Instruction: Write an article about: Xi blasts US ‘containment, encirclement’ of China, Foreign Ministry slams ‘hysterical neo-McCarthyism’. 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, Hua Chunying, new cold war, Qin Gang, Xi Jinping

Output:
President Xi Jinping denounced the US-led Western attempt to “contain, encircle, and suppress China”. Foreign Minister Qin Gang condemned Washington’s “hysterical neo-McCarthyism” and “malicious confrontation”, opposing the “cold war mentality”.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has denounced the US-led Western attempt to “contain, encircle, and suppress China”.
Foreign Minister Qin Gang likewise warned that the US government is pursuing a “hysterical neo-McCarthyism”, and that its “so-called ‘competition’ means to contain and suppress China in all respects and get the two countries locked in a zero-sum game”.
Chinese political leaders are often very cautious and diplomatic with their language, and they frequently caution against the United States’ “cold war mentality”.
These assertive comments show that Beijing is standing up for itself and pushing back as Washington wages an increasingly aggressive new cold war.

“Western countries headed by the United States have contained, encircled and suppressed China in an all-round way, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to China’s development”, Xi said in a speech on March 7, reported by state media outlet Xinhua.
Acknowledging the growing geopolitical tensions, Xi said China is “faced with high winds and choppy waters in the international environment”. He added that “the external environment for China’s development has changed drastically, with uncertainties and unexpected factors increasing remarkably”.
The Wall Street Journal noted that “Xi’s comments marked an unusual departure for a leader who has generally refrained from directly criticizing the U.S. in public remarks—even as his decadelong leadership has demonstrated a pessimistic view of the bilateral relationship”.
“Xi has typically been more measured and vague regarding the U.S. and other Western countries, referring to them as “certain” countries rather than naming them explicitly”, the newspaper added.
This is him telling the Chinese people that China is under attack by the West as a whole, led by the US.
Which is factually undeniable of course but him saying it out loud marks a real turning point. It probably means he's lost hope that a new cold war can be avoided.
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) March 7, 2023

John Pang, a former Malaysian government official who frequently writes for Chinese media outlets, noted that, “Unlike western politicians, Chinese leaders err on the side of understatement and indirectness when discussing external threats, nor are they fond of using it to justify policy. I can’t recall his ever having put this so directly”.
Despite these challenges, President Xi noted that his country has continued progressing: “China’s GDP registered an annual growth rate of 5.2 percent over the past five years. We won the critical battle against poverty as scheduled and finished building a moderately prosperous society in all respects”.
Xi also reiterated his commitment to “common prosperity for all Chinese people“.
In separate remarks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, “The US claim to ‘shape the strategic environment in which China operates’ actually reveals the real purpose of its Indo-Pacific Strategy, that is to encircle China”.
She was referencing remarks made by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who announced this containment policy in a May 2022 speech.
Hua affirmed, “Asia should be a stage for win-win cooperation rather than a chessboard for geopolitical contest. No Cold War should be reignited, and no Ukraine-style crisis should be repeated in Asia”.
The US claim to “shape the strategic environment in which China operates” actually reveals the real purpose of its Indo-Pacific Strategy, that is to encircle China.
— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) March 7, 2023

China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang gave a press conference on March 7 in which he made similar remarks.
He referenced the manufactured crisis in February, in which the US military shot down a Chinese balloon that its own experts admitted had likely been blown off course due to the weather.
Qin said this balloon entering US airspace was “entirely an accident caused by force majeure”. He noted, “Even the United States did not believe it posed a physical threat”.
“However, in violation of the spirit of international law and international customary practices, the United States acted with a presumption of guilt”, Qin added. “It overreacted, abused force, and dramatized the accident, creating a diplomatic crisis that could have been avoided”.
US officials admitted the Chinese balloon they shot down on February 4 had likely been blown off course by unexpected weather.
The US Air Force later spent $2 million using missiles to blow up a $12 hobbyist balloon.https://t.co/kY1r4Cb7Xx
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 21, 2023

Noting that Washington “regards China as its primary rival and biggest geopolitical challenge”, the foreign minister argued that “the US perception and views of China are seriously distorted”.
He stated (emphasis added):
The United States claims that it seeks to “out-compete” China but does not seek conflict. Yet in reality, its so-called “competition” means to contain and suppress China in all respects and get the two countries locked in a zero-sum game.
The United States talks a lot about following rules. But imagine two athletes competing in an Olympic race. If one athlete, instead of focusing on giving one’s best, always tries to trip or even injure the other, that is not fair competition, but malicious confrontation and a foul!
Its so-called “establishing guardrails” for China-US relations and “not seeking conflict” actually means that China should not respond in words or action when slandered or attacked. That is just impossible!
If the United States does not hit the brake but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there will surely be conflict and confrontation. Who will bear the catastrophic consequences?
Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity. Naturally China is firmly opposed to all this.
If the United States has the ambition to make itself great again, it should also have a broad mind for the development of other countries. Containment and suppression will not make America great, and it will not stop the rejuvenation of China.
The Chinese foreign minister was careful to distinguish the people of the United States from the government.
“More and more people with vision and insight in the United States are deeply worried about the current state of China-US relations, and have been calling for a rational and pragmatic policy toward China”, he said.
Qin previously served as China’s ambassador to the United States from 2021 to 2023.
He affectionately recalled the time he spent working in the US and the friends he made.
“The American people, just like the Chinese people, are friendly, kind and sincere, and want a better life and a better world”, he stressed.
Qin concluded (emphasis added):
I’m convinced that the China-US relationship should be determined by the common interests and shared responsibilities of the two countries and by the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples, rather than by US domestic politics or the hysterical neo-McCarthyism.
China will continue to follow the principles put forth by President Xi Jinping, namely, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, to pursue a sound and stable relationship with the United States.
We hope the US government will listen to the calls of the two peoples, rid of its strategic anxiety of “threat inflation”, abandon the zero-sum Cold War mentality.


Instruction: Write an article about: Veterano de la CIA pide guerra contra China y Rusia, amenazando con ataques nucleares. 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: armas nucleares, China, CIA, nueva guerra fría, Rusia, segunda guerra fría

Output:
Un veterano de la CIA y el Pentágono, Matthew Kroenig, publicó un artículo en una revista elitista en el que pide una guerra de Estados Unidos contra China y Rusia, incluyendo la “amenaza de ataques nucleares no estratégicos”.

(You can read this article in English here.)
Un veterano de la CIA y el Pentágono que ahora ayuda a dirigir una de las organizaciones más poderosas de Washington, Matthew Kroenig, ha publicado un artículo en la influyente revista Foreign Policy en el que pide a Estados Unidos que se prepare para librar la guerra contra China y Rusia.
Kroenig desempeñó importantes funciones estatales de seguridad nacional en las administraciones de los presidentes George W. Bush, Barack Obama y Donald Trump, y tiene una influencia significativa en los círculos de la política exterior de Washington.
Kroenig insistió en que el ejército estadounidense debería “amenazar con ataques nucleares no estratégicos” contra China sobre Taiwán y contra Rusia sobre Europa.
Refiriéndose al conflicto de Washington con Beijing y Moscú como una “nueva guerra fría”, también pidió aumentar aún más el presupuesto militar anual de EEUU, que ya es de $768 mil millones. Sostuvo que “Estados Unidos puede permitirse gastar más que Rusia y China al mismo tiempo”.
El veterano de la CIA y el Pentágono enfatizó que Washington debe enfrentarse a ambas superpotencias euroasiáticas, simultáneamente, para mantener la hegemonía unipolar estadounidense, que reconoció está en declive.
Kroenig hizo estos argumentos en un artículo de amplia circulación, publicado el 18 de febrero en la revista de élite Foreign Policy, bajo el título “Washington debe prepararse para la guerra con Rusia y China”.

Matthew Kroenig actualmente se desempeña como subdirector del Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security (Centro Scowcroft para Estrategia y Seguridad) en el Atlantic Council (Consejo Atlántico), un instituto de investigación de la alianza militar de la OTAN, liderada por Estados Unidos.
El Atlantic Council, que está financiado por el gobierno de EEUU, otros gobiernos occidentales, la OTAN y la industria armamentística, tiene una enorme influencia en Washington y ayuda a crear la política exterior de cada administración.
Además de su trabajo para la CIA y el Departamento de Defensa en las administraciones de Bush, Obama y Trump, Kroenig fue asesor de seguridad nacional para las campañas presidenciales de los republicanos Mitt Romney, en 2012, y Marco Rubio, en 2016.
También es miembro del elite Council on Foreign Relations (Consejo de Relaciones Exteriores), y profesor de gobierno y servicio exterior en la prestigiosa Universidad de Georgetown en Washington.
En resumen, Kroenig es una figura muy influyente en los círculos de la política exterior de EEUU, con credenciales impecables, y sus puntos de vista extremadamente agresivos que piden una guerra simultánea contra China y Rusia reflejan las opiniones de muchos de sus colegas en Washington.
Matthew Kroenig resumió la opinión de muchas élites de la política exterior de Washington de que Estados Unidos debe hacer la guerra para mantener su control hegemónico indiscutible sobre el planeta, escribiendo:
Estados Unidos sigue siendo la principal potencia mundial con intereses globales, y no puede darse el lujo de elegir entre Europa y el Indo-Pacífico. En cambio, Washington y sus aliados deberían desarrollar una estrategia de defensa capaz de disuadir y, si es necesario, derrotar a Rusia y China al mismo tiempo.
Una de las tácticas que Estados Unidos podría usar para mantener su hegemonía unipolar, argumentó Kroenig, es la amenaza de una guerra nuclear:
Finalmente, si es necesario, Washington siempre podría tomar una página de su libro de jugadas de la Guerra Fría y confiar más en las armas nucleares para compensar las ventajas locales y convencionales de sus rivales. La presencia de armas nucleares tácticas estadounidenses en Europa ayudó a disuadir al enorme Ejército Rojo soviético durante décadas. De manera similar, Estados Unidos podría confiar en amenazar con ataques nucleares no estratégicos para disuadir y, como último recurso, frustrar una invasión anfibia china de Taiwán o una incursión de tanques rusos en Europa.
Sin duda, existen riesgos asociados con la disuasión nuclear, pero las armas nucleares han desempeñado un papel fundamental en la estrategia de defensa de EEUU durante tres cuartos de siglo, y es probable que continúen haciéndolo en las próximas décadas.
Advirtiendo que “Moscú y Beijing están forjando una asociación estratégica más estrecha, incluso en asuntos militares”, Kroenig insistió en que Estados Unidos debe aumentar drásticamente el gasto militar, para “superar a Rusia y China al mismo tiempo”:
Primero, Washington debería aumentar el gasto en defensa. Al contrario de quienes afirman que los recursos limitados obligarán a tomar decisiones difíciles, Estados Unidos puede permitirse gastar más que Rusia y China al mismo tiempo. Estados Unidos posee el 24 por ciento del PIB mundial en comparación con un 19 por ciento combinado en China y Rusia. Este año, Estados Unidos gastará $778 mil millones en defensa en comparación con solo $310 mil millones en Rusia y China.
Además, Estados Unidos podría llegar a duplicar el gasto en defensa (actualmente el 2,8 por ciento del PIB) y seguir estando por debajo del promedio de la Guerra Fría (cerca del 7 por ciento del PIB). De hecho, dado que esta nueva Guerra Fría es tan peligrosa como la anterior, es necesario un aumento significativo en el gasto de defensa, centrado en las tecnologías de defensa emergentes del siglo XXI.
…
En resumen, incluso si esta nueva competencia estratégica se convierte en una carrera armamentista de dos contra uno, es probable que Washington prevalezca.
Hizo un llamado a los aliados de EEUU para que también aumenten significativamente su gasto militar y escribió: “Los aliados europeos deberían invertir en armaduras y artillería, mientras que los aliados asiáticos compran minas navales, misiles arpón y submarinos”.
Kroenig señaló que se espera que la administración de Joe Biden publique pronto una nueva Estrategia de Defensa Nacional de EEUU, que esencialmente pedirá a Washington que se centre exclusivamente en contener a China, no a Rusia. Pero esta estrategia supuestamente se retrasó debido a la crisis en Ucrania.
Algunos legisladores estadounidenses han pedido que se reduzcan las tensiones con Moscú y que se intente formar una alianza con Rusia contra China, pero Kroenig argumentó que esto “no es realista”.
Esta no es la primera vez que Matthew Kroenig aboga por una guerra estadounidense.
En 2012, publicó un artículo en Foreign Affairs, el diario oficial del poderoso Council on Foreign Relations, en el que pedía al ejército estadounidense que lanzara ataques contra Irán.

En 2021, Kroenig habló en una conferencia contra Irán organizada por una secta infame que se llama el Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK). Muchos derechistas belicosos en Washington han apoyado este grupo extremista para tratar de lograr un cambio de gobierno en Teherán.
Elogió al Consejo Nacional de Resistencia de Irán (NCRI), una fachada del MEK, por la pretendida inteligencia que ha publicado sobre el supuesto programa nuclear de Teherán.

Ciertamente, Matthew Kroenig no es el único funcionario de la inteligencia estadounidense que pide la guerra contra China.
En noviembre de 2021, otro veterano de la CIA, David Sauer, publicó un artículo de opinión en The Hill titulado “Estados Unidos debe prepararse para la guerra con China por Taiwán”.
“Para disuadir a China, Estados Unidos debe aumentar rápidamente sus fuerzas en el Pacífico, continuar fortaleciendo las alianzas militares en la región para garantizar el acceso a las bases en tiempos de conflicto y acelerar las entregas de equipos militares comprados a Taiwán”, escribió Sauer.


Instruction: Write an article about: Philosopher Judith Butler repeatedly donated to ‘top cop’ Kamala Harris. 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: Black Lives Matter, California, David Graeber, Elizabeth Warren, FEC, Gloria Steinem, Judith Butler, Kamala Harris, Michael Walzer, Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, police, SDF, Syria

Output:
Renowned philosopher Judith Butler repeatedly donated to political campaigns of self-declared “top cop” Kamala Harris, a center-right neoliberal who imprisoned poor people of color for minor offenses

Renowned postmodern philosopher Judith Butler repeatedly donated to the political campaigns of proud self-declared “ top cop “ Kamala Harris, a center-right neoliberal who made her name as a notoriously harsh prosecutor who locked up large numbers of poor people of color for minor offenses.
In all, Butler gave at least $1,050 in contributions to Harris’ Senate and presidential campaigns between March 2018 and February 2019:
When Butler’s $300 contribution to Harris’ presidential campaign first began circulating on social media, skeptics insisted the donations must have come from a different person named Judith Butler.
But I looked up the FEC filings, and see what employer is listed on the campaign contribution: UC Berkeley, where Butler is a professor of comparative literature and critical theory. Indisputable proof that these donations are coming from the celebrated postmodern philosopher.
Philosopher Judith Butler’s campaign contribution to Kamala Harris, filed with the FEC
Keep in mind Kamala Harris is someone who bent over backward to put poor people in jail. The New York Times affectionately described her in a puff piece as “a ‘Top Cop’ in the Era of Black Lives Matter.”
Harris publicly made fun of criminal justice reform activists who want to “build more schools, less jails.” When protesters say, “‘Put money into education not prisons.’ There’s a fundamental problem with that approach,” she insisted.
“There should be a broad consensus that there should be serious, and severe, and swift consequence to crime,” the “progressive prosecutor” maintained.

During Harris’ reign as attorney general, from 2011 to 2016, California sent 1,974 people to prison for marijuana-related convictions.
The Los Angeles Times reports that she sponsored “a 2010 law to make it a misdemeanor for parents whose young children miss more than 10% of school days a year without a valid excuse. Parents could be punished with a maximum $2,000 fine, up to a year in county jail or both.” (Harris then laughed when discussing this proposal to jail parents over truancy.)
The only other contribution from Judith Butler registered by the FEC is a June 2019 donation of $100 to the presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren, who endorsed Trump’s economic war on Venezuela and boldly declared that she is “capitalist to her bones.”
Judith Butler’s 2019 campaign contribution to Elizabeth Warren, filed with the FEC
And that’s not all: Judith Butler also signed an open letter in 2018 in the New York Review of Books, alongside some prominent leftist academics, calling for the United States to continue its military intervention in northeast Syria.
The missive publicly requested that Washington “continue military support for the SDF” (Syrian Democratic Forces, who were created in a rebranding demanded by the US, to better wage war on the central government in Damascus).
Joining Butler as signatories on the pro-intervention letter were Debbie Bookchin, the daughter of pro-imperialist anarchist hero Murray Bookchin (although unlike Bookchin, Butler does at least deserve credit for challenging the racist colonialist Zionist movement); along with fellow anarchist luminaries Noam Chomsky and David Graeber; erstwhile Obama aficionado Bill Fletcher; imperialism-denying scholars Michael Hardt and David Harvey; Iraq War-supporting social democrat Michael Walzer; and last but certainly not least, eminent feminist icon Gloria Steinem — a former CIA agent.
Speaking of the CIA, Capitalism’s Invisible Army has promoted the growth of postmodernism for decades.
Postmodernism has long served as a right-wing bludgeon to supplant Marxism in academia. Non- or anti-Marxist forms of “left-wing” ideology, as advocated by philosophers like Judith Butler (whose academic writing is legendary for its proletarian comprehensibility and crystalline clarity of thought), have been supported by powerful, and reactionary, institutions.
And together they succeeded in replacing Marxism, which has been almost entirely eradicated in the gilded halls of neoliberal academe.
For more on this history, read the research of scholar Gabriel Rockhill, who shows in articles like “The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left” how the CIA quite liked postmodern philosophers — Michel Foucault being another favorite of the spooks — because they were anti-communist, soft on imperialism, and fighting against Marxists.
Rockhill writes:
The intelligence agency understands culture and theory to be crucial weapons in the overall arsenal it deploys to perpetuate US interests around the world. The recently released [CIA] research paper from 1985, entitled “France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals,” examines—undoubtedly in order to manipulate—the French intelligentsia and its fundamental role in shaping the trends that generate political policy. Suggesting that there has been a relative ideological balance between the left and the right in the history of the French intellectual world, the report highlights the monopoly of the left in the immediate postwar era—to which, we know, the Agency was rabidly opposed—due to the Communists’ key role in resisting fascism and ultimately winning the war against it. Although the right had been massively discredited because of its direct contribution to the Nazi death camps, as well as its overall xenophobic, anti-egalitarian and fascist agenda (according to the CIA’s own description), the unnamed secret agents who drafted the study outline with palpable delight the return of the right since approximately the early 1970s.
More specifically, the undercover cultural warriors applaud what they see as a double movement that has contributed to the intelligentsia shifting its critical focus away from the US and toward the USSR. On the left, there was a gradual intellectual disaffection with Stalinism and Marxism, a progressive withdrawal of radical intellectuals from public debate, and a theoretical move away from socialism and the socialist party. Further to the right, the ideological opportunists referred to as the New Philosophers and the New Right intellectuals launched a high-profile media smear campaign against Marxism.
While other tentacles of the worldwide spy organization were involved in overthrowing democratically elected leaders, providing intelligence and funding to fascist dictators, and supporting right-wing death squads, the Parisian central intelligentsia squadron was collecting data on how the theoretical world’s drift to the right directly benefitted US foreign policy. The left-leaning intellectuals of the immediate postwar era had been openly critical of US imperialism. Jean-Paul Sartre’s media clout as an outspoken Marxist critic, and his notable role—as the founder of Libération—in blowing the cover of the CIA station officer in Paris and dozens of undercover operatives, was closely monitored by the Agency and considered a very serious problem.
In contrast, the anti-Soviet and anti-Marxist atmosphere of the emerging neoliberal era diverted public scrutiny and provided excellent cover for the CIA’s dirty wars by making it “very difficult for anyone to mobilize significant opposition among intellectual elites to US policies in Central America, for example.”


Instruction: Write an article about: US post-9/11 wars caused 4.5 million deaths, displaced 38-60 million people, study shows. 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: Afghanistan, Brown University, drones, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, war, Yemen

Output:
Wars the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan following September 11, 2001 caused at least 4.5 million deaths and displaced 38 to 60 million people, with 7.6 million children starving today, according to studies by Brown University.

(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
The wars the United States waged and fueled in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan following September 11, 2001 caused at least 4.5 million deaths, according to a report by Brown University.
Nearly a million of the people who lost their lives died in fighting, whereas some 3.6 to 3.7 million were indirect deaths, due to health and economic problems caused by the wars, such as diseases, malnutrition, and destruction of infrastructure.
These were the conclusions of a study conducted by the Cost of Wars project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

The report also analyzed the effects of wars in Libya and Somalia, which were sponsored by Washington.
The scholars estimated that, in the countries studied, there are still today 7.6 million children under age 5 who are suffering from acute malnutrition, meaning they are “not getting enough food, literally wasting to skin and bones, putting these children at greater risk of death”.
In Afghanistan and Yemen, this includes nearly 50% of children; and, in Somalia, close to 60%.

In a separate study in 2021, Brown University’s Cost of Wars project found that the United States’ post-9/11 wars displaced at least 38 million people – more than any conflict since 1900, excluding World War II.
This 2021 report noted that “38 million is a very conservative estimate. The total displaced by the U.S. post-9/11 wars could be closer to 49–60 million, which would rival World War II displacement”.

The May 2023 study, which estimated that US post-9/11 wars killed 4.5 to 4.6 million people, emphasized that large numbers of civilians are still perishing today, due of the lasting consequences of these violent conflicts.
Although the US military withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, “today Afghans are suffering and dying from war-related causes at higher rates than ever”, the report noted.
In addition to the staggering death tolls, millions more civilians were wounded and suffered other incredible hardships due to these wars.
“For instance, for every person who dies of a waterborne disease because war destroyed their access to safe drinking water and waste treatment facilities, there are many more who sicken”, the study highlighted.
The 2023 report “highlights many longterm and underacknowledged consequences of war for human health, emphasizing that some groups, particularly women and children, suffer the brunt of these ongoing impacts”.
People living in poverty and those from marginalized groups had higher rates of death and lower life expectancies.
The document stressed how the “post-9/11 wars have caused widespread economic hardship for people in the war zones, and how poverty, in turn, has been accompanied by food insecurity and malnutrition, which have led to diseases and death, particularly amongst children under age five”.

In virtually all wars, indirect deaths represent the majority of the lives lost. The Brown University researchers pointed out, for example, “In conflict areas, children are 20 times more likely to die of diarrheal disease than from the conflict itself”.
Damage to infrastructure that happens during wars is likewise very deadly. “Hospitals, clinics, and medical supplies, water and sanitation systems, electricity, roads and traffic signals, infrastructure for farming and shipping goods, and much more are destroyed, damaged and disrupted, with lasting consequences for human health”, the report noted.
Economic problems caused by these post-9/11 wars have been devastating.
Two decades of US-NATO military occupation of Afghanistan left behind a borderline apocalyptic economic crisis.
More than half of Afghanistan’s population is in extreme poverty, living on less than $1.90 per day. A staggering 95% of Afghans do not have enough food.
In Yemen, more than 17.4 million people are food insecure, and 85,000 children under age 5 have likely died from starvation.
Even in countries where large numbers of US troops weren’t deployed on the ground, Washington’s wars have destroyed the lives of countless civilians.
US drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia “significantly impact people’s livelihood sources”, killing workers, destroying farms and businesses, and bankrupting families.
“The severe impact of such economic setbacks on populations who depend on the land for their survival cannot be underestimated”, the report emphasized.
Washington’s so-called counter-terrorism laws in Somalia have also “hampered humanitarian relief efforts, intensifying the effects of famine”, the researchers noted.
Hundreds of thousands of children have died from famine in the East African nation.
The Brown University studies are part of a growing body of scholarship documenting the death tolls of post-9/11 US wars.
A 2015 report by the Nobel Prize-winning group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) concluded that 13 years of Washington’s so-called “War on Terror” caused a total of 1.3 million deaths, including 1 million in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan, and 80,000 in Pakistan.
IPPNW cautioned that this 2015 figure was “only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely”.
Report: Over 1.2 million killed in US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan


Instruction: Write an article about: NY Times admits Saudi bombing of Yemen could not continue without US support. 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: New York Times, Saudi Arabia, Yemen

Output:
The New York Times editorial board acknowledged that Saudi Arabia could not wage war on Yemen without US backing: “the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support”.

The editorial board of The New York Times has acknowledged what journalists and activists have said for well over a year: The Saudi Arabia’s brutal bombing campaign, which has ravaged Yemen and created a humanitarian catastrophe, would be impossible were it not for US support.
“Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support,” the US newspaper of record wrote in “America Is Complicit in the Carnage in Yemen,” an editorial published on August 17.
The United States is complicit in the Saudi carnage in Yemen. https://t.co/WRiWwpQ6fM pic.twitter.com/1AJKIwI7Sw
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 17, 2016

This admission comes a bit late, considering the US-backed bombing began in March 2015 — and, since then, thousands of civilians have been killed; millions have been displaced; more than half of the country, at least 14 million people, are going hungry; and parts of major Yemeni cities have been pulverized.
“The United States is complicit in this carnage,” the editorial board conceded. “It has enabled the coalition in many ways, including selling arms to the Saudis.”
The Times continued:
Although many experts believe the threat to be overstated, Mr. Obama agreed to support the Yemen intervention — without formal authorization from Congress — and sell the Saudis even more weapons in part to appease Riyadh’s anger over the Iran nuclear deal. All told, since taking office, Mr. Obama has sold the Saudis $110 billion in arms, including Apache helicopters and missiles.
Mr. Obama has also supplied the coalition such indispensable assistance as intelligence, in-flight refueling of aircraft and help in identifying appropriate targets. Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support. Instead, the State Department last week approved the potential sale of $1.15 billion more in tanks and other equipment to Saudi Arabia to replace items destroyed in the war.
The editorial board also recognized a UN report that found the coalition responsible for 60 percent of the deaths and injuries to Yemeni children, along with reports by human rights groups that document war crimes committed by the coalition.
Many of these basic facts — which independent journalists have reported on for months— have been absent from the Times’ coverage of the war.


Instruction: Write an article about: CIA veteran calls for US war on China and Russia, threatening nuclear strikes, in elite Foreign Policy magazine. 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: Atlantic Council, China, CIA, Cold War Two, Foreign Policy magazine, Iran, Matthew Kroenig, media, MEK, NATO, new cold war, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine

Output:
A CIA and Pentagon veteran who helps run NATO’s powerful think tank the Atlantic Council, Matthew Kroenig, published an article in elite Foreign Policy magazine calling for US war on both China and Russia, including “threatening nonstrategic nuclear strikes” and a new arms race. He has also advocated military attacks on Iran.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
A veteran of the CIA and Pentagon who now helps to run one of the most powerful think tanks in Washington, Matthew Kroenig, has published an article in highly influential Foreign Policy magazine calling for the United States to prepare to wage war on China and Russia.
Kroenig served in important national security state roles in the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations, and has significant sway in DC foreign-policy circles.
Kroenig insisted that the US military should “threaten nonstrategic nuclear strikes” on China over Taiwan and Russia over Europe.
Referring to Washington’s conflict with Beijing and Moscow as a “new cold war,” he also called for boosting the $768 billion annual US military budget even further, maintaining that “the United States can afford to outspend Russia and China at the same time.”
The CIA and Pentagon veteran emphasized that Washington must take on both Eurasian superpowers, simultaneously, in order to maintain US unipolar hegemony, which he acknowledged is in decline.
Kroenig made these arguments in a widely circulated February 18 article in the elite Foreign Policy magazine, titled “Washington Must Prepare for War With Both Russia and China.”

Matthew Kroenig currently serves as deputy director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, the de facto think tank of the US-led NATO military alliance.
The Atlantic Council, which is funded by the US government, other Western governments, NATO, and the weapons industry, has massive influence in Washington, helping to craft foreign policy for every administration.
In addition to his work for the CIA and Defense Department in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, Kroenig was a national security adviser for the presidential campaigns of Republicans Mitt Romney, in 2012, and Marco Rubio, in 2016.
He is also a life member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, and a tenured professor of government and foreign service at Washington’s prestigious Georgetown University.
In short, Kroenig is a highly influential figure in US foreign-policy circles with impeccable credentials, and his extremely hawkish views calling for simultaneous US war on China and Russia reflect the opinions of many of his colleagues in Washington.
Matthew Kroenig encapsulated the view of many Washington foreign-policy elites that the United States must wage war in order to maintain its unchallenged hegemonic control over the planet, writing:
The United States remains the world’s leading power with global interests, and it cannot afford to choose between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Instead, Washington and its allies should develop a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating Russia and China at the same time.
One of the tactics the United States could use to maintain its unipolar hegemony, Kroenig argued, is the threat of nuclear war:
Finally, if necessary, Washington could always take a page from its Cold War playbook and rely more heavily on nuclear weapons to offset the local, conventional advantages of its rivals. The presence of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe helped deter the massive Soviet Red Army for decades. Similarly, the United States could rely on threatening nonstrategic nuclear strikes to deter and, as a last resort, thwart a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan or a Russian tank incursion into Europe.
To be sure, there are risks associated with nuclear deterrence, but nuclear weapons have played a foundational role in U.S. defense strategy for three-quarters of a century—and will likely continue to do so for decades to come.
Warning that “Moscow and Beijing are forging a closer strategic partnership, including on military matters,” Kroenig insisted that the United States must drastically increase military spending, to “outspend Russia and China at the same time”:
First, Washington should increase defense spending. Contrary to those who claim that constrained resources will force tough choices, the United States can afford to outspend Russia and China at the same time. The United States possesses 24 percent of global GDP compared to a combined 19 percent in China and Russia. This year, the United States will spend $778 billion on defense compared to only $310 billion in Russia and China.
Moreover, the United States could go so far as to double defense spending (currently 2.8 percent of GDP) and still remain below its Cold War average (close to 7 percent of GDP). Indeed, given that this new Cold War is every bit as dangerous as the last one, a meaningful increase in defense spending, focused on the 21st century’s emerging defense technologies, is in order.
…
In short, even if this new strategic competition becomes a two-versus-one arms race, Washington is likely to prevail.
He called for US allies to significantly increase their military spending as well, writing, “European allies should invest in armor and artillery while Asian allies buy naval mines, harpoon missiles, and submarines.”
Kroenig noted that the Joe Biden administration is soon expected to publish a new US National Defense Strategy, which will essentially call for Washington to focus exclusively on containing China, not Russia. But this strategy was allegedly delayed because of the Ukraine crisis.
Some US policymakers have called for easing tensions with Moscow and trying to form an alliance with Russia against China, but Kroenig argued this is “not realistic.”
This is by no means the first time Matthew Kroenig has advocated for a US war.
In 2012, he published an article in Foreign Affairs, the official journal of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, calling for the US military to launch attacks on Iran.

In 2021, Kroenig spoke at an anti-Iran conference organized by the extremist Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK) cult, which many hawkish figures in Washington have supported to try to bring about regime change in Tehran.
He praised MEK front the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) for supposed intelligence it has gathered on Tehran’s alleged nuclear program.

Matthew Kroenig is certainly not the only US intelligence official calling for war on China.
In November 2021, another CIA veteran, David Sauer, published an op-ed in The Hill titled “America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan.”
“To deter China, the United States must rapidly build up its forces in the Pacific, continue to strengthen military alliances in the region to ensure access to bases in time of conflict, and accelerate deliveries of purchased military equipment to Taiwan,” Sauer wrote.


Instruction: Write an article about: Silicon Valley Big Tech corporations are US military contractors. 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: Amazon, DHS, Facebook, FBI, Google, Microsoft, Pentagon, Silicon Valley, Twitter

Output:
Silicon Valley Big Tech corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter have thousands of contracts worth tens of billions of dollars with the US government, primarily with the Pentagon, but also with the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and other agencies.

Big Tech corporations in Silicon Valley act essentially as outsourced arms of the United States government.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have thousands of contracts with the US military, spy agencies, and police, NBC News has reported.
They are the computer technology version of the weapons corporations that are the Pentagon’s top contractors: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman.
From 2004 to 2021, Big Tech corporations Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter signed at least $44.7 billion in contracts with US government agencies, the vast majority with the Defense Department, VICE documented.
Facebook has contracts with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and has been paid to promote propaganda from US state media outlet Voice of America.
Twitter also has a contract with DHS, and is paid to promote US state media propaganda.
Journalist Yasha Levine detailed the close links between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon in his book “Surveillance Valley.” Many of these Big Tech corporations in fact emerged out of the US military-industrial complex.


Instruction: Write an article about: Analyst suffered 20 years in US prison for helping Cuba, still condemns ‘suffocating’ blockade. 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: Ana Belén Montes, blockade, Cuba, DIA, embargo, Puerto Rico

Output:
Former DIA analyst Ana Belén Montes was imprisoned for 20 years for sharing intelligence with Cuba that helped it prevent US attacks and sabotage. Upon being released, she condemned the “suffocating embargo” that makes Cubans “suffer.”

A former intelligence analyst who was imprisoned by the United States government for 20 years for sharing information with Cuba that helped it prevent US attacks against it was freed this January.
Upon leaving prison, she condemned the six-decade-long US blockade of Cuba and called for more attention to the hardships endured by the Puerto Rican people.
“Who in the last 60 years has asked the Cuban people if they want the United States to impose a suffocating embargo on them that makes them suffer?” she asked.

Ana Belén Montes had been an official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). She worked her way up the ranks of the organization, becoming its top Cuba analyst, before she was arrested in 2001.
In 2002, Montes was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
She was convicted of secretly giving sensitive intelligence to Cuba, helping its revolutionary government prevent US terror attacks and disrupt US sabotage operations.
At her trial, Montes declared, “I obeyed my conscience rather than the law… giving the island [Cuba] classified information to help it defend itself.”
“I believe our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighborly, and I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it,” she said.
The US Department of Defense, where Montes worked, had a history of planning terror attacks on Cuba. In Operation Northwood in 1962, top US military officials discussed launching false-flag attacks on civilian targets in both Cuba and Florida and falsely blaming them on communists, to try to justify a US military invasion of the island.
Have you ever heard of Operation Northwood? It was a false flag operation concocted by the #US Joint Chiefs of Staff in March 1962, after the Chief of Operations of the ‘Cuba Project’, asked them for pretexts to justify #US military intervention in #Cuba. https://t.co/Gmg7LP1AzD pic.twitter.com/PPYpEj5P4m
— Helen Yaffe (@HelenYaffe) November 5, 2021

Montes is a national hero in Cuba, and many around the world considered her to be a prisoner of conscience.
On January 6, 2023, US authorities allowed Montes to leave prison, having served 20 or her 25 year-sentence. But she is not yet completely free; the US government is going to monitor Montes for the remaining five years, and all of her internet access will be closely followed.
Soon after her release, Montes published a statement stating, “I encourage those who want to focus on me to, instead, focus on important issues, such as the serious problems that the Puerto Rican people face, or the United States economic embargo against Cuba.”
“Who in the last 60 years has asked the Cuban people if they want the United States to impose a suffocating embargo on them that makes them suffer?” she added.
The international community overwhelmingly opposes the illegal US blockade against Cuba, and every year for decades more than 95% of member states at the United Nations have voted to condemn it.
The US State Department admitted in an internal cable in 1960 that its goal in imposing sanctions and eventually an embargo on Cuba was “to weaken the economic life of Cuba” and make “the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Montes is Puerto Rican, and upon being released she moved back to her homeland. There, she delivered these remarks (emphasis added):
I am happier than ever to touch Boricuan soil again. After two quite exhausting decades, and with the need to go back to earning a living, I would like to dedicate myself to a quiet and private existence. Therefore, I will not participate in any media activities.
I encourage those who want to focus on me to, instead, focus on important issues, such as the serious problems that the Puerto Rican people face, or the United States economic embargo against Cuba.
Who in the last 60 years has asked the Cuban people if they want the United States to impose a suffocating embargo on them that makes them suffer?
What also deserves attention is the urgent need for global cooperation that stops and reverses the destruction of our environment.
I as a person am irrelevant. I am not important, while there exist grave problems in our world homeland that demand attention and a demonstration of brotherly love.
Her lawyer, Linda Backiel, said that this would be Montes’ only public statement and that she would not grant interviews, asking for her privacy to be respected.
Addressing the court at her trial in October 2002, Montes delivered a passionate speech (emphasis added):
An Italian proverb perhaps best describes the fundamental truth I believe in: “All the world is one country.”
In such a “world-country,” the principle of loving one’s neighbor as much as oneself seems, to me, to be the essential guide to harmonious relations between all of our “nation-neighborhoods.”
This principle urges tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others. It asks that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated – with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, tragically, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.
Your honor, I engaged in the activity that brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law.
I believe our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighborly, and I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.
We have displayed intolerance and contempt towards Cuba for most of the last four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice.
I do not understand why we must continue to dictate how the Cubans should select their leaders, who their leaders cannot be, and what laws are appropriate in their land.
Why can’t we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for over two centuries?
My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba’s right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice.
My greatest desire is to see amicable relations emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility towards Cuba and to work with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect, and understanding.
Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred – by individuals or governments – spread only pain and suffering.
I hope for a U.S. policy that is based instead on neighborly love, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt. Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people.
It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one “world-country,” in our only “world-homeland.”


Instruction: Write an article about: US gov’t knew NATO expansion to Ukraine would force Russia to intervene. 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: CIA, Georgia, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, WikiLeaks, William Burns

Output:
Former US Ambassador to Russia William J. Burns, who is now CIA director, admitted in a classified 2008 embassy cable that NATO expansion to Ukraine crosses 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.”

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
Senior US government officials knew as far back as 2008 that the possibility of adding Ukraine to NATO was seen as a serious “military threat” by Russia, one that crosses Moscow’s security “redlines” and could force it to intervene.
Yet Western leaders continued insisting that Ukraine would join the US-led military alliance, right up until Russia did indeed intervene in February 2022.
At the annual NATO summit back in 2008, the George W. Bush administration publicly called for adding Russia’s neighbors Ukraine and Georgia to the military alliance. NATO’s secretary-general declared that the two countries would eventually become members.
But privately, US diplomats knew that this move would be seen as an existential threat by Moscow, and could provoke Russian military intervention in Ukraine.
The former US ambassador to Russia, William J. Burns, who is now director of the CIA, warned in a February 2008 embassy cable that Ukraine constituted a security “redline” for Moscow.

The confidential State Department cable was titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines” (“nyet” is Russian for “no”).
Burns cautioned that the issue of NATO membership for Ukraine “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.”

Burns wrote that Foreign Minister Sergey “Lavrov emphasized that Russia was convinced that [NATO] enlargement was not based on security reasons, but was a legacy of the Cold War.”
The former US ambassador to Russia, and current CIA director, published a prescient analysis that would foreshadow Moscow’s actions in 2022:
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
Burns’ warnings came true just a few years later.
This kind of internal violence did indeed break out in Ukraine, after a US-sponsored coup d’etat in 2014 overthrew a democratically elected government that had maintained a relatively neutral foreign policy, balanced between Russia and the West, and instead installed a staunchly pro-Western and anti-Russian regime.
In response to the 2014 putsch, Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region rose up against the coup government in Kiev, which they denounced as an illegitimate Western puppet regime.
Independence activists declared the creation of two new autonomous states, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The Ukrainian government, with Western military support and weapons, has waged a brutal war against these breakaway republics in the Donbas ever since.
Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been displaced. Ukraine, which shares a massive 2,300-kilometer border with Russia, has been rocked by violence and instability since the 2014 US-backed coup – and this constant turmoil has had significant effects inside Russia, especially economically.
This was precisely the civil war scenario that Burns had warned about in 2008.
On February 21, 2022, Russia officially recognized Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. Then on February 24, Moscow launched an invasion of Ukraine, which it said aimed to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country.
Russia’s goal is to force Ukraine to maintain political neutrality, preventing it from being a Western military outpost that could threaten Russia on its borders, potentially with nuclear weapons.
While Western governments and media outlets portrayed the Russian invasion as the crazy decision of a supposed madman, internal US embassy cables showed that Washington knew as far back as 2008 that its push to expand NATO to Ukraine would result in this exactly this outcome: forcing Russia to intervene.
The world only knows this thanks to the whistleblowing journalist outlet Wikileaks, which published the formerly classified State Department cable by William Burns, and publicized his prophetic warning on Twitter.
'Nyet Means Nyet: Russia's #NATO Enlargement Redlines' – #Ukraine Cable from 2008 written by #CIA director William J. Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow https://t.co/rOoxmuwIul pic.twitter.com/KGy0PU4Igg
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 25, 2022

At every stage leading up the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States and its NATO alliance refused to give substantial concessions to Moscow, sabotaging all serious attempts at a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
Since it signed the Minsk II agreement in 2015, under the supervision of Germany and France, the Ukrainian government has been legally obligated to cease hostilities against the Donbas and create a decentralized system that ensures autonomy for Donetsk and Lugansk.
But Ukraine adamantly refused to abide by Minsk II, and its Western sponsors did nothing to save the diplomatic agreement.
So in December 2021, the Russian Federation sent the US and NATO a series of requests for security guarantees. Principal among these was the demand that the military alliance must not admit Ukraine and Georgia.
Moscow said that NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia constituted a security “red line” – recalling the language Ambassador William Burns had used in his 2008 embassy cable.
For Russia as a country, regardless of who is president and regardless of the political ideology of the Kremlin, the prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO poses an existential security threat, given that both nations, which were former republics of the Soviet Union, directly border Russia at geostrategic points.
When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in its 1941 Operation Barbarossa, it tore through and occupied Soviet Ukraine, to try to cut off Moscow’s access to the Black Sea and Caucasus, break off southern cities like Stalingrad, and ultimately surround the Russian heartland.
In its December 2021 request, the Russian Federation insisted that the United States and NATO must respond to its demand for security guarantees with legally binding written statements.
Moscow emphasized that any agreements had to be in writing precisely because NATO has a history of lying to it.
Notes from a 1991 meeting prove that the US, UK, France, and Germany assured the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand east.
It’s part of a growing body of evidence that the West broke its promise to Russia.https://t.co/JY3fcuOVPa
— Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 21, 2022

In 1990, the US, Britain, and France repeatedly promised the Soviet Union that they would not expand NATO “one inch eastward” after the reunification of Germany.
This is an undeniable historical fact, a matter of public record confirmed by numerous internal documents from Western governments.
But NATO later broke that promise, and not once or twice but 14 times. All 14 new member states that it admitted were east of Germany, and many had previously been Soviet allies in Moscow’s former security alliance, the Warsaw Pact.
A map of NATO expansion
NATO has militarily encircled Russia more and more by the year.
Estonia and Latvia, former republics of the Soviet Union, are already NATO member states directly on Russia’s borders.
In fact Western militaries, including those of the United Kingdom and France, were using Estonia to run NATO military exercises just 100 kilometers from Russia’s border in late 2021 and early 2022, at the peak of the crisis in Ukraine.
NATO troops have launched a series of war-games in Estonia, less than 2 hours drive from the Russian border.
The “Winter camp” exercise includes troops from Britain and France, and involves armoured vehicles and live-fire drills pic.twitter.com/pEHCPYHNfV
— Murad Gazdiev (@MuradGazdiev) January 29, 2022

The United States and NATO ultimately ignored Russia’s December 2021 request for security guarantees. Leaked copies of their written responses, which they had asked to keep private, show that they refused to grant Moscow any significant concessions, and both insisted that Ukraine could and even should one day join NATO. (NATO’s response was particularly aggressive and disrespectful.)
In a speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022, the Western military alliance’s hawkish secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, threatened that “if Kremlin’s aim is to have less NATO on Russia’s borders, it will only get more NATO.”
The US-led NATO imperialist alliance provoked Russia right up til the end:
On February 19, a few days before its intervention in Ukraine, warmongering NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg threatened, "if Kremlin’s aim is to have less NATO on Russia’s borders, it will only get more NATO" https://t.co/tiKDynhYqY pic.twitter.com/kd2n6kZmnL
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 25, 2022

Instead of respecting Russia’s security red lines, the United States and several European countries escalated the situation further by sending billions of dollars worth of more weapons to Ukraine.
Pointing to a Russian troop deployment inside its own territory, near its border with Ukraine, Western governments deployed more soldiers to the region as well, driving up the tensions.
Throughout the entire time, NATO depicted itself as an angelic, innocent “defensive” alliance. But Russia understands how high the stakes are, clearly seeing the consequences of NATO’s destructive wars on Yugoslavia – which destroyed and balkanized the country – Afghanistan, and Libya – which turned what had been the most prosperous country in Africa into a failed state with open-air slave markets.
The 2022 crisis in Ukraine traces its roots back to the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008, when the George W. Bush administration publicly called for adding Ukraine and Georgia to the US-led military alliance.
There were internal divisions within NATO, and some members, namely Germany and France, were uncomfortable with the possibility. But NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared that Ukraine and Georgia eventually “will become member nations.”
Ukraine’s president at the time was Viktor Yushchenko, a US-backed, pro-Western politician who supported NATO membership.
But in the 2010 presidential election, the Ukrainian people voted for a new leader who promised a more balanced foreign policy, Viktor Yanukovych.
Western media outlets often refer to Yanukovych as “pro-Russian,” but in reality he tried to keep Ukraine neutral, sometimes allying with the West and sometimes allying with Moscow.
For Washington and Brussels, however, Yanukovych was too independent. So in 2014, the United States sponsored a coup d’etat to overthrow the democratically elected president.
Far-right extremists and neo-Nazis played a key role as the violent muscle behind this putsch.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, senior US diplomats like hardline anti-Russian hawk Victoria Nuland were conspiring with friendly Ukrainian politicians to create a pro-Western puppet regime right on Russia’s borders.

A leaked 2014 phone recording shows that Nuland and other US officials had handpicked the top officials who would run Ukraine’s government after the Washington-backed coup.
The Joe Biden administration brought Nuland back in 2021, appointing her third-in-command of the State Department, where she helped to shape US policy toward Russia, pushing for an extremely aggressive strategy.
Nuland is a key figure in Washington’s neoconservative foreign-policy circles. Before she helped run the Obama and Biden State Departments, Nuland was Vice President Dick Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy adviser from 2003 to 2005, during the Iraq War.
Nuland’s mentor Cheney has himself made it clear that the United States will never tolerate a strong and independent government in Moscow. Cheney sought to break up Russia itself after the overthrow of the Soviet Union.
Back in 1992, the Pentagon drafted a new belligerent US defense strategy, overseen by a neoconservative ally of Nuland and Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz. It clearly stated that Washington’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival… deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
The zero-sum game mentality behind this Wolfowitz Doctrine, which insists that the US empire must run the world without any opposition, and which refuses to countenance the possibility of Russia having its own security interests, still undergirds Washington’s foreign policy to this day.
The US “maximum-pressure” strategy against Moscow that this imperial doctrine has inspired, under the watch of anti-Russia hawks like Nuland, helped provoke exactly what Ambassador William Burns warned about in 2008: a Russian military intervention in Ukraine.


Instruction: Write an article about: Criminals welcome as US recruits foreign proxies to wage ‘irregular war’ on adversaries. 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: CIA, Iran, News York Times, Nick Turse, Pentagon, Russia, SOCOM, special operations, Special Operations Command, Ukraine, Yahoo News, Zach Dorfman

Output:
The US military trains and arms foreign fighters as “proxies” to wage “irregular warfare” against adversaries, and the Pentagon does not vet them to see if they have committed atrocities, according to documents obtained by the New York Times.

The United States military recruits foreign fighters to serve as “proxies” in order to wage “irregular warfare” against Washington’s adversaries, and the Pentagon does not vet them to see if they have a history of committing atrocities, according to declassified documents obtained by the New York Times.
These “surrogate” fighters are armed and trained by the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command.
They are key players in a growing number of secretive “shadow wars” that Washington is waging across the planet.
US special operations commandoes were deployed to 154 countries, or roughly 80% of the nations on Earth, as of 2020.

“U.S. Special Operations forces are not required to vet for past human rights violations by the foreign troops they arm and train as surrogates”, the New York Times reported on May 14.
“American commandos pay, train and equip foreign partner forces and then dispatch them on kill-or-capture operations”, the newspaper noted.
The Times disclosed two Pentagon programs in which “surrogate” forces are used: Section 127e, known as “127 Echo”, which gets $100 million per year to train “counterterrorism” proxies; and Section 1202, which is allotted $15 million per year to recruit proxies to wage “irregular warfare”.
This unconventional warfare is “aimed at disrupting nation-state rivals via operations that fall short of full armed conflict — including sabotage, hacking and information campaigns like propaganda”, the newspaper wrote.
U.S. Special Operations forces are not required to vet for past human rights violations by the foreign troops they arm and train as surrogates, newly disclosed documents show. https://t.co/9MIV0cvw74
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 14, 2023

The proxies recruited by the US military are vetted, but only “to detect counterintelligence risks and potential threats to American forces”, not for any “violations of human rights — such as rape, torture or extrajudicial killings”, the Times clarified.
The newspaper explained:
Proxy forces are an increasingly important part of American foreign policy. Over the past decade, the United States has increasingly relied on supporting or deputizing local partner forces in places like Niger and Somalia, moving away from deploying large numbers of American ground troops as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even as that strategic shift is meant to reduce the risk of American casualties and blowback from being seen as occupiers, training and arming local forces creates other hazards.
The Pentagon refused to tell the Times what countries these programs are active in. However, previous reports have noted that the US military ran its irregular warfare operation in Ukraine, where it trained forces for an eventual proxy war with Russia, years before Moscow’s 2022 invasion.
By its very nature, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has been notoriously secretive about its activities around the world.
Investigative journalist Nick Turse reported that US special operations forces were active in 154 countries in 2020, covering approximately 80 percent of the planet.
In a 2021 story in The Intercept, Turse wrote:
U.S. Special Operations Command has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. “Special operations-specific funding” topped out at $3.1 billion in 2001, compared with $13.1 billion now. Before 9/11, there were roughly 43,000 special operations forces. Today, there are 74,000 military personnel and civilians in the command. Two decades ago, an average of 2,900 commandos were deployed overseas in any given week. That number now stands at 4,500, according to SOCOM spokesperson Ken McGraw.
As the command’s global reach has grown, so has the toll on America’s commandos. While special operations forces make up just 3 percent of American military personnel, they have absorbed more than 40 percent of the casualties, mainly in conflicts across the Greater Middle East.
SOCOM’s irregular warfare campaign was previously acknowledged in reporting by Yahoo News.
“In the final month of his presidency, Donald Trump signed off on key parts of an extensive secret Pentagon campaign to conduct sabotage, propaganda and other psychological and information operations in Iran”, wrote the media outlet’s national security correspondent Zach Dorfman, in a 2021 article on Washington’s “shadow war”.
Dorfman said that Washington’s goal was “to undermine the Iranian people’s faith in their government as well as shake the regime’s sense of competence and stability”.
Former top US officials described the operation as “irregular warfare”, and it included “a 200-page package of options, involv[ing] ‘things that would cause the Iranians to doubt their control over the country'”.
Dorfman is very friendly with US spy agencies. At Yahoo News, he has also disclosed similar irregular warfare operations targeting Russia, but run by the Central Intelligence Agency.
“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel”, he revealed in a report published in January 2022 – a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.
This CIA program training Ukrainian paramilitaries in the southern United States was initiated in 2015, Dorfman disclosed.
In March 2022, a month after Moscow invaded, Yahoo News revealed that the CIA had another program training elite Ukrainian forces inside their country. That CIA initiative began in 2014.
These operations were overseen by the CIA, however. What is unique about the New York Times’ May 2023 report is that it sheds light on similar programs in which the US military arms and trains proxy forces abroad.


Instruction: Write an article about: CNN and MSNBC hire CIA/Pentagon officials as talking heads – and they push for more war. 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: CIA, CNN, James Clapper, James Spider Marks, Jeremy Bash, John Kirby, Lisa Monaco, Michael Hayden, MSNBC, North Korea, Pentagon, Philip Mudd, Russia, Syria

Output:
Top TV networks CNN and MSNBC hired a slew of former CIA and Pentagon officials as analysts, who use the media to push for war and an even more hawkish US foreign policy.

(This article was first published in The Real News.)
Americans frequently boast of how free and independent their press ostensibly is. According to mainstream NGO Reporters Without Borders, media freedoms in the United States come in at a measly 43rd place globally. But even overlooking that fact, some of the liberties that do indeed exist are being whittled down.
It is not just the government that is cracking down on press freedoms in the U.S. (although it certainly is). In recent years, leading corporate media networks have also, of their own accord, abrogated their independence by directly hiring former top government officials as analysts and commentators.
The latest example of the revolving door between U.S. intelligence agencies and the corporate media came on February 1, when NBC News announced that John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been hired as a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
Brennan joins a slew of other former senior U.S. intelligence officers who can now be seen across television.
In April 2017, CNN added three new government officials to its ranks.
Michael Hayden, the only person to have served as the director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, was hired as a CNN national security analyst.
Hayden is not exactly known for being a friend of journalists. As I previously reported for Salon, Hayden has likened Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Glenn Greenwald to the devil and disparaged other prominent investigative journalists, such as Seymour Hersh, Laura Poitras and Jane Mayer. He also joked about putting whistleblower Edward Snowden on the drone assassination program’s kill list.
John Kirby, the former spokesperson for the State Department, was also hired as a military and diplomatic analyst for CNN.
Kirby was previously a press secretary for the Pentagon and served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations. That is to say, he spent years playing the media on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense, and subsequently became a prominent voice in the very media he had worked for so long.
Moreover, Lisa Monaco, who was homeland security advisor under President Barack Obama, joined CNN’s ranks as a senior national security analyst. Upon her promotion to the president’s top counterterrorism advisor, Monaco had taken over the previous position of new MSNBC analyst Brennan, as CNN itself noted at the time.
That’s not all. Later in 2017, CNN likewise hired James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under Obama and previous head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as a national security analyst.
Lawmakers have called for Clapper to face perjury charges for lying under oath. During congressional testimony in 2013, the top spy chief was asked if the NSA was collecting any of the data of Americans; he insisted the agency was not doing so. Months later, Edward Snowden showed otherwise, with the help of journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras — all of whom have been excoriated by CNN national security analyst Hayden.
These new hires joined CNN military and national security analyst James “Spider” Marks, a retired major general who previously led the U.S. Army Intelligence Center; along with longtime CNN counterterrorism analyst Philip Mudd, an intelligence agency veteran who helped lead counterterrorism operations at both the CIA and the FBI, and who sat on the White House National Security Council.
Many of these U.S. government officials were frequent guests on corporate media networks before becoming regular paid contributors. Top CIA and FBI official Mudd boasts on his website, for instance, that “he has been featured by ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, BBC, MSNBC, al-Jazeera, NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.”
The latest figure to cross through the revolving door from the U.S. intelligence community into the media, former CIA Director Brennan, is far from the only top government official MSNBC has added to its roster.
NBC and its subsidiary hired as a national security analyst Jeremy Bash, who previously served as the chief of staff for both the Pentagon and the CIA.
Bash is also the founder and managing director of the Washington, D.C.-based advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies, which, as I detailed in AlterNet, is populated by former government officials and is closely linked to UAE ambassador to the U.S. Yousef al-Otaiba, one of the most influential foreign diplomats.
It will come as no surprise that the former government officials hired by corporate media networks have toed the U.S. government line in their analyses on air.
All have openly demanded more aggressive U.S. actions against Russia in particular.
As the media watchdog FAIR noted, Bash has all but called for war on Moscow.
Hayden has warned, as CNN puts it, “that Russia is still trying to influence American minds.”
Monaco has defended “the imposition of unprecedented sanctions” as necessary “consequences” for Moscow.
Clapper has implied the Kremlin is pulling the strings over Trump.
Kirby has fearmongered about Russian jets — while promoting uber-bellicose Senator John McCain.
On Syria, they have been equally hawkish. After a Syrian military attack on the district of Khan Shaykhun, in al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib province, Bash took to NBC News to propose “airstrikes from U.S. military aircraft or cruise missile strikes from U.S. naval warships operating off the coast of Syria. The objective… would be to punish Assad.” In order to do this, Bash added, “We’d effectively have to push Russia aside, because they are there. And that’s not something I’m sure this White House is willing to do.”
When Trump responded by attacking the Syrian government, launching 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles on its Shayrat airbase and destroying some 20 percent of the Syrian military’s operational planes, according to the Pentagon, Bash applauded. In an NBC News report, the former Pentagon and CIA official praised the strike for sending “an important message to Assad” and a “critical message” to other countries targeted by the U.S., such as Iran and North Korea.
Former CIA and NSA director Hayden likewise penned an op-ed in The Hill extolling “the first real military action of the Trump era.” On CNN, Hayden saluted Trump for his “remarkable flip.”
For some of these spy chiefs-cum-analysts, nevertheless, Trump’s missile strike on Syria was not quite aggressive enough. On CNN, Mudd lamented that the dramatic attack was not enough to deter Russia. On the same network, General Marks wishfully observed that the strike
is not like Kentucky basketball, one and done; this is the start of a series of operations. We will continue to maintain a very strong intelligence presence on top of this target. And we’ll be able to roll more Tomahawks and we’ll be able to escalate and we’ll be able to do additional types of operations in order to achieve the results that we’re looking for, which is number one politically, I think we’ve done that and we’ve sent a very strong message. But to degrade and ultimately, eliminate his WMD, weapons of mass destruction capability and his ability, Assad’s ability to deliver.
Similarly, these government officials turned reliably hawkish pundits have called for more threatening action against North Korea.
Kirby has declared that “the credibility of the threat from North Korea is palpable.”
Hayden has defended the Trump administration’s extremely belligerent posturing.
Both Hayden and Bash have called for an aggressive approach on North Korea.
Clapper has proposed more sanctions on the country as a way forward.
CNN even created a hologram animation showing what war would look like with North Korea, starring General Marks.
The embrace of former top U.S. officials as go-to employees and this willing abandonment of putative independence by the corporate media further underscores just how closely the press mirrors the government on issues of war, national security, and foreign policy.
This approach combines the worst of both worlds: while Americans are told that their media apparatus is free because it is not state owned, the news broadcasts on their televisions are replete with pugnacious talking heads who have spent most of their lives working for the government, and its notoriously violent military and intelligence agencies.


Instruction: Write an article about: CIA is training Ukrainian paramilitaries to ‘kill Russians’. 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: CIA, Maidan, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
The CIA is training far-right Ukrainian nationalists to “kill Russians” and wage an “insurgency” against Moscow.

The CIA has, since 2015, been training Ukrainian special forces and paramilitaries to “kill Russians.”
The covert program started under US President Barack Obama and was subsequently expanded by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The CIA has also been in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region advising anti-Russian fighters.
This is according to a January 13 report in Yahoo News, titled “CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades.”
“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel,” reported Yahoo News’ national security correspondent Zach Dorfman.
A former CIA official told the outlet, “The United States is training an insurgency.”
The CIA’s goal is to teach Ukrainian fighters “to kill Russians,” he said.
An excerpt from the Yahoo News report in which a former CIA officer says the “United States is training an insurgency” to “kill Russians”
To understand Moscow’s perspective on what is happening in Ukraine, imagine this scenario: What would the United States do if Russia orchestrated a violent coup d’etat in Mexico – as Washington did in Russia’s neighbor Ukraine in 2014 – then Russian spy agencies spent years training Mexican gangs to kill North Americans, and sent them to the US border to fight an “insurgency”?
That is what Washington is doing on the Russian border.


Instruction: Write an article about: US funds ‘independent journalists’ in Cuba to spread propaganda, ex CIA spy admits. 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: CIA, Cuba, disinformation, information war, La Prensa, National Endowment for Democracy, NED, Nicaragua, propaganda, Venezuela

Output:
Former CIA analyst Fulton Armstrong told The Guardian that, in Cuba, “a lot of the so-called independent journalists are indirectly funded by the US”. They spread anti-government disinformation with the support of the NED.

(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
A former top CIA spy has admitted that the United States funds anti-government propagandists in Cuba who portray themselves as “independent journalists”.
Major British newspaper The Guardian spoke with CIA veteran Fulton Armstrong, whom it described as “the US intelligence community’s most senior analyst for Latin America from 2000 to 2004”.
Armstrong stated that, in Cuba, “a lot of the so-called independent journalists are indirectly funded by the US”.
The ex CIA analyst pointed out that, today, the Joe Biden administration bankrolls anti-government opposition forces in Cuba with at least $20 million in annual support for supposed “democracy promotion” activities.
The Guardian acknowledged that the CIA has a history of spreading disinformation inside Cuba, as part of a US information war aimed at destabilizing the revolutionary government. The newspaper wrote:
Financing media has long been part of Washington’s diplomatic toolkit.
In the 1960s in Cuba, Radio Swan, a CIA covert action programme, attempted not only a propaganda offensive to undermine support for Fidel Castro, but doubled up as a communication link, sending coded messages to paramilitaries during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
A decade ago it emerged that the US government had paid contractors to create ZunZuneo, a social network built on texts, to organize “smart mobs” on the island. And during historic, largely spontaneous anti-government protests on the island in 2021, externally funded, externally directed bots made anti-government hashtags trend on Twitter.
Still today, Washington funds another prominent Spanish-language, anti-Cuba disinformation outlet called Radio y Televisión Martí, which is part of the government’s propaganda arm the US Agency for Global Media (formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors).
Armstrong, the former CIA agent, explained to The Guardian the US destabilization strategy in financing opposition media outlets in foreign countries like Cuba:
US programs are designed with a win-win strategy. We win if the opposition media gain a foothold, and we win if they provoke government repression.
That thrusts the government into a dilemma – to let the organizing and funding go forward or to risk image and credibility by crushing it.
In addition to spying for the CIA, Armstrong worked for the State Department’s US Interests Section in Cuba (a diplomatic office located inside Switzerland’s embassy in Havana).
Armstrong served as the US “National Intelligence Officer for Latin America”, the intelligence community’s top analyst focused on the region. He also oversaw Latin America for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Guardian – which is itself closely linked to and collaborates with the UK’s intelligence services – portrayed the Cuban government as repressive for cracking down on foreign-funded disinformation agents.
The British newspaper gloated over the large revenue streams that anti-government media outlets in Cuba have, writing, “Tiny state salaries have also been unable to compete with the private sector”.
While The Guardian praised two right-wing Cuban opposition media outlets, called El Toque and El Estornudo, it admitted that both are bankrolled by the US government.
El Toque disclosed to The Guardian that “it has received US federal funds ‘indirectly’ as part of a mix of money from corporations and foundations”.
El Estornudo is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious instrument of US regime-change operations that has meddled in the internal politics of countries all around the world.
A co-founder of the NED, Allen Weinstein, told the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA“.
The NED reported that it gave El Estornudo $180,000 in 2021 – a huge sum of money in any Latin American country, but especially in Cuba, which has trouble getting access to dollars due to Washington’s illegal, six-decade blockade against it.

In a 1977 report titled “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.“, the New York Times admitted that the CIA had established a media outlet in the early 1960s called Free Cuba Radio, whose “propaganda broadcasts against the Government of Prime Minister Fidel Castro were carried over radio stations” in various cities inside the US and in the Caribbean.
The prominent newspaper explained:
One motive for establishing the Free Cuba radio network, a former C.I.A. official said he recalled, was to have periods of air time available in advance in case Radio Swan, meant to be the main communications link for the Bay of Pigs invasion, was destroyed by saboteurs.
Radio Swan’s cover was thin enough to warrant such concern. The powerful station, whose broadcasts could be heard over much of the Western Hemisphere, was operated by a steamship company in New York that had not owned a steamship for some time.
The United States has used the same tactics to try to destabilize the leftist governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
The NED has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding right-wing opposition media outlets and so-called “civil society organizations” in Venezuela.
Many of these groups have been complicit in violence and participated in coup attempts against democratically elected Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
In Nicaragua in the 1980s, the CIA supported far-right death squads known as the Contras (short for “Counterrevolutionaries”), who burned down schools and hospitals and waged a campaign of terror to try to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government.
A key part of the US hybrid war on Nicaragua in the 1980s, and still today, included the dissemination of disinformation through NED-funded newspapers like La Prensa, which is owned by the Central American nation’s most powerful right-wing oligarch family, the Chamorro dynasty.
After the Sandinista Front returned to power in 2007, through democratic elections, the US again began pouring millions of dollars into opposition media outlets in Nicaragua.
During a bloody coup attempt in 2018, US-funded Nicaraguan opposition media outlets spread extreme propaganda and fake news, openly inciting violence and encouraging people to murder President Daniel Ortega and hang his body in public.
Right-wing Nicaraguan media outlets funded by the US government constantly spread blatant fake news to attack the Sandinistas https://t.co/hzafT2yLH0
— Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticEcon) August 8, 2022