Instruction: Write an article about: The U.S. is spending millions on ‘Havana Syndrome’ research – but it’s not clear if it exists. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Cuba, Havana Syndrome, Moscow signal, Project Pandora, Russia, Soviet Union, USSR

Output:
U.S. government agencies have spent more than $2 million researching Havana Syndrome, but medical experts and internal reports suggest it is psychological, not physical. Similar investigations into the “Moscow signal” during the Cold War found nothing.

U.S. federal agencies have spent more than $2 million researching the mysterious condition known as Havana Syndrome – and they plan on spending more.
Havana Syndrome is a condition first identified in 2016 that is alleged to be afflicting some diplomats and intelligence agents in the United States and Canada. But numerous scientific experts and internal government reports have suggested the syndrome is psychological, not physical, concluding that it is “very unlikely” to be the result of attacks by a foreign adversary.
Politico reported on March 9, 2023 that the U.S. Department of Defense and Army had awarded researchers at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan a grant for a “Traumatic Brain Injury and Psychological Health Research Program.” The Defense Technical Information Center’s database of public research identified the program as focusing on “anomalous health incidents” – a phrase that the Intelligence Community and State Department use for Havana Syndrome.
A review of public data on USASpending.gov and SAM.gov, websites used by the government to report contracting information, reveals that the grant is not the only money recently awarded or proposed for research into Havana Syndrome.
In September 2022, the same month the DoD awarded the Wayne State grant, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded a contract via the National Institutes of Health to the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, for work on “Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) and Anomalous Health Incidences (AHI),” according to USASpending.
Similarly, in January 2023, the Virginia Contracting Activity, the body within the Defense Intelligence Agency responsible for contract management, posted a request for information on behalf of the DIA and the Office of the Surgeon General to SAM.gov. The publication called for proposals for a contractor to work with one or both of the agencies on what appears to be a new initiative, called the Anomalous Health Incident Program.
Collectively, the studies add a new layer to a long-developing, and at times controversial, story.
In 2016, a group of Central Intelligence Agency officers working under diplomatic cover at the U.S. embassy in Cuba claimed that they had experienced a constellation of odd physical and mental ailments, ranging from headaches and nausea to memory loss, after exposure to a high-pitched noise.
The embassy’s chief of mission called a general meeting and encouraged staff to report any unusual symptoms. Shortly after, more cases were identified.
News of the condition first broke a year later, in August 2017, when the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had expelled two diplomats from Cuba’s embassy in Washington D.C. in connection with what State Department officials called “incidents” – suggesting that the condition was linked to attacks by a foreign government, possibly even Cuba itself.
A subsequent story published by the Associated Press in October confirmed this, stating that investigators suspected the noise, which was described as sounding like a “mass of crickets,” may have come from a sonic weapon, or a weapon that uses sound waves to injure a target.
However, speculation on the nature of the alleged attacks shifted, and some individuals claiming to suffer from the condition – now dubbed Havana Syndrome by the media, because of the location of the original cases – said their symptoms were the result of directed-energy weapons, or ranged weapons that attack a target with electromagnetic energy like ultra-high frequency radio waves.
Soon, U.S. officials stationed abroad were reporting a range of unusual symptoms, expanding upon the scope of the attacks to include countries beyond Cuba.
A CIA official in Moscow described feelings of vertigo and nausea to GQ magazine. A diplomat stationed in China claimed to NBC News that, in addition to a “pulsing pressure” in her body, she believed her dogs were being poisoned.
The shift in the alleged source of the attacks highlighted a problem in the stories surrounding Havana Syndrome, however. Few news outlets covering the subject appeared to understand what they were reporting.
A State Department official who has claimed to suffer from Havana Syndrome was said to have experienced both “sonic attacks” and an assault by a “microwave range” weapon by different news agencies within a three-month period.
These strange dimensions to the Havana Syndrome saga have led to speculation that the condition might not exist at all.
Neurologist Robert Baloh and medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew published a book in 2020 titled “Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria,” in which they argue that the condition is a kind of mass hysteria, known as a psychogenic illness, which spreads through medical misdiagnosis and media coverage.
Their argument was supported by the findings of multiple federal agencies and scientific panels.
In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Analysis Unit reviewed medical information and interview transcripts supplied by the State Department and determined the cause of Havana Syndrome to be a psychogenic illness. (It later retracted those findings after pushback from State Department officials.)
That same year, a separate investigatory body of scientists convened by the State Department, called JASON, came to a similar conclusion, stating that “psychogenic effects may serve to explain important components of the reported injuries.”
A study published in 2019 by researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada found another possible explanation for the physical symptoms, suggesting they may have been caused by pesticides. At the time when Havana Syndrome was first reported, the Cuban government was in the midst of an aggressive fumigation campaign to combat the Zika virus.
The Dalhousie study was leaked to Canadian media four months after publication, but the findings of the FBI and JASON reviews were withheld until 2021.
The FBI has denied Freedom of Information Act requests for the full BAU report, citing exemptions for medical privacy reasons and an ongoing investigation.
Despite mounting evidence pointing to a psychogenic illness, the State Department has remained firm in its stance that Havana Syndrome is real.
In 2020, it commissioned another study, this time at the National Academy of Sciences, which argued that directed-energy weapons were the “most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases.” The following year, the State Department coordinated with the Biden administration to rebrand Havana Syndrome as “anomalous health incidents.”
The phrase “anomalous health incident” has since been adopted by members of the Intelligence Community, many of whom hold conflicting positions on the subject.
This has put the Anomalous Health Incident Program at the center of a fierce debate over the nature of the condition and its alleged source.
On March 1, 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a press release stating that it was “very unlikely” that anomalous health incidents were the result of attacks by a foreign adversary.
The Washington Post reported that seven intelligence agencies participated in the assessment, with five coming to the “very unlikely” conclusion, one ruling it “unlikely,” and a final agency abstaining entirely.
An unclassified statement of work included with the Virginia Contracting Activity’s request for information (RFI) identifies the Anomalous Health Incident Program by name, repeatedly using the phrase alongside occasional references to Havana Syndrome, suggesting that the Defense Intelligence Agency, VACA’s parent agency, may have been the abstaining party in the ODNI assessment.
The document calls for a 26-person team of support staff, ranging from resident nurses and psychologists to industrial hygienists and case managers, to assist the DIA in medical response and data analysis of anomalous health incidents targeting the Intelligence Community in the continental United States and duty stations abroad.
It is one of a number of documents produced over the years that point to a long-standing belief in anomalous health incidents by agencies within the government. An earlier version of the RFI included with the contract opportunity identifies the Office of the Surgeon General as the supervising agency and is dated for October 2019.
It is unclear if the Anomalous Health Incident Program is a new program within the DIA and/or the OSG, or if the RFI is expanding upon a pre-existing one.
The DIA has investigated anomalous health incidents in the past, as discovered by Freedom of Information Act researcher John Greenewald, Jr. in 2022, when a FOIA request into an alleged incident returned a response from the agency.
In August of 2021, @VP Kamala Harris' flight was delayed for more than three hours due to an "anomalous health incident" / likely a "Havana Syndrome" attack.
DIA found 45 pages relating to this as responsive to my #FOIA filed.
They won't release a single page. pic.twitter.com/hTm15oZyzy
— John Greenewald, Jr. (@blackvaultcom) April 11, 2022

The Anomalous Health Incident (AHI) Program is one of many now popping up in the public and private spheres, showing a growing financial incentive to support claims of the existence of anomalous health incidents.
Researchers at Wayne State University were awarded $750,000 in September 2022 for a study that uses animal subjects in testing, by exposing them to radiofrequency waves for two hours a day over a 60-day period.
Even more noteworthy is a contract awarded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine through the National Institutes of Health, also with an action date of September 2022.
The Office of the Surgeon General, one of the agencies that may be involved in the government’s AHI Program, falls under the jurisdiction of the HHS.
The Henry M. Jackson Foundation contract totals $1.5 million – double the amount of the Wayne State grant – and covers research into the relationship between traumatic brain injuries and anomalous health incidents.
The foundation does not list the award or the nature of the research on its website, but it may be connected to a one-time employee of the foundation, Dr. James Giordano, a professor of neurology and bioethics at Georgetown University.
Giordano appears regularly in the media as a subject matter expert on anomalous health incidents, and in a 2021 op-ed referencing Havana Syndrome for Medpage Today, he included a financial disclosure stating that he has received funding from both the NIH and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.
When asked about the contract, Colleen Franklin, director of communication for the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, stated via email, “This is a government contract, we cannot respond to any media inquiries, requests for interviews or comments.”
The Office of the Surgeon General did not respond to a request for comment.
These studies are not the first time the U.S. government has funded inquiries into such phenomena.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) conducted radiation experiments on humans and primates, to see if microwave radiation could impede the mental and physical abilities of test subjects.
The experiments were part of a larger program, Project Pandora, which sought to understand if the Soviet Union had used a directed-energy weapon on staff at the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
At the time, embassy employees reported of suffering from ailments similar in character to Havana Syndrome, prompting the government to look into a so-called “Moscow Signal.”
Documents made public by the National Security Archive in 2022, however, revealed that Pandora researchers could find no evidence that microwave radiation degraded mental ability or posed a physical risk at the levels reportedly used against embassy staff.
One of the Pandora studies, identified as Project Big Boy, focused on human test subjects on a Navy ship, the USS Saratoga. The study found no changes between groups who had been exposed to microwave radiation through the Saratoga’s radar equipment and those who had not.
“There were no significant differences discernible among the three groups, either in the dockside or underway tests with respect either to task performance, psychological effects, or biological effects,” reads a summary of findings of Big Boy in a 1979 Congressional report on Pandora.
According to the report, a subsequent primate study also “did not provide an acceptable answer to the question as to whether or not any effects, either behavioral or biological, could be caused by microwave radiation of the intensity and characteristics contained in the synthetic ‘Moscow’ signal.”
Project Pandora was terminated in 1970.
This presents yet another question in a growing list related to anomalous health incidents: If the United States could not find evidence of their existence in earlier research, why is it funding a new round of studies over 50 years later?


Instruction: Write an article about: Sanctions violate human rights and should be lifted, says UN Human Rights Council. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Human Rights Council, sanctions, UN, unilateral coercive measures, United Nations

Output:
The UN Human Rights Council voted to condemn unilateral coercive measures, known more commonly as sanctions, saying they should be ended because they harm vulnerable populations. Most Global South nations supported the resolution, while Western countries opposed it.

The United Nations Human Rights Council voted to condemn sanctions, stating that they violate human rights and should be lifted.
Despite repeated denunciations by international legal institutions, the United States and European Union have imposed unilateral sanctions on dozens of countries, representing more than one-quarter of the global population.
These Western sanctions are illegal under international law, because they have not been endorsed by the Security Council.
The UN refers to these illegal sanctions as “unilateral coercive measures.”
In a meeting on March 31, more than half of the 47 members of the Human Rights Council voted to condemn these sanctions.
The resolution (A/HRC/49/L.6), titled “The negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights,” was passed with 27 votes in favor (57%), 14 votes against (30%), and six abstentions (13%).
Most of the countries that voted in support of the resolution are from the Global South, whereas almost all of the states that opposed the measure are from the Global North.

The 27 countries that voted in support of the resolution, thereby condemning sanctions, were the following: Argentina, Benin, Bolivia, China, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Eritrea, Gabon, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Kazakstan, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Namibia, Nepal, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela.
The 14 nations that voted against the resolution were: Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Marshall Islands, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Republic of Korea, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States.
The six states that abstained were: Armenia, Brazil, Cameroon, Gambia, Mexico, and Paraguay.
The resolution states that it “urges all States to stop adopting, maintaining or implementing unilateral coercive measures not in accordance with international law, international humanitarian law, [or] the Charter of the United Nations.”
The resolution also “strongly urges all States to refrain from imposing unilateral coercive measures, also urges the removal of such measures, as they are contrary to the Charter and norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States at all levels, and recalls that such measures prevent the full realization of economic and social development of nations while also affecting the full realization of human rights.”
According to the Human Rights Council, unliteral sanctions violate the International Bill of Human Rights.
The resolution emphasized that these sanctions are particularly destructive for poor people, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and the environment.
The council “expresse[d] its grave concern that, in some countries, the socioeconomic conditions of family members, particularly women and children, are adversely affected by unilateral coercive measures, imposed and maintained contrary to international law and the Charter, that create obstacles to trade relations among States, restrict movement through various means of transport, impede the full realization of social and economic development and hinder the well-being of the population in the affected countries, with particular consequences for women, children, including adolescents, the elderly and persons with disabilities.”


Instruction: Write an article about: Washington Post calls for censoring Chinese media, praises purge of Russian outlets. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Big Tech, censorship, Facebook, Jeff Bezos, Twitter, Washington Post

Output:
The Washington Post – owned by billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos, who has CIA and Pentagon contracts – has called for censoring Chinese news outlets on social media, while praising Silicon Valley for purging Russian publications.

Since the election of Donald Trump as US president, billionaire oligarch-owned newspaper the Washington Post has posted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in the logo at the top of its website.
The newspaper is now calling to accelerate the death of democracy and increase the shroud of darkness, by censoring alternative media outlets that challenge the US government’s information dictatorship.
The Washington Post editorial board has called for “imposing clear rules for government outlets that result in the removal of Chinese channels” from social media platforms.
The newspaper insisted, with the fervor of a contemporary crusader, that censoring Chinese publications on “social media sites would land another blow in service of Ukraine. But they’d also land a blow against authoritarianism everywhere.”
The Washington Post has a very close relationship to the US government, and relies heavily on officials in Washington for its stories.
The Post is also owned by Jeff Bezos, one of the richest human beings in history, valued at approximately $200 billion in wealth.
Bezos is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, which has billions of dollars of contracts with numerous US government agencies, including the CIA, Pentagon, NSA, FBI, and ICE.
In an article published on April 11, titled “Social media shouldn’t let China do Russia’s dirty work,” the Washington Post editorial board accused Beijing of spreading “misinformation” on social media about the war in Ukraine.
The newspaper wrote that “when it comes to these platforms, there’s a way to stop the spread”: more censorship.
By imposing clear rules for government outlets that result in the removal of Chinese channels, social media sites would land another blow in service of Ukraine — and against authoritarianism everywhere, the Editorial Board writes. https://t.co/jHCiDNBWvh
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) April 12, 2022

The editorial board praised “U.S. social media sites’ steps to ban Russian state media.”
YouTube, which is owned by Google, banned Russian state media outlets across the entire world. Google has billions of dollars of contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, and other US government agencies.
Facebook, another US government contractor, has also prohibited Russian state media outlets in Europe.
As an example of the supposed “disinformation” or even “lies” allegedly spread by China, the Washington Post cited Beijing’s insistence that “NATO is to blame for the fighting.”
The top US newspaper erased the history of NATO expanding 14 times to the east after the reunification of Germany, in blatant violation of promises made to Moscow, militarily surrounding Russia with hostile powers – not to mention the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014, which unleashed a civil war, fueled by billions of dollars worth of weapons, military support, and training from NATO, which led to more than 14,000 Ukrainian deaths before Russia sent a single troop in.
Even the former US ambassador to Russia, William Burns, who now serves as CIA director, admitted in a 2008 State Department cable that NATO expansion to Ukraine would cross Moscow’s security “redlines” and “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”
The Post refuses to acknowledge any of these facts, and instead claims that anyone who blames NATO for the war – as many countries in the Global South do – is guilty of “disinformation” and “lies,” and must be censored.
The incredible irony is that the Washington Post accuses China and Russia of “prevent[ing] their citizens at home from hearing any voices but theirs,” while it is actively calling for censoring voices that challenge the US government’s propaganda line.
It is not just Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets that are being silenced. Anyone who opposes NATO disinformation is under threat.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the already dangerous levels of censorship on social media platforms went into hyperdrive.
On Twitter, journalist Pepe Escobar, former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, and the popular podcast Russians with Attitude have all been censored for daring to expose Western government lies about Ukraine, just to name a few of the high-profile victims of this digital witch hunt.
Independent journalists who challenge NATO government propaganda are at risk of being purged.
And the editorial board of a major newspaper calling for unaccountable Big Tech corporations to wage war on the freedom of the press and freedom of expression shows how extreme this neo-McCarthyite mentality is the United States.
Anyone who refuses to toe the line of the US government is in danger of having their electronic existence erased.


Instruction: Write an article about: After nuking Japan, US gov’t lied about radioactive fallout as civilians died. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Hiroshima, Japan, Nagasaki, nuclear weapons

Output:
After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, US government officials lied to the media and Congress, claiming there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that civilians did not face “undue suffering,” that it was “a very pleasant way to die.”

After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, top US government officials lied to the media and Congress, claiming there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that Japanese reports of deaths due to radiation were “propaganda.”
The US general overseeing the nuclear program told Congress that Japanese civilians did not face “undue suffering,” insisting that it was in fact “a very pleasant way to die.”

This information was revealed by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
On August 8, the archive published declassified documents exposing this shocking history. The archive wrote:
the head of the [Manhattan] project, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, was so worried about public revulsion over the terrible effects of the new weapon – which a Navy report later in 1945 called “the most terrible agent of destruction known to man” – that he cut off early discussion within the MED of the problem. Later, he misleadingly told Congress there was “no radioactive residue” in the two devastated cities.  In doing so, he contradicted evidence from his own specialists whom he had sent to Japan to investigate.  Groves even insisted that those who had been exposed to radiation from the atomic explosions would not face “undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”
The New York Times echoed these falsehoods on behalf of the US government, publishing an article on September 13, 1945 titled “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin.”
In this case, the newspaper of record was repeating the lies of another top US official, Brig. Gen. T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission. Like Groves, Farrell ignored his own medical experts and publicly denied that Japanese civilians were dying of radioactive fallout.

Doctor James N. Yamazaki was the lead physician of the US Atomic Bomb Medical Team sent to Nagasaki in 1945 to investigate the effects of the nuclear attack.
In his website Children of the Atomic Bomb, published by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Yamazaki wrote:
The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible. It is not unlikely that the estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are over conservative.
Yamazaki added that the “bomb was a deliberate act of destruction that destroyed human bodies, brains, and genes for generations.”
Multipolarista further detailed this gruesome history in a report after the assassination of Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this July:
US-backed fascism in Japan: How Shinzo Abe whitewashed genocidal imperial crimes


Instruction: Write an article about: Biden is expanding the US govt’s brutal anti-immigrant machine. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: CBP, ICE, immigration, Joe Biden

Output:
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained roughly 250,000 people in 200 jails in 2021, using brutal tactics to repress immigrants. This violent apparatus continues to grow under President Joe Biden.

President Joe Biden and his top administration officials met on March 15 and signed a massive spending bill of $1.5 trillion into law.
This package, which funds federal government agencies for fiscal year 2022, boosts military spending and increases discretionary spending for domestic agencies by $6.7 billion, the biggest increase in domestic discretionary spending in the past four years.
The spending bill also expands the US government’s brutal deportation machine, with an additional $284.7 million for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This includes $57 million more funding for ICE’s contentious Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office, which is responsible for detaining and removing immigrants.
Overall, the Biden administration is funding ICE with $312 million more than the Donald Trump-era average.
Joe Biden’s budget proposal increases funding for ICE:https://t.co/6o8gVPo67C pic.twitter.com/zXUb91gtR4
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) June 1, 2021

The expansion of these notoriously repressive agencies continues despite the fact that net immigration to the United States has consistently declined since 2016, and substantially dropped from 2020 to 2021, to the lowest levels in decades.

The 2022 spending bill provides funding to keep roughly 20,000 people currently detained by ICE behind bars.
The vast majority – 70% to 80% – of people held by ICE have no criminal record. Many of those who do have minor offenses such as traffic violations.
According to court records, only 0.6% of new cases in 2022 resulted in deportation orders based on a criminal record.
There are presently more than 1.7 million people waiting for immigration court hearings, as the system experiences its largest ever backlog. They are stuck in limbo.

Incarceration of immigrants in private prisons is also growing under Biden.
At the end of 2021, private prison corporation the GEO Group signed a deal with Charlton County in Georgia to expand immigration detention centers from 780 beds to 3,018, located in the city of Folkston, which has just 4,464 residents. Down the road near Lumpkin, Georgia is the Stewart Detention Center, which has a capacity of 1,900 detainees.
The 2022 spending bill also includes an increase of $10 million for ICE’s “Alternative to Detention” (ATD) program. This expands ICE’s surveillance program in immigrant communities by patrolling their neighborhoods.
As of December 2021, there were more than 150,000 people in the ATD program, which received $440 million in taxpayer dollars. That number continues to grow.
The Detention Watch Network notes that the “Biden administration continues to significantly and quickly funnel people, including families, into the ICE ATD program.”
As of April 9, 2022, there are more than 216,000 people monitored by the ATD program, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Harlingen, Texas, is home to the largest number of people monitored by ATD: 17,340. This is a region that is 81.8% Latino, and where the poverty rate is 29.1% – more than double the national average of 12.8%.
The second-biggest area is Phoenix, Arizona, with 16,075 people monitored, followed by Los Angeles, California, with 14,726.
The 2022 spending bill likewise puts aside $200 million for the US Department of Homeland Security to develop two permanent migrant processing centers on the southwest border.
These will be “one-stop” processing centers to replace the “soft” tent centers that sprung up during the Donald Trump administration. As a result, that border region will see an increase in law enforcement officers patrolling.
The quotas set by the US government are typically met or surpassed.
In 2018, for example, the quota of ICE detention beds rose from 34,000 to 40,520. In the following year, ICE broke records by detaining more than 55,000 people and applying funding pressure.
The 2022 spending bill maintains its payroll of more than 84,000 ICE and CBP employees and 50,000 border and interior enforcement officers.
Thousands of people wait while the US government decides on their immigration status or the possibility of deportation. Some are held behind bars in inhumane conditions in crowded detention centers.
In the fiscal year 2021, across the roughly 200 jails run by ICE, nearly 250,000 people were detained. Yet, many people in the United States are not aware of the astonishing record ICE has of depriving people of access to lawyers, denying them medical attention, and separating them from their families.
These abuses were highlighted in a Detention Watch Network report that showed how ICE refused to release people held during the Covid-19 pandemic, which threatened thousands of lives.
It has been consistently demonstrated that ICE is unable and unwilling to properly care for people who require medical attention. Reports indicate that poor medical care has resulted in nearly half of all deaths in ICE custody.
Today, DWN released a new report that details an emerging, lethal situation in detention–ICE’s lack of sanitation and basic necessities and their troubling record of medical negligence and deaths combined with #COVID19’s risk to public health: https://t.co/KiZ3KooBT9 #FreeThemAll pic.twitter.com/eU73W51xtS
— Detention Watch (DWN) (@DetentionWatch) March 26, 2020

ICE has officially reported 207 deaths of detainees since the agency was created in 2003, in what is likely a very conservative estimate.
Mandated by federal law to publicly report every detainee’s death in their custody, ICE has used a loophole to avoid full accountability.
The Investigative Reporting Workshop found that “ICE underreported fatalities by releasing sick inmates to hospitals, where some died shortly afterward.” IRW also discovered cases of individuals who died after being released and returned to their families.
A tragic case of this was the death of Oscar López Acosta.
While detained in an Ohio immigration center as Covid-19 spread around the country in 2020, López phoned his wife to tell her that he was “dying in silence.”
López battled health issues such as diabetes and was worried about contracting the deadly virus. He had been in ICE custody since 2018 for re-entering the country.
López was released on April 24, 2020, with deteriorating health. On May 10, he died on the couch in his home in Dayton, Ohio. He left behind a wife and children, among them a 9-year-old daughter.
Lourdes Maria Mejia, López’s wife, said that she believes ICE was aware that he was infected, which was later confirmed by a hospital test after coming home.
In addition to the systemic violence of ICE, there is also rampant abuse under US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the county’s largest federal law enforcement agency, which includes Border Patrol.
CBP’s culture of violence, added to its lack of accountability and oversight, has led to a significant loss of life. Yet no one in the agency’s 90-year history has been successfully convicted of killing while on duty.
Moreover, CBP has not consistently reported death-related information to Congress.
After tracking deaths based on media coverage, the Southern Border Communities Coalition found that at least 200 people have died in encounters with CBP agents since 2010.
The organization’s report on CBP-related violence showed that 31% of deaths came from fatal shootings, 29% from deadly car chases, and 23% from medical issues. 2021 the deadliest, with 58 deaths reported.
So far in 2021, 45 deaths resulting from an encounter with #CBP have been reported. No agent has been held accountable, in large part because of the agency’s shadow units which work to protect agents rather than the public. https://t.co/x6aZVVUmFY pic.twitter.com/8mGYSdeenl
— SBCC (@SBCCoalition) December 22, 2021

Each of the last four US presidents has left an imprint on the southern border. Biden is already making his.
The US government is further militarizing the border by deploying new technology such as drones, camera-equipped towers, and now headless robot dogs to terrorize people migrating to the US.
This new technology further pushes people seeking asylum or work into deadly alternative routes. This contributed to the deaths of 650 migrants crossing the US-Mexico border in 2021 – the deadliest year since reporting began in 1998.
Despite this high number, the International Organization for Migration noted that “all (migrant death) figures remain undercounts.”
At least 650 migrants died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, but undercounting migrant deaths has and continues to be a big problem. Correcting this count is important because it helps determine if the U.S. should send more aid to Central America https://t.co/Rr345NjvW1 pic.twitter.com/XwGfOkkYe3
— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) February 25, 2022

Since Biden’s first day in office, he has pledged to “modernize our immigration system” with “smart” technologies. But these technologies have also been used on people inside the US protesting police killings.
On May 25, 2020, when Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used a Predator B drone to surveil protesters.
Later, the Department of Homeland Security’s Air and Marine Operations division deployed drones in more than 15 cities to monitor activists protesting against police brutality.
Immigrants’ rights organizations such as Mijente, Just Futures Law, and the Rio Grande Valley No Border Wall Coalition have reported on the high-tech border infrastructure that surveils disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.
The digital border wall consists of aerial drones, underground sensors, and surveillance towers over hundreds of miles capable of detecting humans, vehicles, and animals in all directions.
US agencies also use biometric surveillance technology such as facial recognition, voice recognition, DNA, and iris scans to surveil individuals.
The Israeli military company Elbit Systems, which creates technologies to help spy on and militarily occupy the Palestinian people, is the same company that California Border Protection hired to build towers on the US-Mexico border.
Former Israeli Colonel Danny Tirza, a principal architect, explained the idea behind this mass surveillance: “It’s not enough to construct a wall. You have to construct all the systems around it.”
The move to further militarize the US-Mexico border is fueled by propaganda in the mainstream corporate media, which treats the border as a war zone.
This propaganda narrative claims the border is being militarized to stop criminals, cartels, and “terrorists,” when the truth is that the vast majority of people that Border Patrol face are parents and children, innocent individuals seeking asylum or work.
But CBP and ICE have long tried to deceptively link immigration to terrorism – a tactic that Trump promoted, but which was also used by the George Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
The development of new technologies has reduced the number of workers in various sectors, such as retail, service, and factory jobs, with a corresponding increase in automation. But the opposite is happening with law enforcement: Instead, repressive US agencies keep expanding, and racism is growing along with them.
Meanwhile, each US presidential administration uses more and more taxpayer money to strengthen a system of terror targeting Black and Brown people migrating, despite Census data showing a consistent decline in migration to the United States, to the lowest levels in decades.


Instruction: Write an article about: Facebook censors journalist Seymour Hersh’s report on Nord Stream pipeline attack. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Facebook, Meta, Nord Stream, Russia, Seymour Hersh, Ukraine

Output:
Facebook censored a report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany, forcing users to instead read a website funded and partially owned by NATO member Norway.

Facebook has censored a report by the world’s most famous investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, on the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany.
While discouraging its users from posting Hersh’s article, Facebook instead recommends a website that is funded and partially owned by the government of NATO member Norway.
Facebook has millions of dollars worth of contracts with the US government, including with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security.

The Nord Stream system consisted of two sets of two pipelines each (known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2) that delivered natural gas from Russia, through the Baltic Sea, to Germany.
Nord Stream AG, the Switzerland-based international consortium that built and oversees the pipelines, is owned by five European companies. Russia’s state gas giant Gazprom has 51% of the shares, but the other 49% belong to two German companies, a Dutch firm, and a French company.
In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged in a suspicious explosion, in what amounted to a terror attack on the energy infrastructure of Europe.

World-renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the pipelines were blown up by the US government, in an operation overseen by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.
All three officials are hard-line anti-Russia hawks. Nuland was a key architect of the violent coup d’etat that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in 2014 and installed a pro-Western regime.
Hersh published the bombshell story at his personal blog at the website Substack in February.
If a Facebook user posts a link to this report by Hersh, a notice pops up that says: “Before you share this content, you might want to know there’s additional reporting from Faktisk. Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways”.

The page Facebook links to, Faktisk, is a fact-checking website from Norway, which is funded and partially owned by the government of that NATO member state.
Faktisk discloses that one of its owners and main funders is NRK: the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, a state-owned media outlet.
NRK states clearly on its website, “NRK is Norway’s biggest media house. The broadcaster is state-owned and the Parliament (Stortinget) has given the mandate and the ownership role to the Ministry of Culture”. It notes that “NRK is publicly financed (97%) by a individual tax everybody in Norway has to pay”.
The editor-in-chief of Faktisk, Kristoffer Egeberg, discloses in his biography on the website that he served in the Norwegian Armed Forces as a soldier and officer, participating in NATO and UN operations in Lebanon, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
What this means it that Facebook is censoring a report by the world’s most famous investigative journalist and instead promoting a website partially owned and funded by a NATO member state, Norway, which is edited by a former Norwegian military officer who participated in NATO operations.
Facebook censored a report by Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh on the Nord Stream pipeline attack, forcing users to instead read a website funded/owned by NATO member Norway
Press freedom: a casualty of the West's information war on Russia
Full video: https://t.co/9j7jHE5Ujb pic.twitter.com/td0Te4zwwZ
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 25, 2023

The US government publicly denied Hersh’s report on the Nord Stream attacks, but Washington has always rejected the investigative journalist’s stories, which have consistently proven to be true.
Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which the US military killed hundreds of civilians. The US government had denied this massacre, although it was later proven to have happened.
Similarly, Washington initially denied Hersh’s blockbuster 2004 report exposing the US military’s use of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which was similarly proven to be correct.
In response to Hersh’s report on the Nord Stream attacks, anonymous US government officials used the New York Times to undermine the reporter, instead blaming an unidentified “pro-Ukrainian group”, which they claimed was not linked to the Ukrainian government or any other NATO member state.
Washington and its allies in the corporate media have been desperate to smear Hersh, nitpicking over very minor details he may have mistakenly reported, but they have utterly failed to provide any tangible evidence or compelling alternative explanation of how the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed.
The massive pipelines were built out of steel, surrounded with thick concrete, and located 50 to 100 meters underwater.
It would be extremely difficult for a small ragtag “pro-Ukrainian group” to sabotage these pipelines. The attack clearly involved a lot of planning and resources, which suggests that a state was very likely involved.
A worker testing part of the Nord Stream pipelines
Facebook is by no means the only US social media giant that has censored dissident voices over the war in Ukraine.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, blocked the channels of Russia’s state media outlet RT everywhere on the planet.
Like Facebook, Google has millions of dollars of US government contracts, with the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, and various police departments.
Furthermore, the European Union banned RT and Sputnik, another Russian state media outlet.

If someone in the EU tries to access the Twitter profiles of RT or Sputnik, a message appears stating, “Account Withheld”.
The US government even went so far as to seize the domain name of Iran’s state media outlet Press TV.
“The domain presstv.com has been seized by the United States Government”, reads a notice on the website, published jointly by the Departments of Justice and Commerce.


Instruction: Write an article about: Ex US official admits Ukraine conflict is NATO ‘proxy war with Russia’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: CSIS, Eliot Cohen, NATO, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
Former US State Department official Eliot Cohen stated openly that the conflict in Ukraine is a NATO “proxy war with Russia,” and called for using the country to kill as many Russian soldiers as possible, “the more and faster the better.”

A former US State Department official has stated openly that the conflict in Ukraine is a NATO “proxy war with Russia,” and called for killing as many Russian soldiers as possible, “the more and faster the better.”
These comments were made by Eliot A. Cohen, who served as a counselor for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009, in the George W. Bush administration’s State Department.
A staunch advocate for hardline neoconservative foreign policy, Cohen published an article in The Atlantic magazine on March 14, titled “America’s Hesitation Is Heartbreaking,” in which he praised the Joe Biden administration for waging an indirect war on Russia on multiple fronts, including through information war, economic war, and proxy war in Ukraine.
Cohen complained, however, that Biden should do even more to up the ante, escalating the conflict even further.
The Biden administration has already sent Ukraine more than 17,000 anti-tank weapons, including Javelin missiles, as well as 2,000 stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Some of these went directly to the notorious neo-Nazi Azov regiment.
After sending $350 million in arms to Ukraine in late February, the Biden administration approved an additional $13.6 billion aid package in March, including $6.5 billion in military support.
NATO is sending weapons and trainers to help neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s white-supremacist Azov movement fight Russia, as the US floods the country with weapons.
This follows numerous reports of Western government support for Ukrainian far-right extremists.https://t.co/5gYgmU8PFo
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 10, 2022

Eliot Cohen insisted this is not nearly enough. “The stream of arms going into Ukraine needs to be a flood,” he proclaimed in his article in The Atlantic.
“The United States and its NATO allies are engaged in a proxy war with Russia,” he wrote clearly. “They are supplying thousands of munitions and hopefully doing much else—sharing intelligence, for example—with the intent of killing Russian soldiers.”
Cohen added on an equally explicit note: “we must face a fact: To break the will of Russia and free Ukraine from conquest and subjugation, many Russian soldiers have to flee, surrender, or die, and the more and faster the better.”
“Thus far the Biden administration has done an admirable job of winning the information war, mobilizing the NATO alliance, and imposing crippling (if not yet complete) sanctions on the Russian economy,” he continued. “It has, it appears, sped the delivery of some weapon systems (notably Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable surface-to-air missiles) to Ukrainian forces.”
The neoconservative hawk called for the Biden administration to give Ukraine fighter planes. He claimed sending MiG-29 jets would not escalate the proxy war into World War III with Russia – although many experts strongly disagree with him, including leaders of the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies.
“If only we have the stomach for doing what needs to be done,” he wrote.
Cohen was a leading supporter of the 2003 Iraq War, and has likewise called for Washington to wage a conventional war on Iran.
Although he is no longer directly in government, Cohen works at the highly influential neoconservative think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by the US government and its allies, the weapons industry, and fossil fuel corporations.
He is also a professor at the elite Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, which has a revolving door with the US government.
Cohen’s ultra-bellicose views are quite representative of his fellow hawks in Washington; he is by no means alone. His article in The Atlantic provides an honest glimpse into how prominent US imperial planners see the crisis in Ukraine: as an opportunity to use the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder in a proxy war to bleed Russia.


Instruction: Write an article about: Biden is deporting more migrant children than Trump. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: deportations, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mexico, racism

Output:
US deportations of migrant children increased by 30% in 2021, year one of the Biden-Harris administration. 78% of the minors were not accompanied by adults. But the English-language media ignored this

US government deportations of migrant children increased by 30% in 2021.
In this first year of the Biden-Harris administration, 19,793 minors were deported to Mexico, more than three-quarters of whom — 15,488, or 78% — were not accompanied by adults.
2021 saw the most U.S. deportations of children in five years, including all of the time of the Donald Trump administration.
These are official figures that come from Mexico’s Secretariat for Home Affairs. They were published in the major Mexican newspaper La Jornada on January 3.
Yet 10 days later, there still has not been a report about this in a mainstream English-language news outlet.
All of the migrant children deported by the United States to Mexico in 2021 were from the Northern Triangle of Central America — a region that has been devastated by violence, organized crime, and poverty, fueled by U.S.-backed coups, meddling, and neoliberal economic policies.
The La Jornada article notes that, of the minors deported by the Biden administration in 2021, 51.7% were Guatemalan, 31.8% were Honduran, and 16.5% were El Salvadoran.
While the Democratic Party rightfully criticized Trump for his racist and inhumane anti-immigrant policies, the reality is those barbaric policies have continued under Biden, with little-to-no scrutiny.
And despite how much he tried, the inveterate bigot Trump was not even able to deport as many immigrants as the Obama-Biden administration did.
I discussed this clear political hypocrisy in the video below:


Instruction: Write an article about: Dick Cheney confirmed US goal is to break up Russia as a country, not just USSR. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Dick Cheney, Iraq, Iraq War, Russia, Soviet Union, USSR

Output:
Former Vice President and Iraq War architect Dick Cheney wasn’t content only breaking up the Soviet Union. Balkanizing Russia (and China) is a bipartisan foreign-policy goal among top US national security state officials.

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney, a lead architect of the Iraq War, not only wanted to dismantle the Soviet Union; he also wanted to break up Russia itself, to prevent it from rising again as a significant political power.
Balkanizing Russia, as NATO did to former Yugoslavia, is a fantasy shared by many hawks in the US national security state. They will never tolerate an independent government in Moscow, regardless of whether or not it is socialist.
Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote that, “When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat.”
Gates made these comments in his 2014 memoir “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.” This quote was highlighted on Twitter by journalist Jon Schwarz.
In Robert Gates's memoir "Duty," he describes how at the end of the Cold War, Dick Cheney—then secretary of defense—wanted to dismantle not just the Soviet Union but Russia itself. No one in the US knows or cares about this, but I bet lots of people in the Russian government do. pic.twitter.com/Dyb7NeXzJD
— ☀ Jon Schwarz ☀ (@schwarz) January 31, 2022

Cheney was one of the most powerful vice presidents in modern US history. He exercised significant influence over President George W. Bush, who had little foreign-policy experience and knowledge.
The fact that a figure at the helm of the US government not-so-secretly sought the permanent dissolution of Russia as a country, and straightforwardly communicated this to colleagues like Robert Gates, partially explains the aggressive posturing Washington has taken toward the Russian Federation since the overthrow of the USSR.
The reality is that the US empire will simply never allow Russia to challenge its unilateral domination of Eurasia, despite the fact that the government in Moscow restored capitalism.
This is why it is not surprising that Washington has utterly ignored Russia’s security concerns, breaking its promise not to expand NATO “once inch eastward” after German reunification, surrounding Moscow with militarized adversaries hell bent on destabilizing it.
Leading US imperial planner Zbigniew Brzezinski clearly stated in his 1997 opus “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives” that the goal was to contain and weaken Russia.
Washington had to “prevent the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power,” the former US national security advisor wrote, in order to maintain US “global primacy.”
US imperial planner Brzezinski stressed they must "prevent the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power" to maintain US "global primacy"
The US empire knows the biggest threat to its hegemony is if China & Russia can integrate Eurasia, and form a military alliance pic.twitter.com/8ekQrfOBrZ
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) September 21, 2021

Also in 1997, Brzezinski penned an article proposing “A Geostrategy for Eurasia.” This imperial blueprint was published in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations.
The influential US policymaker insisted that Russia should be divided into a “decentralized political system”, with “free-market economics”.
Brzezinski proposed a “loosely confederated Russia — composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic”. He added that “a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization”.
The Russian Federation of today consists of 22 republics. Moscow has long accused Washington of supporting secessionist movements within its borders, aimed at breaking away some of these republics, with the goal of destabilizing and ultimately dismantling Russia.
Russian security services have published evidence that the United States supported Chechen separatists in their wars on the central Russian government.
British academic John Laughland stressed in a 2004 article in The Guardian, titled “The Chechens’ American friends,” that several Chechen secessionist leaders were living in the West, and were even given grant money by the US government.
Laughland noted that the most important US-based pro-Chechen secessionist group, the deceptively named American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), listed as its members “a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror'”:
They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be “a cakewalk”; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.
This was a Who’s Who of DC’s most influential hawks. Alongside Rumsfeld, Abrams, and company, Cheney was a key figure in these neoconservative foreign-policy circles in Washington, whose bellicose adherents fill the unelected US national security state bureaucracy, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
That is to say that Cheney was by no means alone is seeking the breakup of the Russian Federation; it is a fantasy shared by many of his Beltway colleagues.
During the Second Chechen War in the 2000s, these avid proselytizers of the so-called “War on Terror” cheered on Chechen insurgents as they battled the Russian central government.
The fact that far-right Salafi-jihadists made up a significant percentage of the Chechen insurgency didn’t bother these anti-Muslim neocons – just as Islamophobic “War on Terror” veterans had no problem supporting extremist head-chopping Takfiri Islamists in the subsequent US wars on Syria and Libya.
Today many of these same neoconservative US national security state functionaries have turned their attention back toward supporting secessionist movements in China – in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and especially Xinjiang.
The fact that the CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) openly publicizes its support for Uyghur separatist groups in China shows how transparent Washington’s geopolitical objectives are.
To further #humanrights & human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy has funded Uyghur groups since 2004. #NEDemocracy #HumanRightsDay https://t.co/C0LJEyWxq1 pic.twitter.com/OqZdehdxXN
— NEDemocracy (@NEDemocracy) December 10, 2020

The idea that the US foreign-policy apparatus, and NATO as a military bloc, seeks to prevent the rise of both Russia and China as independent powers is obvious to any truly impartial analyst.
Michael T. Klare, a professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, wrote at TomDispatch this January that “America’s top leaders have reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great power, China, with hostile military alliances, thereby thwarting its rise to full superpower status.”
Klare continued:
The gigantic 2022 defense bill — passed with overwhelming support from both parties — provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country’s military inside its own territory and potentially cripple its economy in any future crisis. For China’s leaders, who surely can’t tolerate being encircled in such a fashion, it’s an open invitation to… well, there’s no point in not being blunt… fight their way out of confinement.
…
For Chinese leaders, there can be no doubt about the meaning of all this: whatever Washington might say about peaceful competition, the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has no intention of allowing the PRC to achieve parity with the United States on the world stage. In fact, it is prepared to employ every means, including military force, to prevent that from happening. This leaves Beijing with two choices: succumb to U.S. pressure and accept second-class status in world affairs or challenge Washington’s strategy of containment. It’s hard to imagine that country’s current leadership accepting the first choice, while the second, were it adopted, would surely lead, sooner or later, to armed conflict.
This goal is likewise clearly reflected in a 2019 report published by the RAND Corporation, a major Pentagon-backed think tank. Titled “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” the document discusses various ways to exploit Moscow’s “weaknesses,” encircle it, and contain it.
RAND listed the following “geopolitical measures”:
Measure 1: Provide Lethal Aid to Ukraine
Measure 2: Increase Support to the Syrian Rebels
Measure 3: Promote Regime Change in Belarus
Measure 4: Exploit Tensions in the South Caucasus
Measure 5: Reduce Russian Influence in Central Asia
Measure 6: Challenge Russian Presence in Moldova
Excluding perhaps concerning Moldova (at least openly), the US government has pursued all of these policies to a tee.
The Pentagon's privatized policymaking arm the RAND Corporation published a report in 2019 calling for the US to wage proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, Syria, Belarus, Caucasus, & Central Asia — the next region on the list, now being targeted via Kazakhstanhttps://t.co/sp6CTNFDeq pic.twitter.com/yxkxeJRuGh
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 6, 2022

The Moon of Alabama blog, which highlighted this RAND report, also noted that Victoria Nuland, the third-most powerful official in the Joe Biden administration’s State Department, served as Vice President Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy adviser from 2003 to 2005.
Nuland, today under-secretary for political affairs, held a similar senior position in the Barack Obama administration’s State Department. She used her role there to help sponsor a violent coup in Ukraine in 2014.
A leaked phone call showed that Nuland chose who would make up the top members of the subsequent Ukrainian puppet government.
Current State Dep person running U.S. Russia policy is Victoria 'Fuck the EU' Nuland.
"From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney" https://t.co/9rEQVt1uVB
— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) January 31, 2022

Like her mentor Cheney, Nuland is a hard-line neoconservative. The fact that he is a Republican and she works primarily in Democratic administrations is irrelevant; this hawkish foreign-policy consensus is completely bipartisan.
Nuland (a former member of the bipartisan board of directors of the NED) is also married to Robert Kagan, a patron saint of neoconservatism, and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century – the cozy home of the neocons in Washington, where he worked alongside Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and other top Bush administration officials.
Kagan was a longtime Republican, but in 2016 he joined the Democrats and openly campaigned for Hillary Clinton for president.
What all of this shows is that these hawkish foreign-policy positions are totally mainstream in Washington. Whether Republican or Democrat, Beltway policy-makers simply refuse to allow Russia and China to challenge US unipolar hegemony.
The idea that the United States, a country on the other side of the planet, should rule Eurasia – and frankly the world as a whole – is unquestionable and sacrosanct.
There are some exceptions and internal contradictions, but they are few and far between. The reality is that large parts of the US national security state clearly seek the balkanization of Russia and China. This quote from Dick Cheney only further confirms what was already apparent.


Instruction: Write an article about: US and Colombia do military exercises with nuclear submarine near Venezuela, after sending warship through Taiwan Strait. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Colombia, nuclear submarine, Taiwan, Ukraine, Venezuela

Output:
While the world is focused on Ukraine, the US and Colombia threatened Venezuela in military exercises with a nuclear submarine, a day after Washington intimidated China by sending a warship through the Taiwan Strait.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
While the world is fixated on the war in Ukraine, the United States is taking provocative military actions against Venezuela and China.
The US and Colombia held military exercises with a nuclear submarine in the Caribbean Sea, near Venezuela, just one day after Washington sent a warship through the Taiwan Strait.
Both Venezuela and China saw the US military moves as clear threats, condemning the actions as provocative.
On February 27 and 28, the US Navy held anti-submarine warfare exercises with the Colombian Navy.
Colombia’s Ministry of Defense boasted that this was the first time they had done a military exercise with a nuclear submarine, the USS Minnesota.
Por primera vez fue utilizado un submarino nuclear en un ejercicio de interoperabilidad entre Colombia y EE.UU. El submarino USS Minnesota ?? y  el ARC ‘Pijao’ ?? pusieron a prueba sus capacidades, ratificando la cooperación y confianza entre ambos países. @ArmadaColombia @USNavy pic.twitter.com/WcGkBsVlvL
— Mindefensa (@mindefensa) February 28, 2022

US Southern Command (Southcom) shared photos of the exercises on its official Instagram account.

A post shared by U.S. Southern Command (@ussouthcom)

The Colombian Defense Ministry emphasized that the exercise highlighted the “interoperability between Colombia and the US.”
The private intelligence firm Stratfor, which is popularly known as the “shadow CIA,” noted that the US military exercises with Colombia were “within [the] scope of NATO.”
Although the US-led military alliance is called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the South American nation is decidedly not in the North Atlantic region, Colombia is a special “partner” of NATO.
It is NATO’s first and only “partner” in Latin America.
Washington and Bogotá claimed the exercises were aimed at fighting drug trafficking, but in reality Colombia’s government is deeply linked to drug cartels, organized crime, and violent paramilitary groups.
Colombia’s former president Álvaro Uribe, the most powerful politician in the country and a top ally of Washington, works closely with drug cartels and death squads. And Colombia’s current, far-right president, Iván Duque, only came to power because Uribe ordered an infamous drug dealer, Ñeñe Hernández, to buy votes for him.
The Colombian Navy said it felt “proud” to collaborate with the US military and deepen their integration.
? La @ArmadaColombia se siente orgullosa de hacer parte de la operación “Contralmirante José David Espitia Jiménez” en aguas del Caribe, para el progreso de la educación marítima, siendo participe de la protección y el desarrollo de los intereses nacionales. ???? pic.twitter.com/nBHTPJFGYL
— Armada de Colombia (@ArmadaColombia) February 28, 2022

For its part, Venezuela recognized the US-Colombian military exercises near its borders with a nuclear submarine as a blatant threat.
Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino tweeted, “Why is there such imperialist flashiness? Is this a copy of NATO expansion in the Mediterranean of the Americas?”
“You don’t battle drug trafficking, the war in Arauca [in Colombia], systematic murders and terrorist groups with nuclear submarines,” he wrote. “I categorically reject this.”
¿Para qué tanta ostentación imperialista?¿Es una réplica de la expansión Otanista en el Mediterráneo de América? El narcotráfico, la guerra en Arauca, los asesinatos sistemáticos y los grupos terroristas no se combaten con submarinos nucleares. Lo rechazo de manera categórica. pic.twitter.com/aDeLONv5AO
— Vladimir Padrino L. (@vladimirpadrino) February 28, 2022

Just one day before these US-Colombian naval exercises started, Washington threatened China by sending a large warship through the Taiwan Strait.
On February 26, the US Navy’s guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson sailed through the narrow strait.
Destroyer USS Ralph Johnson Performs Taiwan Strait Transit – USNI News https://t.co/joAxUU4480 pic.twitter.com/VG0Izmujkn
— U.S. Naval Institute (@NavalInstitute) February 28, 2022

China condemned the exercise as “provocative.”
“It is hypocritical and futile for the US to conduct this provocative action in an attempt to bolster the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces,” the Chinese military said.
Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, then added, “If the US wants to embolden the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces in this way, then we have this to say to the US: such move will only accelerate the demise of the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces.”
“The US will also pay a heavy price for its adventurist act,” he continued. “If the US tries to intimidate and pressure China in this way, then we have this stern warning: the so-called military deterrence will be reduced to scrap iron when facing the steely great wall of the 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
Comment on the US guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson's recently sail through the Taiwan Strait and all the hype. pic.twitter.com/j5RXw7Vw28
— XIE Yongjun 解勇军 (@XIEYongjun_CHN) March 1, 2022


Instruction: Write an article about: Pentagon says China and Russia are top US national security ‘threats,’ not terrorism. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: China, Cold War Two, Donald Trump, James Mattis, new cold war, Pentagon, Russia, war on terror

Output:
The US government is moving away from “war on terror” rhetoric as Defense Secretary Mattis says “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security.”

(This report was first published at The Real News.)

BENJAMIN NORTON: Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has justified numerous wars and interventions throughout the world under the pretext of a so-called “war on terror.”
That appears to be is changing. In December, President Donald Trump released a new national security strategy, which reveals that the top priority for U.S. national security is not countering terrorism, but rather countering the influence of competing foreign states, namely China and Russia.
Defense Secretary James Mattis made this incredibly significant announcement in a speech at John Hopkins University on January 19.
JAMES MATTIS: The world, to quote George Shultz, is awash in change, defined by increasing global volatility and uncertainty with great power competition between nations becoming a reality once again. Though we will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.
BENJAMIN NORTON: This marks a huge shift in U.S. government rhetoric on national security, which for nearly two decades has largely been synonymous with counterterrorism.
The United States has used terrorism and the threat of extremist groups like al-Qaeda as an excuse to military intervene throughout the Middle East and North Africa, from Iraq to Libya, to Syria, to Yemen.
Trump’s new national security strategy, however, singles out China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as the primary targets of U.S. foreign policy.
JAMES MATTIS: We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia are from each other… Rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran persist in taking outlaw actions that threaten regional and even global stability.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Defense Secretary Mattis said this is the first U.S. national defense strategy in 10 years.
A key part of the Trump administration’s rhetoric in the document is the myth that the U.S. military is somehow underfunded.
JAMES MATTIS: The negative impact on military readiness is resulting from the longest continuous stretch of combat in our nation’s history and defense spending caps, because we have been operating also for nine of the last 10 years under continuing resolutions that have created an overstretched and under-resourced military.
BENJAMIN NORTON: In reality, with a $611 billion budget in 2016, the United States already spent more on its military than the next eight largest countries combined — and six of those eight are U.S. allies.
And in 2017, Congress voted to increase the already enormous U.S. military budget to a staggering $700 billion per year.
Trump’s national security strategy also states that sustaining U.S. nuclear weapons and modernizing U.S. nuclear infrastructure is a key priority.
These announcements from the Trump administration are yet another sign that the post-Cold War, U.S.-led hegemonic order is breaking down, and we are seeing the rise of a new multipolar world. Military rhetoric is changing from a war on terror to a more traditional, World War I-style great power rivalry.
However, there has long been skepticism of the notion that the “war on terror” was ever even about stopping terror in the first place. The George W. Bush administration, which launched the endless war, falsely tried to link Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda to justify an invasion that the United Nations said was illegal.
Moreover, while the United States has waged a drone war in Yemen since 2001, ostensibly to beat back al-Qaeda extremists, in recent years, there has simultaneously been a well-documented alliance between al-Qaeda and U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have fought side-by-side against Yemen’s Houthi movement, Ansarallah.
A similar alliance with al-Qaeda-linked Islamist extremists could be seen in the U.S.-backed opposition in Syria.
The United States is not necessarily abandoning the war on terror, but the Trump administration’s new national security strategy stands out as one of the most frank admissions yet that U.S. foreign policy is principally about undermining foreign states that challenge U.S. economic and political interests, not about stopping extremist groups that threaten civilians.
This announcement did not come out of nowhere. The shift began under former president Barack Obama, whose administration declared a “pivot to Asia” as a key part of its foreign policy.
But this declaration is another indication of the Trump administration’s embrace of a more conventional, hawkish, bipartisan foreign policy. And it’s a sign of President Trump’s abandonment of any pretense of non-interventionism.


Instruction: Write an article about: Biden, like Trump, breaks international law, violating UN neutrality by blocking countries. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Donald Trump, Iran, Joe Biden, Russia, UN, United Nations, Venezuela

Output:
In violation of international law and its 1947 hosting agreement, the US government under both Biden and Trump has blocked foreign diplomats from the UN headquarters in New York, targeting Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and more.

In a blatant violation of international law and its 1947 hosting agreement, the US government has blocked numerous countries from participating in events at the UN headquarters in New York City.
The Biden administration is banning Russian diplomats, while the Trump administration illegally prohibited top officials from Venezuela and Iran.

Reuters reported on September 2 that Russia has filed a formal complaint with the United Nations, after the US government has “been constantly refusing to grant entry visas” to Russian diplomats to participate in events at the UN headquarters, Moscow’s ambassador said.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his delegation have been denied entry to the United States, barring them from the UN.
This Joe Biden administration policy, which flagrantly violates international law, was likewise implemented by the Donald Trump administration.

In January 2020, Foreign Policy reported that Trump had banned Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif from addressing the UN Security Council in New York, after Washington assassinated top Iranian official Qasem Soleimani, in an illegal act of war.
Foreign Policy wrote, “The Iranian government was awaiting word on the visa Monday (January 6) when a Trump administration official phoned U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to inform him that the United States would not allow Zarif into the country.”
The outlet noted that this US policy violates “the terms of a 1947 headquarters agreement requiring Washington to permit foreign officials into the country to conduct U.N. business.”
Exclusive: Trump administration bars top Iranian diplomat from addressing U.N. Security Council, in breach of U.S.-U.N. host country agreement, FP's @columlynch and @RobbieGramer report.https://t.co/c9Pb9aqK1d
— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) January 6, 2020

In April 2020, the US government similarly barred Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro from speaking at the United Nations.
A Justice Department spokesperson told CNN that Maduro would be “arrested immediately” if he stepped foot on US territory.
“Nicolás Maduro will be arrested if he is in the United States,” the spokesperson said, in remarks reported in the Spanish-language press. “The government of the United States does not recognize him as head of state. Executive immunity does not apply to him.”
The Justice Department spokesperson threateningly added that “Maduro would face a mandatory minimum sentencing of 50 years in prison and a maximum of life in prison.”
This policy also blatantly violated international law. The United Nations always recognized Maduro as the one and only legitimate president of Venezuela.
Moreover, even at the peak of the US-led coup attempt against Venezuela in 2019, more than two-thirds of UN member states – the vast majority of the international community – still recognized Maduro as Venezuela’s president, not US-appointed coup leader Juan Guaidó.
EEUU advirtió sobre el "arresto inmediato" de Nicolás Maduro si llega a pisar su territorio https://t.co/nCbnEZs9Lh
— infobae (@infobae) April 16, 2020

Foreign Policy magazine made it clear that this illegal US behavior is official, systematic government policy, in another report published in November 2019.
Titled “Trump Turns U.N. Visas, Travel Restrictions Into Foreign-Policy Cudgel,” the article noted, “If you’re deemed hostile to U.S. interests, you may face travel limitations, arbitrary visa denials, sudden airport checks, and other forms of harassment, diplomats say.”
Foreign Policy wrote:
The decision to withhold federal protection for a senior Syrian official is just one among a growing number of diplomatic slights experienced by delegates from a handful of countries with poor relations with the United States during their travels to New York City for United Nations meetings. It reflects the punitive nature of U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump, whose administration has sought myriad ways to sanction or penalize individuals and countries that are viewed as hostile to the United States, or that simply refuse to comply with U.S. demands. It reinforces the perception among some diplomats that the United States has contempt for the United Nations.
“Not exactly a high point in U.S. diplomacy,” said Larry Johnson, an American lawyer who previously served as the U.N. assistant secretary-general for legal affairs.
Johnson, an adjunct professor at Columbia University Law School, said it’s not the first time the United States has “resorted to delaying tactics and harassment” to keep unwanted foreigners out of the country. But he said Washington has acted under “weak or no legal grounds” in denying access to U.N. headquarters.
Representatives from the U.N. delegations of China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, and Syria say their diplomats and support staff are subjected to increasingly restrictive travel limitations, arbitrary denial of visas and driver’s licenses, additional airport security checks, and curtailed access to banking services needed to conduct their diplomatic work and pay their dues at the U.N., according to a report by a U.N. committee that monitors U.S. dealings with the U.N.’s 192 other states.
Those measures, they contend, violate the host country treaty, or Headquarters Agreement, signed by the United States in 1947. In many cases, the U.N.’s lawyers agree. In an Oct. 15 statement, the U.N. legal counsel told the committee that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is “concerned” by recent measures, including the rejection of a visa for a Russian national hired by the United Nations and new travel restrictions imposed on the Iranian delegation and foreign minister after Tehran refused to participate in talks with Washington. The statement said the U.N. was maintaining its long-standing position that the United States lacks legal authority to impose travel restrictions on states in retaliation for restrictions on U.S. diplomats serving in those countries. “There is no room for the application of measures based on reciprocity,” according to the statement.
The lengthy claims of diplomatic retaliation are included in a 64-page report of the U.N. host committee that details a range of matters that bear on U.S. relations with the diplomatic community in New York.
Diplomats coming from countries considered hostile to U.S. interests have been experiencing travel limitations, arbitrary visa denials, sudden airport checks, and other forms of harassment, @columlynch reports. https://t.co/FVtltVB6jl
— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) November 6, 2019


Instruction: Write an article about: US TikTok ban aims to weaken China & protect Big Tech monopolies. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Big Tech, China, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, technology, Tesla

Output:
The US government’s plan to either ban TikTok or force owner ByteDance to sell it to a (US) company is part of Washington’s economic war on China, and an attempt to protect Big Tech monopolies from competition.

The US government has for years threatened to ban TikTok, one of the most popular social media apps in the country.
It’s now looking like this might actually happen.
This March, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass legislation called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”.
This bill states that it “prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)”.
It passed with an overwhelming majority of 352 votes in favor and just 65 votes against. It will now go to the Senate, where it is likely going to pass. And President Joe Biden has said he will sign the bill.

TikTok is not technically a Chinese company. It is based in Los Angeles, California, and also Singapore. The CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, is not Chinese; he is Singaporean.
Shou pointed this out many times when he was grilled in the US Senate by Republicans like Tom Cotton, who portrayed him as an agent of the Communist Party of China.
What the US government is trying to do with this legislation is force the owner of TikTok, the Chinese company ByteDance, to divest – and ideally sell TikTok to a US company.
If ByteDance refuses to sell its popular social media to its competitors, the US government will ban TikTok.
This is part of a technological war that Washington is waging against Beijing.
The US is essentially trying to block competition from Chinese tech companies, to protect Big Tech monopolies in Silicon Valley.
“Banning TikTok would boost Alphabet, Meta and Snap”, Forbes chirped excitedly in 2023. It noted that these “American technology giants could tack on some $431 billion in market value if the U.S. bans TikTok”.
For its part, Meta (which has tens of billions of dollars of contracts with multiple US government agencies) has spent years lobbying against TikTok.
The Washington Post reported in 2020, “Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok”.
To try to sabotage Chinese competition, the US is banning apps, imposing tariffs, and restricting exports – targeting Chinese electric vehicles, Chinese solar panels, advanced semiconductors, 5G tech, and smart phones, principally from cutting-edge companies like Huawei.
Washington’s goal is to prevent China from catching up technologically. And TikTok is only one part of this larger tech war.

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo made this clear as day back in 2021, stating, “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe”.
The US commerce secretary has since repeated comments like this multiple times.
This March, Raimondo said that the US will “do whatever it takes” to prevent China from getting access to the most advanced technology.
It’s not a coincidence that, also in March, President Biden called for an investigation into the so-called “national security risks” posed by Chinese electric vehicles.
The Biden White House published an official statement claiming, “Chinese automakers are seeking to flood the autos market in the United States and globally, posing new threats to our national security”.
Biden made this statement just a few weeks after the billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, publicly called for trade barriers, to weaken Chinese competitors to his company (which has received billions of dollars of subsidies from the US government).
“If there are no trade barriers established, [Chinese electric vehicles] will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world”, Musk complained in January. He added in despair that his Chinese competitors are “extremely good”.
The European Union is doing the same thing. In October, the European Commission announced an official investigation into Chinese electric vehicles.
This March, the EU revealed that it is likely going to put retroactive tariffs on Chinese EVs. (This came just a few weeks after Musk called for trade barriers.)
This is the root of the issue with TikTok. The West is waging a technological war on China.
Washington’s explicitly stated goal is to prevent China from catching up technologically and competing with US corporate monopolies.
This is an attempt to protect US Big Tech monopolies so they can continue to dominate the entire world, so there are no alternatives to US corporate hegemony.


Instruction: Write an article about: US convenes anti-China ‘Quad’ alliance, Beijing calls it ‘tool for containment and siege’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Antony Blinken, Australia, China, Cold War Two, India, Japan, new cold war, Quad, Russia, Scott Morrison, Ukraine

Output:
The US, Japan, and India held a meeting of the Quad alliance in Australia. Beijing condemned it as “a tool for containing and besieging China to maintain US hegemony,” with an “antiquated Cold War mentality.”

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
The United States has brought Japan, India, and Australia together in an anti-China alliance called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad for short.
Top representatives of these four countries convened in the Australian city of Melbourne on February 11, to discuss ways to counter Beijing, among other issues.
The Chinese government responded to the meeting by condemning the Quad as “a tool for containing and besieging China to maintain US hegemony.” Beijing accused the alliance of seeking “to stoke confrontation,” with an “antiquated Cold War mentality.”
The timing of this gathering was not coincidental; it came right in the middle of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which the US, Australia, and India had condemned with diplomatic boycotts. (Britain’s influential newspaper the Financial Times described the Beijing Olympics as “the new front line in the US-China cold war.”)
The Melbourne meeting featured the foreign ministers of the US, Japan, India, and Australia, and was their fourth reunion since the Quad was re-established by the Donald Trump administration in 2017 to focus on containing Beijing.
The Quad is a vital part of our vision for the Indo-Pacific and shows the priority we place on working with partners and allies in the region. We had a productive discussion on issues that shape our collective prosperity and security. pic.twitter.com/VvEhZOEVAK
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) February 11, 2022

The Australian government enthusiastically endorsed the Quad meeting by not only sending its foreign minister but also its Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the leader of the right-wing Liberal Party, who has made fearmongering about the supposed “threat” of China a central part of his political program.
Under Morrison, Australia has become a front line in the second cold war. The country joined an anti-China military alliance with Washington and London called AUKUS, and announced it is buying nuclear-powered submarines with North American and British technology – a very provocative move, given that all other countries that have nuclear submarines also have nuclear weapons.
In a press conference before the Quad meeting, Morrison claimed Australia has faced “coercion and the pressure,” implying that China was guilty. He framed the conflict with Beijing as a matter of “freedom,” insisting that the alliance exists to protect “a world order that favors freedom, and particularly here in a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Appreciate that PM @ScottMorrisonMP met the Quad FMs collectively before we began talks. His insights and thoughts were valuable.
We are focused on the early and effective realization of our Leaders' vision. pic.twitter.com/VfKMSRcbdw
— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) February 11, 2022

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Quad members “share concerns that in recent years China has been acting more repressively at home and more aggressively in the region, and indeed potentially beyond.”
Blinken joined the Australian prime minister in portraying the meeting as “four democracies coming together.” Juxtaposing them implicitly against Beijing, Morrison claimed the Quad consists of “great democracies, great liberal democracies.”
Neither Blinken nor Morrison mentioned that Japan is essentially a one-party state that has been ruled by the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party, with few exceptions, since 1955, or that India is governed by the far-right Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been dismantling the secular state and attacking the rights of religious minorities.
Facts like these, along with the US and Australian governments’ continued history of genocide against Indigenous peoples and brutal violations of civil rights, blatantly contradicted their attempt to portray the Quad as a symbol of freedom and democracy against supposed Chinese authoritarianism.
The foreign ministers of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan at the Quad meeting in Melbourne on February 11
Following the meeting, the four Quad member states released a joint statement. From the use of language, it appears that this declaration was largely written by the United States.
Blinken stated in the press conference that the Quad exists to defend the “free and open Indo-Pacific, the most dynamic region in the world with the fastest growing economies, half the world’s population.” The statement echoed this rhetoric, calling “to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific – a region which is inclusive and resilient, and in which states strive to protect the interests of their people, free from coercion.”
Blinken said the Quad seeks “to defend the rules-based system that we have spent tremendous time and effort building over these many years.” The declaration used this phrase “rules-based” three times, reflecting Washington’s attempts to create a new international legal framework that it controls, in order to isolate China and Russia.
Although the joint statement forcefully condemned North Korea and Myanmar, it was careful not to mention China by name. Despite this, it was overwhelmingly aimed at attacking Beijing, implicitly referring to it as a threat to the Indo-Pacific region.
The Chinese government vociferously condemned the February 11 Quad meeting in Australia.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian asserted in a press conference on the same day, “China believes that the so-called Quad group cobbled together by the US, Japan, India and Australia is essentially a tool for containing and besieging China to maintain US hegemony.”
The Quad “aims to stoke confrontation and undermine international solidarity and cooperation,” Zhao said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman added, “I want to stress that as the Cold War is long over. The attempt to forge a so-called alliance to contain China wins no support and leads nowhere.”
“Relevant countries should abandon the antiquated Cold War mentality, correct the wrong approach of bloc confrontation and geopolitical games, and contribute to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific,” Zhao said.
A reporter in the press conference asked the Foreign Ministry spokesman to respond to US Secretary of State Blinken’s comment that “China has been acting more repressively at home and more aggressively in the region.” Zhao replied, “Speaking of being aggressive in this region and beyond, the United States is second to none.”
Speaking of being aggressive in this region and beyond, the United States is second to none. pic.twitter.com/hOL0DSUF5L
— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) February 12, 2022

Global Times, a newspaper owned by the Communist Party of China’s official organ People’s Daily, responded to the Australia meeting with an article titled “US ropes in Quad allies to fight ‘two-front wars’ with China and Russia despite spent force.”
The semi-official Chinese newspaper wrote, “The sign is clearer than ever that the US is turning Quad into a tool to serve its own strategic goal of countering China and Russia simultaneously.”
It noted that Blinken brought up the conflict in Ukraine in the Quad meeting, although the alliance claims to be focused on Indo-Pacific concerns.
Washington’s attempt to get its Quad allies on board with a cold war against Russia as well is less likely, however. Australia has taken a hard line against Moscow, but Japan and India have more complex relationships.
Japan and Russia are certainly not allies, but until recently they had cordial diplomatic ties. A conflict in 2021 over disputed islands led to souring relations, and Moscow has criticized Tokyo for joining the US in threatening Russia over Ukraine.
India’s government, led by the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has taken an extremely aggressive line against China.
In fact, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar used the Quad meeting as an opportunity to attack China, blaming it for a border dispute that has led to violence.
Yet while ultra-conservative Hindu-nationalist politicians in New Delhi, like their right-wing counterparts in the West, have turned Beijing into a convenient scapegoat for their domestic problems, India has not joined the United States in its war drive against Russia.
In a press conference before the Quad meeting, a journalist asked Foreign Minister Jaishankar what New Delhi’s position is on the conflict in Ukraine. He evaded the question, repeating that “this meeting is focused on the Indo-Pacific.”
The Australia reunion made it clear that, while the Quad members are united in their mutual goal to contain China, they still have political differences on other issues.