Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues and rock 'n roll piano player Johnnie Johnson. Enjoy!

"Reckless adventure is the fool's hazard."

-- Tacitus

News and Opinion

Today In Imperial Recklessness And Insanity

The International Criminal Court has formally issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

No such arrest warrants were issued for President Biden or any of the other western officials who’ve been backing Israel’s genocidal atrocities, which is a bit like a judge issuing a warrant for a mass murderer but not for the guy who gave him the gun and stood next to him handing him ammunition and drove the getaway car and lied to the police to cover up the crime.

Nothing will come of this new development because it is completely unenforcible and international law is only as real as the US empire agrees to pretend it is, but it is a significant step in the deterioration of international consensus on Israel as the entire world watches the Zionist regime commit atrocity after atrocity right out in the open.

Predictably, Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to this decision by shrieking about antisemitism and calling the ICC’s move “a modern Dreyfus trial”. He is doing this because he does not have anything resembling a real argument in his defense, and neither does anyone else.

We saw this illustrated in a statement from Senator Tom Cotton, who proclaimed that the US would invade The Hague if the ICC tries to enforce its arrest warrants.

“The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic,” Cotton said. “Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it.”

This is as psychotic a public statement as anything you’ll see from the most far-right extremists in the Knesset. The United States is run by demented zealots with nukes, just like Israel.

The “Hague Invasion Act”, formally known as the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, is a US federal law passed during the warmongering frenzy of the early Bush administration which authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court.”

That “or allied personnel” bit is why Cotton is able to cite this law in reference to an arrest warrant for Israelis.

Speaking of Israel and US senators, a bill by Bernie Sanders to block a shipment of tank shells to Israel was just killed in the Senate by a vote of 18 to 79.

Sanders framed the bill as an effort to restrict “the sale of offensive arms to Israel”, making a distinction from “defensive” arms like the Iron Dome, which is absurd and obfuscatory to begin with. All arms to Israel are offensive rather than defensive in nature, in that they are all used to help Israel murder people without experiencing the deterrence they would receive from a retaliatory response. There’s a reason body armor is regulated in a way that’s similar to firearms; it’s because someone who wants to commit a violent crime can wear a bulletproof vest while doing so to ensure that they can perpetrate the crime without being stopped by police. That’s exactly how Israel uses its so-called “defensive” weaponry.

And speaking of progressive US lawmakers taking feeble stands on Israel, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come under fire for voting to support House Resolution 1449, a bill which purports to simply denounce antisemitism but in reality promotes the false conflation of antisemitic hate speech with speech that is critical of Israel.

Progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who voted against the bill, said in a statement that she did so because “the bill endorses the harmful definition of IHRA that dangerously conflates legitimate criticism of Israel to antisemitism and further harms our ability to address antisemitism.”

Everywhere you look it’s powerful criminals getting away with far too much while the people who are supposed to be resisting them do far too little.

This happens as Russia hits Ukraine with a new type of hypersonic missile, which Putin went out of his way to mention could easily have been equipped with a nuclear warhead. This attack was a warning to Ukraine for using long-range missiles supplied by the US and UK to strike targets inside Russia, and occurs as Moscow revises its nuclear doctrine lowering the threshold for when nuclear weapons may be used.

This is unsustainable. It cannot continue. One way or the other, all this madness is going to come to an end.

"A Great Day for Justice": Gaza Lawyer Raji Sourani on ICC Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu & Gallant

The ICC Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu Is Also an Indictment of US Policy and Complicity

It’s official now. America’s closest ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the one accorded more than 50 standing ovations in Congress just months ago, is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes. America must take note: the U.S. Government is complicit in Netanyahu’s war crimes and has fully partnered in Netanyahu’s violent rampage across the Middle East.

For 30 years the Israel Lobby has induced the U.S. to fight wars on Israel’s behalf designed to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian State. Netanyahu, who first came to power in 1996, and has been prime minister for 17 years since then, has been the main cheerleader for U.S.-backed wars in the Middle East. The result has been a disaster for the U.S. and a bloody catastrophe not only for the Palestinian people but for the entire Middle East.

These have not been wars to defend Israel, but rather wars to topple governments that oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel viciously opposes the two-state solution called for by international law, the Arab Peace Initiative, the G20, the BRICS, the OIC, and the UN General Assembly. Israel’s intransigence, and its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people, has given rise to several militant resistance movements since the beginning of the occupation. These movements are backed by several countries in the region.

The obvious solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis is to implement the two-state solution and to demilitarize the militant groups as part of the implementation process.

Israel’s approach, especially under Netanyahu, is to overthrow foreign governments that oppose Israel’s domination, and recreate the map of a “New Middle East” without a Palestinian State. Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.

What is shocking is that Washington has turned the U.S. military and federal budget over to Netanyahu for his disastrous wars. The history of the Israel lobby’s complete takeover of Washington can be found in the remarkable new book by Ilan Pappé, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024).

Netanyahu repeatedly told the American people that they would be the beneficiaries of his policies. In fact, Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.

If Trump wants to make America great again, the first thing he should do is to make America sovereign again, by ending Washington’s subservience to the Israel Lobby.

The Israel Lobby not only controls the votes in Congress but places hardline backers of Israel into key national security posts. These have included Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State for Clinton), Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff of Vice President Cheney), Victoria Nuland (Deputy National Security Advisor of Cheney, NATO Ambassador of Bush Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Obama, Under-Secretary of State for Biden), Paul Wolfowitz (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Sr., Deputy Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Douglas Feith (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Abram Shulsky (Director of the Office of Special Plans, Department of Defense for Bush Jr.), Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor for Bush Jr.), Richard Perle (Chairman of the Defense National Policy Board for Bush Jr.), Amos Hochstein (Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State for Biden), and Antony Blinken (Secretary of State for Biden).

In 1995, Netanyahu described his plan of action in his book Fighting Terrorism. To control terrorists (Netanyahu’s characterization of militant groups fighting Israel’s illegal rule over the Palestinians), it’s not enough to fight the terrorists. Instead, it’s necessary to fight the “terrorist regimes” that support such groups. And the U.S. must be the one to lead:

The cessation of terrorism must therefore be a clear-cut demand, backed up by sanctions and with no prizes attached. As with all international efforts, the vigorous application of sanctions to terrorist states must be led by the United States, whose leaders must choose the correct sequence, timing, and circumstances for these actions.

As Netanyahu told the American people in 2001 (reprinted as the 2001 foreword to Fighting Terrorism):

The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states. International terrorism simply cannot be sustained for long without the regimes that aid and abet it… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust. The international terrorist network is thus based on regimes—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan.

All of this was music to the ears of the neocons in Washington, who similarly subscribed to U.S.-led regime change operations (through wars, covert subversion, U.S.-led color revolutions, violent coups, etc.) as the main way to deal with perceived U.S. adversaries.

After 9/11, the Bush Jr. neocons (led by Cheney and Rumsfeld) and the Bush Jr. insiders of the Israel Lobby (led by Wolfowitz and Feith), teamed up to remake the Middle East through a series of U.S.-led wars on Netanyahu’s targets in the Middle East (Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria) and Islamic East Africa (Libya, Somalia, and Sudan). The role of the Israel Lobby in stoking these wars of choice is described in detail in Pappe’s new book.

The neocon-Israel Lobby war plan was shown to General Wesley Clark on a visit to the Pentagon soon after 9/11. An officer pulled a paper from his desk and told Clark: "I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense's office. It says we're going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years—we're going to start with Iraq, and then we're going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran."

In 2002, Netanyahu pitched the war with Iraq to the American people and Congress by promising them that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region[...] People sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

A remarkable new insider account of Netanyahu’s role in spearheading the Iraq War also comes from retired Marine Command Chief Master Sargent Dennis Fritz, in his book Deadly Betrayal (2024). When Fritz was called to deploy to Iraq in early 2002, he asked senior military officials why the U.S. was deploying to Iraq, but he got no clear answer. Rather than lead soldiers into a battle he could not explain or justify, he left the service.

In 2005, Fritz was invited back to the Pentagon, now as a civilian, to assist Under-Secretary Douglas Feith in the declassification of documents about the war, so that Feith could use them to write a book about the war. Fritz discovered in the process that the Iraq War had been spurred by Netanyahu in close coordination with Wolfowitz and Feith. He learned that the purported U.S. war aim, to counter Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, was a cynical public relations gimmick led by an Israel Lobby insider, Abram Shulsky, to garner U.S. public support for the war.

Iraq was to be the first of the seven wars in five years, but as Fritz explains, that follow-up wars were delayed by the anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgency. Nonetheless, the U.S. eventually went to war or backed wars against Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon. In other words, the U.S. carried out Netanyahu’s plans—except for Iran. To this day, indeed to this hour, Netanyahu works to stoke a U.S. war on Iran, one that could open World War III, either by Iran making the breakthrough to nuclear weapons, or by Iran’s ally, Russia, joining such a war on Iran’s side.

The neocon-Israel Lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century. All of the countries attacked by the U.S. or its proxies—Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria—now lie in ruins. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza continues apace, and yet again the U.S. has opposed the unanimous will of the world (other than Israel) this week by vetoing a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution that was backed by the other 14 members of the U.N. Security Council.

The real issue facing the Trump Administration is not defending Israel from its neighbors, who call repeatedly, almost daily, for peace based on the two-state solution. The real issue is defending the U.S. from the Israel Lobby.

COL. Douglas Macgregor : Netanyahu Arrest Warrant !!! - PLUS - Russia fires ICBM into #Ukraine !!!

War crimes charges will be hard stigma for Netanyahu to shrug off

The arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court (ICC) represent an earthquake on the world’s legal landscape: the first time a western ally from a modern democracy has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by a global judicial body.

Inside Israel, the warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant will not have an immediate impact. In the short term they are likely to rally support around the prime minister from a defiant Israeli public.

In the longer term, however, the enormity of the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant could grow heavier over time, shrinking the patch on the globe still open to them. The stigma of being an accused war criminal is a hard one to shrug off. ...

The US – not an ICC member anyway – rejected the warrants, and said it would coordinate with its partners, Israel included, about the “next steps”. Other Israeli allies, such as Germany, will distance themselves, but it will be a difficult moment for the UK government of Keir Starmer, whose background is in human rights and international law. The US is likely to lean on the UK to reject the validity of the warrants, but that would seriously damage UK credibility elsewhere in the world.

There will be a long list of countries that are members of the ICC that Netanyahu and Gallant will be unable to visit, as they would be obliged to act on the arrest warrant. The US, Russia and China are not members, but for the current White House at least, a visit by either man would be highly embarrassing – though the incoming Trump administration will be another matter.

Dearborn will arrest Netanyahu & Gallant if they step within Dearborn city limits.

Others cities should declare the same. Our president may not take action, but city leaders can ensure Netanyahu & other war criminals are not welcome to travel freely across these United States. pic.twitter.com/eHS8oSMuqt

— Abdullah H. Hammoud (@AHammoudMI) November 21, 2024

Arrest warrant against Netanyahu coincides with crisis at ICC

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court has secured arrest warrants in its most politically charged cases just as the judicial body grapples with an unprecedented crisis. Karim Khan, whose request for warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders was granted on Thursday, is facing allegations of sexual misconduct, which will be examined by external investigators.

The inquiry, which is understood to be in its early stages, will focus on claims about Khan’s alleged conduct towards a woman who worked directly for him. In October, the Guardian reported that the allegations included claims of unwanted sexual touching and “abuse” over an extended period, as well as of coercive behaviour and abuse of authority.

Lawyers for Khan, 54, have said he “denies the whole of the allegations”. The alleged victim, a lawyer in her 30s who worked for Khan, has previously declined to comment.

Last week the ICC’s governing body referred the allegations to a UN oversight watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), despite concerns raised at the highest levels of the court about Khan’s ties to the body. Khan and the alleged victim are expected to be interviewed in the coming weeks.

The public emergence of the allegations last month came at an acutely sensitive moment for the ICC, and court officials said they exposed the court to attacks by those seeking to undermine its Palestine investigation.

Jeffrey Sachs: Can the World Survive 2 More Months of Biden?

Israel's continuous bombardment has poisoned Gaza's soil and environment

Khaled Marai, 34, from the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood west of Gaza City, was greatly disappointed after he tried to grow tomatoes and cucumbers to confront the famine prevailing in the northern Gaza Strip.

Marai, who has more than 20 years of agricultural experience, told The New Arab, "I tried to grow vegetable seedlings in my own nursery, and every time the seedlings wither and die despite my regular irrigation."

He explained that after conducting tests on the soil, it was found that it had become unsuitable for agriculture due to its severe contamination by chemicals from Israeli munitions.

Over the course of 13 months of bombing, the Israeli army dropped more than 85,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip—equivalent to more than five times the power of the Hiroshima bomb dropped on Japan in 1945—causing widespread destruction of infrastructure and serious pollution of agricultural soil in the Gaza Strip, which will hinder agriculture for decades according to a statement issued by the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority.

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Who Sets US Foreign Policy?

Biden’s Lust for War

The war in Ukraine is an American war for which the United States government should be ashamed and blamed. It was initiated by President Joe Biden and then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, both of whom advised Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that if he rejected a peace treaty that his own government had freely negotiated and agreed to in 2022 with Russian negotiators, Ukraine could join NATO. The treaty was more than 100 pages in length, each page of which had been initialed by both sides, and its essence accepted by the Kremlin and by Kyiv — until Biden and Johnson advised against it.

Their advice was essentially to trust their military support, as it would be strong enough to resist any Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine and relieve Kyiv of the need to make concessions to the Kremlin. They used Zelenskyy as a puppet, since their purpose was not motivated by peace or empathy or justice, rather by hatred for all things Russian. So, the U.S. and the U.K. encouraged bloodshed instead of peace, confrontation instead of communication, and Congress began paying for a war without declaring one.

Motivated by years of anti-Russian jingoism, heedless of its duties under the Constitution, thumbing its nose at at least three treaties ratified by the Senate that permit war only when the U.S. or an ally is gravely threatened, Congress permitted Biden to start an undeclared war against a country that poses no threat whatsoever to the national security of the United States. ...

There is no dispute but that the U.S. is waging war on Russia — without a congressional declaration, without the consent of the United Nations (as the U.S. is obliged to do under a treaty that the U.S. wrote) and solely on its own. I say solely on its own because the weaponry that destroyed the Russian military warehouse requires secret U.S. satellite technology to operate, and U.S. personnel with top-secret security clearances to aim and trigger. It would be an act of espionage to permit Ukrainians to do this. ...

The Constitution intentionally separated the war-declaring power from the war-waging power. Its author, James Madison, poignantly argued that if presidents could both choose the enemy and fight it, such a person would be a prince and not a president. Joe Biden’s presidency has been an abysmal failure, and he doesn’t know it. He must perversely hope that history will reward him if he keeps the killing coming to the last Ukrainian and even risks a wider war.

G20 circus. Biden unpopular and isolated

Police report details sexual assault allegations against Pete Hegseth

A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted in 2017 by Pete Hegseth after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public late on Wednesday. Hegseth, a Fox News personality and Donald Trump’s nominee to be defense secretary, told police at the time that the encounter had been consensual and denied any wrongdoing, the report said.

News of the allegations surfaced last week when local officials released a brief statement confirming that a woman had accused Hegseth of sexual assault in October 2017 after he had spoken at a Republican women’s event in Monterey.

Hegseth’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment early on Thursday. He has said Hegseth paid the woman in 2023 to head off the threat of a baseless lawsuit.

The 22-page police report was released in response to a public records request and offers the first detailed account of what the woman alleged to have transpired – one that is at odds with Hegseth’s version of events. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event and Hegseth. ...

A spokesperson for the Trump transition said early on Thursday that the “report corroborates what Mr Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false.”

GOP BLESSES Trump's New AG Pick PAM BONDI; Hegseth INSISTS He Was CLEARED Of Sexual Assault Claim

Trump names Pam Bondi as attorney general pick after Gaetz steps aside

Donald Trump announced that he would nominate for attorney general Pam Bondi, the former Florida state attorney general, hours after the former representative Matt Gaetz withdrew in the face of opposition from Senate Republicans who had balked over a series of sexual misconduct allegations.

The move to name Bondi reflected Trump’s determination to install a loyalist as the nation’s top law enforcement official and marked another instance of Trump putting his personal lawyers in the justice department.

Trump almost immediately settled on Bondi as a replacement pick for Gaetz, according to people familiar with the matter. Bondi had not auditioned for the role and her loyalist credentials coupled with her willingness to defend Trump on television made her an attractive pick.

The fact that Bondi could count on broad support inside Trump’s world and the Senate Republican conference, in contrast with Gaetz who always faced an uphill struggle, also earned her the endorsement from most of Trump’s senior advisers on Thursday, the people said.

Georgia Fires Entire Maternal Mortality Panel After Reporting on Abortion Ban Deaths

Georgia officials fired everyone on the Maternal Mortality Review Committee after ProPublica reported that the panel found the deaths of two women whose care was restricted by the state's abortion ban were preventable, the news outlet revealed Thursday.

ProPublica first exposed the committee's findings for Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in September, sparking a flood of criticism directed at abortion care restrictions and the primarily Republican politicians who impose them. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who was running for the White House, even traveled to Atlanta to pay tribute to the two women.

Thurman and Miller's stories, as the news outlet acknowledged Thursday, "became a central discussion" in not only the presidential contest—ultimately won by Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has bragged about the role he played in reversing Roe v. Wade—but also ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in 10 states, seven of which succeeded.

In a November 8 letter obtained by ProPublica, Georgia Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey wrote that an "investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information" despite state law and confidential agreements signed by panel members barring such disclosures.

Toomey explained that the committee was immediately "disbanded," a replacement panel will be formed through a new application process, and additional procedures are under consideration regarding confidentiality, oversight, and organizational structure.

Biden Team Secretly SABOTAGED Kamala

McKinsey clients had ‘rising share of global emissions’, internal analysis shows

The world’s biggest consulting firm found that its clients were on a trajectory to bust global climate targets, details of internal forecasting in 2021 uncovered by the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and the Guardian reveal.

McKinsey & Company has worked with some of the world’s biggest emitters, including many of the largest fossil fuel producers. It has previously argued it is necessary to engage these clients to help them transition to cleaner forms of energy and hit the target of limiting global warming to less than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

But the CCR and the Guardian have learned of an internal analysis of client emissions carried out by McKinsey in 2021 which showed that the companies the firm works with were set to exceed this target. Despite this, an internal email alleges that no senior members of staff were willing to “push the effort forward”.

The revelations follow an investigation published in the Guardian yesterday, based on more than a dozen interviews with former insiders, internal documents and hundreds of pages of court records, which revealed new details about the firm’s work with the fossil fuel industry.

Many of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers have been significant sources of revenue for McKinsey, such as the world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, and oil majors Shell and BP, according to an analysis of bankruptcy court records. “It is not a secret that McKinsey is in deep with big polluters, but now we know just how wide that hole is and how deep they’re digging,” said Rachel Rose Jackson from the campaign group Corporate Accountability. “The more it continues to partner closely with and profit from the very actors condemning people and the planet, the more complicit it becomes.”

US and India lead G20 on climate action, report says

The United States and India have made the greatest progress among the world’s top 20 economies in implementing climate policies since the 2016 Paris Agreement, a study commissioned by the Guardian has found.

The data underscores the importance of political leadership and international coordination, both of which are coming under intense pressure ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump, who has threatened to pull the US out of the United Nations climate treaty.

Over the past nine years, the G20 group of the world’s biggest economies have together introduced policies that are likely to reduce CO2 discharges by 6.9 gigatons by 2030, the report by Climate Action Tracker shows.

Although this is not enough to keep global heating within the Paris target of 1.5C to 2C above preindustrial levels, the authors of the study say it is a substantial improvement on what was forecast in 2015, showing the Cop process – despite its many flaws – has had some effect in reducing the climate dangers facing the world.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Israel: Beginning of the End

International Criminal Court Issues Arrest Warrants for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant

Biden Leaves Office But Risks War with Russia

‘People’s Arms Embargo’ at Travis Air Force Base

Stare Into Gaza: The Horror Was Not What I Expected

What Should Now Be Obvious To Everyone About the Ukraine War

Romania at turning point as pro-EU and nativist candidates seek election

Trump’s tax cuts and Musk’s Doge show they have no idea about US debt

A Little Night Music

Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson ~ House of Blue Lights

Johnnie Johnson - Tanqueray

Johnnie Johnson - Everyday I Have The Blues

Eric Clapton, Johnnie Johnson, and Chuck Lavell - Mean Old World

Johnnie Johnson - The Blues Don't Knock

Johnnie Johnson - I'm Goin' Fishin'

Johnnie Johnson - Key To The Highway

Johnnie Johnson - If You Love Me Like You Say

Johnnie Johnson - Movin' Out

Johnnie Johnson - Just To Be With You

Johnnie Johnson - Johnnie B. Bad

Johnnie Johnson Sessions with a Keyboard Legend