Conditions have been getting so bad for the approximately 1,100 U.S. military personnel stationed in Niger right now that one member of the Air Force decided to write Congress.
In a letter reported by the Washington Post Wednesday night, a whistleblower complained to Congress that the U.S. Embassy in Niger, particularly Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon and Air Force Col. Nora J. Nelson-Richter, the defense attaché posted there, was putting troops at risk by ignoring the military junta's March demands that the military leave and insisting that a diplomatic resolution was "being worked."
The junta overthrew the president Mohamed Bazoum in July 2023 in a coup and by all accounts is still holding him and his family in the basement of the presidential palace. After a reportedly disastrous meeting between U.S. officials and Niger last month, the junta said it wanted the U.S. military footprint gone from Niger, drone base and all. Since that base is so important to the military, especially at a time when things in the Middle East are rupturing and Great and Middle Power Politics is swirling around the Sahel and North African region, Washington is doing whatever to takes to stay put.
This includes putting the troops there at risk, says the whistleblower, who claims the embassy's actions, which included suppressing intelligence to maintain the facade that diplomatic efforts were progressing, have “potential implications” for U.S. relations with other African nations “and the safety of our personnel in the region.” Importantly, the whistleblower said the junta was not approving any more visas for U.S. military members, which would include replacements for those who were supposed to go home in April after a six month mission. The full letter, published last night:
Both the State Department and Defense Department have rejected the whistleblower's claims, but the their charges are sure to inflame those on Capitol Hill who have been calling for a withdrawal of the U.S. military presence all along.
“We have Army soldiers right now in Niger who aren’t getting their troop rotations, who aren’t getting their medicine, who aren’t getting their supplies, who aren’t getting their mail and the two senior people in the United States Army are sitting before me and it’s like ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,’” Rep.Matt Gaetz (R-Fla,) said in a hearing with U.S. Army officers on Tuesday. He said he has talked to a half a dozen service members directly about the conditions there right now.
The whistleblower complaints were reported the same day U.S. officials were meeting with the Nigerien prime minister, with follow-on discussions expected next week on the status of U.S.-Niger relations — talks that the Washington Post says "have appeared to make little headway.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he would be open to peace negotiations with Ukraine.
“Are we ready to negotiate with them? We never refused, but not on the basis of some ephemeral demands, rather on the basis of the documents which were agreed on and actually initialed in Istanbul,” said Putin during remarks at an economic forum with leaders from Malaysia and China.
Putin is referring to negotiations that took place in Istanbul just weeks after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. At that time, Kyiv and Moscow were reportedly close to a deal in which Kyiv would have agreed to reduce the size of its military, refrain from joining NATO but be free to pursue membership of the European Union. Those talks ultimately failed, with continued debate about whether Western countries moved themin that direction.
The Russian president also suggested that Brazil, China, and India could mediate new talks to end the war. His comments come just weeks after Russian officials dismissed limited, indirect talks with Kyiv in response to Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region last month.
Some observers have questioned whether Putin’s apparent desire for talks to end the war is sincere, but there’s also no reason Western leaders shouldn’t try to find out.
“On a stage with Asian leaders, including from China, he knows it’s important to rhetorically embrace talks no matter his real intentions,” Samuel Charap, a Russia expert and senior political scientist at RAND, told the Wall Street Journal. He added: “Western capitals tend to tune in when he rejects talks and tune out when he embraces them. … But until someone actually tests the proposition we’ll never know what his real intentions are. If it’s a bluff, you only know when you call it.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced his resignation this week as part of a cabinet reshuffle President Volodymyr Zelensky hinted at last week. Reacting to the news, Zelensky said his country needs “new energy, and that includes in diplomacy.”
It’s unclear whether Kuleba’s departure will result in Kyiv pushing for negotiations to end the war, nor whether Zelensky would now be open to any concessions, including accepting a partition of Ukrainian territory, as part of any wider agreement. He has previously been unwilling to entertain such concessions.
In other Ukraine war news this week:
— Poland scrambled fighter jets as Russia launched missile strikes on the Ukrainian city of Lviv this week, close to the Polish border, according to CBS News. "I'm personally of the view that, when hostile missiles are on course of entering our airspace, it would be legitimate self-defense (to shoot them down) because once they do cross into our airspace, the risk of debris injuring someone is significant," said Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.
— Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austion last weekend in an effort to lift restrictions on the use of American made weapons. “We have explained what kind of capabilities we need to protect the citizens against the Russian terror that Russians are causing us, so I hope we were heard,” told CNN.
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A man holding a Palestinian flag stands in front of Israeli military vehicles during an Israeli raid in Tulkarm, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, September 3, 2024. REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
News about offensive Israeli military operations has shifted, for the moment, from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.
A series of Israeli raids and attacks against Jenin and other West Bank cities began last week and is continuing. Although the carnage in Gaza during the past 11 months is larger and still deserves the most attention, the new operations in the West Bank are a further escalation of what already was, during this same period, accelerated violence against Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
Since last October, at least 622 of those residents, including at least 142 children, have been killed, most by the Israeli military and the others by Jewish settlers. Fifteen Israelis died there during the same period.
The West Bank operations are a direct extension of what Israel has done so far in Gaza. Israeli foreign minister Yisrael Katz says that Israel “must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps are required. This is a war for everything and we must win it.”
The immediate ill effect of the newest Israeli operations — civilians suffering — also is the same as in Gaza though so far on a smaller scale. The suffering is not limited to the directly inflicted deaths and injuries. Many residents have been forcibly ejected from their homes. Medical care is impeded by a blockade of hospitals. Streets are bulldozed and other infrastructure needed for daily living is being destroyed.
Official Israeli statements, as is customary with Israeli statements, talk of “terrorists” as the targets, the elimination of whom is ostensibly the purpose of the military operations. But again, as in Gaza, most of the victims — directly when they become casualties, and indirectly from all the other consequences of the destruction and dislocation — are innocent civilians.
Undoubtedly there exist in the West Bank armed militants, deserving of the label “terrorist,” who wish to cause Israel harm. The Israeli military already has killed some of those militants and probably will kill some more. The presence of such individuals in the West Bank is unsurprising, given what in general leads people to turn to such violent ways and what specifically are the conditions to which Israel subjects residents of the West Bank. Over the long term — now more than half a century — the relevant condition is the oppression of those residents under Israeli military occupation of their homeland.
Added to this during the past year are the horrors that Israeli military operations have inflicted on their Palestinian brethren in the Gaza Strip. The outrage over those horrors underlies an increase in support of Hamas among West Bankers, although the prevailing sentiment is not love for Hamas but rather opposition to what Israel is doing to fellow Palestinians. The tragedy in Gaza undoubtedly provides additional motivations for the militants the Israeli army is hunting today.
On top of all that is now the intensified violence that Israel is adding to its occupation of the West Bank itself. Whatever armed resistance arises there is not dependent on Hamas or any other group but instead on the anger that naturally occurs in response to this deadly form of military occupation. The resistance will continue as a ready supply of recruits to the cause of resistance replaces any militants the Israeli forces are able to kill.
In short, what is happening in the West Bank today is another chapter in the long, tragic story of Israeli leaders choosing to live forever by the sword, bringing unending conflict to Israel itself and unending suffering to the Palestinian nation.
The West Bank offensive provides further cause — although nearly a year of carnage in the Gaza Strip was already more than sufficient cause — for observers in the United States and elsewhere not only to recognize but to speak frankly about exactly why Israel is following such a destructive course.
Israeli military operations — in both Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention elsewhere — long ago went far beyond anything that can be explained, much less justified, by reference to the inhumane attack that Hamas conducted against Israel last October.
A connection between that attack and current military operations in the West Bank was that an earlier transfer of military resources from southern Israel to the West Bank is part of what possibly made Israel vulnerable to what Hamas did. The episode was one of the many demonstrations of how Israel’s clinging to the occupied territories does not enhance Israeli security but instead diminishes it.
That fact seems lost in the rhetoric of U.S. politicians of both parties who repeatedly swear their commitment to Israeli security and to the right of Israelis to defend themselves. Also not found in the rhetoric is any explanation of why other people should not enjoy and exercise that right as much as Israelis should. Given what has befallen Palestinians especially during the past year, their right to defend themselves appears more in need of sympathy and support than just about any other people in the world.
The fundamental cause of this whole tragic story is the Israeli decision not to live peacefully alongside a state for the Palestinians — as was called for in the 1947 United Nations General Assembly partition plan that is the closest thing to a birth certificate for Israel — and instead to retain Palestinian-inhabited land that Israel has conquered through force of arms.
There should be no doubt about this anymore, notwithstanding past “peace process” rhetoric that has obscured this Israeli objective in the past. The move to the right in Israeli politics has overwhelmed internal questioning of the objective. The Israeli government and legislature have declared, formally and forcefully, their opposition to creation of a Palestinian state.
The West Bank figures into the objective even more than the Gaza Strip does. Although some Israeli religious nationalists are talking about returning Jewish settlements to Gaza, it is the West Bank — what Israel calls Judea and Samaria — and all of Jerusalem that play the largest role in fulfilling their objective.
Accompanying this objective is a bigoted view of Palestinian Arabs that is most apparent among the most extreme rightists in Israeli politics, including those in the Israeli government, but has taken root more widely in Israeli society. The malign attitude is sometimes reflected in the words of Israeli leaders, such as defense minister Yoav Gallant, in announcing a total blockade and siege of the Gaza Strip, which has affected everyone living there, saying that Israel was going against “human animals.”
More explicit bigotry can be heard from other opinion leaders, such as a former chief rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, who once compared non-Jews to donkeys and preached, “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world — only to serve the people of Israel.”
The attitude is also reflected in deeds, especially Israeli military tactics that show little or no regard for Palestinian life and employ rules of engagement that bear no resemblance to international humanitarian law and the laws of war regarding protection of civilians. If an operation has a decent chance of killing even one suspected Hamas militant, then killing a score of civilians in the process evidently is considered acceptable by Israeli commanders.
Too often, Israeli policy decisions show regard for Palestinian lives only when there may be an implication for Israeli lives. That is the situation today in Gaza, where Israeli agreement on a “humanitarian pause” for polio inoculations is motivated largely by a concern about, in the words of the prime minister’s office, “the spread of disease in the region,” with the possibility of infecting Israelis.
Put the land-retaining objective and the bigoted attitudes together, and this translates into the broader objective of destroying the Palestinian nation. Although a plausible case has been made that what the Palestinians are being subjected to is nothing less than genocide, one does not need to employ that term, burdened as it is with legal implications and comparisons with even more horrendous exterminations of the past. Ethnic cleansing is a less loaded term but still descriptive of what is happening to the Palestinians.
Exactly how Israeli leaders intend to complete this objective is probably not entirely thought through, and is more a matter of visceral antagonism than of careful planning. Deaths of individual Palestinians, as is happening wholesale in the Gaza Strip, is one way. A combination of intimidation and sufficient destruction of housing and infrastructure to make areas unlivable may compel others to leave and join the four million Palestinian refugees already living in other Middle Eastern countries. And an Israeli hope may be that those who remain will — like animals that have been broken, tamed, and penned — docilely submit to their subordinate status.
Many will not submit. There will continue to be resistance, including violent resistance, and perhaps enough of an uprising in the West Bank to be called a third intifada. But as former United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk observes, even more worrisome is the prospect of another nakba or catastrophe, in which Palestinians face the choice of extermination in place or fleeing to other countries.
U.S. policy, and the expressions of leaders of both political parties, do not recognize the above realities. Certainly the United States should support Israeli security and the right of Israel to defend itself, although without the occupation there really would not be much to worry about on that score, given Israel’s status as the most militarily advanced state in the region and national wealth sufficient to pay for maintaining that status itself.
Exporting defensive systems such as air defense weapons would be consistent with the declared objective, but not the export of ordnance that Israeli is using offensively with great death and destruction as the result.
Moreover, U.S. policy needs to reflect how much of what Israel is doing undermines rather than advances Israel’s own security. Retaining occupied land is a burden, not a boost, to the Israeli military. The deadly tactics on display in Gaza and now accelerating in the West Bank motivate more deadly resistance to Israel than they quell.
The United States has no positive interest in most of the Israeli behavior that U.S. material and diplomatic support has abetted. The United States has no positive interest in Israel holding on to the West Bank, or in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The relevant U.S. interests are all negative, in terms of the offense to human values, the instability that entails the risk of wider war, and more direct harms to the United States itself.
Those harms include the prospect of additional anti-U.S. terrorism motivated by anger over policies regarding Israel, and the impeding of U.S. diplomacy with foreign governments that are offended as much as their publics are by those U.S. policies.
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Horacio Manuel Cartes Jara, President of Paraguay speaking at the Annual Meeting 2017 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 18, 2017. Copyright by World Economic Forum / Boris Baldinger
In early August, the U.S. Treasury quietly sanctioned the tobacco company of Paraguay’s former president, Horacio Cartes.
Before entering office, Cartes had extensive links to organized crime and took authoritarian actions while in power. However, Cartes faced no public pressure from the American government until long after leaving office in 2018. America’s leadership looked the other way for so long because Cartes fulfilled its mutual interests.
Cartes served from 2013 to 2018 in the right-wing Colorado Party which, other than one term of opposition party leadership that ended in a “parliamentary coup,” has held the presidency since 1948. That includes the 34-year reign of terror led by the U.S.-supported dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. Cartes remains the head of the party today.
The Colorado Party’s foreign policy goals parallel the United States’s initiatives. For example, then-Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, praised Paraguay as one of the leaders of the Lima Group coalition that fell in line with the U.S. recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s unelected leader in 2019.
While in office, Cartes was a conservative counterbalance to some of the liberal leaders of the region. Paraguay has also been a staunch supporter of Taiwan for decades. It’s the only country in South America that has diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Cartes was so firm in his support of Israel that he made Paraguay the third country (after the United States and Guatemala) to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was a controversial decision that sparked protests because Palestinians view East Jerusalem as their future capital.
Honduras, under the leadership of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, became the fourth country to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Hernandez, who is now serving a 45-year sentence in U.S. prison for drug trafficking, has a political career with remarkable similarity to Horacio Cartes. Both men had well-publicized criminal connections, and neither faced the bully pulpit of the U.S. until after leaving office.
For most Americans, Horacio Cartes is an obscure foreign leader. However, Central and South American governments have singled out his tobacco company, Tabesa, for decades as the biggest proprietor of black-market cigarettes in their countries. For example, a governor in Colombia sued Tabesa alleging a loss of $67 million in annual tax revenue.
The scheme is simple. His company produces roughly seven times Paraguay’s entire domestic demand for cigarettes with brands that aren’t licensed in the neighboring countries in a factory ten miles from the porous tri-border region with Argentina and Brazil. This area is notorious for all sorts of illicit trafficking.
Cartes’s company claims to have legally exported over a billion cigarettes over 16 years to Bulgaria, Curaćao, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Netherlands. However, those countries didn’t report a single cigarette imported from Paraguay during that period. It’s an obvious red flag for illegal smuggling.
This contraband is a significant source of income for drug cartels, organized crime syndicates, and narco-terrorists, such as the Sinaloa Cartel, Brazil’s PCC, the FARC in Colombia, and Hezbollah. It's the kind of conduct that would elicit criminal charges, like what Nicholas Maduro has faced if Cartes roamed in those same socialist circles.
Cartes has never shown contrition for his part in this racket. In 2012, he publicly deflected responsibility by stating that smuggling is a “customs issue.” A few years earlier, his CEO was more brazen asserting that “(w)e don’t know where our cigarettes are consumed, and it’s not our problem.”
Cartes has also been suspected of drug offenses for over two decades. Cartes’s uncle, a lifelong trafficker, was arrested in Uruguay with 478 kilos of marijuana a few months before being elected. It’s part of a trend. Paraguayan authorities seized 20 kilos of cocaine and 343 kilos of marijuana on Cartes’s ranch in 2000. He wasn’t arrested. Afterward, Cartes claimed it was a coincidence the plane’s pilot chose his property through an emergency landing.
WikiLeaks published a document from 2007 that disclosed a conversation between Paraguay’s top counternarcotics official and the U.S. Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission. That U.S. official was told that “80 percent of money laundering in Paraguay moves through (Cartes’s bank).” WikiLeaks released another document from 2010 revealing that Cartes was the top suspect in a DEA money laundering investigation.
A man with this background had a predictably horrible human rights record as president. Paraguay’s history is marred with violent illegal evictions of peasants which, in part, caused the country to have one of the worst distributions of land ownership in the world. Ninety percent is owned by less than 1% of the population.
Cartes’s administration continued a long-term trend of Paraguay using state-sponsored violence against people protesting for their land rights. Thousands of these activists have been imprisoned and 128 assassinated since the Stroessner dictatorship ended in 1989, according to Global Witness.
The prime benefactors of this repression are the Paraguayan economic elite, along with multinational corporations, including U.S.-based Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which receive Paraguay’s massive soy and beef exports.
Cartes took the beginning steps towards reestablishing a dictatorship, including using police resources to shut down small opposition radio stations. His sister’s company also purchased a large media conglomerate, Grupo Nación.
His most brazen act was arranging a special session of Congress in March 2017 to allow him to run for another term, which was banned by the constitution in 1992. Protestors reacted by setting the congressional building on fire. Within hours, police raided the leading opposition party headquarters and one of their activists was killed with a shot in the head.
The U.S. government took no official action against Cartes until four years after leaving office. The U.S. State Department slapped him with a corruption designation in July 2022. The press release declared that “Cartes obstructed a major international investigation into transnational crime in order to protect himself and his criminal associate from potential prosecution and political damage.” His vice president and legal counsel were also designated for corruption a month later.
With that said, a designation by the State Department is mostly symbolic. The penalty is a U.S. visa restriction.
In December 2022 Cartes was elected the chairman of the Colorado Party. His protégé, Santiago Peña, won the Colorado Party presidential nomination that same month. Peña, who served as the finance minister under Cartes, had his campaign financed by Cartes.
With interesting timing, the U.S. Department of Treasury first sanctioned Cartes the following month. That tactic is much more punitive. It blocks anyone in the U.S. from doing business with that individual. The Treasury alleged that Cartes offered a $1 million bribe to the legislators who attempted to allow him a second term. “Cartes continued to influence legislative activities after leaving office, targeting political opponents, and bribing legislators to direct votes in his interest, with top supporters receiving as much as $50,000 monthly,” according to the Treasury.
Cartes is certainly deserving of such penalties, but the timing reeks of a politicized use of sanctions. After all, America currently has designated 26 nations and roughly 15,000 individuals/corporations under sanctions. Therefore, it’s not a tool that it is reluctant to use.
If actions speak louder than words, the U.S. government signaled that it was willing to allow Cartes to ride off into the sunset unscathed. However, when he re-emerged in the political sphere, it suddenly became a bridge too far and all the punitive tools at Washington’s disposal are bring brought to bear against him.
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