received overwhelming bipartisan confirmation. This includes Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (confirmed 93-2), Secretary of State Antony Blinken (confirmed 78-22), UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield (confirmed 78-21) and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (confirmed 84-10). When Burns comes to a vote next week, he may outdo Austin.
The bipartisan support exposes the claims of Biden apologists like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and his pseudo-left supporters, that the president can be pushed to the left by political pressure. In the critical area of foreign policy, where the global interests of American imperialism are at stake, Biden has selected a team that consists largely of warmongers and their apologists.
General Austin, of course, was commander of US forces in Iraq and then head of Centcom, which controls all US forces in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Both Burns and Thomas-Greenfield were career diplomats who defended the US invasion and conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq for more than a decade. Haines and Blinken were on the National Security Council in the Obama administration, the White House cockpit for launching US wars in Libya and Syria.
Personnel is policy, and Biden’s choice of national-security staff demonstrates the priorities of his foreign policy, with US imperialism now shifting its attention from the Middle East to Russia and China.
In his speech, delivered virtually to the Munich Security Conference last week, Biden cited, as though reciting proven facts, “Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and across Europe and the world.”
Appearing on a Sunday talk show, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the response to alleged Russian hacking, “will include a mix of tools seen and unseen, and it will not simply be sanctions.” The result would be, he threatened, that “we will ensure that Russia understands where the United States draws the line on this kind of activity.”
Biden is bringing the warmongers back to the White House By Andrea Widburg
For almost all of the Bush administration, Democrats were the anti-war party. They took to the streets, to the airwaves, to the print media, wherever they could, to tout their anti-message.
During Obama’s presidency, the anti-war cohort vanished, even as he dropped bombs, created terrorist groups, started wars, and triggered mass refugee movements.
Then came Trump, a truly anti-war president who was the first president in decades not to start a war. With Biden now the AP's declared president, leftists are openly thrilled about the military-industrial complex moving into the White House.
BLOG EDITOR: READ THE BOOK HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD. BUSH AND HIS CORRUPT FAMILY HAS BEEN ON THE TAKE FROM THE 9-11 INVADERS FOR 50 YEARS!
President George W. Bush was the last of the Wilson Doctrine presidents: He believed that America could “make the world safe for democracy” by sending her blood and gold overseas to kill totalitarian dictators. Of course, he didn’t spell it out in such simple terms, but that was the gist of his belief that you could end Islamic terrorism by bringing Western-style democracy to the Middle East.
In retrospect, it was a dumb idea or, at least, it was a failed idea. The reason we were able to use war to bring democracy to Japan, Italy, and Germany was because, by WWII’s end, we had blasted those countries into dust and were able to rebuild them from the ground up. In addition, we left our troops in place to keep an eye on things for the next 75 years.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, America didn’t fight to win. Instead, she repeated the mistake from Vietnam, which was to fight bad guys within the country while simultaneously trying to be nice to the ordinary people caught in the crossfire. As my father, a veteran of two wars, always said, you can no more "sort of" fight a war than you can be "sort of" pregnant. If you don’t fight to win, you’re losing.
The Iraq War turned around only with the Surge when Bush decided to fight to win, rather than wallow in a Vietnam-esque quagmire in the face of guerilla (and Iranian) warfare. The gains from those bloody battles might have lasted if America had kept her troops there for a decade or two, not to fight but to maintain the peace. Instead, Obama, the “anti-war president,” pulled American troops out of Iraq rather than acknowledge victory, creating a giant gaping hole that ISIS and Iran quickly filled.
BLOG EDIOR: YOU SAW WAR PROFITEER SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN AT OBOMB'S FIRST INAUGURAL GIVING PART OF THE ADDRESS. THE OLD WHORE'S PIMP-HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM HAS PASSED AROUND BIG BRIBES SO DEM POLS WOULD KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT FEINSTEIN'S STAGGERING CORRUPTION. SHE HAS AMASSED MULTIPLE FORTUNES OFF ELECTED OFFICE AND HAS VOTED AGAINST ANY AND ALL ATTEMPTS TO FIX THE SQUALID ETHICS OF THE BRIBES SUCKING U.S. SENATE.
Of course, Obama was a pretty deadly guy for an anti-war president. He personally targeted the victims of drone strikes in the hinterlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He decided to engage in regime-change in Libya, even though the execrable Qaddafi had already laid down his arms against America. Having toppled Qaddafi, Obama left, turning the country into a terrorist haven. And of course, Obama meddled in Syria, creating a refugee crisis that permanently changed Europe for the worse.
And what about the Democrats as a whole? From 2002 to January 2009, they were the anti-War party, taking to the streets on a regular basis to call President Bush "Hitler incarnate." (Where have we heard that before?) They turned the pathetic Cindy Sheehan, who had broken down mentally after her son died fighting in Iraq, into a saint, only to dump her when she ceased to be useful.
In January 2009, when Obama entered the White House, the anti-war movement stopped. Suddenly, American aggression was fine, contingent upon one thing: Samantha Power’s “Responsibility to Protect” theory meant that America could engage in war provided that the war did not confer any direct benefit on her. America’s troops would henceforth die as martyrs to the causes of other nations.
Eventually, America’s working and middle classes, the people whose sons and daughters were filling up the ranks of martyrdom, were done. They rejected self-styled elites using their children as vehicles for the elites’ own sense that, by sacrificing the little people, they were doing a form of penance for America’s sordid history of capitalism and liberty.
That’s one of the reasons we got Trump, who didn’t like seeing Americans die pointlessly. He made it clear to our enemies that, like Teddy Roosevelt, he would speak softly and carrying a "yuuge" stick. It worked. Despite the leftists’ certainty that Trump was Hitler, he was the first president in decades not to embroil America in new wars. Naturally, the Pentagon crowd hates Trump. A peacetime military doesn’t provide scope for promotion, nor is the money following the military businesses that give well-paying jobs to retired Pentagon types.
Leftists have now become the party of war. They are incredibly pleased that Biden will bring the military-industrial complex and pointless wars back to the forefront of American politics. Paul Joseph Watson, with his usual acumen, points out what Obama did to the world and what Biden promises to do. It’s ugly. (As usual, these Watson videos come with a language warning.)
Image: Refugees heading to Europe . YouTube screengrab.
Ten years since
WikiLeaks published the
US diplomatic cables
Today is the tenth anniversary of “Cablegate” when WikiLeaks, leading a group of partner media organisations, began reporting on the contents of hundreds of thousands of leaked United States government diplomatic cables.
The documents revealed the vast scope and global reach of US imperialism’s criminal conspiracies against the international working class, and the brutality and corruption of capitalist governments the world over.
Julian Assange (Credit: Newsonline, Flickr)
Of historic significance in their own right, the publications followed WikiLeaks’s extraordinary releases earlier that year of the “Collateral Murder” video—showing the killing of Iraqi civilians, including journalists and first responders, by US soldiers—the Afghan War Logs and the Iraq War Logs.
These publications earned WikiLeaks, and in particular its founder, the journalist and publisher Julian Assange, the undying enmity of the ruling class . A vicious campaign of slander and pseudo-legal persecution was launched against Assange that continues to this day. He is currently locked up in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison awaiting a verdict on his extradition to the US, where he faces a likely sentence of 175 years in the darkest corner of the American prison system, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Just a small sample of the diplomatic cables exposures gives a sense of their significance.
They revealed that the US had knowledge of and approved the military coup that toppled Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. American officials discussed the possibility of a similar overthrow of the Pakistani government in 2009 with the country’s top general. In 2009, Washington privately supported the military coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and worked to cover up the repression which followed.
US intelligence assets helped to engineer Kevin Rudd’s replacement as Australian prime minister by Julia Gillard in 2010, to ensure a continued Australian presence in the criminal US-led occupation of Afghanistan. Rudd was also targeted for suggesting America make minor accommodations to China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific region.
The cables demonstrated that the US government was fully aware of the torture, random arrests, and extra-judicial killings carried out by its ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. They proved Washington’s detailed knowledge of state corruption in Tunisia and exposed the government’s collaboration in abrogating the rights of Tunisian citizens detained in Guantanamo Bay. Governments in Pakistan and Yemen were shown to have collaborated with US drone operations in their own countries, responsible for the repeated massacres of civilians.
American officials were aware of an explosion at a BP gas rig in the Caspian Sea in 2008 but took no action to investigate the safety of the company’s other sites. Two years later, an explosion at a rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven people and created the largest marine oil spill in history. During the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the US successfully bribed and blackmailed poor countries over development aid to gain support for a watering down of climate commitments.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US embassies and UN representatives to gather personal information, including credit card and frequent flyer account numbers, internet passwords, work schedules and even DNA samples, from UN and foreign government officials. The only realistic purpose being to facilitate similar blackmail operations.
Yet more cables detailed the domination of the Nigerian state by Shell Oil.
Contrary to the claims of the US government that WikiLeaks recklessly endangered vulnerable sources named in the cables, a painstaking and collaborative process was established to review and redact the documents before publication. At Assange’s extradition hearing this September, journalists from all over the world testified to WikiLeaks’ “pioneering” use of encryption to protect sources and documents. The cables were scheduled to be released over the course of a year, on a country-by-country basis, making use of the expertise of local partner media organisations to ensure the appropriate redactions took place. In some cases, the US government itself provided suggestions for redactions.
Evidence heard at the hearing also established that it was Guardian journalist David Leigh who was responsible for allowing the release of tens of thousands of unredacted cables, which had been securely stored by WikiLeaks, in September 2011. In a hatchet-job on WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy , Leigh published the password to a secure online archive containing the cables, making them freely accessible.
Assange called the US State Department to warn them of an impending release but was ignored. He and the other WikiLeaks editors then took the decision to publish the unredacted cables themselves, since the documents were already in the public domain. WikiLeaks’s main media partners, the Guardian , the New York Times , Der Spiegel , El Pais, and Le Monde , used this event as a pretext to break off relations with the organisation and denounce its work.
The American government responded to the initial “Cablegate” publications with an embargo on WikiLeaks. Amazon removed the site from its web servers, PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account and Mastercard and Visa prevented payments being made to the organisation. Bank of America stopped handling WikiLeaks payments and Swiss bank PostFinance froze Assange’s assets.
WikiLeaks also came under a massive “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack, effectively preventing users from accessing its site.
Obama’s Democratic Party administration launched a furious salvo of denunciations, with then Vice President Joe Biden calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and Hilary Clinton reportedly asking, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” This opened the floodgates to a torrent of demands from Republicans and the right-wing media for his assassination.
Assange was subjected to a sprawling conspiracy, as Sweden launched a manufactured sexual assault investigation to secure his arrest. Swedish prosecutors were encouraged by the UK authorities who used a Swedish extradition request to arbitrarily detain Assange in the Ecuadorian Assembly in London, where he had claimed political asylum. Pseudo-left political organisations abandoned Assange entirely over this smear campaign, or openly attacked him as a “rapist”, despite no charges ever being laid.
In April 2019, the US, UK and a new Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno reached a deal to see Assange illegally seized from the embassy by British police.
Wall Street, Republicans and militarists back Biden campaign
Anyone who wants to know what type of policies will be pursued by a Biden administration in the event the Democrats win the November 3 presidential election has only to look at the social and political forces that are rallying to his campaign. BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN.
They include Wall Street, prominent Republicans and veterans of the Obama national security team.
Thanks to strong support from big business, the presidential campaign of the former vice president outraised President Trump’s reelection campaign in June, according to figures announced by the two campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141 million, while Trump’s campaign took in $131 million.
It was the second consecutive month that Biden collected more in campaign contributions than Trump, following a $6 million edge in May, $80.8 million to $74 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Trump campaign still leads in cash in the bank, with $295 million on hand as of July 1, as it had few expenses during the Republican primaries, where Trump had only token opposition. Biden’s campaign was effectively broke at the time of his breakthrough victories in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now has amassed a war chest of at least $125 million, according to published estimates.
ActBlue, the online fundraising vehicle for the Democratic Party as a whole, took in $392 million in June, shattering all previous records, the bulk of it in smaller donations and contributions from first-time donors. This is an indication of the widespread popular hostility to Trump, exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass protests against police violence that took place throughout the month, as well as his refusal to take any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.
But a major factor in Biden’s fundraising surge has been a series of virtual events featuring former President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which wealthy contributors were invited to give the maximum donation of $5,600 directly to Biden as well as much larger sums to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the political action committee favored by the Biden campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend $200 million by itself to support his election.
Under the terms of an agreement between the Biden campaign and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can receive checks as large as $620,600 from wealthy donors. The money is then distributed in smaller amounts to the campaign, the DNC and various state parties in order to comply with campaign finance regulations.
According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Trump raised $33.5 million from the broader category of finance, insurance and real estate. He was competitive with Biden among the real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of their own, but trailed badly, with only $7.8 million, from the “securities and investment” subcategory.
In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one , and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
Along with the support of the stock exchange and financial institutions, Biden is winning support from sections of the Republican Party. This includes the well publicized Lincoln Project, established by former Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, with the support of other former party officials like Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The Lincoln Project began running television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a right-wing foreign policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and Russia. One ad, released after the New York Times launched its fabricated and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL who attacks Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is titled “Betrayal.”
BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR POCKETS.
Another political action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,” consists of hundreds of former officials in the Republican administration of George W. Bush (the 43rd US president). They declare they are “choosing country over party” in the November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.” As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited sums of money to run ads attacking Trump or boosting Biden.
The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.
A remarkable article in The American Prospect —a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
It documents the creation of a strategic consulting firm called WestExec Advisors (named after West Executive Avenue, the street outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by two lesser operatives, Sergio Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power, UN ambassador under Obama, and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
These two recruited Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was widely expected to become secretary of defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she is once again at the top of the list for Pentagon boss under Biden.
Under Trump, Flournoy served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving once the 2020 presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger, and The American Prospect article details her role in advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon. WestExec principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member of Raytheon’s board of directors.
WestExec quickly made a splash in Washington with its launch party attended by top former Obama national security aides such as Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It lined up a list of clients so potent that neither WestExec nor the Biden campaign would release the names, for fear of exposing the fact that Biden’s foreign policy advisory group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big military contractors.
One particularly noxious principal at WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who, as The American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program of using drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition team.
While the former drone missile chief prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current advisers, with their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The American Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let alone disclose them.”
This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.
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