All US military bases (800 worldwide) are environmental disasters during and after departure. It is naive to think any different in Hawaii. 所有美國軍事基地（全球 800 個）在用期間和離開後都是環境災難. 在夏威夷認為有任何不同是幼稚的.
Red Hill Has Changed The Politics Around The Military In Hawaii By Nick Grube
After drinking water was found be contaminated with petroleum believed to come from the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility, political leaders in Hawaii have taken forceful positions.
Gov. David Ige ordered the Navy to come up with a plan to drain its tanks of more than 100 million gallons of fuel.
All four members of the state’s congressional delegation demanded that the Navy suspend its operations at Red Hill until the pollution is under control.
But for a long time, politicians were unlikely to take a critical stance on the military’s operations at Red Hill, despite a history of leakage.
But the unwavering support for the military from state and federal political leaders may be coming to an end.
“We’ve got a proud military tradition in Hawaii,” said Hawaii Congressman Kai Kahele. “But what’s happening right now and how the Navy and U.S. military respond to it will determine their future in Hawaii.”
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Statement on the “Final Ruling” of the So-called “Uyghur Tribunal” – The anti-China, separatist organization “World Uyghur Congress” 2021-12-09
The anti-China, separatist organization “World Uyghur Congress”, manipulated and sponsored by anti-China forces in the US and the West, has rallied a handful of anti-China elements to set up the so-called “Uyghur Tribunal”. They hired liars to make false statements and falsify evidence, in an attempt to craft a political tool to disrupt Xinjiang and smear China. This so-called “tribunal” is completely void of any legal basis and has no credibility at all. The malicious intention of its previous anti-China activities have been laid bare by facts and deplored by perceptive people in the international community. The so-called final ruling by such a machine churning out lies is nothing but a political farce staged by a handful of contemptible individuals.
Lies remain lies, no matter how many times they are repeated. For all the director’s and actors’ efforts in plotting and maneuvering, the farce has attracted a very small audience and received little echo. More and more people begin to know about China. Lies cannot cover up facts and truth, cheat the international community, still less stop the historical trend of stability, development and prosperity in China’s Xinjiang. This farce is doomed to be rejected by all and end up in the dustbin in history.
Can Media Be Independent if It Accepts US Funding? Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wed said the Biden admin has asked Congress for $236 million to support “independent media” around the globe (Color Revolution Regime Change activities like in HK, Thailand, Myanmar, Ukraine etc). 接受美國資助的媒體能否獨立？ 國務卿安東尼·布林肯週三表示，拜登政府已要求國會撥款 2.36 億美元，以支持全球“獨立媒體”（香港、泰國、緬甸、烏克蘭等地的顏色革命政權更迭顛覆活動活動）
Asian Times: Russia Invasion of Ukraine is a joke. Since US lead Color Revolution, Ukraine rotting from the inside, consumed by fear, loathing and poverty, will remain in limbo.
What Putin really told Biden Russian and US leaders dropped their respective rhetorical gauntlets but nobody really expects Russia to invade Ukraine By PEPE ESCOBAR DEC 8, 2021
What Putin diplomatically told Team Biden, sitting at their table, is that Russia’s red line – no Ukraine in NATO – is unmovable. The same applies to Ukraine turned into a hub of the Pentagon’s empire of bases and hosting NATO weaponry.
The root cause of all this drama, absent from any NATO narrative, is straightforward: Kiev simply refuses to respect the February 2015 Minsk Agreement.
Putin demanding from the US – which runs NATO – a written, legally binding guarantee that the alliance will not advance further eastward towards Russian borders is the game-changer here.
Team Biden cannot possibly deliver: they would be eaten alive by the War Inc establishment. Putin studied his history and knows that Daddy Bush’s “promise” to Gorbachev on NATO expansion was just a lie. He knows those who run NATO will never commit themselves in writing.
US President Joe Biden is about to fulfill a campaign promise by hosting a Summit for Democracy. Yet do the 110 leaders of states and regions represent democracy, which is supposed to be about people? “Democracy is about the climate of trust,” said Peter Herrmann (Herrmann), professor at the Human Rights Centre at the Law School, Central South University, China, and member of the European Academy of Science and Arts. Unfortunately, there is no such trust in the society of the US and other Western countries today. In an exclusive interview with Global Times (GT), Herrmann shared his views on democracy and the differences of democracy between China and the West.
GT: The Summit for Democracy is generating another round of debate over the meaning of democracy. How would you define democracy? Does the US have the dominant power to define it?
Herrmann: I think we have problem with the term “democracy” – taking this one term to cover very different conditions and ambitions. Today, one can question if there is democracy (in the US), although the US uses this term for the summit.
Democracy is always thought to be something from below – getting people involved and letting people speak. So why the summit is all about having the top level talk about democracy? Several NGOs are also invited and so on and so forth. But democracy should be more about listening to what comes from the people, instead of inviting the people for showcases.
In the US, you have some major players determining what democracy is and who goes to the elections and who has the power. This has been shown very clearly by former president Trump’s presidency, when he invited Silicon Valley leaders as advisors.
We have to be at least aware that there is not just one democracy. And democracy is something at local, regional, and then at the national level, and increasingly global. Today, there is no one country which should have the power to determine what democracy is, or say this or that is the model of democracy, which is valid for the world and benefits all countries.
GT: Some Americans seem to believe less and less in their democracy. For instance, the result of a general election is not accepted by the losing side. A large number of voters are convinced fraud affected the elections. How would you comment on the democracy in the US?
Herrmann: It is exactly the problem – you ask powerless people to execute once in a while an act of power through the elections. This is systematically from the top. This is not only a problem in the US, but in Europe as well.
Voting and electing is one aspect, the provision of information and canvassing in preparation is another issue and a different story. It has to be highlighted that democracy is especially about building political orientation and consciousness and responsibility.
GT: Why are voters getting increasingly divided? Why are more and more populist politicians elected? What is your biggest concern regarding Western democracy?
Herrmann: If you look at Brexit, for instance, there have been huge debates beforehand. And the debates had been highly misleading. If people would have known the consequences, if there would have been proper information, they would have voted in a different way. But they had been deceived during the preparatory process.
If you look at populism in Germany, there had not been many members of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) (a right-wing populist political party) in the Parliament a couple years ago. Strong populist forces can also be found in Italy, France – and the main problem is that people feel cut off, focusing on one single item: surviving and making the best out of the situation they are in. Populists manage pretty well in taking up on such demands: answering not to what is strategically necessary but to what finds immediate popular applause.
Take environmental issues. If I say parking has to be affordable, everybody will agree. But you have to say: Actually, parking will be more expensive, but we will have a properly organized public transport system, in which you don’t have to depend on your own car.
You can find there are many examples that the populists have managed to take some points out of context and convince people. What is needed is a broad concept of participation: How does this affect our daily life? It is not a one-off decision but a complex process.
Why do they take things out of the context? One problem is with representative democracy. Many of the politicians today are full-time politicians.
In the worst case, when they entered the political system, they were very young, and then sit in the Parliament for the rest of their life. They are completely disjointed from real life. They are not workers, or working officers, not doing anything real. They are, of course, interested in being re-elected. So they have this capacity to focus on the next four years in terms of how they could get back into Parliament. They are not looking at a longer and wider perspective. They are not looking for a strategic approach.
GT: Do you think this democratic system in the West could bridge the gap in their societies?
Herrmann: From what I see now, it is further widening the gap.
But I see more and more people are becoming aware of it. There are protest movements. There are claims that this cannot go on in this way and we have to find other ways. We have to make it working for and with and by the people. I think the general claim can be brought forward that we have to think about a different way of doing democracy, a different way of letting people having a say.
GT: How would you comment on democracy in China? What do you think is its biggest difference if compared with the democracy in the US or other Western countries?
Herrmann: I would say, democracy is about human rights. Democracy is about the climate of trust.
In the West, if there is something going wrong, when there are complaints in respect of the so-called liberal rights, political rights, there is a huge outcry, in particular when it happens in countries like China, Cuba or in Latin America. However, when the same happens to economic and social rights, no voice is being heard. In many European countries, hospitals do not have sufficient capacity, important surgeries are delayed because of the new waves of the pandemic. This is important for democracy: First and foremost, I have to survive, and then I can think about how I want to get involved.
The other thing is that of course it is not just about surviving. Human rights are about having rights to determine the own life, the way I want to live. This is about a way of living together with others.
What strikes me here in China is “trust.” When I arrived here, I didn’t have my own telephone number, I could not surf the internet. People gave me the internet connection. All I did on the internet had been on their record. They trust me that I would not abuse it.
I see other small things like this. Food is ordered and left on the table, in a large room or on the fences (by delivery guys). You would not trust anybody in Europe doing this. But here, people trust that other won’t take it.
Human rights are about trust and trust is about having conditions where I can trust. If I live under conditions where I have to look after myself competing with others, this is a completely different story.
GT: You remind me of recent gun violence in the US, where people may not trust to be safe when walking in the streets at night.
Herrmann: Not even during the daytime. I have to say there are shocking examples.
GT: What’s your take on the forthcoming Democracy Summit, for which the US get to decide on its own who can participate and who cannot. What signals does the summit sent to the world?
Herrmann: When it comes to the summit, what makes me really angry is what the US states in the document linked to the summit: We are showing one of the greatest abilities that democracy has to offer, and that is admitting imperfection.
They say we are imperfect. But if they are able to learn from it, I wonder why they keep the Guantanamo Bay? It is a question for ages. They did not learn anything. How can they come up now and say “we are ready to learn”? It is about permanent involvement in wars. Why is the US not able to learn?
There are ongoing problems in the health system, social care system, such that people cannot develop any trust. People are dying on the streets.
And then the president said: But we are able to learn and to admit our shortcomings. This is something I don’t understand. This is simply ignorant.
When US Government promote Asian hates during COVID19 to shift blames for its incompetence. At the same token, the Pentagon Doesn’t Care About Civilian Casualties. 當美國政府在新冠病毒期間宣揚亞洲仇恨以轉移對其無能的指責時。 同樣，五角大樓也不關心平民傷亡 Stephen Zunes Nov 26, 2021 The Progressive
Facing little opposition from either Republicans or Democrats, the U.S. military is almost never held accountable for killing civilians during airstrikes.
In August 2019, thousands of refugees, prisoners, and families of ISIS fighters crowded into an encampment in the border town of Baghuz in eastern Syria, one of the last territories controlled by the so-called Islamic State. The United States, supported on the ground by an allied Kurdish and Arab militia, launched a massive air assault on the enclave.
As The New York Times reported on November 13, 2021, a U.S. attack jet unleashed its payload on the civilian encampment. “As the smoke cleared,” the article noted, “a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then, a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.” At least seventy civilians died.
A Pentagon legal officer reported internally that this was a possible war crime, but, “at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” according to the Times. The death toll was downplayed, and reports were delayed, sanitized, and classified.
The U.S-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. The office of the Defense Department’s independent inspector general launched an investigation, but the report was effectively censored. An evaluator in that office lost his job when he complained about the cover-up.
In response to an inquiry earlier this month from the Times, the U.S. Central Command acknowledged the strikes for the first time and admitted that eighty people were killed. Nevertheless, it insisted the airstrikes were justified and that “no formal war crime notification, criminal investigation, or disciplinary action was warranted.”
The Baghuz massacre was one the last of the 35,000 air strikes the United States launched over a five-year period in Syria and Iraq that ostensibly targeted ISIS. According to Pentagon rules, U.S. forces could call in airstrikes without checking to see if civilians were threatened, so long as it was deemed necessary for self-defense.
What constitutes “self-defense” for the Pentagon, however, is not just when its forces are under fire. The authorization of deadly force can also be granted if enemy troops are simply believed to be displaying “hostile intent,” which the Pentagon defined so broadly in the case of U.S-backed ground operations in Syria that it constituted 80 percent of all U.S. air strikes.
The New York Times article also noted that the Pentagon failed to keep track of the numerous reports of civilian casualties and usually failed to follow through with investigations. In the rare cases where an investigation was ordered, it was later squashed. An email shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed that the only time an investigation was allowed to move forward was when there was “potential for high media attention, [or] concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
So far, the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee has refused to open an investigation into the Baghuz attack or any other possible war crimes by U.S. forces in the war against ISIS.
New technologies have made bombing far more accurate than in World War II, the Korean War, or the Vietnam War. During those wars, the United States regularly engaged in carpet bombing of major urban areas—at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. However, since the launch of “the war on terror,” both major political parties have gone to some length to justify the killing of civilians in the name of counterterrorism.
For example, Congress has passed a series of resolutions defending Israel’s attacks on civilian areas in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Lebanon, which have attempted to exonerate the U.S.-backed Israeli armed forces for thousands of civilian casualties.
Often, these resolutions have defended the Israeli attacks on civilians by claiming Arab militia groups were using “human shields.” This is despite the fact that, while using civilians against their will to deter attacks on an adversary’s troops or military hardware is considered a war crime, it does not give license to bomb them any more than a criminal holding hostages gives police the right to shoot them all.
When investigations by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the U.S. Army War College, and others failed to find a single documented case of any civilian deaths caused by either Hamas or Hezbollah using human shields while fighting Israeli forces, Congress decided to redefine it.
A 2009 resolution, drawn up by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, expanded the definition of the use of human shields to include any members of a designated “terrorist group” within a civilian population. By this definition, a Hamas official living in a high-rise apartment building in Gaza would make the entire structure a legitimate military target. In other words, when being in the proximity of a “terrorist” is enough to classify a civilian as a human shield, an entire city can become a free fire zone.
Years earlier, I predicted that this kind of defense for Israeli war crimes would likely be used as a rationale for “massive U.S. airstrikes on Mosul, Raqqa, and other Islamic State-controlled cities, regardless of civilian casualties.”
And this is indeed what happened. There were virtually no expressions of concern raised in Congress when, in 2017, the United States launched heavy attacks against Syrian and Iraqi cities held by ISIS (which really did use civilians as human shields).
An investigation by Amnesty International revealed that 1,600 civilians died in the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Raqqa, largely destroying the Syrian city. There has been no challenge to the accuracy of the report, which has been called the “most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict,” yet it was largely ignored in the mainstream U.S. media.
There was only a little more coverage of the U.S.-led bombing of Mosul earlier that year, when U.S. planes hit thousands of targets, turning much of that ancient city into rubble and resulting in the deaths of at least 3,000 civilians. A 2019 investigation by Human Rights Watch determined that approximately 7,000 civilians had been killed in the previous five years in Iraq and Syria in air strikes by the U.S. and its allies.
With virtually no negative reaction in Washington, D.C., or coverage in the mainstream media, there should be no surprise that the Pentagon thought they could get away with the 2019 massacre in Baghuz. There appears to be a sense that, given the horror of ISIS, the killing of large numbers of civilians may be necessary to ensure their defeat, so it’s important to keep such tragedies quiet.
The problem, however, goes well beyond ISIS. Even when it involves another extremist militia (and even if a U.S. attack on civilians does get in the news), the U.S. government has little reason to worry. For example, after its belated acknowledgement that a drone missile attack in Kabul this past August had targeted a car driven by an Afghan aid worker, killing him and nine others, including seven children, the Pentagon insisted there was no misconduct or negligence.
The implication is that there would, therefore, be no changes in procedures or personnel, and that the Pentagon would not take steps to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
And there appear to be few political costs. Not only have leading Republicans defended killing civilians in the name of fighting terrorism, but many Democratic members of Congress who have defended Israeli bombings of civilian targets in Gaza have been repeatedly endorsed as “bold progressives” and “peace leaders,” sending the message that the killing of civilians in the name of “self-defense against terrorists” is not considered a problem even within the Democratic left.
Meanwhile, the Biden Administration continues to provide arms, training, and maintenance to Saudi and Emirati forces that have killed tens of thousands of civilians through air strikes in Yemen. A bipartisan majority in Congress has reiterated that the billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel remain “unconditional,” despite the hundreds of civilians killed during last spring’s bombardment of crowded urban neighborhoods in Gaza, again under the rationale of self-defense against terrorists.
Maybe it’s finally time to question what exactly constitutes terrorism.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and a contributing editor of Tikkun. His most recent book is “Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution” (Syracuse University Press).
There is a key section in this article. It reads: “As officials often note, China has achieved more than four decades of rapid economic growth. More recently, it has contained the coronavirus outbreak that began in Wuhan, with fewer deaths throughout the pandemic than some countries have had in a single day.
“Skeptics reject the argument that such successes make China a democracy.
“They cite surveys like the one done by the University of Würzburg in Germany, which ranks countries based on variables like independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press and integrity of elections. The most recent put China near the bottom among 176 countries. Only Saudi Arabia, Yemen, North Korea and Eritrea rank lower. Denmark is first; the United States 36th.”
Notice the contrast. China is relying on deeds, successes.
The US relies on opinions, peddled by a media it dominates and shored up by past successes which were built on horrific exploitation (slavery and extermination of the indigenous population along with abysmal conditions for immigrant labor, Chinese and many, many others)
A big part of the problem is that China’s successes are not well known although in the first paragraph there is brief acknowledgement of them. The successes will dominate in the long run. China will have to continue to produce and the US is determined to prevent that and to destroy the fruits of the past successes.
The greatest success recently and one that should be the envy of the world is the victory over the pandemic. Given its life saving value for the world it should also be the object of examination and scrutiny. It is not except for the brief chaotic period in Wuhan typical of any outbreak. (Notice paragraph one mentions Wuhan specifically – no accident.
The presence of Israel to the D-summit says it all – a country that overtly and unapologetically practices Apartheid (to use the term that even Jimmy Carter used for it in the title of his excellent little book.)
As in the days of white-ruled South Africa which the US described as a democracy, Israel qualifies. What a joke.
p.s. China has the advantage of having most of the world’s media arrayed against it. So it must demonstrate genuine accomplishments. The US in contrast only has to blow smoke in our eyes. In the long run when the smoke clears, that will leave the US in a very bad state indeed.
Professor George Koo in SF: To paraphrase a joke about lawyers, a modified punchline is “Democracy is whatever you wish it to be.” By judicious selection and definition of the parameters to measure democracy, any country can qualify or not qualify as a democracy.
It’s also an honorific title to be bestowed to deserving nations. If you are aligned with Washington, you are ipso facto a democracy. If you are not so aligned, then you are a socialist country or even worse, a communist country. Being called a communist has nothing to do with ideology, just the worst profanity the U.S. can sling at another.
By self proclaiming as the champion of democracy despite its many flaws and terrible outcomes, the United States has erased whatever claim remaining in its name.
Johnson Choi Biz 