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Lawyer Linked to Netanyahu Gov't Warned ICC Prosecutor Israel Would 'Destroy' Him Over Arrest Warrants
A British-Israeli lawyer told ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan he'd spoken to a top Israeli legal adviser and warned he should have gone after "lower-level suspects."
Jul 16, 2025
One international human rights expert said Tuesday that a new report of alleged threats made against the International Criminal Court's prosecutor regarding his arrest warrants for Israeli officials were "extremely worrying," noting that the reported threats were just the latest show of intimidation against authorities who aim to hold Israel to account for its abuses of humanitarian law.
"The Commission of Inquiry on the [occupied Palestinian territories] quit, Francesca Albanese was sanctioned, and now we have reports of threats against Karim Khan," said London School of Economics human rights fellow Alonso Gurmendi, referring to the mass resignation of three United Nations human rights experts, U.S. sanctions targeting the U.N. special rapporteur on the OPT, and the news about the ICC prosecutor.
The Middle East Eye (MEE) reported that a British-Israeli defense lawyer linked to Israel's government, Nicholas Kaufman, delivered a warning to Khan at a meeting in May, as Khan was facing pressure over the arrest warrants he'd issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Along with Hamas leader Mohammed Deif—since confirmed dead—Netanyahu and Gallant were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Netanyahu's government began a military assault on Gaza in October 2023 that has been called a genocide by top human rights experts and groups.
Days before the meeting in May, Kaufman reportedly told Khan that he'd spoken to Roy Schondorf, a legal adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
When they met at a hotel in The Hague, Kaufman told Khan to apply to the ICC to have the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant reclassified as "confidential" and submit them as part of a "noncriminal, noninvestigative process," allowing Israel to access the details of the allegations and privately challenge them without the outcome of the case being made public.
"This looks like a coordinated attack on international accountability on a scale never before seen."
Kaufman also told Khan that issuing more arrest warrants for Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over their support for illegal settlements in the West Bank, as the ICC was considering at the time, could result in more U.S. sanctions against the ICC; the Trump administration imposed travel and economic sanctions against Khan earlier this year. More sanctions would "risk destroying the court," said Kaufman, MEE reported.
"All options would be off the table" for Khan if he issued the new arrest warrants, warned Kaufman. "They will destroy you, and they will destroy the court."
Kaufman told MEE that he requested a meeting with Khan in early May "because as an Israeli ICC lawyer, who had experienced the shock of October 7, 2023, I was well placed to understand the matter" and because Khan was "under fire" over his investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Netanyahu's government in Gaza.
At the time of the meeting, Khan was also facing an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct; he has denied the allegations.
He also told Khan that he should have gone after "lower-level suspects" and that his indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant had "basically indicted Israel."
Kaufman told the outlet that he had simply "told Mr. Khan that he should be looking for a way to extricate himself from his errors" but denied that he'd made a proposal to amend Khan's case against the Israeli officials on behalf of the government—despite his contact days earlier with Netanyahu's legal adviser.
Khan and his wife, lawyer Shyamala Alagendra, who also attended the meeting, told Kaufman his warning that Israel would "destroy" Khan over more warrants "was a clear threat."
Gurmendi said that if MEE's report is true, "this looks like a coordinated attack on international accountability on a scale never before seen."
Khan has faced other threats from officials allied with Israel since investigating Israel's assault on Gaza. In April 2024, the United Kingdom's then-foreign secretary, former Prime Minister David Cameron, had a tense phone call with Khan in which he threatened to defund the ICC and withdraw the U.K. from the court if it issued warrants for any Israeli leaders.
In May 2024, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threatened sanctions against ICC officials is Khan applied for more warrants.
Graham "was screaming at us," ICC lawyer Andrew Cayley, who oversaw the court's investigation into Palestine, told The Observer.
After Khan announced later that month that's he'd requested warrants for the Israeli and Hamas leaders, Cayley "began receiving anonymous, threatening phone calls saying, 'You're in a very dangerous position.'"
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'Lots of Psychotic Murderers': Ex-Elite UK Troops Break Silence on Iraq, Afghanistan War Crimes
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," said one Special Air Service veteran.
May 12, 2025
Dozens of former United Kingdom Special Forces troops or those who served with them have broken their silence to describe alleged war crimes they witnessed—including the execution of children—during the U.S.-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
BBC's "Panorama"—which has repeatedly aired episodes focused on war crimes committed by British soldiers during the so-called War on Terror—on Monday featured testimonies from 30 former U.K. Special Forces (UKSF) members, including Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), and supporting troops who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," recalled one SAS veteran who fought in Afghanistan. "He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."
"It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
Another veteran who served with the SAS said that killing was "intoxicating" for some soldiers and became "an addictive thing to do," adding that there were "lots of psychotic murderers" among the ranks.
"On some operations, the troop would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there," he said. "They'd go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry. It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
One SBS veteran described executions of wounded people who posed no threat, including one man who was being treated by a medic when "one of our blokes came up to him."
"There was a bang. He'd been shot in the head at point-blank range," the veteran recalled, describing the killing and other like it as "completely unnecessary."
"These are not mercy killings," he said. "It's murder."
Another veteran recounted a fellow SAS commando who kept track of the dozens of Afghans he'd killed during his six-month deployment.
"It seemed like he was trying to get a kill on every operation, every night someone got killed," the former soldier said, adding that his colleague was "notorious in the squadron; he genuinely seemed like a psychopath."
The soldier allegedly slit the throat of an injured Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot him again, "because he wanted to go and finish the wounded guy off with his knife."
Another veteran said "everyone knew" what was happening and that to avoid scrutiny for executions, British troops would plant "drop weapons" on victims' bodies to make it appear as if they were militants. U.S. troops—who widely engaged in this war crime—called it "dead-checking."
One veteran said that "there was implicit approval for what was happening" from commanders.
"We understood how to write up serious incident reviews so they wouldn't trigger a referral to the military police," he explained. "If it looked like a shooting could represent a breach of the rules of conflict, you'd get a phone call from the legal adviser or one of the staff officers in HQ. They'd pick you up on it and help you to clarify the language. 'Do you remember someone making a sudden move?' 'Oh yeah, I do now.' That sort of thing. It was built into the way we operated."
"Panorama" also confirmed for the first time that former Conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who was in office from 2010-16, was repeatedly warned that British troops were committing war crimes.
Gen. Douglas Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told "Panorama" that then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai—who repeatedly condemned American war crimes in his country—was "so consistent with his complaints about night raids, civilian casualties, and detentions that there was no senior Western diplomat or military leader who would have missed the fact that this was a major irritant for him."
In 2020, the International Criminal Courtdetermined that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq but declined to prosecute any alleged perpetrators.
Documented war crimes committed by U.S. troops, mercenaries, and other private contractors in nations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria during the ongoing War on Terror include but are not limited to murder of civilians and detainees, extraordinary rendition, torture, rape, and jailing and sexual abuse of women and girls held as bargaining chips.
Whistleblowers who exposed these and other illegalities—including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former NSA operative Edward Snowden, former Army analyst Chelsea Manning, former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou, and others—were almost always the only ones ever punished in connection with the crimes they exposed.
Other coalition troops—including Afghans, Iraqis, Australians, Germans, Poles, and Canadians—have allegedly committed atrocities during the War on Terror, as have Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and other militants.
According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, "at least 940,000 people have died due to direct war violence, including civilians, armed forces on all sides, contractors, journalists, and humanitarian workers" in U.S.-led wars since 9/11. This figure includes at least 408,000 civilians.
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Let's Not Stop With the Russian Oligarchy
Why is oligarchy, which means rule (arche) by the few (oligoi), considered an exclusively Russian phenomenon?
Mar 23, 2022
No sooner had Roman Abramovich, newly targeted by the United Kingdom's sanctions on Russian oligarchs, announced that he was selling Chelsea Football Club than the feeding frenzy began. An athletics icon, City grandees, and even a respected Times columnist, each representing different American multi-billionaires, descended on London in a race to buy the club. Meanwhile, a host of London properties belonging to Russian oligarchs entered a long-overdue process of liquidation. What took so long?
In terms of magnitude, American plutocrats match every dollar that Russian plutocrats stash abroad to escape scrutiny with $10 of their own.
To put it bluntly: the West's legal foundations.
True, Western leaders encouraged the inflows. David Cameron, then UK Prime Minister, appealed in 2011 to a Moscow audience to "invest" in Britain. But it wasn't hard to convince the oligarchs to flood London with their money. Western countries' legislation prevents governments and the public not only from disturbing wealth stored in their jurisdictions but also from even knowing where and how much of it there is. Why else would countless corporations register in the US state of Delaware, using post office box addresses that guarantee their owners anonymity?
In fact, Western democracies grant foreign wealth even more protection from scrutiny. In a 2021 report aptly titled "The UK's Kleptocracy Problem," the London-based think tank Chatham House revealed that the golden visas for sale to oligarchs from all over the world were granted after "checks ... [that] were the sole responsibility of the law firms and wealth managers representing them." In my country, Greece, following our state's effective bankruptcy in 2010, an oligarch could buy a no-questions-asked golden visa, which also came with a Schengen visa (and the opportunity to live and travel anywhere in the European Union), for a measly EUR250,000 ($276,000). Similar visas are sold by other fiscally stressed eurozone countries, fueling a race to the bottom that the world's oligarchs greatly appreciate.
While there is good reason to focus on Russian money, now that Russian bombs are destroying Ukrainian cities, it is puzzling that only Russian billionaires are called oligarchs. Why is oligarchy, which means rule (arche) by the few (oligoi), considered an exclusively Russian phenomenon? Are the Saudi or Emirati princes not oligarchic? Do American billionaires, like those now flocking to buy Chelsea FC, smuggle less money out of their country than their Russian counterparts do, or have less political clout? Do they use such power better than the Russians?
Russia's wealthiest 0.01% (the top 1% of the top 1%) have taken about half their wealth, around $200 billion, out of Russia and stashed it in the UK and other havens. At the same time, America's wealthiest 0.01% have taken around $1.2 trillion out of the United States, principally to avoid paying taxes. So, in terms of magnitude, American plutocrats match every dollar that Russian plutocrats stash abroad to escape scrutiny with $10 of their own.
As for the relative political clout of Russian and American billionaires, it is not at all clear who has more. While there is no doubt that a number of Russian oligarchs have President Vladimir Putin's ear, he has more control over them than the American government has over its billionaires. Since the US Supreme Court's 2010 decision affording corporations the right to donate to politicians as if they were persons, America's richest 0.01% accounted for 40% of all campaign contributions. It has proved to be an excellent investment in wealth preservation.
Is it by chance that in the years since the "deregulation" of campaign financing, American billionaires have obtained the lowest tax rate in over a generation, and the lowest among all wealthy countries? Is it an accident that the US Internal Revenue Service is starved of resources? According to an authoritative empirical study of the US legislative record, none of this is an accident: the correlation between what Congress enacts and what most Americans prefer is not significantly greater than zero.
So, if non-Russian billionaires are also oligarchs, does the exclusive emphasis in the West on Russians mean that "our" oligarchs, and those nurtured by our allies, are in some sense better? Here we are treading on treacherous ethical ground.
To argue that the Saudi billionaires behind the decade-long devastation of Yemen are "better" than Abramovich is to invite mockery. Putin would feel vindicated if we dared claim that the American oilmen who reaped a windfall from the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq were morally superior to the owners of Rosneft and Gazprom. To be sure, Putin's oligarchs turn a blind eye whenever a brave journalist is snuffed out in Russia. But, meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange withers in a high-security UK prison, under conditions bordering on torture, for having exposed Western countries' war crimes following their illegal invasion of Iraq. And how did Western oligarchs and governments respond when their Saudi business partners dismembered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi?
Following Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the UK government declared its determination to rip away the veil of secrecy and deception shrouding the money parked in Britain to escape the scrutiny of law enforcement and tax authorities. Whether the reality matches the rhetoric remains to be seen. Already, there are signs of tension between the ambition to seize oligarchs' money and the imperative of keeping Britain "open for business."
Perhaps the only silver lining in the Ukrainian tragedy is that it has created an opportunity to scrutinize oligarchs not only with Russian passports but also their American, Saudi, Chinese, Indian, Nigerian, and, yes, Greek counterparts. An excellent place to start would be with the London mansions that Transparency International tells us sit empty. How about turning them over to refugees from Ukraine and Yemen? And, while we're at it, why not turn over Chelsea FC to its fans.
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Larry Sanders, Bernie's Brother, to Fight for David Cameron's MP Seat
"We need to show that we don't want Britain to be the most unequal country in Europe"
Sep 23, 2016
Larry Sanders, the older brother of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who lives in the U.K., is taking a page from his brother's book and running for the parliamentary seat left empty by former Prime Minister David Cameron.
And in keeping with family tradition, he will campaign on a platform to end social inequality and neoliberalism. The elder Sanders, who was chosen by the Green Party, opposes privatization of healthcare and, as a retired social worker, wants to highlight the impacts of austerity on public services.
"In Britain, as in the U.S., we have had an increase in inequality in the last 30 years, and that's having all sorts of consequences," he told the Guardian on Friday--comments that probably seemed familiar to some American readers. "Many people can't afford houses who you would have expected to not long ago."
"We need to show that we don't want Britain to be the most unequal country in Europe. We don't want unmet health needs to increase when we already have too few doctors, nurses, and hospital beds," he said in a separate statement. "We don't want the government to impose unworkable contracts on 50,000 precious doctors, when it is clear that the supposed reason for the contract, a seven day hospital service, can't be done at present funding."
"This is a rich, capable, and decent country," he said. "We can do better."
Cameron resigned as prime minister following the Brexit referendum but only stepped down as a minister of parliament this month, triggering a by-election for his seat in Witney of Oxfordshire.
Left-leaning candidates do not do well in the area, the Guardian notes, with the last Green to run there winning just 5.1 percent of the vote, but Sanders believes his name recognition will go a long way.
"Because of Bernard, I've become famous, and I will get more attention from the media, and that's to be used to get the Green Party's policies across," he said. "Bernard's campaign in America was a very successful shifting point."
"Our similarities in terms of policies are astonishing, partly because we talk all the time," he added.
Sanders will face off with Conservative candidate Robert Courts, Liberal Democrat Liz Leffman, and Labour's Duncan Enright. The election will take place on Thursday, October 20.
Sanders moved to Britain in the 1960s after studying at Harvard Law School.
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Getting Fooled on Iraq, Libya, Now Russia
After the British report exposing falsehoods to justify invading Iraq in 2003, a new U.K. inquiry found similar misconduct in the 2011 attack on Libya, but no lessons are learned for the West's new propaganda about Russia
Sep 15, 2016
A British parliamentary inquiry into the Libyan fiasco has reported what should have been apparent from the start in 2011 - and was to some of us - that the West's military intervention to "protect" civilians in Benghazi was a cover for what became another disastrous "regime change" operation.
The report from the U.K.'s Foreign Affairs Committee confirms that the U.S. and other Western governments exaggerated the human rights threat posed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and then quickly morphed the "humanitarian" mission into a military invasion that overthrew and killed Gaddafi, leaving behind political and social chaos.
The report's significance is that it shows how little was learned from the Iraq War fiasco in which George W. Bush's administration hyped and falsified intelligence to justify invading Iraq and killing its leader, Saddam Hussein. In both cases, U.K. leaders tagged along and the West's mainstream news media mostly served as unprofessional propaganda conduits, not as diligent watchdogs for the public.
"When it comes to Putin and Russia, it's the same ole hyperbole and falsehood that so disinformed the public regarding the 'threats' from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi."
Today, we are seeing an even more dangerous repetition of this pattern: demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, destabilizing the Russian economy and pressing for "regime change" in Moscow. Amid the latest propaganda orgy against Putin, virtually no one in the mainstream is exercising any restraint or finding any cautionary lessons from the Iraqi and Libyan examples.
Yet, with Russia, the risks are orders of magnitude greater than even the cases of Iraq and Libya - and one might toss in the messy "regime change" projects in Ukraine and Syria. The prospect of political chaos in Moscow - with extremists battling for power and control of the nuclear codes - should finally inject some sense of responsibility in the West's politicians and media, but doesn't.
When it comes to Putin and Russia, it's the same ole hyperbole and falsehood that so disinformed the public regarding the "threats" from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Just as President George W. Bush deceptively painted Hussein's supposed WMD as a danger to Americans and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dishonestly portrayed Gaddafi as "genocidal," U.S. officials and pundits are depicting Putin as some cartoonish villain or some new Hitler.
And, just as The New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets amplified the Iraq and Libyan propaganda to the American people - rather than questioning and challenging it - these supposedly journalistic entities are performing the same function regarding Russia. The chief difference is that now we're talking about the potential for nuclear annihilation.
According to the new U.K. report on Libya, Britain's military intervention - alongside the U.S. and France - was based on "erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding" of the reality inside Libya, which included a lack of appreciation about the role of Islamic extremists in spearheading the opposition to Gaddafi.
In other words, Gaddafi was telling the truth when he accused the rebels around Benghazi of being penetrated by Islamic terrorists. The West, including the U.S. news media, took Gaddafi's vow to wipe out this element and distorted it into a claim that he intended to slaughter the region's civilians, thus stampeding the United Nations Security Council into approving an operation to protect them.
That mandate was then twisted into an excuse to decimate Libya's army and clear the way for anti-Gaddafi rebels to seize the capital of Tripoli and eventually hunt down, torture and murder Gaddafi.
Ignored Terror Evidence
Yet, there was evidence before this "regime change" occurred regarding the extremist nature of the anti-Gaddafi rebels as well as those seeking to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. As analysts Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman wrote in a pre-Libya-war report for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, "the Syrian and Libyan governments share the United States' concerns about violent salafist/jihadi ideology and the violence perpetrated by its adherents."
In the report entitled "Al-Qaeda's Foreign Fighters in Iraq," Felter and Fishman also analyzed Al Qaeda's documents captured in 2007 showing personnel records of militants who flocked to Iraq for the war. The documents revealed that eastern Libya (the base of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion) was a hotbed for suicide bombers traveling to Iraq to kill American troops.
Felter and Fishman wrote that these so-called Sinjar Records disclosed that while Saudis comprised the largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, Libyans represented the largest per-capita contingent by far. Those Libyans came overwhelmingly from towns and cities in the east.
"The vast majority of Libyan fighters that included their hometown in the Sinjar Records resided in the country's Northeast, particularly the coastal cities of Darnah 60.2% (53) and Benghazi 23.9% (21)," Felter and Fishman wrote, adding:
"Both Darnah and Benghazi have long been associated with Islamic militancy in Libya, in particular for an uprising by Islamist organizations in the mid?1990s. ... One group -- the Libyan Fighting Group ... -- claimed to have Afghan veterans in its ranks," a reference to mujahedeen who took part in the CIA-backed anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as did Al Qaeda founder, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi.
"The Libyan uprisings [in the 1990s] became extraordinarily violent," Felter and Fishman wrote. "Qadhafi used helicopter gunships in Benghazi, cut telephone, electricity, and water supplies to Darnah and famously claimed that the militants 'deserve to die without trial, like dogs,'"
Some important Al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan's tribal regions also were believed to have come from Libya. For instance, "Atiyah," who was guiding the anti-U.S. war strategy in Iraq, was identified as a Libyan named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman.
It was Atiyah who urged a strategy of creating a quagmire for U.S. forces in Iraq, buying time for Al Qaeda's headquarters to rebuild its strength in Pakistan. "Prolonging the war [in Iraq] is in our interest," Atiyah said in a letter that upbraided Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for his hasty and reckless actions in Iraq.
The Atiyah letter was discovered by the U.S. military after Zarqawi was killed by an airstrike in June 2006. [To view the "prolonging the war" excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click here.]
Hidden Motives
This reality was known by U.S. officials prior to the West's military intervention in Libya in 2011, yet opportunistic politicians, including Secretary of State Clinton, saw Libya as a stage to play out their desires to create muscular foreign policy legacies or achieve other aims.
Some of Clinton's now-public emails show that France's President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared to be more interested in protecting France's financial dominance of its former African colonies as well as getting a bigger stake in Libya's oil wealth than in the well-being of the Libyan people.
"For Clinton, a prime motive for pushing the Libyan 'regime change' was to demonstrate her mastery of what she and her advisers called 'smart power,' i.e., the use of U.S. aerial bombing and other coercive means, such as economic and legal sanctions, to impose U.S. dictates on other nations."
An April 2, 2011 email from Clinton's personal adviser Sidney Blumenthal explained that Gaddafi had plans to use his stockpile of gold "to establish a pan-African currency" and thus "to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc."
Blumenthal added, "French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya." Another key factor, according to the email, was Sarkozy's "desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production."
For Clinton, a prime motive for pushing the Libyan "regime change" was to demonstrate her mastery of what she and her advisers called "smart power," i.e., the use of U.S. aerial bombing and other coercive means, such as economic and legal sanctions, to impose U.S. dictates on other nations.
Her State Department email exchanges revealed that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a "Clinton doctrine," but that plan fell through when President Obama seized the spotlight after Gaddafi's government fell in August 2011.
But Clinton didn't miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20, 2011, after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi's demise with the quip, "we came; we saw; he died."
Clinton's euphoria was not long-lasting, however, as chaos enveloped Libya. With Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic militants expanded their power over the country. Some were terrorists, just as Gaddafi and the West Point analysts had warned.
One Islamic terror group attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel, an incident that Clinton called the worst moment of her four-year tenure as Secretary of State.
"Western nations have little credibility left inside Libya."
As the violence spread, the United States and other Western countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Once prosperous with many social services, Libya descended into the category of failed state with rival militias battling over oil and territory while the Islamic State took advantage of the power vacuum to establish a foothold around Sirte.
Though Clinton prefers to describe Libya as a "work in progress," rather than another "regime change failure," U.S. and U.N. efforts to impose a new "unity government" on Libya have met with staunch resistance from many Libyan factions. Since April, the so-called Government of National Accord has maintained only a fragile presence in Tripoli, in Libya's west, and has been rejected by Libya's House of Representatives (HOR), which functions from the eastern city of Tobruk.
Over the past few days, military forces loyal to Gen. Khalifa Hafter, who is associated with HOR in the east, seized control of several oil facilities despite angry protests from Western nations, including the U.S., U.K., and France. But Western nations have little credibility left inside Libya, which not only faced colonization in the past but has watched as the U.S.-U.K.-French military intervention in 2011 has led to widespread poverty, suffering and death.
Inept Intervention
The U.K. report only underscores how deceptive and inept that intervention was. As described by the U.K. Guardian newspaper, then-Prime Minister "David Cameron's intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, according to a scathing report by the foreign affairs select committee.
"Though Blair and Cameron have at least faced personal disgrace over their roles in these two failed 'regime change' invasions, there has been less accountability in the United States."
"The failures led to the country becoming a failed state on the verge of all-out civil war, the report adds. The report, the product of a parliamentary equivalent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, closely echoes the criticisms widely made of [then-Prime Minister] Tony Blair's intervention in Iraq, and may yet come to be as damaging to Cameron's foreign policy legacy."
Earlier this year, Cameron stepped down as prime minister following the approval of the "Brexit" referendum calling on the U.K. to leave the European Union, a position that Cameron opposed. This week, Cameron also resigned his seat in Parliament.
Though Blair and Cameron have at least faced personal disgrace over their roles in these two failed "regime change" invasions, there has been less accountability in the United States, where there were no comprehensive examinations of the policy failures that led to the wars in Iraq and Libya (although studies were undertaken regarding Bush's false claims about Iraq's WMD and the Obama administration's failure to adequately protect the U.S. consulate in Benghazi).
There has been even less accountability in the mainstream U.S. news media, where, for instance, The Washington Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who repeatedly reported Iraq's non-existent WMD as flat fact remains in the same job today pushing similar over-the-top propaganda regarding Russia.
A New Cold War
As with the fiascos in Iraq and Libya, U.S. policymakers continue to ignore or sideline American intelligence analysts who possess information that would cast doubt on the escalation of hostilities with Russia.
Even as the Obama administration has charted this new Cold War with Russia over the past two years - a prospect that could cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars and carries the risk of thermonuclear war - there has been no National Intelligence Estimate getting a consensus judgment from America's 16 intelligence agencies about how real the Russian threat is, according to intelligence sources.
One source said a key reason why an NIE had not been done was that U.S. policymakers wanted a more alarmist report than the intelligence analysts were willing to produce. "They call [the alarm about Russia] political, not factual," the source said. "They weren't going to do one, period. They can't lie."
The source added that the analysts would have to acknowledge how helpful Putin has been in a number of sensitive and strategic areas, such as securing Syria's agreement to surrender its chemical weapons and convincing Iran to accept tight limits on its nuclear program.
"Israel has nuclear weapons and a crazy leader," the source said about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "If not for Putin, the guy may have used it [a nuclear bomb] in Iran. He [Putin] calmed things down in Syria. They [CIA analysts] aren't that stupid. To tell the truth, you have to say he [Putin] saved the Middle East a lot of trouble."
U.S. intelligence analysts also might have had to include their assessments regarding whether Syrian rebels - not Assad's military - deployed sarin gas outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, and whether an element of the Ukrainian military - not ethnic Russian rebels - shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
Those two propaganda themes blaming Syria and Russia, respectively, were promoted heavily by mainstream Western media and various Internet-based information warriors. The two themes have been central to the Western-backed "regime change" project in Syria and to the new Cold War with Russia. If U.S. intelligence analysts knocked down those themes in an NIE, valuable propaganda assets would be exposed and discredited.
Also, in the wake of the two British government reports undermining the propaganda that was used to justify "regime change" in Iraq and Libya, the blow to Western "credibility" if there were similar admissions about falsehoods regarding Syria and Russia could be devastating.
Instead, the hope of Official Washington is that the American public won't catch on to the pattern of deception and that the people will continue to ignore the famous warning that President George W. Bush infamously garbled: "fool me once, shame on ... shame on you; fool me - you can't get fooled again."
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Former British Prime Minister David Cameron Resigns
The Conservative says continuing to be MP would be 'big distraction'
Sep 12, 2016
This post will be updated.
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron announced Monday he is resigning from Parliament.
He said in a statement:
In my view, with modern politics, with the circumstances of my resignation it isn't really possible to be a proper backbench MP as a former prime minister.
I think everything you do will become a big distraction and a big diversion from what the government needs to do for our country.
The development comes less than three months after Cameron resigned as prime minister following the Brexit referendum. During his time as prime minister, as Common Dreams wrote, he faced "criticism over his support for austerity policies, disregard for the environment, callous approach toward refugees, and hawkishness on the bombing of Syria."
Cameron's resignation, which counters his previous claim that he was "very keen" to continue as MP, triggers a by-election for his Oxfordshire seat of Witney. Cameron said in his statement that he would support the Conservative candidate.
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Farewell, David Cameron, It's Theresa May's Turn to Mess Things Up Now
UK is rid of Cameron's "post-truth politics," but his successor's record on human rights is cause for concern
Jul 13, 2016
Britain bid farewell to David Cameron on Wednesday as the reign of Prime Minister Theresa May began.
Over the six years he was installed at 10 Downing Street, Cameron--who resigned in the wake of the Brexit referendum--drew criticism over his support for austerity policies, disregard for the environment, callous approach toward refugees, and hawkishness on the bombing of Syria.
The Independent offered a round-up of "10 moments David Cameron will want us to forget," while others took to social media to critique Cameron's legacy.
"David Cameron is perhaps the greatest practitioner of what has come to be understood as 'post-truth' politics," British novelist Irvine Welsh wrote on Wednesday.
He continued:
He perfected that muted Orwellian populism of saying what people wanted to reassuringly hear, while diametrically opposing this with his actions. Thus the NHS was safe in his hands, just as he was charging Jeremy Hunt with demolishing it. The BBC, ossifying into a neoliberal Pravda under his tenure, was his 'genuine commitment to public service broadcasting'. Scotland could 'have all the powers it wanted' in the run up to the independence election, before waverers taken in by 'the Vow' realized that the actual reality was new road signs. He declared that 'no stone would be left unturned' in the prosecution of establishment paedophile sex offenders, who were then, of course, protected under the Official Secrets Act."
But Cameron's unelected successor may not provide much respite.
"Cameron's long-time Home Secretary is known for her tough views on immigration and asylum," wrote Maria Margaronis from The Nation's London bureau on Wednesday.
"Three years ago, she piloted a billboard campaign warning illegal immigrants to 'go home or face arrest,' and she pushed hard for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights on the grounds that it makes it harder to deport terrorism suspects--a position she rowed back from when she announced her candidacy for the Tory leadership," Margaronis added.
In 2015, May was dubbed "Islamophobe of the Year" by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, leading commentator Shaheen Sattar to write on Wednesday: "I fear that Theresa May's track record as Home Secretary will result in the extended isolation and denigration of the British Muslim community."
Indeed, wrote Sattar:
It's starkly evident that May's actions as Home Secretary created an atmosphere where hatred and violence toward Muslims became a social norm. When it was announced that she was to become Prime Minister by default, I pictured 3 million British Muslims on an iceberg being violently prodded by May to move further away from their faith. We used to think "British Muslim" wasn't a contradiction in terms. Now we fear the two words can never seem compatible in the eyes of the white British public or, increasingly, in the eyes of the Muslim community.
Meanwhile, as Common Dreams has reported, May introduced last year the so-called "Snooper's Charter," a sweeping expansion of surveillance powers in the UK.
"Theresa May has been a draconian Home Secretary, introducing the wrong policies at the wrong times for the wrong reasons," said Harmit Kambo, campaigns director at Privacy International, on Tuesday. "Instead of responding to public alarm about the Edward Snowden disclosures by rolling back state surveillance powers, she has instead ratcheted it up with the Investigatory Powers Bill, the most intrusive surveillance legislation of any democratic country."
And when it comes to environmental issues, May's record is mixed at best. Joe Sandler Clarke writes for Greenpeace's EnergyDesk:
May has been largely silent on the issue of climate change since becoming an MP. Meanwhile, her voting record on the environment while in government mirrors that of her party.
She supported the badger cull in the last parliament and was absent for the vote on allowing fracking in national parks, held before Christmas.
Citing a report issued this week by Britain's Committee on Climate Change--one which warned of deadly heatwaves, food shortages, and widespread flooding as a result of climate change--UK Green Party leader Natalie Bennett wrote that "there is still room for [May] to show the leadership that the country--and the planet--needs. The environmental crisis we face is one which crosses party lines and requires tough decisions and urgent action."
"What May needs to grasp," Bennett wrote, "is that the environmental, social and economic crises are not separate issues, but inter-related parts of the same issue--our failed model for Britain that over decades had led to the divides behind the Brexit vote."
She concluded: "Our political crisis is both a cause and a sign of decades of failure. The one thing that cannot continue in Britain is more of the same--the status quo is not an option."
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Britain: Shakespeare in Action
It's a bit like a Shakespeare play - specifically the final scene of Hamlet, when almost all the play's major characters die violently. And now we're down to one. Her name is Theresa May.
It has been barely three weeks since the United Kingdom (or at least, 52 percent of those who voted) chose to leave the European Union, but all the main Brexit leaders have already left the stage. The Conservative Party has always been notable for its ruthlessness, and leaders who threaten to split the party get short shrift.
Jul 11, 2016
It's a bit like a Shakespeare play - specifically the final scene of Hamlet, when almost all the play's major characters die violently. And now we're down to one. Her name is Theresa May.
It has been barely three weeks since the United Kingdom (or at least, 52 percent of those who voted) chose to leave the European Union, but all the main Brexit leaders have already left the stage. The Conservative Party has always been notable for its ruthlessness, and leaders who threaten to split the party get short shrift.
The first to go was Prime Minister David Cameron, who called the referendum expecting that a pro-EU outcome would finally make the anti-EU obsessives on the right of his own Conservative Party shut up. It was a needless, fatal blunder.
Cameron allowed some of his own cabinet members to campaign for "Brexit", in the belief that they would return to the fold, chastened by defeat, when the country voted for "Remain". Instead, the "Leave" campaign won, and Cameron announced his resignation the morning after the referendum.
However, he said that he would stay in office until October, to give the party time to choose a new leader. This would have involved three months of political paralysis, but it also gave Cameron time to settle his own future (he seems to be angling for a senior job with NATO). And then the slaughter started.
It was generally assumed that one of the pro-Brexit Conservative leaders would replace Cameron, most likely Boris Johnson. His presence at the head of the Brexit campaign probably gave it the million extra votes it needed for victory - but he was clearly shocked by the prospect of actually having to lead the country into the post-Brexit wilderness.
Johnson disappeared from sight for four days after the referendum, which gave the co-leader of the Brexit campaign, Justice Minister Michael Gove, time to plan a coup against him. Gove was supposed to be running Johnson's campaign, but instead he announced that Johnson was not up to the job and declared that he was running for the leadership himself.
Johnson withdrew (probably glad to be out), and Gove's treachery was so blatant that even his fellow Conservatives turned against him. For comic relief Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, also quit, saying that he wanted his life back. All the main Brexit leaders were gone in just two weeks, leaving only Andrea Leadsom as a pro-Brexit contender for the Conservative leadership.
Leadsom was a hard-right pro-Brexiter who only entered parliament in 2010. She was a lightweight who would never normally be seen as a potential prime minister, and her views were so extreme - marriage should only be for Christians, not gays; bring back fox-hunting - that she probably could not win a general election.
But Conservative members of parliament worried that she might win the leadership race anyway, because the people who decide that are the 150,000 paid-up Conservative Party members, a socially conservative, middle-class group with an average age of 60. So the pressure on Leadsom to step aside grew and grew.
On Monday morning Leadsom caved in, ensuring that the last woman standing, Home Secretary Theresa May, will be the new Conservative leader and British prime minister. There will be no split in the party, and there will be no three-month hiatus in British politics. May is seen as a "safe pair of hands," and she will be in office within days.
She will have a free run in parliament, because the opposition Labour Party has a radical new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, elected a year ago by the rank and file of the Labour Party, who has never had the support of even one-fifth of the party's Members of Parliament. Corbyn had always been hostile to the EU, and his lacklustre campaigning for "Remain" contributed to the fact that fully one-third of Labour voters backed Brexit.
As a result the Parliamentary Labour Party is now in revolt against Corbyn, and a senior Labour politician, Angela Eagle, is officially challenging his leadership. The Labour Party will be off-line politically while it settles its internal struggle, so Theresa May will have a free run for a while.
May supported "Remain" in the referendum, but very quietly. She has now pledged to carry out the wishes of (52 percent of) the voters and lead Britain out of the European Union - but that doesn't mean she has the faintest idea how to do it.
The Guardian newspaper summed up the situation in an editorial last Wednesday: "It is now brutally clear that there is not a plan - no plan for how and when Britain leaves, no plan for future relations with Europe, and no plan at all for how political assent might be secured for any of the imperfect political options on offer." That is as true for May as it was for the defunct pro-Brexit leadership.
But cheer up. Assuming that Angela Merkel remains Chancellor of Germany and that Hillary Clinton wins the US presidential election in November, by year's end the three biggest Western countries will all be run by women. Maybe they can sort it all out.
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Yes It Can Happen: Populist Conservatives Led UK out of European Union
Donald Trump hails Brexit as foretaste of things to come.
Jun 25, 2016
Britain woke up to crisis on Friday that promises to reverberate across the globe, with potential implications for the fall election in the US.
After a narrow majority of the population voted to leave the European Union, Prime Minister David Cameron announced he would resign. Cameron set the referendum in motion in the first place, in an attempt to placate the "Euro-skeptic" wing of his Conservative Party and stave off the perceived threat of the populist United Kingdom Independence Party.
It was a disastrous miscalculation, as evidenced by the reaction of some of the Leave campaigners within Cameron's Conservative party. Even they seemed shocked by their own success. Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and contemporary of Cameron at the elite Eton school, appeared ashen as he greeted his victory. He went out of his way to hail the prime minister's record. So did Michael Gove, a friend of the prime minister who campaigned against him.
The vote was a reflection a growing divide between a metropolitan elite that has flourished in a globalized economy and a populist anger on the part of those who feel left behind. Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader who almost single-handedly triggered this crisis, welcomed the Leave vote as a victory for "the real people, for the ordinary people, for the decent people." The implication being that those who campaigned to remain were inauthentic, odd and even indecent.
With impeccable timing, Donald Trump arrived in Britain Friday to open a new golf course in Scotland. He praised the result, drawing parallels with his own campaign. "I think it's a great thing that's happened. It's an amazing vote, very historic," the BBC reported Trump as saying.
"People are angry all over the world. They're angry over borders, they're angry over people coming into the country and taking over and nobody even knows who they are," America's presumptive Republican presidential nominee declared. "They're angry about many, many things in the UK, the US and many other places. This will not be the last."
The isolationist, anti-immigrant movement across Europe, and indeed in the United States, will be hugely emboldened by this result.
He is not wrong. Right-wing populists in France and the Netherlands are already calling for their own referendums on European Union membership. The isolationist, anti-immigrant movement across Europe, and indeed in the United States, will be hugely emboldened by this result.
It was difficult to make an emotional case for the European Union in Britain. On the continental mainland, the benefits -- free movement across borders, and a sense of unity between nations that had previously seemed locked in perpetual warfare -- are clear. But Britons have never taken to a sense of European identity. Moreover, the ongoing refugee crisis on the continent, and the relentless onslaught of the globalized economy, has left many feeling that the UK is better off alone: in the words of the Leave campaign, this was a referendum on Britain taking back control of its destiny.
The result, with the Leave campaign winning by 4 percent, exposes deep divides in the UK. Scotland, which only last year had a referendum on its own independence, voted to stay in Europe. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has already said the result once again throws up the question of the nation's connection to the rest of Britain.
And just as Trump is vying for disaffected working-class Democrats, the Leave campaign succeeded in peeling off some of that constituency in its victory. The opposition Labour Party, led by Britain's Bernie Sanders equivalent, Jeremy Corbyn, failed to deliver a Remain vote in its heartlands in the north of England. Corbyn faces calls to resign, with a motion of no confidence tabled by veteran MP Margaret Hodge.
And as in the United States, mainstream conservativism is in chaos. Cameron came to power in 2010 as a centrist, forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrat Party. The presence of the liberals in government made it strangely easy for him to portray himself as a tough conservative reigned in by his wooly coalition partners.
The parallels with the plight of US Republican congressional leaders are striking: When the Conservatives won an overall majority in 2015, the right of the party saw it as a chance to push through their more radical ideas -- principal among them being the break from Europe. Cameron singularly failed to convert or confront the right wing of his party, and now he is paying the price.
The American political establishment should take note of what has happened. What was inconceivable for Britain just a few months ago has suddenly become reality.
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A 'Brexit' Blow to the Establishment
British voters turned a deaf ear to scary warnings about leaving the E.U. and struck a blow against an out-of-touch, self-interested and incompetent Western Establishment – a message with meaning for the U.S., too
Jun 24, 2016
The United Kingdom's "Brexit" vote may cause short-term economic pain and present long-term geopolitical risks, but it is a splash of ice water in the face of the West's Establishment, which has grown more and more insular, elitist and unaccountable over recent decades.
The West's powers-that-be, in both the United States and the European Union, too often display contempt for real democracy, maintaining only the facade of respecting the popular will, manipulating voters at election time with red-meat politics and empty promises - before getting back to the business of comforting the comfortable and letting the comfortable afflict the afflicted.
"In the end, the American election - like the "Brexit" referendum - may come down to whether voters feel more comfortable sticking with the status quo at least for a while longer or whether they want to blow up the Establishment and gamble on the consequences."
That has been the grim and tiresome reality with America's two parties and with the E.U.'s bureaucrats. The average American and the average European have every reason to see themselves as a lesser concern to the politicians and the pundits than the special interests which pay the money and call the tune.
In the stunning "Brexit" vote - with 52 percent wanting to abandon the 28-nation European Union - U.K. voters rejected the West's politics-as-usual despite dire warnings about the downsides of leaving. They voted, in effect, to assert their own nationalistic needs and aspirations over a commitment to continental unity and its more universal goals.
But, in the vote, there was also a recognition that the West's Establishment has grown corrupt and arrogant, routinely imposing on the people "experts" who claim to be neutral technocrats or objective scholars but whose pockets are lined with fat pay checks from "prestigious" think tanks funded by the Military-Industrial Complex or by lucrative revolving-door trips to investment banks on Wall Street or The City.
Despite the Establishment's self-image as a "meritocracy," its corrupted experts and haughty bureaucrats don't even demonstrate basic competence anymore. They have led Europe and the United States into catastrophe after catastrophe, both economically and geopolitically. And, there is another troubling feature of this Establishment: its lack of accountability.
In the United States, the rewards and punishments have been turned upside-down, with the benighted politicians and pundits who pushed for the Iraq War in 2003 still dominating the government and the media, from Hillary Clinton's impending Democratic presidential nomination to the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.
And, the Iraq War disaster was not a one-off affair. The neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks have their fingerprints on other "regime change" messes, from Libya to Ukraine to Syria (still in the works), with their predictable recommendations for more violence and more belligerence. Yet, they have impunity for their crimes and incompetence. They fail up.
Establishment Doesn't Know Best
So, the West's Establishment can't even argue that it knows best anymore, which always had been its ace in the hole. The various insurgents could be painted as the dangerous option - and that is sometimes true as we've seen with Donald Trump - but it is arguably a toss-up as to whether Clinton or Trump would be the bigger risk to the world's future.
Trump may be a blustering buffoon but he challenges the neocon "group thinks" about the wisdom of expanding the West's war in Syria and launching a costly and existentially risky New Cold War against nuclear-armed Russia and China. Clinton surrounds herself with neocons and liberal hawks and shares their obsession with overthrowing the government of Syria and provoking Russia and China with military operations near their borders.
Trump and "Brexit" advocates also reject the Establishment's neoliberal consensus on "free trade," which has depressed (or eliminated) the wages of American and European workers while the benefits accrue mostly to financial and political elites. The Establishment's embrace of the "winners" and its disdain for the "losers" have further enflamed today's populism.
Yet, there are undeniably ugly features in the populist sentiment sweeping the U.S. and Europe. Some of it is driven by bigotry toward non-whites, especially immigrants. Some is inspired by wild conspiracy theories from a population that has understandably lost all faith in what it hears from Washington, Brussels and other capitals. Trump has espoused the scary know-nothing notion that the scientific evidence of global warming is "a hoax."
There is always something unsettling when an incipient revolution takes shape and starts tearing down the old order. What follows is not always better.
In the end, the American election - like the "Brexit" referendum - may come down to whether voters feel more comfortable sticking with the status quo at least for a while longer or whether they want to blow up the Establishment and gamble on the consequences.
Right now, Clinton and the Democrats are carrying the banner of the Establishment, while Trump and his Republican insurgents fly the Jolly Roger. In a political year when the anti-establishment wave seems to be cresting, the Democrats may regret their choice of a legacy, status-quo candidate.
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