Category: Foreign Relations

I Can Do This Pissing in a Bucket of Bleach………

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After screwing it up by using Fascists to stage an at best marginally effective coup in the Ukraine, it looks like the Obama administration is
trying to use new dodgy allegations of chemical weapons use to try to create support for US action:

The United States has indications of the use of a toxic chemical, probably chlorine, in Syria this month and is examining indications that the Syrian government was responsible, the US State Department said on Monday.

 “We have indications of the use of a toxic industrial chemical” in the town of Kfar Zeita, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

 “We are examining allegations that the government was responsible,” she told reporters.

Earlier this month the Syrian regime and opposition forces accused each other of carrying out a chemical attack in Kfar Zeita, located in the embattled country’s western-central province of Hama.

 Opposition activists reported that dozens of residents suffered from symptoms of suffocation after air units loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad targeted the town with explosive barrels allegedly containing toxic material.

 Yesterday, French President Francois Hollande said that his country had “information” that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has continued using chemical weapons, although Paris lacked proof, AFP reported.

 “We have a few elements of information but I do not have the proof,” AFP quoted Hollande as telling the Europe 1 radio station.

And yes, you can create chlorine gas by peeing in a bucket of bleach.

Unlike the (blatantly false) allegations that the Syrian insurgents lacked the capabilities to make Sarin, making chlorine gas is pretty simple: (Pee has a low yield)

  1. Run DC current through sea water.
  2. Collect the oxygen and chlorine off of the anode.  (This is why, in chemistry class, they used something other than table salt, typically Epsom salt or lye).
  3. Either cool the mixture to less than -40°, or pressurize it at room temperature to more than about 100 psi. (or some combination of the two)
  4. When the chlorine condenses into a liquid, VERY carefully collect  it, and put in munitions.

Note that the provenance of the the Sarin is unclear, with Seymour Hersh detailing how the Obama administration chose to very suppress significant facts to in order to justify their abortive attempt to create a justification for a bombing campaign.

Hersh’s latest, The Red Line and the Rat Line, details how many inside and outside of the US state security apparatus are accusing Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan of actively aiding the Islamist rebels in Syria develop chemical weapons capability.  (It appears that he objects both to Syria’s secular character, and wants the country to be a client state of Turkey).

Note that we have tapes of senior Turkish security officials planning an attack on Suleiman Shah Tomb, technically Turkish soil, so as to justify direct Turkish (and possibly NATO) intervention.

Count me as tremendously dubious of the latest chemical weapons revelations.

    Barack Obama is Not a Member of the the Reality-Based Community

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    The “reality-based” bon mot is, of course from Run Suskind’s description of the hubris and delusions of the Bush administration:

    In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

    The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

    Well, it increasingly appears that Barack Obama comes from a very similar place:

    Am I misjudging our time, or have we entered some accelerated cycle of American subversions, and then another cycle of coverups and disinformation that do not quite come off? In less than a year, the Obama administration has mounted four covert coup operations, all variants of the classic Cold War model, all costly of human life, all assuring us the contempt and animosity of many people for years to come.

    In chronological order:

    * The American-authorized coup in Egypt last July. In the disinformation universe, Washington watched at a distance. Since the coup, dead silence in the face of a blood bath, except for Secretary of State Kerry’s applause for the Egyptian army’s “restoration of democracy.”

    • In the war to depose Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the linchpin event is the chemical-weapons attack last Aug. 21. We are invited — required, actually — to believe Assad allowed U.N. inspectors in to determine responsibility for previous gas attacks and then launched another attack near Damascus while the inspectors were settled in their hotel rooms.

    * The role of the U.S. and its European allies in financing, fomenting and steering the direction of the Ukraine coup requires little discussion at this point. Rather bizarrely in the face of all we have on record, the Obama people continue to insist Ukraine is nothing more than a case of Russian overreach. As order unravels in the eastern sections of the country, it is important to bear in mind the chronology of events — and from the beginning, not somewhere in the middle.

    * In Venezuela, the foreign minister recently read aloud portions of intercepted cable traffic documenting American subterfuge. No, no, no: Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez, is just as paranoid as his mentor, and both were merely trying to distract Venezuelans from their economic problems. (Vigilance is always essential when Washington and the hacks marshal the “distraction” thesis.)

    Cuba could go on this list, given news of Washington’s operation of a social-media network on Cuban soil via the customary collection of front companies, except that intruding covertly in Cuba is so routine as to be (appallingly) unremarkable.

    And Seymour Hersh is all over how Barack Obama attempted to lie us into a Libya-type war:

    In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

    Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

    For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

    ………

    A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’

    In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

    ………

    In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

    (emphasis mine)

    Once again, what was sold as a strike for a specific purpose is actually being run as a flat out attempt at regime change.

    I am not arguing that Barack Obama is simply George W. Bush with a prettier (and smarter) wife. (At least not today)

    Rather, I am suggesting that, notwithstanding protestations of “Hope” and “Change”, Barack Obama is a creature of the political and bureaucratic institutions in Washington, and he lacks the inclination, and perhaps the power to challenge them.

    This is far more worrying, because it means that it is not the elected officials, who periodically must submit themselves to the will of the voters, but rather the internal bureaucracies of our foreign policy/war making apparatus who are approaching our interests from a viewpoint detached from reality.

    This makes our foreign policy missteps over the past decade or so an artifact of an ineluctably dysfunctional culture.

    When one looks at history, this is a place occupied by empires just before their death throes.

    This will not be pretty.

    Shades of “Nurse Nayirah”

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    Remember her?

    She was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter (and member of the royal family) who testified to Congress that she saw Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators.

    She falsely claimed to be a nurse’s aid when she had not even been in the country at the time of the invasion.

    Well,”Nurse Nayirah,” meet Liz Wahl, the former RT News anchor who resigned on the air:

    Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation as a Russia Today news anchor came amid a perfect geopolitical storm. She announced her departure from RT just as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.

    “I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” said the 28-year-old American reporter and show host, who worked at RT America for two-and-a-half years. “I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I am resigning.”

    ………

    Wahl’s Howard-Beale-like moment came just one day after her colleague Abby Martin, host of RT America’s “Breaking the Set,” committed her own on-air indiscretion. Martin denounced Russia’s military occupation of the Crimean peninsula, which had been part of neighboring Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

    Unlike Wahl, however, Martin didn’t quit the network; she is still hosting her daily 30-minute show. Martin’s decision to stay at RT drew criticism from the same reporter who landed the first interview with Wahl after her resignation, The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick.

    “Indeed, far from damaging the propaganda efforts of the Russian government, Martin’s momentary act of nonconformity plays right into the Kremlin’s hands,” Kirchick wrote in a March 4 article in Tablet Magazine. “RT will now be able to hold up her 60-second departure from the official script as evidence of its editorial independence.

    ………

    Case in point: The Beasts’ Kirchick—who got the first interview with Wahl and was critical of Martin after she remained at RT—gets his paychecks from the neoconservative Foreign Policy Institute, where he is a Fellow. FPI has been described as a renascent version of the Project for the New American Century, which is in turn often described as one of the well-connected brain trusts behind the launch of the Iraq War.

    Note that the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) was founded by William Kristol, who founded PNAC, and

    A source from inside RT, who spoke to WhoWhatWhy anonymously for fear of retribution, had at one point “observed [Wahl] taking pictures of the office over the summer, asking all sorts of odd questions about my experience, and looking at Jamie Kirchick’s website while in the office.”

    This led the RT America employee to believe that Kirchick—with the help of Wahl—was planning to write a hit piece on the organization.

    A recently published piece by TruthDig goes further, contending that Kirchick and neoconservative allies orchestrated—in TruthDig’s words “stage managed“—Wahl’s resignation right from the start.

    ………

    A large part of TruthDig‘s contention that Kirchick and the Foreign Policy Institute “stage managed” the whole thing relies on FPI’s Twitter feed activity in the minutes leading up to Wahl’s on-air resignation.

    FPI’s feed that day telegraphed “something big might happen on RT” and teased “you’re really going to want to tune in to RT” within 19 minutes of Wahl’s stepping down. Then, as soon as Wahl made her announcement, FPI tweeted, “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’”

    Asked about the feed and timing of the tweets by WhoWhatWhy, Kirchick responded, “I am an employee of FPI. Liz called me [while I was] at work. I told everyone in the office to watch. We did.”

    Wahl corroborated Kirchick’s account of how events unfolded.

    The prevalence of this kind of sh%$ in the political and media landscape is why I try to get as much of my news as possible from overseas sources.

    H/t Crooks and Liars.

    Nope, no Fascists Here

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    The Ukrainian parliament is rushing to pass anti-gay legislation:

    Kiev is getting back to normal. Downtown streets that just one month ago looked like battlefields are now full of busy crowds and tourists. In one of the newly revitalized city squares, I met Olena Shevchenko, an LGBT-activist-turned-revolutionary. I had heard a lot of about her—an openly gay woman who managed to form a female-only military unit. Some call them the “Maidan Amazons.”

    Olena joined the revolution in its very first days, but the idea to form a women-only “sotnya” (a Cossack term for a group of one hundred fighters) came a bit later, as a response to rising sexism within Maidan (Independence) Square. The women in Maidan Square were being asked to make sandwiches; meanwhile, they had been building the barricades.

    At the start, Olena had only eight women in her military unit (mostly human rights activists from feminist or LGBT groups). But thanks to social media, the number rose to 500 people in Independence Square and more than 1,500 at other locations. (For comparison, the right-wing Right Sector, had around 2,500 fighters in downtown Kiev on a regular basis.) “It was amazing, because ‘feminism’ is still a dirty word in Ukraine,” she says, “the same as ‘gay.’”

    ………

    First, many open homophobes are still among the country’s top-officials. Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov (also a Baptist preacher) famously said, back in 2007, “If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy—you label them a progressive person. All of these are perversions.” Several leaders from the far-right Ukrainian nationalist party, Svoboda, have been given ministerial posts in the post-revolution government, including the vice-prime minister position. In fairness, Svoboda has toned down its anti-gay rhetoric in recent months. One of the party’s MPs, Yuriy Syrotyuk, called the first gay pride parade in Kiev “an act of aggression” against Ukraine in 2012, but now presents a more moderate, if still limited, position. “We respect rights of all minorities, but LGBT legalization will blow up this country,” he stated in an interview. “If we take this discussion to the parliament, not only Crimea will secede, but Ukrainian provinces will also start to leave the country.”

    The new government is also actively trying to block an anti-discrimination law that would protect LGBT people in workplaces. This piece of legislation, pushed as part of integration talks with EU is, frankly, the only progressive thing to happen for the local gay community since 1991, when Ukraine became the first post-Soviet country to decriminalize homosexuality. (Some opponents of the law argue that support for it would give Russia a cart-blanche; in the past, the Kremlin has showed amazing capabilities to organize quickly and effectively against any kind of gay movement inside Ukraine.) Now, a law similar to the Russian’s “gay propaganda” law—which criminalizes even discussion of gay rights—is pending in the Ukrainian parliament.

    (emphasis mine)

    These are the folks that our foreign policy and intelligence allied with to drive out Yanukovych.

    This is the Wrong Way to Do this

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    We now have a report that the US is having discussions with Israel about having Jonathan Pollard released as a way to move along the Middle East peace process:

    The United States is talking with Israel about the possibility of releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard early from his life sentence as an incentive in the troubled Mideast peace negotiations, a person familiar with the situation said Monday. Such an extraordinary step would show the urgency of U.S. efforts to keep negotiations alive.

    The person cautioned that a Pollard release — which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous refusals — was far from certain and that discussions with Israel on the matter were continuing. The person spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the negotiations on the record.

    In return for such a release, Israel would have to undertake significant concessions to the Palestinians. Such concessions could include some kind of freeze on Israeli settlements in disputed territory, the release of Palestinian prisoners beyond those Israel has already agreed to and a guarantee that Israel would stay at the negotiating table beyond an end-of-April deadline.

    First, this is stupid on the part of the US.

    Netanyahu really does not care about Pollard beyond the political benefits he can derive from securing his releases.

    More importantly, there is a protocol to such things.

    Even among those most opposed to his release, there is acceptance of his release as a part of a spy swap, as this is the socially acceptable way to do this within the intelligence community.

    The Koch Suckers at the Cato Institute Just Came Out Against Investor-State Dispute Settlements

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    Yes, Cato has come out against the the ISDS, that secret court that allows private entities to sue countries under arbitrary rules slanted in favor of investors.

    This is kind of like Ford recommending General Motors pickup trucks for consumers:

    Faced with an increasingly vocal opposition to a landmark EU-US trade agreement, a growing number of backers of the deal are starting to ask a simple question: might the future of transatlantic trade be better served if one of its most controversial provisions was simply dropped?

     Almost nine months after negotiations opened with great hope and fanfare, opponents of the mooted Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, are rallying against a plan that would allow private investors to use the pact to sue governments if they felt local laws threatened their investment.
    Environmentalists worry that it would allow big US oil companies to challenge France’s anti-fracking laws and other environmental regulations, while consumer groups fret that it would open the EU’s sacrosanct ban on genetically modified organisms to a challenge from American agribusiness.

     The concerns in Europe over the inclusion of an “investor-state dispute settlement”, or ISDS, mechanism grew so loud earlier this year that Karel De Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, announced he would suspend negotiations on the relevant text to hold public consultations.

     But in recent weeks, as both sides have been preparing for Monday’s resumption of negotiations in Brussels, the opposition has spread beyond the traditional sceptics.

     In a paper released last week, Daniel Ikenson, director of the trade programme at the conservative Cato Institute, argued that the investor protection measure had become too toxic. And that in order to defuse the growing opposition, negotiators should simply drop what seemed like a superfluous provision.

     “ISDS is not even essential to the task of freeing trade. So why burden the effort by carrying needless baggage?” Mr Ikenson wrote in his paper, which called for the US to drop ISDS provisions from its push for a 12-country Pacific Rim deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well.

    Cato, and the Kochs, are all about enforcing the primacy of the holders of capital over that of democratically elected government, so this turn around is a big deal, and it’s a good thing.

    In an era of historically low tariffs, these increasingly anti-sovereignty provisions in trade deals are being viewed with well justified suspicion.

    The old argument, “Because ……… Free Trade,” is simply no longer enough to justify trade deals with draconian IP and investor protections.

    It’s a welcome side effect of the financial meltdown.

    Oh Crap

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    Russia has annexed the Crimea.

    This is going to be a complete clusterf%$3 for everyone involved, particularly the people of the Ukraine, about whom all the actors profess to care.

    There is a lot of blame to allocate:

    • Some of it goes to Vladimir Putin, because, after all, he is the one sending troops.
    • Some of it also goes to the EU, which is so hell bent on expansion that it ignored the nature of its premature attempts to bring the Ukraine into its its orbit because ……… Europe.
    • Viktor Yanukovych for his abject corruption and venality.
    • Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko for their abject corruption and venality, which is what got Yanukovych elected.
    • The oligarchs, because ……… oligarchs.

    That being said, the decision to support and bolster the Fascists in the Svoboda party and the Right Sector militia, and make them the tip of the spear in the protests that drove Yanukovych from power after a deal had already been cut, tripping every switch in Russian psyche, that wasn’t any of them.

    That was us.  That was neocon Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland and our State Department, and our CIA, and our front groups like the National Endowment for Democracy that put the Fascists in control of the defense and interior portfolios in the new government.

    The Neocons have been wrong about everything since before they were Republicans, when they were staffers for Scoop Jackson’s (D-WA) staff, and yet they continue to drive our foreign policy decisions.

    Where are the “Adults in the Room” who are supposed to keep the metaphorical firearms out of the metaphorical hands of metaphorical children (neocons)?

    Theoretically, Barack Obama, who won the primaries, and later election as president, over his opposition to “stupid wars”, and so should be keeping these people’s hands away from the reigns of power.

    The fact that Nuland was promoted from spokesman to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs by Secretary of State John Kerry, but Obama is in charge, and the decision to place a former Cheney aide in such a position is ultimately his decision.

    Or, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point, the Cossacks work for the Czar, which is kind of ironic, because the Cossacks actually come from the Ukraine.

      Thank You Victoria Nuland

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      Thanks to neocon support right-wing nationalists Ukraine, courtesy of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, Ur-neocon Robert Kagan’s wife, a deal got killed, and there was coup in the Ukraine, followed by anti-ethnic Russian legislation, which was in turn followed by the Russian occupation of the Crimea.

      Well, now we have an overwhelming vote for the Crimea to join Russia:

      Russian state media said Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia on Sunday, as Kiev accused Moscow of pouring forces into the peninsula and warned separatist leaders “the ground will burn under their feet”.

      With over half the votes counted, 95.5 percent had chosen the option of annexation by Moscow, the head of the referendum commission, Mikhail Malyshev, said two hours after polls closed. Turnout was 83 percent, he added – a high figure given that many who opposed the move had said they would boycott the vote.

      Western powers and leaders in Kiev denounced it as a sham.

      Underlining how Moscow’s military takeover of the peninsula two weeks ago has driven Russia and the West into a crisis with echoes of the Cold War, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama spoke by telephone and, according to the Kremlin, the Russian and U.S. presidents agreed on a need to cooperate to stabilize Ukraine.

      This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland, and those who have decided to employ her in (Obama, Clinton, Kerry) need to realize that neocon triumphulism has been a recipe for a US foreign policy disaster.

      I’m not saying that neocons should not be employed by the State Department, but I am saying that they should not be put in positions of authority.

      Witness how we are now repeating the South Ossetia debacle all over again.

      It’s like giving an AK-47 to a hyperactive 6-year old child.

      No Virginia, Trade Deals Do Not Require Draconian IP Restrictions

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      Case in point, Canada and South Korea, who signed a free trade agreement without an all encompassing over-broad IP regime:

      Canada and South Korea announced agreement on a comprehensive trade agreement earlier today. The focus is understandably on tariff issues, but the agreement also contains a full chapter on intellectual property (note that the governments have only released summaries of the agreement, not the full text, which is still being drafted). The IP chapter is significant for what it does not include. Unlike many other trade deals – particularly those involving the U.S., European Union, and Australia – the Canada-South Korea deal is content to leave domestic intellectual property rules largely untouched. The approach is to reaffirm the importance of intellectual property and ensure that both countries meet their international obligations, but not to use trade agreements as a backdoor mechanism to increase IP protections.
      Yesterday I noted that Canada might be asked to increase the term of copyright protection given that South Korea had agreed to longer copyright terms in its recent agreements with the European Union, Australia, and the U.S. In fact, the U.S. agreement contains extensive additional side letters on Internet provider liability, enforcement, and online piracy.  The Canada – South Korea deal rejects that approach with copyright, trademark, patent, and enforcement rules that are all consistent with current Canadian law (plus the coming border measures provisions in Bill C-8). 
      On copyright, the summary states the agreement:

      • reflects Canada’s regime as updated by the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act, which brought Canada into compliance with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s two Internet treaties;


      • reiterates existing aspects of Canada’s regime, including the protection of technological protection measures (technology designed to protect copyrighted material), protection of rights management information, and special measures against copyright infringers on the Internet (no change to Canada’s notice and notice regime, which defines the responsibility of Internet service providers in respect of copyrighted material on their networks).

      The specific reference to notice-and-notice is important since it confirms no takedown requirements nor three-strikes rules. The specific measures against copyright infringers may be interpreted as Canada’s enabler provision that targets websites that facilitate infringement. Moreover, the references to reflecting Canada’s regime indicates that there is no copyright term extension or other substantive changes.

      No copyright erxtensions.  No requirement that the other countries accept evergreening of drugs.

      IP sanity.  What a concept.

      H/t Slashdot.

      Ukraine: Sniper Theory Leaves Tinfoil Hat Territory

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      We have another leaked conversation between high level diplomats involving the Ukraine, in this case Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton.

      The big story in this discussion, a lot bigger than Victoria Nuland’s, “F%$3 the EU,” comment is Paet’s statement that sources on the ground strongly implied that the snipers at the protests were from the opposition, not Yanukovich:

      A leaked phone call between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet has revealed that the two discussed a conspiracy theory that blamed the killing of civilian protesters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on the opposition rather than the ousted government.

      The 11-minute conversation was posted on YouTube – it is the second time in a month that telephone calls between western diplomats discussing Ukraine have been bugged.

      In the call, Paet said he had been told snipers responsible for killing police and civilians in Kiev last month were protest movement provocateurs rather than supporters of then-president Viktor Yanukovych. Ashton responds: “I didn’t know … Gosh.”

      The leak came a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said the snipers may have been opposition provocateurs. The Kremlin-funded Russia Today first carried the leaked call online.

      The Estonian foreign ministry confirmed the leaked conversation was accurate. It said: “Foreign minister Paet was giving an overview of what he had heard in Kiev and expressed concern over the situation on the ground. We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence.” Ashton’s office said it did not comment on leaks.

      During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.

      “What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides,” Paet said.

      Note that there is no accusation of blame for the snipers, nor for a cover-up in the phone conversation, but it does indicate that allegations that elements among the protesters were behind this bears further investigation.

      Also, Paet gives an eyewitness account of a member of the Ukrainian Parliament being beaten just outside of the parliament building, and harassment of MPs by “uninvited visitors” (militiamen), which would imply that there is a use of violence or threat of violence against MPs to ensure that they vote “the right way.”

      I do not know what is up in the Ukraine, but it does seem that this sh%$ is all f%$#ed up and sh%$.

      Your Daily Dose of Ukraine Related Incompetence and Hypocrisy

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      It turns out that one of the first acts of the new parliament in the “no-bigotry, ethnocentrism, or fascist parties here” Ukraine was to rescind the status of the Russian language one of the official languages of the Ukraine: (and note how this was buried at paragraph 5 of the story)

      Officials in Moscow continued Tuesday to express displeasure with events in Ukraine, if not as harshly as the day before. One bill that flew through the Rada on Monday downgraded the status of Russian as an official language, which struck critics as an unnecessary and incendiary move and which opened Ukraine’s new authorities to stinging criticism from their larger neighbor.

      Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, tweeted Tuesday, “We want to curtail the influence of radicals and nationalists who are trying to play first fiddle in Ukraine.”

      Note that this story was from February 25, 4 days before Russia sent troops.

      Do you think that there is any connection?

      As Ted Rall pithily observes that, “Millions of ethnic Russians in former Soviet Republics have suffered widespread discrimination and harassment since the 1991 collapse — and that their troubles began with laws eliminating Russian as an official language.”

      BTW, the person who seems to be deepest in our shenanigans in the Ukraine, you know, things like funding the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party the Pravyi Sektor militia, that would be Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who is literally in bed with the Neocons.

      I mean it.  She is married to Robert Kagan, who is not just a Neocon, but is pretty the much the ur-Neocon, having co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which has called for:

      • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein (1999)
      • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, because he was behind 9/11 (2001)
      • Called for American hegemony across the world
      • Repeatedly called for preemptive military strikes
      • Permanent U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia
      • Hostilities with China

      Yeah, he founded the group that more than any other organization put us in Iraq.

      And his reward for this? 

      Why, he is on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

      How do these folks, and here I am referring to both the Neocons like Kagan and Nuland, and Liberal Interventionists like the Samantha Powers, continue to maintain influence in our foreign policy?

      Why is an an uninterrupted record of failure, misery, and the death of innocents considered an endorsement for greater responsibilities in Washington, DC?

      It’s like promoting the guy who designed the Edsel to run the company.

      Quote of the Day on the Ukraine

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      Courtesy of Ian Welsh:

      I will be frank: the West needs to stop fomenting these revolutions.  Russia is not going to allow NATO to creep up to their border without taking action.  You’d have to be crazy to think that Russia was going to allow the Ukraine, including Crimea, to become part of NATO, and yes, that was the West’s (or rather, America’s) endgame.  (The Europeans think the Americans are crazy to be baiting the bear like this.  But the Europeans need Russian natural gas.)

      He also notes that since 1991, the official public spending on changing the Ukraine’s government has been 5 billion dollars.

      By comparison in 2010 California Senate race Barbara Boxer Spent $29,537,796.00, and Carly Fiorina Spent $21,521,397.00, for total spending of $51,059,193.00, (Link), and California’s population is 37,253,959, so the spending was $1.37 per person.

      So if you took the $5 billion that was spent over the last 23 years on the 44,573,205 residents of the Ukraine, you get $4.88 per person per year.

      And this is in a place where the media market for the whole country has got to be considerably less than that of the Bay Area.

      And BTW, much of this money is going to the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party and its accompanying Pravyi Sektor militia, which payed a large role in the current revolution.

      OK, I Don’t Have Any Special Insights, But Here are My Unspecial Insights On the Ukraine

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      First, as in Georgia, the Russian operation was well considered and well executed. This was a tougher job than was done in Georgia, because as I noted at the time of that invasion, there was months of Georgian preparation for their attack on Sough Ossetia, and the Georgian military had been completely penetrated by the Russians, so the Russian forces had months to prepare.

      In this case, it was all pulled together in about 1½ weeks:

      At first, it wasn’t clear who exactly the armed men were—spotted at airports in Sevastopol and Simferopol overnight on Feb. 28. But on March 1, the Russian senate unanimously approved a request from Pres. Vladimir Putin to use the military “on the territory of Ukraine pending the normalization of the social and political situation in that country.”

       The operation was already underway. Russian forces had launched a coordinated takeover of key sites, including airports, government offices, television stations and the two land routes connecting Crimea to the rest of Ukraine.

       Someone sabotaged Ukrtelecom, which provides phone and Internet service to the peninsula.

      Well executed, and John Kerry, aka the Clown Prince of Foreign Policy, has a response that is jaw dropping in its hypocrisy:

      Secretary of State John Kerry made the round of Sunday shows this morning to condemn Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine, warning Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the country faces harsh economic sanctions from the international community.

       “It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country,” Kerry said on Face the Nation.

       But in the seriousness of the situation, the irony of Kerry’s next comments may have gone missed. ”You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said.

      Yes, that WAS his talking point of the day.

      Meanwhile, the Ukranians are mobilizing their military, and a member of their interim government, and a member of the right-wing Svoboda party, Mikhail Golovko, is suggesting that the Ukraine will restore its nuclear arsenal.

      Needless to say, this is a complete mess, and there are not a lot of lessons learned at this point.

      The only one that immediately comes to mind is that the EU’s hasty moves toward expansion work against its viability and continued existence.  (The start of this crisis was the rejection of an EU deal intended to lead toward Ukrainian accession)

      A Correction:

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      While still feel that the the government transition in the Ukraine will likely lead to an upsurge in anti-semitism.

      The Ukraine has a long and inglorious tradition of virulent Jew hatred, and periods of social unrest lead to an upsurge in bigotry of all kinds.

      That being said, Mark Ames, former editor in chief of the eXile, a former Moscow based English language tabloid, knows a LOT more about the former Soviet Union than I do.

      One of the things that he knew was that Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, whom I quoted as advising that Jews leave Kiev, is a Chabad rabbi, and Chabad is really tight with the Kremlin.

      So, I have to question the reliability of Reb Azman’s pronouncements.

      Ames’ thesis is basically that the sh%$ is f%$#ed up and sh%$, and that teasing out alliances and philosophies is simply not a productivity, or as he sums up, “Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong“:

      ………

      Everyone looking for a proxy side to support or oppose in the Ukraine political dynamic will be disappointed. Ukraine politics go by their own rules. Today’s neoliberal ultranationalist could be tomorrow’s Kremlin ally, and visa-versa. Just look at what happened to the Orange Revolution—nothing. To wit:

      a) One Orange Revolution leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, wound up turning against her partner Viktor Yushchenko and allying with Yanukovych to strip Yushchenko of presidential powers; later, Tymoshenko allied with the Kremlin against Yushchenko; now she’s free from jail and the presumptive leader of the anti-Yanukovych forces.

      b) The other Orange leader—the pro-EU, anti-Kremlin Viktor Yushchenko—wound up allying with pro-Kremlin Yanukovych to jail Yulia Tymoshenko.

      c) John McCain has been the big driving force for regime change against Yanukovych, but McCain’s 2008 campaign chief’s lobby firm, Davis Manafort, managed Yanukovych’s political campaigns and his lobbying efforts in the US.

      d) Anthony Podesta, brother of President Obama’s senior advisor John Podesta, is another Yanukovych lobbyist; John Podesta was the chief of Obama’s 2008 transition team.
      4. Yanukovych was not fighting neoliberalism, the World Bank, or oligarchy — nor was he merely a tool of the Kremlin.

      There’s another false meme going around that because the World Bank and IMF are moving in to “reform” Ukraine’s economy — for the umpteenth time — that somehow this means that this was a fight between pro-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forces. It wasn’t.

      Yanukovych enthusiastically cooperated with the IMF and pledged to adhere to their demands. Six months after Yanukovych was elected president, the headline read “International Monetary Fund approves $15 billion loan to Ukraine”. ………

      ………

      The point is this: Ukraine is not Venezuela. This is not a profoundly political or class fight, as it is in Venezuela. Yanukovych represents one faction of oligarchs; the opposition, unwittingly or otherwise, ultimately fronts for other factions. Many of those oligarchs have close business ties with Russia, but assets and bank accounts—and mansions—in Europe. Both forces are happy to work with the neoliberal global institutions.

      In Ukraine, there is no populist left politics, even though the country’s deepest problem is inequality and oligarchy. Memories of the Soviet Union play a big role in turning people off to populist-left politics there, for understandable reasons.

      So Mark Ames thesis is that the political culture of the Ukraine is largely one of corrupt politicians and oligarchs grasping for advantage.

      This does not mean that Jews in the Ukraine are not likely to see harassment, because (as Ames notes) the ultra-nationalist parties were at the lead of the most recent protests, and because the history of that part of the world.

      The Shock Doctrine Being Applied Again in Venezuela

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      And the major powers in Latin America are aware of this and stop it:

      When is it considered legitimate to try and overthrow a democratically-elected government? In Washington, the answer has always been simple: when the US government says it is. Not surprisingly, that’s not the way Latin American governments generally see it.

       On Sunday, the Mercosur governments (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela) released a statement on the past week’s demonstrations in Venezuela. They described “the recent violent acts” in Venezuela as “attempts to destabilize the democratic order”. They made it abundantly clear where they stood.

       The governments stated:

      their firm commitment to the full observance of democratic institutions and, in this context, [they] reject the criminal actions of violent groups that want to spread intolerance and hatred in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as a political tool.

      We may recall that when much larger demonstrations rocked Brazil last year, there were no statements from Mercosur or neighboring governments. That’s not because they didn’t love President Dilma Rousseff; it’s because these demonstrations did not seek to topple Brazil’s democratically-elected government.

      The US has declared the Chavezista government to be our “Hitler of the week”:

      An anonymous State Department spokesman was even clearer last week, when he responded to the protests by expressing concern about the government’s “weakening of democratic institutions in Venezuela”, and said that there was an obligation for “government institutions [to] respond effectively to the legitimate economic and social needs of its citizens”. He was joining the opposition’s efforts to de-legitimize the government, a vital part of any “regime change” strategy.

       Of course we all know who the US government supports in Venezuela. They don’t really try to hide it: there’s $5m in the 2014 US federal budget for funding opposition activities inside Venezuela, and this is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg – adding to the hundreds of millions of dollars of overt support over the past 15 years.

      You can go to C&L for a more explicit critique of US foreign policy and our media’s lapdog reporting:

      Would it help your perspective if I reminded you Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, that Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil industry even more industries and that powerful interests have never stopped trying to take them back?

      There’s an alternate version, one in which the usual suspects (World Bank, IMF) manipulate the currency, drive hyperinflation, cause food shortages and subsequent unrest. Add the former ruling class, once made wealthy by oil industry corruption, whose now-grown children still harbor resentment and anger over what their families lost (much like the members of the Cuban ruling class who fled after Castro) and are leading the opposition.

      Netfa Freeman is even less circumspect.

      And then you have the attempt to make the thoroughly corrupt Leopoldo Lopez a into a poster boy for a potential revolution.  Despite his role in the 2002 attempted coup, where it appears that he was knowingly involved in the sniping incident that was used as a justification:

      Lopez played a key role instigating opposition demonstrators into taking an illegal march route towards the presidential palace, where snipers fired on protesters as part of the opposition’s plan to justify the coup.

      See also here for Max Blumenthal’s take on Lopez.

      Chavez was to a large degree a product of US Government meddling, but it appears that Obama and Kerry see the solution to any problems therein is more US government meddling.

      This is not only wrong, but stupid.

      If You Did Not Already Think that the TPP Sucked

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      The gushing endorsement of the international trade deal by corrupt subprime lendor, union buster, and enthusiastic Obama supporter Commerce Sec. Penny Pritzker should remove all doubt:

      The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other U.S. trade relationships are outdated and need an “upgrade”, U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said on Tuesday during a trade visit to Mexico.

      Attitudes toward labor and the environment as well as e-commerce and new technology have shifted trade concerns since NAFTA was signed, so the U.S. government is focusing on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would establish a free-trade bloc stretching from Vietnam to Chile, she said.

      “NAFTA was a groundbreaking agreement 20 years ago and it has served all of the North American countries well,” Pritzker said of the 1994 treaty between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. “But now it’s time to be looking at how can we upgrade our trade relationships.”

      In the article, she is described as a, “a businesswoman and heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune who has been a prolific fundraiser for U.S. President Barack Obama,” but that is a weak description of their relationship.

      She has bankrolled his career from the very start. She was his first patron, and arguably his biggest supporter among the top tenth of the 1%.

      She has also been virulently anti-labor in her business and public actions, and she and her family paid themselves big bucks as they drove Superior Bank into the ground.

      Between, her, Rahm Emanuel, and Arne Duncan, and the full throated support of all of them from Barack Obama, it is no wonder that I’ve concluded that the President is a corporate tool.

      H/t Crooks & Liars.

      From the Department of Double Standards………

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      I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

      The big news in diplomacy recently is the leaking of a conversation between Victoria Nuland,the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and Geoff Pyatt, the Ambassador to the Ukraine, regarding the recent political upheavals in that former Soviet republic.

      Diplomatic heads have been exploding over Neuland telling Pyatt, “F%$# the EU.

      America’s new top diplomat for Europe seems to have been caught being decidedly undiplomatic about her EU allies in a phone call apparently intercepted and leaked by Russia.

       “F%$# the EU,” Victoria Nuland apparently says in a recent phone call with the US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, as they discuss the next moves to try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine amid weeks of pro-democracy protests which have rocked the country. The call appears to have been intercepted and released on YouTube, accompanied by Russian captions of the private and candid conversation.

       Although the US state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, White House spokesman Jay Carney alleged that because it had been “tweeted out by the Russian government, it says something about Russia’s role”.

       ………

       State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Nuland “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologized for these reported comments”.

       She said that if the Russians were responsible for listening to, recording and posting a private diplomatic telephone conversation, it would be “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

      Well, first, I would argue that if a diplomat decides conduct a conversation over unsecured cell phones, they pretty much had it coming, and second, given the very recent history of the NSA targeting the sex lives of domestic political opponents of the Bush administration.

      If intercepting an unencrypted call between two people discussing how to intervene in political instability on a nation state bordering your own is “a new low in Russian tradecraft,” then there are simply no words to describe what the NSA has been doing against domestic critics of our government.

      Neither the EU’s outrage over the comments about the EU, which is a participant in the conflict, and therefore cannot be a good faith interlocutor on this issue, nor the US’s crocodile tears over being spied upon are justified.

      They are simply exercises in self serving hypocrisy.

      Barack Obama is Determined to Go to War Against Syria

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      Because we need to find some little country to beat up every decade or so.

      The US is now amping up complaints about the speed of Syrian chemical weapons destruction as a justification for military strikes:

      The United States on Thursday accused Syria of deliberately delaying the surrender of its chemical weapons stockpiles and jeopardizing a tightly timed and costly international removal and destruction operation that narrowly averted U.S. airstrikes last year.

      It was the first formal accusation that Syria was not cooperating with the terms of its disarmament after months in which international diplomats and chemical weapons experts marveled at the speed with which the process was being carried out. The public denunciation, however, closely tracked concerns that independent experts have expressed privately in recent weeks about the operation’s pace.

      ………

      Most chemical weapons experts agree that Syria’s ability to manufacture and deploy the banned weapons was destroyed last year. ………