Tag: Foreign Relations

Another Stopped Clock Moment

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[UPDATE: I did not look at the date on the article.  It was from over a year ago, but he is looking at cutting its budget again this year.]

In Trump’s latest budget request, he is cutting the funding to the National Endowment for Democracy by ⅔.
Seeing as how the NED is, and always been, little more than a front group for CIA, this is a good thing:

Thank you, President Trump! Finally you have made a foreign policy recommendation that is logical, overdue, and in the long-term interest of the United States. Congress will probably reject it, but you deserve credit for making the effort.

Trump’s budget for the coming fiscal year proposes to gut the National Endowment for Democracy by cutting two-thirds of its budget. The endowment is one of the main instruments by which the United States subverts and undermines foreign governments. In a less Orwellian world, it might be called the “National Endowment for Attacking Democracy.” Cutting the budget would signal that we are re-thinking our policy of relentlessly interfering in the politics of other countries.

That kind of interference is the National Endowment’s mission. Whenever the government of another country challenges or defies the United States, questions the value of unrestrained capitalism, limits the rights of foreign corporations, or adopts policies that we consider socialist, the Endowment swings into action. It pours over $170 million each year into labor unions, political factions, student clubs, civic groups, and other organizations dedicated to protecting or installing pro-American regimes. From Central America to Central Asia, it is a vivid and familiar face of US intervention.

President Ronald Reagan established the program in 1983, following years of scandals that tarnished the Central Intelligence Agency. Soon it took over many of the tasks that the CIA used to perform. When the United States wanted to interfere in the Italian election of 1948, for example, the CIA did the job. Decades later, when Washington sought to push its favored candidate into the presidency of Nicaragua, our instrument was the National Endowment for Democracy. More recently, it has sought to influence elections in Mongolia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” one of the organization’s founders explained during the 1990s.

………

Because its job is to shape the course of other countries, the Endowment has become a darling of Washington’s regime-change crowd. Shortly after ordering invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush pushed to double its budget. That made sense, because bombing and organizing “peaceful” revolutions are two ways of achieving the same goal: forcing countries to bend to our will. Both reflect our insistence on judging foreign governments, deciding which may survive and which must be attacked.

Leaders of the Endowment include some of our country’s most militant interventionists. One of its board members is Elliott Abrams, who helped direct anti-Sandinista projects in Nicaragua during the 1980s and was later convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. Another is Victoria Nuland, who as assistant secretary of state in 2016 flew to Ukraine to encourage protesters to overthrow their government.

The US efforts at regime change have been a constant source of misery for their targets, and a constant source of blow-back for US foreign policy goals.

The only thing wrong about reducing the budget of the NED by ⅔ is that it’s not been completely defunded.

Yemen War Powers Resolution Passes House

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Trump has strongly opposed this, so a veto is likely, but the War Powers Act resolution requiring a US withdrawal from Yemen is the proverbial big f%$#ing deal:

The effort was a top priority for House Democrats after they took control in January amid a worsening humanitarian crisis on the ground in Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels have sought to overthrow the country’s government, prompting a Saudi bombing campaign that has lasted nearly four years.

It also reflects broad dissatisfaction on Capitol Hill with Trump’s foreign policy — in particular, his posture toward Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

“The president will have to face the reality that Congress is no longer going to ignore its constitutional obligations when it comes to foreign policy,” said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The situation in Yemen is appalling, and the actions, politics, and ideology of our erstwhile ally, the House of Saud, is even more appalling.

Our continued support for the maniacs in Riyadh serves no one but a handful of psychopathic royals.

Listen to Admiral Ackbar

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This is not a good faith offer. May is incompetent, and her only governing principle is her repeated attempts to appeal to racists for political advantage. (See the Windrush scandal)

She has lost all credibility, and most of her influence with, her own party.

She literally has nothing to offer, and the only reason to do this is as part of an attempt to somehow paint Labour in the most vile and racist manner.

Listen to Admiral Ackbar.

Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday broke with her own party, appealing to the opposition to work with her on a plan in a move that could keep Britain closely tied to the European Union after the country leaves the bloc.

Mrs. May made the announcement after her cabinet had met for seven hours, amid a growing sense of crisis. With only 10 days left until Britain is due to leave the European Union, she also said she would ask leaders of the bloc for an extension.

A seven hour cabinet meeting?  That doesn’t sound good.

………

Her overture to the Labour Party could mark a turning point in Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European Union is known, ending months of stalemate between Mrs. May and Conservative hard-liners, who have adamantly refused to support the deal she negotiated with the European Union.

……….

The prime minister said the withdrawal agreement must stand, even though Parliament has rejected it three times already. European leaders have insisted upon this.

Under the withdrawal agreement, Britain would remain in the European Union customs and trading system until at least the end of 2020.

………

Mrs. May’s plan had envisioned eventually severing ties with the bloc’s customs and trading system, and taking control over immigration from continental Europe.

Until now, she has refused to consider softening any of these so-called red lines.

She’s trying to make Corbyn her patsy.

Monty Python Abides, Brexit Edition

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I see the similarities

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has said that Theresa May is like the legless knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It’s an inspired analogy:

“Tis but a scratch.” “A scratch?! Your arm’s off!” “No it isn’t.”

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte likened Theresa May to a Monty Python character who refuses to admit defeat despite losing all his limbs in a sword fight.

“I have a lot of respect for Theresa May. She reminds me occasionally of that Monty Python character where all his arms and legs are cut off and then says to his opponent: let’s call it a draw,” Rutte said in an interview on the “WNL op Zondag” TV show, Bloomberg reported.

He was referring to the Black Knight (played by John Cleese, a Brexiteer) in the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” who, even after having all of his limbs cut off by King Arthur, declares “I’m invincible.”

I have no clue as to why May has not been turfed out by her Tory colleagues, but the Dutch PM has her nailed.

What a Surprise, the Venezuela Aid Story Was a Lie

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There was a confrontation at the Columbia-Venezuelan border over the US aid convoy 2 weeks ago, and it appears that the narrative stating that the Venezuelan Army had burned the convoy was a lie.

I would note that, until dozens of alternate sources had, and revealed the footage, the New York Times had bought into the previous narrative:

The narrative seemed to fit Venezuela’s authoritarian rule: Security forces, on the order of President Nicolás Maduro, had torched a convoy of humanitarian aid as millions in his country were suffering from illness and hunger.

Vice President Mike Pence wrote that “the tyrant in Caracas danced” as his henchmen “burned food & medicine.” The State Department released a video saying Mr. Maduro had ordered the trucks burned. And Venezuela’s opposition held up the images of the burning aid, reproduced on dozens of news sites and television screens throughout Latin America, as evidence of Mr. Maduro’s cruelty.

But there is a problem: The opposition itself, not Mr. Maduro’s men, appears to have set the cargo alight accidentally.

Unpublished footage obtained by The New York Times and previously released tapes — including footage released by the Colombian government, which has blamed Mr. Maduro for the fire — allowed for a reconstruction of the incident. It suggests that a Molotov cocktail thrown by an antigovernment protester was the most likely trigger for the blaze.

At one point, a homemade bomb made from a bottle is hurled toward the police, who were blocking a bridge connecting Colombia and Venezuela to prevent the aid trucks from getting through.

But the rag used to light the Molotov cocktail separates from the bottle, flying toward the aid truck instead.

Half a minute later, that truck is in flames.

The same protester can be seen 20 minutes earlier, in a different video, hitting another truck with a Molotov cocktail, without setting it on fire.

Accidentally?

This guy threw Molotov Cocktails at at least 2 trucks over a period of 20 minutes, and you are calling it a f%$#ing, “Accident”?

More like a deliberate false flag.

BTW, in related news, another New York Times story, about the widespread power outages in Venezuela buries the lede:

The blackout will further depress Venezuela’s already collapsing economy, which is being squeezed by bad governance, graft and sanctions imposed by the United States. The sanctions have affected Venezuela’s ability to import and produce the fuel required by the thermal power plants that could have backed up the Guri plant once it failed.

(emphasis mine)

This is why, when I want accurate stories regarding US foreign policy, I go to the foreign press.

Kind of Like West Side Story, With Nukes

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In the most ominous military confrontation between India and Pakistan since both tested nuclear weapons two decades ago, Pakistan said it shot down two Indian military aircraft over its territory Wednesday and launched strikes in Indian-controlled Kashmir, while India claimed it shot down a Pakistani fighter jet in the “aerial encounter.”

An especially volatile aspect of the confrontation was Pakistan’s capture of an Indian fighter pilot. Pakistani military officials posted a photo of him on Twitter sitting in a room, and they said he was being treated “per norms of military ethics.”

But Pakistani television showed a video of the pilot, blindfolded and apparently with blood on his face. India’s Foreign Ministry said it “strongly objected to Pakistan’s vulgar display of an injured personnel” and expected “his immediate and safe return.”

While experts warned that the clash could easily escalate out of control, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan told his nation Wednesday that he wanted to avoid war with India, saying, “Let’s settle this with talks.” There was no public statement, however, by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  

I really hope that this does not get out of hand, because there are no good dance numbers involving nuclear weapons.

Clearly, Ending a 69 Year Old War Is Clearly a Disaster of Unprecedented Proportions

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There is no better example of a complete and total intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American foreign policy establishment in general, and liberal interventionism in particular than Susan Rice’s OP/ED in the New York Times.

It appears that, in Susan Rice’s world, negotiations should only occur when the other side has capitulated completely, and putting the official end to a war that started 69 years ago makes one an enemy of peace.

She notes that Kim sees his nuclear program as, “Vital to his regime’s survival,” but seems to think, particularly as the US is fomenting a coup in Venezuela, that talking without further tightening of sanctions, which, incidentally, would likely trigger refugee flows into China, is somehow irresponsible.

In the words of Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon.”

Do You Know What Worries More than Iranian Nukes?

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The House of Saud getting nukes.

I am particularly concerned about Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud, who has shown himself to be both reckless and incompetent, having access to nuclear technology, and it appears that the Trump administration is determined to transfer advanced nuclear technology to Riyadh:

Top Trump administration officials have pushed to build nuclear power plants throughout Saudi Arabia over the vigorous objections of White House lawyers who question the legality of the plan and the ethics of a venture that could enrich Trump allies, according to a new report by House Democrats released on Tuesday.

The report is the most detailed portrait to date of how senior White House figures — including Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser — worked with retired military officers to circumvent the normal policymaking process to promote an export plan that experts worried could spread nuclear weapons technology in the volatile Middle East. Administration lawyers warned that the nuclear exports plan — called the Middle East Marshall Plan — could violate laws meant to stop nuclear proliferation and raised concerns about Mr. Flynn’s conflicts of interest.

Mr. Flynn had worked on the issue for the company promoting the nuclear export plan and kept pushing it once inside the White House.

But even after Mr. Flynn was fired, the proposal appears to have lingered. The initial discussions took place during the chaotic early months of the Trump administration, according to the 24-page report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee, but House Democrats on Tuesday cited evidence that as recently as last week the White House was still considering some version of the proposal. Democrats said they had begun a full-scale inquiry.

It keeps being pushed because Jared Kushner is in hock up to his eyeballs and is solvent only by dint of Saudi money, and also this:

Claims presented by whistle-blowers and White House documents obtained by the House oversight committee show that the company backing the nuclear plan, IP3 International, was working so closely with allies in the Trump political world that the company sent draft memos that would be needed from the president for the nuclear export plan to Mr. Flynn just days after Mr. Trump took office.

A week after Inauguration Day, the Democrats’ report said, a Flynn deputy for Middle East and North African affairs, Derek Harvey, met with the IP3’s co-founders at the White House, and asked National Security Council staff to include information about the nuclear power plan in a briefing to prepare Mr. Trump for a call with King Salman of Saudi Arabia.

………

Even after Mr. Flynn left the White House in February 2017 under scrutiny by the F.B.I. for his communications with Russia, officials on the National Security Council continued to push ahead, repeatedly ignoring advice from the council’s ethics counsel, the report said.

At a March 2017 meeting, Mr. Harvey tried to revive the IP3 plan “so that Jared Kushner can present it to the president for approval,” the Democratic report said, a reference to Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser. Eventually Mr. Flynn’s successor, H. R. McMaster, said all work on the plan should cease because of potentially illegal conflicts.

………

Mr. Kushner’s efforts continue. He is scheduled to travel to the region next week, with a stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to brief diplomats on the economic portions of the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan.

Here’s hoping that the House Oversight Committee is on this like white on rice.

Brexit, Now With Tits

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First, yes, this is British TV presenter Rachel Johnson disrobing in protest to Brexit, and yes, she is Boris Johnson’s sister.

Every time that I think that the political situation cannot get any weirder, someone in the UK seems compelled to say, “Hold my lager, mate.”

Seriously?

This looks like an ineffectual and desperate attempt at relevance, which makes sense, since she recently joined the Lib-Dem party.

In the Annals of Unconvincing Denials………

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An air cargo shipper and its client on Friday both denied knowledge of the small shipment of weapons that Venezuelan authorities said arrived in the city of Valencia earlier this week on a flight from Miami International Airport.

A Boeing 767 operated by 21 Air, which maintains an operating facility at MIA, delivered cargo earlier this week that included 19 assault rifles, telescopic sights, radio antenna and other materiel to the international airport in Valencia, according to a Bolivarian National Guard general, Endes Palencia.

The charge drew sharp denials both from the Greensboro, North Carolina-based air cargo company and a second company that arranged the shipment.

A lawyer for 21 Air, Alberto N. Moris, said Friday that the company was never formally notified by Venezuela of any arms seizure and had no knowledge of the cargo that was aboard its plane since it had been chartered by a second company.

“All of the cargo on board our aircraft was from the GPS-Air, who chartered the aircraft,” Moris said. The Transportation Security Administration “is going to investigate the party responsible for the cargo,” he added.

………

“Only a fool would try sending guns out of the airport,” said Cesar Meneses, who identified himself as a manager at the cargo shipper, which has done business with 21 Air and other companies. He said the arms shipment report was a fabrication by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to make himself appear as a victim.

………

Because there is no one in the US State security apparatus who has expressed interest in overthrowing the Maduro government. (Not)

The denials only added to the mystery of the alleged shipment — a mystery compounded by perhaps coincidental ties between the chairman and a key employee of 21 Air with a company that Amnesty International says once took part in a CIA program to whisk suspected terrorists to “black site” jails around the world, a procedure known as rendition.

The chairman and majority owner of 21 Air, Adolfo Moreno, has set up or registered at least 14 other companies in Florida over the past two decades. Among the people brought on to 21 Air when it formed in 2014 was Michael Steinke, its director of quality control.

Both men appear to have either coincidental or direct ties to Gemini Air Cargo, a company that Amnesty International described in a 2006 report as being among more than 30 air charter services believed to have taken part in a CIA program of rendition in which suspected terrorists were abducted abroad and taken to third-country secret “black sites” for interrogation.

There is nothing to worry about though, as the CIA has never attempted to overthrow foreign governments  ……… Right?

She Could F%$# Up a 2 Car Funeral

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I am referring, of course to Theresa May, who just lost ANOTHER crucial Brexit vote in Parliament.

Her level of incompetence is such that it invokes that old punch line, “You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”  (Yes, I am suggesting that she might be failing on purpose. )

The vote was non-binding, but it wasn’t even close:

Prime Minister Theresa May has suffered another Commons defeat after MPs voted down her approach to Brexit talks.

MPs voted by 303 to 258 – a majority of 45 – against a motion endorsing the government’s negotiating strategy.

The defeat has no legal force and Downing Street said it would not change the PM’s approach to talks with the EU.

………

The voting figures showed it was not just hardline Brexiteers that failed to support the government – a number of Tory Remainers also declined to vote, as more than a fifth of the party in the Commons failed to back the government.

Five Conservative MPs – Brexiteers Peter Bone, Sir Christopher Chope, Philip Hollobone, and Anne Marie Morris, and the pro-Remain Sarah Wollaston – even voted with Labour against the motion.

It seems that every time that Donald Trump does some remarkably stupid sh%$, Theresa May thinks, “Here, hold my beer.”

It Would Be Nice to See this Validated in the Courts

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In what is an extremely rare rebuke, the House of Representatives voted to invoke the War Powers Act to prevent further aid to the House of Saud’s brutal war in Yemen.

It’s good policy, and good politics:  The actions in Yemen are indefensible, and it shows  Trump’s pretense of opposition to foreign wars to be false.

While I do not expect this to go very far in the Senate, it does a good job of jamming Trump and the Republican Party up.

Well played.

It Does Seem to Be an American Tradition

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Another administration, another coup fomented in Latin America.

This is wrong, and it’s a distraction, we should be spending our energy on being outraged about Russian Facebook trolls.

I mean that literally, there has been an overthrow of a regime promulgated by the US in every administration since (at least) the Reagan administration.  (Honduras was Obama’s coup.)

President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela officially cut off dipomatic ties with the U.S. government on Wednesday—and gave American diplomats 72 hours to leave the country—in response to President Donald Trump declaring formal recognition of an opposition lawmaker as the “Interim President” of Venezuela, despite not being elected by the nation’s people for that position.

“Before the people and nations of the world, and as constitutional president,” declared Maduro to a crowd of red-shirted supporters gathered outside the presidential residence in Caracas, “I’ve decided to break diplomatic and political relations with the imperialist U.S. government.”

………

Critics of U.S. imperialism and its long history of anti-democratic manuevers in Latin American expressed immediate alarm on Wednesday after Trump’s announcement. And what Trump identified as “democracy,” critics of the move instead used Maduro’s description: “coup.”

………

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), called the latest moves by the Trump administration a “disgrace.”

“It’s acceleration of the Trump administration’s efforts at regime change in Venezuela,” said Weisbrot. “We all know how well that strategy has worked out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria—not to mention that hundreds of thousands of people in Latin American have been killed by U.S.-sponsored regime change in Latin America since the 1970s.”

I don’t claim omniscience, but I will say that should this coup be successfully prosecuted, the ordinary Venezuelan is going to  suffer, and the Venezuelan elites, along with Wall Street will loot the sh%$ out of the place.

This Just In: Jeremy Corbyn Can Count

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Jeremy Corbyn has been opposed to a a 2nd referendum on Brexit ever since the process started.

There have been a few motivations ascribed to to this with Corbyn’s mild Euroskepticism (true) and the suggestion that that the EU is fundamentally a neoliberal institution that is structured to dismantle the modern social safety net (also true).

Well, now we have what seems to be a more likely explanation, that Jeremy Corbyn understands the political dynamics involved.

There are two very clear data points:

As Labour Party leader, these have to be a part of his considerations.

Making Boris F%$#ing Johnson look like Ernst F%$#ing Blofeld:

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I am referring, of course, to Theresa May, who didn’t just lose her Brexit vote, but did so by a margin greater than any in modern history, and it’s the first defeat of a treaty in Parliament since 1864.

Jeremy Corbyn is calling for a vote of confidence, as should be expected by the opposition in any Parliamentary Democracy:

British lawmakers defeated Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit divorce deal by a crushing margin on Tuesday, triggering political chaos that could lead to a disorderly exit from the EU or even to a reversal of the 2016 decision to leave.

After parliament voted 432-202 against her deal, the worst defeat in modern British history, opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn promptly called a vote of no confidence in May’s government, to be held at 1900 GMT on Wednesday.

With the clock ticking down to March 29, the date set in law for Brexit, the United Kingdom is now ensnared in the deepest political crisis in half a century as it grapples with how, or even whether, to exit the European project that it joined in 1973.

………

More than 100 of May’s own Conservative lawmakers – both Brexit backers and supporters of EU membership – joined forces to vote down the deal. In doing so, they smashed the previous record defeat for a government, a 166-vote margin, set in 1924.

The humiliating loss, the first British parliamentary defeat of a treaty since 1864, appeared to catastrophically undermine May’s two-year strategy of forging an amicable divorce with close ties to the EU after the March 29 exit.

This is a complete clusterF%$#.

The only bright side for May is that she has left such a dogs breakfast of Brexit that none of the Tories want her job:

If there was any consolation for May, it was that her internal adversaries appeared set to fight off the attempt to topple her.

Seriously, she is making the Trump administration look like bloody geniuses.

I Remember the Cicadas

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Well, there is now an explanation of the “sonic attacks” against the US embassy in Havana.

It turns out that it was crickets looking for love in all the wrong places:

In November 2016, American diplomats in Cuba complained of persistent, high-pitched sounds followed by a range of symptoms, including headaches, nausea and hearing loss.

Exams of nearly two dozen of them eventually revealed signs of concussions or other brain injuries, and speculation about the cause turned to weapons that blast sound or microwaves. Amid an international uproar, a recording of the sinister droning was widely circulated in the news media.

On Friday, two scientists presented evidence that those sounds were not so mysterious after all. They were made by crickets, the researchers concluded.

That’s not to say that the diplomats weren’t attacked, the scientists added — only that the recording is not of a sonic weapon, as had been suggested.

………

Experts on cricket songs said the analysis was well done. “It all seems to make sense,” said Gerald Pollack of McGill University, who studies acoustic communication among insects. “It’s a pretty well supported hypothesis.”

When the American diplomats first complained of the strange noises in Cuba, they dismissed the possibility that insects were responsible. But short-tailed crickets are exceptional: They have long been known to make a tremendous racket.

I remember Brood X when it roused from its subterranean slumber in 2004, and it was deafening.

Tru Dat

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American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Myth

This is true.

Over the past 40 years, this myth has been a license for brutality and plundering on and scale that rivals the height of the British empire:

But it would be more accurate to say that this is who we’ve too often been. This hateful sociopath, immune to all human sentiments save fear and greed, devoid of all principles save a will to power, incapable of seeing the world from anyone’s perspective but his own — this is who we were to the peasants of Vietnam, and to the people of Jacobo Árbenz’s Guatemala, Salvador Allende’s Chile, Mohammad Mosaddegh’s Iran, João Goulart’s Brazil, and so many other fragile republics yearning to breathe free.

Two of the three DC area airports, Dulles and Reagan National, are named after psychopaths.

There is nothing more horrifying than a people who believe that God is on their side.

For the New Year, I’ll Be Rooting for the Isolationist Right

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Not the “Right” part, I remain a pinko, but the “Isolationist” part.

These days, the only people who seem to be opposing the the US archipelago of wars around the world are the isolationist right, as shown by this essay in American Conservative.

Unfortunately, the (very) few mainstream anti-War voices on the left are largely silent these days, because of the fear of being seen as supporting Trump, but we do have meaningful movement supporting a reduction of America’s imperial ambitions on the right:

The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team. But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story. They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone. The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.

The article is worth a read, as well as some serious consideration for the upcoming year.

Can We Just Give the Whales Weapons and Let the Chips Fall Where They May?

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On Wednesday, Japan announced that it was pulling out of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a step that will allow it to restart commercial whaling in the spring. The move comes after a failed attempt to get the IWC to set legal quotas for legal hunting by its members. For whales, the news is good and bad: the move with shift Japan’s hunting to its territorial waters, and away from the healthier populations in the Antarctic.

The plunge in whale populations in the 1970s ultimately resulted in an international moratorium on the commercial hunting of whales. The IWC allowed some exemptions for subsistence hunting among native populations, and left a loophole for killing whales in the course of scientific research. Japan exploited that loophole, sending large vessels to the Antarctic that killed hundreds of whales annually, with their meat ending up for sale in Japan.

But Australia, which has put whale sanctuaries in place to protect Antarctic populations, took Japan to the International Court of Justice and won a suit over the practice. The International Court determined that there was little to Japan’s claim that its whaling program was for science, as the country had never explored non-lethal alternatives or determined whether the number of whales it killed was appropriate to answer any scientific questions.

Japan has literally years of whale meat stored on ice, because even the Japanese don’t want to eat cetacean flesh any more.

This is a pissing contents engaged on the backs of aquatic mammals.

I’m hoping that someone blows up the whole f%$#ing fleet, but I’m a very bad person.