The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad by Islamist rebels in Syria has outside factions scrambling for influence with the new rulers, HTS, who are former members of Al Qaeda and ISIS. The United States is among the suitors, offering to work with the Islamists. But these love affairs tend to have an expiration date.q
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss the latest news from around the globe, including rising tensions out of the Middle East. 
On this episode of Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed a multitude of topics from around the world, including a new revelation about Google’s attempt to maintain its hold over the search engine industry.
The strange story at the top of the headlines—the current president and the most recent former president are both the subject of special-counsel investigations for taking home classified documents when they left the White House—rests upon two premises. One is patently false. The other is brazenly silly.
Americans believe their nation exists in a terrifying state of endless peril. Propagandized by popular culture and the media, we imagine that we’re constantly teetering at the precipice of collapse or subjugation, surrounded by clever and ruthless fiendish enemies hellbent on undermining, attacking and ultimately destroying the United States and turning us into their slaves.
The era of great invading armies and empire-building is over. In our world, borders are largely settled so empires are built via economic influence rather than territorial gains. Bigger countries bump up against each other at the edges in search of incremental advantage.
Fewer nations in history have ever been less at risk than the U.S. in 2023. Buffered by vast oceans and bordered by vassal states, enjoying total command of the world’s oceans, the U.S. is uniquely impervious to invasion. No nation-state has launched a military attack on the mainland U.S. since the War of 1812—and we started that one. (In an attempt to buy time, warn us away from the western Pacific and to convince us to drop our oil embargo, Imperial Japan picked Pearl Harbor as a target because it was located on a remote American colony that was not yet a state. The Japanese didn’t think we would care as much as we did.) The danger to the U.S. is from within: right-wing counterrevolution, secession, disintegration, environmental or economic collapse.
None of the “threats” we worry about—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—want a war with the U.S., much less to invade. When U.S. adversaries saber-rattle, their motivation is to dissuade us from attacking them. To paraphrase Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” we are not the one who gets attacked. We are the one who attacks.
The hysterical reaction to the classified-documents idiocy rests on a cartoonish worldview derived from watching too many Bourne movies. In the fevered imagination of political-thriller scriptwriters, we would be totally screwed if the wrong Super Duper Important Document were to fall into the clutches of an Evil Enemy of America.
There is no such document.
When, if ever, has a classified document ever been so explosive that it represented a serious threat to national security? Almost certainly never. The exposure of classified material can lead to the theft of technology or the capture or murder of intelligence agents. And when such breaches have occurred, they have been inconveniences that required cleanups and workarounds. They were not existential dangers to the American nation-state. Nuclear launch codes are changed daily, so it wouldn’t even matter if a nefarious foreigner were to nick yesterday’s “gold codes” off the president’s desk.
The problem with classified documents is not the possibility that Donald Trump might, in the ridiculously overheated speculation by mainstream media outlets that ought to know better, sell them to the highest bidder. The problem is that there are too many of them.
Overclassification is wildly out of control. Publicly-available news articles are marked “top secret,” Should we impeach President Biden over keeping some of these next to his car? Description of foreign cultural practices, like wedding ceremonies, are marked “confidential,” so you can be prosecuted as a felon under the Espionage Act for mishandling one. The U.S. government has kept documents classified for a full century; in 2011 the CIA finally declassified World War I-era memos explaining how to expose invisible ink.
“Everything’s secret,” former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden, remarked “I mean, I got an email saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a Top Secret NSA classification marking.”
Get a grip, people!
There would be no effect whatsoever if 99.99999% of classified documents were to be posted to the Internet. Since that’s almost certainly the case about all the documents found in Biden’s garage and at Mar-a-Lago, it would be nice if both major political parties were to drop the posturing over the presidents’ sloppy record management and focus on real problems that affect real Americans every single day: climate change, healthcare for profit, high college tuition, the prison industrial complex, brutal and racist police, unemployment, homelessness, unaffordable housing.
Where would the money come from? We could start by abolishing the unnecessary agencies that churn out those zillions of useless classified documents.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Censorship in mainstream corporate American media outlets is subtle. It’s not so much that they spin the truth. It’s that they omit pertinent facts and exclude relevant points of view.
So it is with politics. Among the tools available to messaging and framing experts is “flooding the field” — dominating the news with a blizzard of headlines in order to obscure actions they ought to be undertaking but are instead ignoring. That’s what we are seeing, or not seeing, from the new Biden Administration.
Donald Trump and his predecessors left behind a hell of a mess. But much of what you and I consider unfinished disasters to be reversed or cleaned up is to this centrist Democrat’s cronies and top administrators just business as usual, perfectly desirable neoliberal policy that, as far as they are concerned, can and should continue. Only one thing to get in the way of the continuationists: voters noticing what they are up to.
A lot of important items are missing from Biden’s executive orders and his early legislative proposals. He and his allies are hiding behind the usual fig leaf of “give the guy time, he just got in, he has a lot of stuff to fix.” But that’s malarkey. There is only one reason that issues near and dear to progressives couldn’t have been prioritized for early action alongside the over three dozen presidential executive orders that have already been signed: the White House’s agenda isn’t the same as ours.
Take the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. It’s an international embarrassment that turns everything the United States preaches about human rights into a joke. It should have been closed years ago. The inmates are all innocent as a matter of law (none has been charged in a real court) and should be released, to the United States if their home countries won’t take them or are too dangerous, and all prisoners past and present should be generously financially compensated and offered physical and psychological health treatment for the remainder of their lives.
Biden doesn’t care about Gitmo and we should hold him to account for his immorality. He has had almost nothing to say about this boil on the ass of America since he began running for president. He blames Congress for a 2014 law forbidding the military from transferring prisoners to the U.S., shrugs his shoulders and talks about other things.
Nothing prevents the President from closing the facility. He could do it with a stroke of a pen. Actually, the entire naval base should be returned to Cuba, from which it was stolen as a spoil of the based-on-lies Spanish-American War. Let Congress figure out what to do with its torture victims.
Considering how easy it would be for him to take bold and decisive action on an issue that would earn him widespread claim from human rights organizations and the international community, it is more than fair to criticize Biden for ignoring this huge issue in favor of the relatively trivial question of whether transgender women should be allowed to compete in high school athletics.
Another blight on our country’s international reputation is the ongoing drone war. International polls are clear; everyone on earth except citizens of the United States despises us for invading foreign airspace with assassination robots and murdering people who almost always turn out to be completely innocent. Like his predecessors, Biden is responsible for personally signing off on blowing up people on the other side of the planet for no good reason. And he could stop it with a stroke of a pen. It’s not like he’s too busy.
As with Guantánamo, however, Biden has been silent on drones. Biden’s new Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was an Obama lawyer who signed off on Obama’s drone “kill list” between 2010 and 2015. She also helped cover up CIA torture. “We know that in almost all cases that she said it was legal to put these names on the kill list, and people were subsequently killed by drone, including American citizens,” says CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. (Disclosure: I have been interviewed by Kiriakou and consider him a friend.) But the media doesn’t much talk about that. They’re super excited that this miserable turd of a human being is female.
On January 29, Biden ordered a mass killing by drone strike against Somalia. If he is “too busy” cleaning up Trump’s mess, how did he have time to do that?
The talking point that a new president is busy and should be allowed time to do what’s right is an effective but ridiculous argument. The President of the United States has a huge staff reporting directly to him; he can walk and chew gum and stand on a foot and bark like a dog at the same time. And if he’s too busy to do the right thing, he should certainly be too busy to do the wrong thing.
Progressives and other critics of the administration shouldn’t grant Joe Biden a honeymoon that he doesn’t seem interested in taking for himself.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Terrified political leaders watched the police who were assigned to protect them melt away. They fled as an angry mob of hooligans, riled up by sketchy allegations of rigged elections, stormed up the stairs of the government building that hosted the debates and deliberations of their venerable democracy. The rioters, reactionary right-wingers from the nation’s rural hinterlands, rampaged through the corridors of power, smashing windows, vandalizing offices and looting files and furniture.
Political elites deplored the physical appearance and comportment of the protesters. “I’d like to believe and hope that the actions of a mob high on narcotic substances will not totally destabilize this republic,” remarked a top official of a neighboring country.
This scene didn’t take place at the Capitol. It occurred at the “White House,” the seat of parliament and the presidential staff in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
In March 2005, the mob got its way. President Askar Akayev, the only leader of a former Soviet republic in Central Asia to have been democratically elected, fled into exile. The Tulip Revolution, as Western news media approvingly dubbed the coup, prompted the all-but-total collapse of the country’s economy and politics into chaos so intense that parts of the country have become a failed state where currency has stopped circulating. When I entered via Tajikistan in 2009, the illiterate border guards didn’t even have a stamp in order to mark my passport.
Stability remains elusive. Mobs similarly toppled Akayev’s successor Kurmanbek Bakiyev in 2010 and, in a barely noticed bit of international drama eclipsed by the U.S. election, Bakiyev’s replacement in October 2020.
Those Kyrgyz mobs of Muslim young men from the conservative Ferghana Valley didn’t materialize by chance in 2005. They were trained and funded by you and me.
Scores of CIA agents permanently stationed in southern Kyrgyzstan trained a bunch of hicks to overthrow a northern-based secular government that had annoyed the Bush Administration. The Akayev regime’s real sin? Not fixing an election. It was their demand for higher rent payments from the U.S. to use Bishkek’s airport as a base for bombing runs into Afghanistan.
“It would have been absolutely impossible for [the overthrow of Akayev] to have happened without that help [from the U.S.],” said Edil Baisolov, who led an NGO financed by the U.S. government. Freedom House, a CIA cover operation masquerading as an NGO, published anti-Akayev newspapers. The U.S. Congress allocated $12 million a year under the Freedom Support Act toward undermining Central Asia’s sole democracy.
“Hundreds of thousands more filter into pro-democracy programs in the country from other United States government-financed institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy. That does not include the money for the Freedom House printing press or Kyrgyz-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a pro-democracy broadcaster,” reported The New York Times. Bakiyev, the president who took over after the coup forced Akayev to flee, was himself trained in the U.S.
American media outlets loved the Kyrgyz insurrection. They grouped it with other CIA-backed “color revolutions” against the governments of Ukraine and Georgia, spinning the overthrow of Akayev, an intellectual physicist, as the liberation of the people from an authoritarian despot.
So please excuse me if I don’t shed geysers of tears over the traumas endured by the pampered lobbyist-fattened members of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate while idiots wearing horned Viking masks desecrated the hallowed hallways of the Capitol.
What happened on January 6th is infinitely less than chickens coming home to roost. A few hours of mayhem is but a tiny taste of the far greater violence and misery those 535 men and women vote to inflict on countries around the world. According to one study, the United States interfered overtly or covertly in the free elections of 81 foreign countries between 1946 and 2000. The U.S. tried to overthrow the president of Venezuela in 2002, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq where it replaced the local governments with puppet regimes, set off a war within the Palestinian Authority by trying to get rid of Hamas in 2006, and is currently trying to destroy Yemen, Syria, Iran and Libya, which thanks to the U.S. has become a failed state. This is by necessity a truncated list.
Here is true American exceptionalism. Our Congress throws billions of dollars a year at regime change operations around the globe but, with the exception of events like the 9/11 attacks, nothing happens here. Blowback is infrequent, relatively small-scale and never directly impacts the people who are responsible, i.e. the political class. Given that one of the few things Democrats and Republicans still agree upon is to finance the cash-bloated military, I don’t see that changing.
It would be nice, however, for the members of Congress who finance and arm the rampaging mobs that illegally overthrow the sovereign governments of other countries to take it on the chin when the same thing kind of, sort of, almost happens to them.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
It’s just like the Ukraine story that failed to impeach Donald Trump. Anonymous sources tell major newspapers that second hand or thirdhand source is based in the intelligence community, which is tasked with lying, that Russia may be paying bounties to the Taliban in order to kill United States troops in occupied Afghanistan. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but why pay attention to a story that has no evidence or sourcing?
Russia — OK, not the actual Russian government but a private click-farm company located in Russia — bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that that small fraction was divvied up between pro-Hillary Clinton and pro-Donald Trump ads. And especially except that $100,000 in Facebook ads can’t affect the outcome of a $6.8 billion election.
Now the same media outlets who touted Robert Mueller’s fizzled Russiagate investigation daily for three years is warning that Russia is planning to do the same thing in 2020.
Be slightly afraid. Very slightly afraid.
“Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment and affect government policies,” read a statement from top Trump Administration security officials issued in November. “Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions.”
Setting aside the question of whether it’s smart to take the U.S. government at its word — it isn’t — if Russia were to meddle in our domestic politics, we would have it coming.
To say the least.
Throughout its history the United States repeatedly attacked, sabotaged and undermined the Soviet Union. U.S. interference was one of the major contributors to the collapse of that country in 1991. So the Russian government that followed — the Russian system now in place — might not even exist if not for the United States.
Imagine being one of the freshly-minted leaders of Russia in the months following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. You have a lot on your plate. The last thing you need is a U.S.-led invasion force of tens of thousands of troops invading your chaotic new country, most of which is primitive and dirt-poor. But that’s what they got. It took three years to kick out our troops.
That’s a little more interferency than Facebook ads.
During World War II the U.S. and the USSR were allies against Nazi Germany — enemy of my enemy and all that — but even after promising to jump in the feckless Americans dragged their feet for three years before getting into the war, content to stand down as tens of millions of Soviet citizens died. FDR “deliberately made the Soviet people shoulder the hardships of war and hoped to see the Soviet Union bled white,” a wartime commander named Ivan Kuzovkov told Tass news service in 1984.
In 1962 JFK took the world to the brink of World War III because the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba, 90 miles away from Florida. Yet two years earlier the Soviets shot down American spy pilot Gary Powers in what became known as the U-2 incident. There’s no question that the plane was over Soviet airspace. It was an act of war. But even at the height of the Cold War the Soviets chose to look the other way. Can you imagine what would happen if Russia had done the same thing to us?
In 1982 President Ronald Reagan approved an ingenious CIA operation to blow up a huge natural gas pipeline running across Siberia. “In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” recalled a former member of Reagan’s national security council. The result was economic disruption, environmental catastrophe and “the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.”
Blowing up the equivalent of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was a tad more dramatic than releasing DNC emails. Not that there’s any evidence that Russia was behind that.
In 1983 Korean Airlines flight 007 — gotta love the subtlety of the number — was shot down over northeastern Russia after its pilot turned off the plane’s transponder and ignored orders to withdraw from militarily-sensitive Soviet airspace. KAL flight 007 had penetrated 587 km into the USSR, a world record for “off course” aerial navigation. It’s impossible to know for sure but given the close ties between South Korea and the U.S. at the time it’s likely that the airline allowed the CIA to affix high-resolution spy cameras to the plane. They gambled the lives of the passengers on the assumption that the Russians wouldn’t fire on a civilian airliner.
Another Reagan-era project involved economic sabotage. Because oil and gas were major Soviet exports, the U.S. convinced Saudi Arabia to ramp up production of its own energy reserves. Oil and gas prices fell globally, the Soviet economy went into a tailspin and U.S. taxpayers compensated the Saudis for doing them a favor. If Russia had purposefully caused the 2008-09 financial meltdown just to mess with us we would view it as an act of war.
In 1991 the U.S. got its way, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia transitioned to free-market capitalism. You’d think that the Americans would reach out to help. They did send money: bribes for the tiny clique of corrupt former bureaucrats surrounding Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, from whom soon emerged a new class of violent oligarchs. Ordinary Russians got nothing. It is estimated that between 2.5 and 3 million Russian citizens died of hunger and other causes as a result of the collapse of communism and the refusal of the international community to step up.
Talk about interference! The Americans worked hard to destroy the USSR. After they succeeded, when interference would have been welcome and appropriate, they left Russia to die.
When the U.S. worries about Russia messing with its internal politics it sounds a lot like psychological projection.
Or just desserts.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
