https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GquGH489SJc
Monday, September 6, 2021
AFRICOM IN THE CONGO
By Kambale Musavuli,
Black Agenda Report.
September 4, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/africom-in-the-congo/
Its immeasurable mineral resources has made the Congo the victim of a long history of Western greed, plunder, and genocidal violence.
AFRICOM’s recent arrival in the Congo — ostensibly to fight ISIS — will only extend this history; we can be sure these military forces will do more to support the US looting of the Congo’s wealth than stopping terrorism.
On the night of August 13, 2021, a US Special Forces team arrived in Kinshasa, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo. In a press release, the US embassy in Kinshasa notes that the US soldiers are in Congo at the invitation of the Congolese government. The ostensible goal is to fight the invisible and fabricated ISIS-DAESH, which the US State Department and Pentagon insist are in the Congo, even as multiple reports, including the UN Group of Experts, have categorically rejected that any ties exist in Congo between rebels called Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and ISIS.
The press statement was released on the same day the US soldiers arrived. It is also not available as of now on the U.S. embassy website. It is only on the embassy’s twitter page as an image, and in only French.
It has been fascinating watching the escalation of violence in my family’s hometown of Beni since the discovery of oil in Lake Albert in the mid 2000s. Lake Albert, at the border of Uganda and Congo, is said to be containing 2.5 billion barrels of oil, most of which are on the Congo side.
For the past 15 years under the Kabila regime, there has been reluctance in exploiting oil and giving out licenses in that lake, with the exception of the licenses given to Clive Khulubuse Zuma (Dig Oil affair) and Dan Gertler (Israeli secret service asset in Congo). On the Uganda side, Total (the French oil company) has been successful in securing most of the licenses for oil exploitation. As the geopolitics of the region changed, and Tullow Oil collapsed, French oil interests started to dominate not only the Central and East African region, but also Mozambique where Total is also present.
There is a plan to build a long oil pipeline from Lake Albert to the Indian Ocean which will go through Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and of course the DRC. The pipeline has multiple stakeholders, including with foreign countries, with countries who have been involved in long time regional conflicts, and, importantly, with China. The former Tanzanian president John Pombe J. Magufuli, though his position on COVID-19 was non-scientific, was right on the pipeline deal and refused to get the project moving forward seeing it as an exploitative measure being imposed by French interests in the oil reserves in the region.
Since Magufuli’s death, the project is moving much faster and it’s becoming obvious what everyone is trying to do in the Kivus.
Let’s keep in mind that thousands of people have been killed senselessly in Beni (North Kivu), very often by assailants speaking foreign languages and sometimes even speaking Lingala, per the findings of the UN reports. We have seen the displacements of thousands more in the same area where we know that if not displaced, the people will benefit from the oil exploitation. We have also heard one of the biggest lies of the 21st Century: ragged-tagged Ugandan rebels called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in the Congo since the late 90s, with no capacity to overthrow the Ugandan government, have been somehow connected to ISIS. This “connection” is being made by the US government and, to some extent, a Texas organization called Bridgeway Foundation, a charity arm of a US hedge fund.
From the day the U.S. State Department listed the Congo as a country harboring Islamic terrorists tied to ISIS, I have been consistently debunking this myth. Though Muslims are less than 10% of the population, we understand that it is ludicrous to think a group of people will want to convert a nation the size of Europe to Islam by beheading people. Only the gullible can trust what the US State Department and US Department of Defense are saying after their lies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We do have a serious problem now as international and regional interests collide. Kenya, which now controls the financial sector in the Congo as they push out South African banks, is sending their special forces in North Kivu. Uganda is building a military base in Beni, North Kivu, becoming the first African country to build a military base in Congo and arguably the first African country to build a military base in another country. Rwandan special forces have been operating in the Kivus without any official documentation, as exposed in the 2020 UN Group of Experts report, which notes that these soldiers are operating near the area where the Italian ambassador Luca Attanasio was killed earlier this year. The French president Emmanuel Macron promised to Congolese President Felix Tshilombo that he also will send French troops soon to the DRC to help fight “Islamist Terrorists.” This promise took place during the latest Africa summit in Paris where African presidents went to beg for debt forgiveness, including Ghanaian president Akuffo Addo, since Ghana now receives tremendous support from France (and Total) and is now a voluntary member of Francophonie. And last, the US soldiers have now arrived in Kinshasa.
What does all of this mean?
I’m certain that the US military coming under the umbrella of AFRICOM is there to secure US interests in the Congo. In the Kivus, it is the oil in Lake Albert and around Virunga Park all the way to Beni. I’m also clear that there is a huge attempt to counter Chinese interests in the Congo. People do not realize that Jeff Bezos could not go to space for 15 minutes if it wasn’t for Congo’s cobalt, nor could South African Elon Musk do the same. But this cobalt at the moment, in the Congo, is in control of China after the US mining company Freeport McMoran sold it to China. Freeport controlled the largest cobalt reserve in the world and had it (with Canadian Ludin) at 80% while Congo had 20%.
Watching the fight between US and China, I believe the US is going to try to take that mine from the Chinese using Felix Tshilombo while playing on anti-Chinese hysteria on the African continent.
Just study the visits of China and U.S. in the past 8 months in the Congo and the tweets by the Chinese ambassador to the Congo. That will show you what’s unfolding geopolitically with military ramifications.
Mao said “whoever controls the Congo, controls the world.” As Congolese people struggle to control their destiny, we know we are not alone. Lumumba reminded us of this. And we will not remain silent as they create their lies to control our land and resources.
We want to control our land and resources. We want to exploit them for the benefit of our people and not the Washington lobby firms, the mining conglomerates, or western powers! We want to better the conditions of our people!
We know why the US special forces are in Congo… and it’s not to stop ISIS!
POPULAR RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL WAR
By Evan King And Pambana Gutto Bassett,
Counter Punch.
September 4, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/popular-resistance-in-the-age-of-neoliberal-war-the-case-of-colombia/
The Case Of Colombia.
Since April 28 hundreds of thousands of Colombians have taken to the streets to demand the end to neoliberal reforms, chanting “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido”. Workers, women, students, unionists, pensioners, Indigenous and Afrocolombian campesinos, and youth began the strike in opposition to a regressive tax reform that disproportionately affected the poorest Colombians. Now, a month later their joint call has grown into a generalized rejection of the neoliberal and far-right government of Ivan Duque. His government is polled as the least popular in recent Colombian history, already a low bar for a State that has waged an ongoing war against its people.
Shortly after the nonviolent protests began, the government tabled the reforms, but both the Finance Minister and Foreign Minister were forced to resign in response to the people’s pressure. The demonstrations rejected them for proposing austerity measures that burden the poor in the midst of a pandemic. This victory was followed by the decades-old government response to resistance: repression, outrageous lies, racist and misogynist violence, and sheer terror. At the marches most carry only instruments and placards, and are met with murderous state forces shooting indiscriminately or targeting community leaders who defend human rights and collective decision-making. In the face of this, the protests have grown stronger in number and location. They are now across the country, proving that the demands are shared by many more than those who can brave the streets.
The right to protest is denied daily by the militarised forces that are well-equipped with U.S. funding. They shoot from helicopters, motorcycles, and from the massacres, forced disappearances, sexual violence, and real and constant fear. While the state and paramilitary focus their brutality with unprecedented intensity against the people, the protesters focus their demands on an alternative agenda that builds popular power. This agenda emerges out of the most poor sectors, and out of Indigenous and Afro-Colombia whose resistance is over 500 years old.
It cannot be denied that the resistance is led by the youth. It is mainly impoverished young people from urban peripheries who are the leading force in the “puntos de resistencia” or points of resistance. Although they face the brunt of police terror, and have witnessed the police massacre their community members and forcibly disappear, rape, and torture their neighbours, they refuse to stop organising.
Youth from the most poor sectors and their families account for a majority of Colombia’s 50 million. On the rare occasion that they are interviewed, they say things like: ‘We have no future because they have taken everything from us.’ This was already true before Covid-19 hit, but the State’s failure to ensure basic economic support during the pandemic, coupled with a wholly inadequate public health response, has made daily life an act of survival. The youth add, “Even fear. We have nothing left to lose.” The marches are an exercise in despair, coupled with a clear and utter rejection of a system that enriches the small Euro-descendant elite and the multinational corporations that buy them. The youth have an unparalleled determination to build a distinct path.
Urban middle-class university students, whose families account for about one third of the population, have not hesitated to participate in ‘the resistance’; they went on strike in 2018 and again the following year, helping to trigger the general strike. Many of them are only a generation or two away from those who suffered hunger. During the pandemic, confined to their homes, they have seen their job prospects and educational opportunities dry up, bills arrive that their families can no longer pay, and many small and medium family-owned businesses have closed. They understand that the precarity they face is a product of the disinterest of the elite in their future, and have joined the demonstrations against neoliberal reforms.
The youth in Colombia demand dramatic changes to the country’s increasing privatisation and militarisation and they are willing to put their bodies on the line to achieve it. They call for a radical transformation of the country, from a neoliberal, racist, and warring regime, to one that is democratic, participatory, and guarantees basic necessities for a life with dignity: an end to austerity and the creation of universal healthcare, education, dignified housing, and peace.
The “puntos de resistencia” are also where the youth build community, and practice the world they want for all Colombians. They are filled with solidarity and a sense of purpose. Many of the puntos host communal soup kitchens, free workshops for children, and tables for mutual aid or “mesas solidarias”. They carry out cultural work with music, dance, theatre, and painting, a reprieve as well as a creative and collaborative outlet. The youth are newer protagonists in the formation of neighbourhood assemblies or “asambleas”. There, the people meet, hold long discussions and debate, and make decisions through collective processes. Direct and participatory democracy, service-provision, as well as cultural production all flourish in resistance to the centuries-long disenfranchisement by the State, and the current militarised government crackdown.
The resistance and the protagonism of the poor, Indigenous, Afrocolombian, women, and the young are threats to the powerful. Although there has yet to be an exhaustive investigation of State crimes, preliminary reports by local human rights groups have documented 3155 incidents of police violence, including 43 homicides, 1388 arbitrary arrests, 22 cases of sexual violence, 42 blindings and at least 93 cases of forced dissapearance, in the city of Cali alone. The victims include minors as young as 13. Images of the bodies of young men can be seen floating down the Cauca River in the outskirts of urban centers. Chop houses, a gruesome tool of colonial violence, have resurfaced.
The level of violence points to a systemised plan from the top echelons of the State.The types of violence and its targets are similar to those committed by other U.S.-trained and -funded state and paramilitary forces across the Americas. These repressive tactics are elements of a particular kind of military doctrine known as counterinsurgency, a doctrine of the U.S., a nation-state borne out of white supremacist genocide and counter-revolution. This doctrine has targeted resistance movements across Latin America and the Caribbean, for decades. It is by sheer determination and dignity of the people, the resistance continues.
A Brief History of Counterinsurgency in Colombia
During the 1960s, a time of global anti-colonial struggle, the United States began formal training of the Colombian armed forces in counterinsurgency warfare. It was a declared campaign to halt the so-called spread of communism- or, the mass mobilisations by poor and racialised people to end exploitation and promote governance by the oppressed. The U.S. invested heavily in attacking the organised resistance of anyone or group that opposed U.S. interests and corporate control. U.S. military officials instructed the Colombian armed forces to target armed and unarmed actors suspected of harboring communist sympathies or “subversive thoughts”. Any advocate of rights- of workers, youth, women, Indigenous, Afrocolombians, farmers- became a potential target, and many of them were surveilled, threatened, disappeared, assassinated.
U.S. counterinsurgency manuals stated that “civilians in the operational area” such as trade unionists, students, and community organizers could be targeted with “guerrilla warfare, propaganda, subversion, [… and] terrorist activities.” This tactic: “quitarle el agua al pez,” or “drain the water to catch the fish”. The scorched earth policy has been utilised by various military and politicians who are backed by the U.S. and have responded to popular resistance with death squads and genocide.
Although the policies were State run, they relied greatly on para-state forces and funding from U.S. tax dollars, as well as informal revenue streams linked to multinational projects. Large corporations benefit from a population demobilised to defend their rights and have recorded ties to illicit activities. Much of the State violence perpetrated against Colombian civil society was outsourced to paramilitary groups, who received the Colombian state’s tacit and active support by way of arms and personnel exchanges, information sharing, and legal protection through official impunity. They became known as the “sixth division” of the Colombian military. When protesters shout “Responsabilizamos a Iván Duque, al Ministerio de Defensa y a la Policía Nacional por las vulneraciones que puedan sufrir lxs manifestantes!” “We blame (or accuse) Ivan Duque, the Ministry of Defense and the National Police for any infringements on their rights that the protestors may suffer!” They speak to a long history of state responsibility for official and paramilitary violence.
More than 18,000 Colombian military and police officials have been trained by the U.S. in the notorious School of the Americas (SOA), later renamed WHINSEC, and popularly called the “School of the Assassins” by peace activists. The Colombian state has a close relationship with this programme. According to public documents, more than 110,000 members of the Colombian security forces have received training by the U.S. Most years, Colombia is the country that sends the most military and police personnel to train at SOA in Fort Benning, Georgia. There, officers receive expert training on white supremacist and right wing ideology, intelligence gathering, anti-communism, counterinsurgency, command and control, psychological operations, and irregular warfare.
SOA graduates leave well-prepared to commit atrocities in their home countries. Some of the School’s most notorious graduates include Guatemala’s Rios Montt, El Salvador’s Roberto d’Aubuisson, Panama’s Manuel Noriega, and Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer. There are many thousands more.
The Age of Neoliberal War
This is part of a plan that Canadian journalist Dawn Paley calls “Neoliberal War”. Building on the counterinsurgency of past decades, this war differs from the “Cold War” in a number of ways. First, unlike the U.S. sponsored military dictatorships that characterized 20th century Latin America, these are carried out in nominally democratic countries. Second, unlike those dictatorships, they avoid mention of specific political systems (like “neoliberalism”) or use misinformation and vague political content. The U.S. was explicitly anti-communist, against anti-colonial struggles, and pro the free market during the Cold War. The Neoliberal War is presented as chaotic, confusing, and despite the strategy aimed squarely at suppressing resistance, and despite the carefully-planned multinational coordination, it is never called a war.
During the “Cold War”, the U.S. perfected’ a number of socio-political and military strategies to destroy the “internal enemy” (the people), known as counterinsurgency or COIN. In Colombia, this included the formation of paramilitary units, special brigades, and military intelligence agencies that engaged in sabotage, displacement, dispossession, terrorism, torture, and forced disappearances intended to subjugate the “subversive” forces in society through state-sponsored terrorism, ecocide, and genocide.
In the age of “Neoliberal War” the Colombian security forces use COIN 2.0, which has three central themes: 1) the confusion of the perpetrator of state sanctioned violence, including members of state security forces, organized crime networks and individual actors used as proxies; 2) the widening of the definition of insurgent to include broad swaths of the population (often marginalized communities dependent as well as independent of their particular ideological or partisan identity); and 3) the unleashing of mass organized violence involving the physical destruction and public display of racialized people as well as the forced disappearance of people under the opaque and depoliticized neoliberal regimes. The repetition, or continuation, of settler colonial violence is undeniable
The Case of Alvaro Herrera
Alvaro Herrera, is a young music student, and French horn player at the Universidad del Valle in the city of Cali, Colombia. On May 28th, Alvaro was participating in a peaceful cultural event, playing music along with other members of the orchestra, when shots could be heard being fired at the crowds of protesters near the University campus. As he makes his way back home he is approached by a group of men in civilian clothing with bullet-proof vests and high-caliber assault rifles. Two of the men point their weapons at him and begin to beat him. Later, this group of unidentified assailants turned Alvaro over to the police, which debated the possibility of taking him away in an unmarked white truck near the station. As Herrera later declared, he believed the plan was to make him disappear.
After being brutally beaten in police custody, Alvaro was forced to make a false confession of being a part of an “organized group of vandals” which was recorded by a police officer and uploaded to social media. The video caused an uproar of public outrage that was able to pressure the police into releasing Alvaro days later, but many others are not so lucky.
Alvaro’s case exhibits all three central characteristics of “Neoliberal War”: 1) the unidentified armed men casually patrol the streets while the official authorities look on is part of a strategy of confusion. A strategy that blurs the line between State and non-State actors and creates a sense of paranoia amongst protesters who may not be able to distinguish who might be a potential threat or what their relation to State power could be. 2) Alvaro is forced to confess to being an “organized vandal” and is published widely on social media in a feeble attempt to reinforce the government narrative of violent criminal vandals terrorizing the population which must be met with overwhelming force. This reflects the widening definition of insurgent to include basically anyone. 3) The unleashing of mass violence. In the case of Alvaro in the form of brutal beatings and psychological torture. Both the public exhibition of this violence through viral video and the threat of forcibly being disappeared for seemingly opaque and depoliticized reasons. All of this is textbook counterinsurgency warfare financed by the United States taxpayer.
Violence and Control
As in the case of Alvaro Herrera and hundreds more currently missing in Colombia, these forced disappearances occur without the need of sophisticated intelligence operations, or the intricate network of clandestine detention centers as was the case in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala among others during the “Dirty Wars” of the 1970s and 80s. The concept of COIN 2.0 allows us to make sense of the multiple and superficially unrelated cases of violence in Colombia over the past weeks.
The violence, which appears with different intensities and geographies, has the common goal of gaining control over the popular sectors that are currently mounting a significant resistance to the established political and economic system that has regularly dispossessed and exploited them in the name of greater capital penetration and accumulation. In Colombia, we can see attempts to blame this violence on a criminal subculture or “vandals” rather than recognizing the calculated nature of an all out counterinsurgency war, financed by the United States, that is being carried out by the Colombian security forces against broad sectors of the civilian population.
Many of the mainstream outlets covering the current uprising in Colombia often ignore the complicity of powerful political figures in carrying out crimes against humanity, the nexus between mass violence and capitalism, and the role of the U.S. government in promoting “Neoliberal War”.
WE NEED PUBLIC CONTROL OF OUR ENERGY SYSTEMS
By Thomas M. Hanna,
In These Times.
September 4, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/we-need-public-control-of-our-energy-systems/
The Power Is Still Out In New Orleans After Hurricane Ida.
The Damage From Hurricane Ida Is The Latest Reminder That The Climate Change Era Requires Public Ownership Of Infrastructure.
On Sunday August 29, New Orleans and neighboring areas were hit by Hurricane Ida, one of the strongest storms to make landfall in Louisiana’s history. The rebuilt levy system in the city held, preventing the large-scale flooding wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Yet the damage caused by Ida has been “catastrophic,” according to Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards. This includes the total collapse of the city’s privately-owned electric grid, leaving the predominately Black city, which was already reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, completely without electricity.
All told, more than one million people in the region lost power during Hurricane Ida, and Entergy — the Fortune 500 corporation that owns and operates New Orleans’ grid — has warned that service in some areas might not be restored for weeks. As a result of this grid failure, water and sewer facilities were knocked off-line (leading to water outages and boil water advisories), schools and universities have been shuttered, and communications services have been badly interrupted.
When natural disasters like Hurricane Ida occur, policymakers often wave away the damage and devastation as an unavoidable “act of god” (to use common insurance language). However, these types of response ignore deep structural deficiencies and inequities in the way critical infrastructure systems are often designed and operated in the United States. Specifically, they obscure the role of private, for-profit ownership and control of these services.
In the case of New Orleans’ electric grid, for instance, Entergy has long been accused of neglect, poor maintenance and manipulative business practices in the pursuit of profit. In 2019, advisers to the New Orleans City Council recommended fining the company up to $2 million for failing to maintain the city’s aging transmission system, concluding that the company’s “actions, inactions and delayed reactions caused adverse impacts on tens of thousands of ratepayers, both commercial and residential.”
Earlier that same year, the City Council fined the company $5 million for using paid actors to pose as supportive residents during council hearings on a proposed new power plant in New Orleans East. And in March of this year, the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the Arkansas Public Service Commission, and the New Orleans City Council filed a federal complaint against Entergy asserting that the company overcharged (and should refund) customers to the tune of $1.1 billion related to its shoddy attempts to refurbish the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in 2012.
While these types of issues are endemic to privatization and for-profit ownership and control, the era of climate change is bringing them into stark relief. Last year, for instance, the large California for-profit utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in conjunction with the devastating 2018 “Camp Fire,” which was caused by a combination of climate-related drought conditions and profit-seeking corporate malfeasance. Prior to the plea, a grand jury report found that the company had failed to maintain and upgrade its aging power lines (one of which started the fire) despite multiple warnings to do so. At the same time, the company was spending millions of dollars lobbying state officials, and had distributed $4.5 billion in profits to shareholders over just five years.
Similarly, in February 2021, Texas’ highly privatized and marketized energy system totally failed under pressure from stronger than usual winter weather. As in New Orleans, the resulting effects from climate change fueled the disaster, which disproportionately and inequitably impacted communities of color and low-wealth people. For its part, Entergy has a long track record of bitterly opposing any efforts to address climate change (despite knowing about it since the 1980s).
There is an alternative to this extractive, ecologically unsustainable, and racially and economically inequitable model of private control over our vital infrastructure: public ownership. In the electricity sector, for instance, roughly 28 percent of customers in the United States already get their power from a publicly owned utility or cooperative. These locally controlled, not-for-profit entities often charge significantly lower rates for electricity than their for-profit counterparts and, in the case of publicly owned utilities, return a greater percentage of their revenue back to the local community.
They also do not have the same incentives (namely short-term profits) to defer maintenance, reduce service quality, and fail to invest in climate resiliency. For instance, on repeated occasions over the past several years, Sacramento’s publicly owned electric utility, Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), has kept power on for their customers during heat waves and wildfires, while, nearby, PG&E was cutting off power for millions of customers under orders from the California Independent System Operator, which supports the three large, for-profit utilities in the state. Part of the reason SMUD is able to do this when for-profit utilities cannot is that, rather than squeezing out as much profit as possible, they have chosen to invest in mitigation and reliability measures.
Public ownership of infrastructure and services is not a guarantee of more equitable, democratic and ecologically sustainable outcomes. For instance, while publicly owned utilities in general generate significantly more of their energy from renewable sources than for-profit utilities (mostly due to high concentrations of hydropower), many have a long way to go in transitioning to renewable forms of energy. Similarly, many publicly-owned enterprises and services are severely lacking when it comes to genuine participation, transparency and accountability to democratic structures.
However, what public ownership and control does provide is an opportunity and a tool for communities at various scales to democratically and collectively determine and implement priorities, goals, and timelines — such as climate resiliency, a just energy transition, and an equitable recovery from crises — that go beyond a single-minded pursuit of short-term profits. It is an opportunity that simply does not exist with for-profit, fossil-fuel addicted corporations in control. At a briefing to discuss the difficulty of restoring power after Hurricane Ida, President Biden neatly and unknowingly summarized the problem. “They’re all private providers,” he said. “We don’t control that.”
From hurricanes and polar vortexes to wildfires and pandemics, recent events across the country demonstrate that decades of privatization, corporatization and marketization have left our communities — especially those most marginalized and under-resourced — fragile and highly vulnerable to disasters. As we enter into what is likely going to be a period of increasing and intersecting economic, ecological and social crises, it is imperative that we reclaim democratic public ownership and control over our infrastructure and vital public services.
WHISTLEBLOWER SHARES PERSPECTIVE ON END TO AFGHANISTAN WAR
By Kevin Gosztola,
The Dissenter.
September 4, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/australian-military-whistleblower-shares-perspective-on-end-to-afghanistan-war/
“We knew it was a debacle.”
“Everybody knew. There was a culture of silence to cover it up, and the politicians were never really trying to win the war.”
David McBride is a former military lawyer in the Royal Australia Regiment and Australia Special Forces. He completed two tours in Afghanistan and submitted an internal complaint against what he witnessed in the war. He immediately faced scrutiny and harassment.
A few years later, David found journalists with the Australia Broadcasting Corporation, who were willing to listen to him. They accepted classified documents that showed the reality of Australia’s involvement in the war.
What David had to reveal was published as “The Afghan Files.” It was a “quite a big story in Australia,” according to him. But the Australia government responded by raiding the ABC and targeting David with a prosecution for an espionage offense.
In this episode from the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast, which Kevin Gosztola typically co-hosts with Rania Khalek, Kevin speaks with David about his deployments to Afghanistan. He shares his view on the last several weeks, when the United States withdrew forces and mounted an unprecedented evacuation effort with a mostly cooperative Taliban.
“I was born in Australia, but I spent a lot of my life in the U.K. I went to Oxford University in England, and then I joined the British Army,” David recalls. “I came back to Australia and I started practicing as a lawyer, and I got a job being a legal officer.” (In the U.S., these are known as JAGs.)
“You wear a uniform, but you’re meant to make sure people comply with the rules of engagement. If people get in trouble, you’re meant to make sure that the law is followed,” McBride adds.
In 2011, David grew concerned with how the Australia Army was lying to politicians. They were saying everything was going well. If you spoke to soldiers, they would say “everybody knew it wasn’t going well, but the idea was to put out false messages to say it was going well.
“I came back in 2013 for my second tour with the Special Forces, which do a lot more direct action which is attacking the enemy with missiles and going to their houses and killing them. I could see again the false messaging was getting out of control.”
After returning to Australia, David made his internal complaint. He attempted to “gently prod the organization” to recognize “we’re not following the law, and we’re not even doing a good job. We’re just trying to win the war by saying we’re winning the war, even though we know we’re not.”
“We’d become very politicized in that we were really just an arm of the politicians, and we would say whatever the politicians wanted us to say, which of course was good news.”
The complaint was not well received. It resulted in scrutiny. “I had a very good career up to that point, and then my career stalled. I was moved sideways. I was given a lot of psychological reviews.”
David recounts, “I was gaslit by the organization, who said it’s all in your imagination. They sent me to a psychiatrist who said that I was nuts and it was all a sense of my own entitlement.”
“Eventually, after four years of trying to get people to care, I found some media people who took the classified documents, which I think proved my case, and they made something called the Afghan Files, which was quite a big story in Australia which was one of the first stories to expose the war crimes and coverups and general fact that we weren’t telling the truth about the war.”
The police came after David, and he took off for Spain. He says he was kind of on the run, but he had a daughter in Australia and came back to face the music, where he was arrested in 2018.
“Since then, I have been fighting a charge similar to Julian Assange. It’s an espionage charge, even though I’m a whistleblower. They’re saying I damaged national security.”
David claims he could face over 100 years in prison if they want to put him in prison for that long because the penalty can be severe. “I’m very much treated as if I’m a terrorist.”
While awaiting trial (which was postponed again to 2022), David has followed recent developments in Afghanistan closely.
“These latest events in Afghanistan have been very helpful to me, even though they’re tragic for the people of Afghanistan, because it shows what I’ve been saying all along. That we knew it was a debacle.”
“Everybody knew. There was a culture of silence to cover it up, and the politicians were never really trying to win the war,” David contends. “I believe, as Julian Assange said, they just wanted to keep it going because it was a big money spender for the corporations. It was a big money spender for the political parties because the corporations would make donations to them. And it was a vote-winner.”
“Dropping bombs on Islamic people in the mountains won a lot of votes off that section of the population that equates dropping bombs and shooting people up as strong leadership.”
As David puts it, “Australia’s got a lot to answer for—and Britain—because the U.S. cannot carry out these military adventures without some sort of allies.”
He also reacts to a news report about “Captain Louise,” who was attached to the Australia Special Forces and at one time had a partner in the Special Forces. She is a key witness in an Australia war crimes inquiry and had her home bombed.
“It’s a big deal. I was as surprised as anybody by that story,” David says.
Her partner apparently told her his unit was out on patrol. They shot someone in a group of 11 farmers by mistake and panicked. They did not want any witnesses so everyone was murdered, including children. They claimed they were Taliban.
David suggests a stun grenade was thrown at her house. It was likely intended not to kill her but to scare her into recognizing if she gives evidence against certain people then bad things will happen.
“I’ve got two daughters. I got veiled threats to say that everything that you hold dear could be taken away from you,” David shares. “They know I’m pretty nuts, and I’m not going to worry about it too much. But obviously everybody’s got a weakness, and the idea that my daughters would be harmed because I’m giving evidence against certain people, yeah, it’s pretty scary.”
Louise was relocated and now is under witness protection. The attack made her even more determined to tell investigators whatever they need to know.
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