adhoc

ass. professor

[Esfandyar Batmanghelidj @yarbatman]

I've been engaged with Western, Iranian, and regional negotiators working on the Iran file for more than a decade. Nothing in the MOU surprises me.

I am seeing a lot of claims that the Trump administration has made enormous concessions in the MOU and that this shows the Trump "lost" the war. But if you know why the language of the MOU reads the way it does, you would realize why this view is wrong.

Every major "concession" in the MOU was something under discussion during the negotiations last May, before the 12-Day War.

American and Iranian negotiators had discussed confidence building measures including the granting of oil waivers and the unfreezing of assets. The "reconstruction fund" outlined in the MOU was originally envisioned as a regional investment vehicle, with investment coming from the Gulf states.

We shouldn't criticise the MOU because it contains unreasonable concessions, we should be frustrated that the MOU contains very logical inducements and that the Trump administration was poised to offer these same inducements not just before the 40-Day War, but also before the 12-Day War last year.

In other words, the wars were completely idiotic because the parameters of a viable diplomatic agreement between the U.S. and Iran *were already put forward* to Witkoff and Vance by the Omani mediators, with input from the Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati systems more than a year ago. Iran was inclined to accept the deal, but instead it got attacked.

We should consider ourselves fortunate that two wars later, Iran is still inclined to accept this deal, without dramatically different terms. That is a reflection of hard-nosed Iranian pragmatism and the under-appreciated fact that the Iranian national security establishment takes the idea of diplomacy seriously.

The Trump team have proven slow learners, but they may finally be realizing why diplomacy needs to be conducted with a win-win outlook.

[CounterPunch @NatCounterPunch]

Last month the Interior Department approved new grazing rules that revoke tribal rights to graze Bison on federal land in favor of cattle, i.e.“production-oriented livestock”. https://t.co/itl3q6KR7j

[Wesley @WesleyLowery]

FL police use A.I. to identify a vehicle theft suspect from surveillance video. Based on an "85% match" they arrest and charge Jalil Richardson. He spends 3 months in jail. He loses his job, his home, and custody of his kids.

Richardson lives in N.C.
He's never been to Florida. And his timesheet shows him at work at the time of the crime. No one checked before charging him. https://t.co/2AcQYwq30f

[hanzala. @juliusssiezure]

Persepolis eurocentrism also reminds me of Fanon. Fanon was concerned with how colonized elites seek legitimacy through categories established by europe. desire isn't necessarily 'i want to become european' but 'I want europe to recognize me as civilized modern rational cultured'

[dylan saba @shaabiranks]

“Historically, buffer zones do not remain buffers. They become frontiers. And frontiers, in the logic of states that have internalised expansion as security, generate the justification for the next buffer.”

[ORGANIZE! @SoulRevision]

What’s happening in Orange County, specifically the city of Garden Grove, with the chemical leak at the GKN Aerospace facility is stark reminder of how U.S. imperialism is killing us all. GKN manufactures material for military aircraft.

[mari @mariatdystopia]

“Ofc, the very plausibility of the notion of a free-floating pure science detached from its prospective utility & retrospective funding was itself the product of a fair amount of legal & economic construction initiated by the [US] military. The notion of the scientist as sequestered in an ivory tower was encouraged by the military, especially once a few of the elect physicists had suffered crises of conscience about ‘‘knowing sin’’ after the dropping of the bomb.

The notion that scientists somehow were members of a commonwealth apart from society became smoothly integrated with the oft-intoned refrain that they could not be held responsible for how their discoveries in ‘‘pure science’’ were put to use by ‘‘others.’’

The various protocols worked out during WWII—that scientists would conduct research under contracts that were issued by the military but managed through their universities, that they would be subject to indirect controls through security clearances and classification of secrets, that downstream development would be the province of the military science managers, that bureaucratic evaluation would be deployed through peer review, that grant overheads could buy off the principal investigator’s academic obligations to his or her home institution—all militated in favor of treating the scientist as though he or she were a member of a community apart from the general run of intellectual life.”

—Philip Mirowski
“How Positivism Made a Pact with the Postwar Social Sciences in the United States”

[Greg @GregGrandin]

In 1898, the US invaded and occupied Cuba, preempting a domestic revolt against Spanish colonial rule that was about to triumph. This was the first real US military op justified nearly fully in humanitarian terms, against Spanish brutality. The justification was cynical and…1/3

[BreakThrough News @BTnewsroom]

The Trump administration continues to pursue Monroe Doctrine 2.0 in Latin America, with U.S. troops training Panamanian military personnel in jungle warfare at a new school.

Some critics see this as a revival of the School of Americas, the notorious military training school the U.S. used to train Latin American military and police officers in counter-insurgency operations. Many of those trained would go on to commit severe political repression, torture, and other human rights abuses.

Report from Bloomberg.

[박주현 @hermit_hwarang]

This appears to be an older report, but there's a key point missing: THAAD does not protect a single inch of South Korea.

THAAD interceptors block LONG-RANGE projectiles. They do not guard against a "North Korean threat;" they protect US bases in the Pacific using SK as a shield

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

I'm a bit shocked @matthewkassel would write a story like this, meant to distract from a viral post highlighting the role of Stewart and Lynda Resnick, a zionist couple who swindled Californians of their water and now privately own more water than anyone on earth.

They seized control over California’s water resources in service of their pistachio empire— the "Wonderful Company." Also in service of their pistachio empire, they've lobbied hard for sanctions and war on Iran, precisely because Iran's pistachios are unparalleled in the world and their only real competitor in the global market.

Accusations raised in the documentary, Pistachio Wars, probably underestimate their mendacity and wickedness. The Wonderful Company is today’s United Fruit Company.

For more background, watch

I'm grateful to @nikasoonshiong, @DropSiteNews and Watermelon Pictures for exposing these parasites.

[Van Jackson @RealVanJackson]

Forward basing strategies in distant regions are nice and imperious when there’s no war going on, but when you have to fight a real military in an age of precision munitions, those forward bases are missile sponges. US allies have not really come to terms with their exposure

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The Phoenix Program deserves its own reckoning.

Because it is not taught in American schools.

Because it does not appear in most American War movies.

Because the people who ran it went on to long, decorated careers in intelligence and government and were never once called to account for what they did.

Phoenix was a CIA program. Officially called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support.

Its goal was to identify and eliminate the Viet Cong infrastructure, meaning anyone suspected of supporting or sympathizing with the National Liberation Front.

Between 1965 and 1972, it reportedly killed between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese civilians.

Tortured tens of thousands more.

In interrogation centers built by American money, staffed by American-trained personnel, overseen by American advisors.

The methods were not subtle.

Electric shock. Waterboarding. Rape. Mutilation.

The tiger cages of Con Son Island, cramped stone boxes where prisoners were kept folded for weeks, were built with American funding and American approval.

A CIA officer who ran the program, William Colby, later became Director of the CIA.

He testified before Congress about Phoenix.

He was never charged.

He wrote a book.

He became a respected member of the foreign policy establishment.

And now his grandson, Elbridge Colby, sits at the center of U.S. defense policy.

This is not ancient history.

The logic of Phoenix, identify, isolate, eliminate civilian support networks, was used in Iraq. In Afghanistan. In other places whose names we don't know yet.

The institution that built Phoenix still exists.

The men it trained trained other men.

The program ends. The program never ends.

Vietnam showed it could be resisted.

Vietnam showed it could be survived.

Vietnam is still here.

[maria @resistancestan]

south korea reopening its embassy in iran & taiwan reconciling with china is not to be underestimated… they’ve realized that the US is not the all-powerful & is therefor unable to protect them which leaves them no choice but to play nice with countries they once deemed hostile

[Dr. Ghada Sasa, PhD 🇵🇸 @drghadasasa]

I just read the new Haaretz article about how Israeli planted pines are suddenly dying en masse and it is absolutely worth dissecting. Here are a summary & my observations as a Palestinian scholar who writes on green colonialism. 1/

[Daniel Swain @Weather_West]

I can't believe we have reached this point, but this bears crystal clear emphasis: Our global climate system ensures that even "limited" use of lower-yield "tactical" nuclear weapons against civilian or industrial targets would have major regional-to-global scale consequences.

[Stephen Wertheim @stephenwertheim]

The Iran war exposes just how mil­it­ar­ily over­stretched and stra­tegic­ally undis­cip­lined the United States has become. Within weeks, the country has poured massive quant­it­ies of scarce high-end muni­tions into a region that its own National Secur­ity Strategy deemed a low pri­or­ity just four months ago.

“The days in which the Middle East dom­in­ated Amer­ican for­eign policy in both long-term plan­ning and day-to-day exe­cu­tion are thank­fully over,” wrote the aides who penned the doc­u­ment for Trump. “We should encour­age and applaud reform when and where it emerges organ­ic­ally, without try­ing to impose it from without.”