The US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the Pentagon’s overseer for Latin America and the Caribbean, will be sending hundreds of Marines and special forces troops to Peru beginning as early as this week, to train military and Peruvian National Police special forces units. These same forces have carried out massacres and extra-judicial executions to suppress the mass protests against the coup regime of Dina Boluarte.
Pentagon sending troops to train Peruvian coup regime’s killers
Tag: use of force
Chile Pushes Authoritarian Police Law
Chile’s neoliberal government is close to securing a new law that expands the right of security forces to use firearms against the population. The Naín-Retamal Law, a proposal of the executive branch, was today approved by the Senate for a third and final reading.
Chile Pushes Authoritarian Police Law
The Tragedy of US Diplomacy Pushing for War, But Never Peace
In a brilliant op-ed published in the New York Times, the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so after siding with the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades. The title of Parsi’s article, “The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable Peacemaker,” refers to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s use of the term “indispensable nation” to describe the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world.
The Tragedy of US Diplomacy Pushing for War, But Never Peace
After Backlash, San Francisco Government Quickly Moves from Authorizing to Banning Police Using Robots to Kill
Public backlash can lead government to reverse power overreaches, and to do so quickly.
After Backlash, San Francisco Government Quickly Moves from Authorizing to Banning Police Using Robots to Kill
Previously:
San Francisco Police Want To Use Robots to Kill Criminal Suspects
San Francisco Police Want To Use Robots to Kill Criminal Suspects
In a draft addressing the use of military weaponry, The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has struck out a line stating, “Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person,” according to the independent investigative news outlet Mission Local.
San Francisco Police Want To Use Robots to Kill Criminal Suspects
Philippines: Our Foreign Policy on China Is Clear, But Is It to The United States?
The chief architect of Philippine foreign policy is the President.
It appears that the sitting President has been somewhat slow in defining it but certainly he knows that buck of responsibility stops with him.
Our Foreign Policy on China Is Clear, But Is It to The United States?
Related:
Are Freedom of Navigation Operations and Innocent Passage Really the Same?
U.S. destroyer challenges China’s claims in South China Sea
Kamala Harris Heads to Philippines to Pick a Fight With China
Ukraine: A War To Save The Rules-Based International Order?
Washington’s Fraudulent, Rules-Based International Order: Among the many deceptive arguments that Joe Biden’s administration has made about the Ukraine war is that Russia’s invasion is an attack of unprecedented severity on the liberal, “rules-based international order” established at the end of World War II. That allegation has been a constant theme of administration officials and their allies in the news media and the foreign policy blob. Proponents argue that the war is a global existential struggle between order and chaos, free societies and unprincipled aggressors. Biden has stated the thesis succinctly that the Ukraine war is nothing less than “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules‐based order and one governed by brute force.”
Ukraine: A War To Save The Rules-Based International Order?
“There is nothing more democratic than referendums”
Machine-translated by Google Translate. H/T: Alfred de Zayas’ Human Rights Corner.
“There is nothing more democratic than referendums” (original in German)
Read More »“NATO does not want to allow self-determination of the Russians”
Interview with Prof. Dr. iur. et phil. Alfred de Zayas, international law expert and former UN mandate holder
Current affairs in focus: Were the elections in the Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaparozhye and Kherson oblasts in accordance with international law?
Prof. Dr. Alfred de Zaya: Referenda are fundamentally a human rights-compliant method of “taking the temperature” and determining the will of a population. Art. 1 of the UN pact on civil and political rights stipulates the right of self-determination for all peoples – including the people of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaparozhye and Kherson – and of course the people of Crimea.
Article 19 of the Covenant stipulates the right of all people to freedom of expression. There is nothing more democratic than referendums. However, the UN has failed here. The UN has held self-determination referendums in Sudan, Timor-Leste and Ethiopia/Eritrea. But only after tens of thousands of people had been killed. The UN should have intervened earlier and held preventive referenda.¹
Are referendums irrelevant if they are not conducted by the UN?
Of course, popular referendums are important, even if international bodies ignore them. Of course, there are referendums all over the world, which unfortunately are not organized and carried out by the UN, but solely by the affected population themselves, for example the 1962 referendum in Algeria, which led to independence.²
More Disinformation From Israel
Joe Biden ran for president in 2020 with a pledge to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, which Donald Trump had withdrawn from in May 2018 under pressure from Republican Party Jewish donors, most notably underwritten by an estimated $100 million coming from now deceased Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas casino fortune. The JCPOA might plausibly be regarded as the only major diplomatic success for the Barack Obama Administration, which featured Biden as Vice President, and it was good for the US due to its curb on proliferation, as well as being a benefit for the entire Middle East region as it made less likely a “weapons of mass destruction” arms race involving the Egyptians and Saudis.
More Disinformation From Israel
How The Pentagon Uses A Secretive Program To Wage Proxy Wars
Nick Turse, Alice Speri, The Intercept, Jul 1 2022
Small teams of US SOF are involved in a low-profile proxy war program on a far greater scale than previously known, according to exclusive documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials. While The Intercept and other outlets have previously reported on the Pentagon’s use of the secretive 127e authority in multiple African countries, a new document obtained through the FoIA offers the first official confirmation that at least 14 127e programs were also active in the greater Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region as recently as 2020. In total, between 2017 and 2020, US commandos conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world. Separately, Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both SOCOM & CENTCOM, which oversees US military efforts in the Middle East, confirmed the existence of previously unrevealed 127e “counter-terrorism” efforts in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
How The Pentagon Uses A Secretive Program To Wage Proxy Wars
Related:
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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