July 2018

  • Iran’s foreign minister says the US is addicted to imposing sanctions on other countries but the Iranian nation, through its unity and resistance, can force Washington to give up such habit. The comments by Mohammad Javad Zarif come as the US is set to restore sanctions on Iran after pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal in May. Zarif said the world has also come to the understanding that Washington needs to stop using sanctions to pressurize others. He said the US economic pressure has been unable to hamper Iran’s progress in the past and that the new sanctions would prove futile as well. The top diplomat urged the Iranian people to stand united in the face of the United States in order to preserve the country’s dignity. I was asked to comment on Zavad Zarif’s statement and added that it could be seen as the start of...

The MEK’s Maryam Rajavi with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani By Paul R. Pillar President Trump’s belligerent, all-caps tweet about Iran this past weekend is hardly a natural response to anything the Iranians have been saying or doing lately. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani did make a speech on Sunday in which he stated, “America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” while advising Trump that “to play with the lion’s tail” would become a source of “regret.” So, Rouhani was saying that he wants peace with America and that moving toward war would be a bad idea. Hardly the stuff that ordinarily would provoke a flaming riposte. To the extent Iranian leaders might be sounding a little testy these days, no one should be surprised. In response to Iran’s internationally certified compliance with an agreement in...

  TFF PressInfo # 470 Lund, Sweden – July 27, 2018 Forgive us for saying it but the coverage of the Putin-Trump meeting in the mainstream press has been painful to witness – the US media in particular. Navel-gazing in the extreme and turning the Presidential Summit meeting about their relations and international affairs into a US domestic policy affair. The Western media questions -also the so-called respected media – matched the rest in their narrow-minded tabloid attitude – one super fool believing he could get Putin to talk about what he “has” on Trump concerning alleged prostitute hiring in Moscow years ago – prestitutes about prostitutes! Write to PI@transnational.org and get TFF PressInfo from now on – it’s free because TFF is free And – which your free press has hardly mentioned – one journalist, Sam Husseini, who intended to ask about nuclear disarmament was forcefully ejected from the...

A personal pledge provoked by the debates about Syria   By Jan Oberg   Summary About 95% of all debates about conflicts and war that we see in politics, mainstream media, the Internet and social media focus on the violence, who uses more or less of it and who is, therefore, the evil party. This approach places direct violence – such as human rights violations, killings, bombings etc. – in the centre of the attention and that is unfortunate because violence is always only a symptom. I call this the simplifying or reductionist approach; invariably it has populist connotations too and usually ends up in mud-slinging. I argue in this analysis that this reductionist approach is counterproductive and that – because of the defining characteristics of these debates – the underlying conflicts/problems that cause the violence are never in focus and that no international complex conflict can be explained even...

  By Lyle Jeremy Rubin July 26, 2018  Any Russian interference is only a small part of the “election meddling” we should care about… I think we are due for a little perspective on Russia. I was trained at NSA headquarters as a signals intelligence officer in the Marines. This was about a decade ago, and I was by no means an area specialist. That said, I was privy to relevant briefs. At the time I learned that U.S. cyber operations in Russia, across Russia’s periphery, and around the world already dwarfed Russian operations in size, capability, and frequency. It wasn’t even close, and the expectation was that the gap was about to grow a whole lot wider. Published at currentaffairs.org This should hardly come as a surprise. Just compare the defense budgets of the United States and Russia. The president recently signed a gargantuan $700 billion gift to the Pentagon,...

Video interview with Miko Peled of July 20, 2018 We strongly recommend that you go to Peled’s excellent blog, see his articles and video and read about his now classical book, “The General’s Son. Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.” You’ll also find an interesting one on his recent visit to Iran and how people react to his going to Iran. And why not subscribe to his blog? Here is civil courage, analytical mind, passion and truth in one, a man who knows – compare that with the mainstream media’s coverage of the issue that are his.

I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of journalism such an hysterical outpouring against a presidential statement as I’ve seen the last week. President Donald Trump has even been accused of treason by prominent columnists and politicians. There’s barely a voice of dissent in the media. (Maybe it’s written but not published.) No wonder that even some of my normally open-minded friends feel that things are as bad as they are made out to be. Sorry to say it, as I’ve told them, they are being brainwashed. The issue is Trump’s dishing of his intelligence services during his press conference with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He denied their conviction that Russia had meddled in the election that brought Trump to power. In standing by Putin’s denial on this he speared the sacred heart of the American foreign policy establishment, the so-called “Blob”. Only Republican voters stood...

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been in a benign mood after a perfectly organized World Cup which gave Russians and foreigners the rare freedom to mass in the street. In response the world TV audience has looked at Russia with new eyes. Maybe there’s a new Russia coming to the boil which, if the West could seize the chance, could help the two countries make a pot of very tasty and good tea! Maybe. The Donald Trump/Vladimir Putin encounter is as convoluted as they come. There seem to be two American policies towards Russia – one led by the president, the second led by his advisers. On nearly every issue, bar two, Trump appears to be more dovish than his Administration. He never criticizes Putin publically. Trump hasn’t made a great fuss about the Russian presence in Syria, nor its coziness with Iran and China. He hasn’t criticized the crackdown...

  By Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev June 16, 2018 • Russia and the United States are not condemned to confrontation. We must now make up for lost time! Mikhail Gorbachev’s Address to Participants in the Conference Marking the 30th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Visit and the Moscow Summit. Originally published at the homepage of the Gorbachev Foundation on June 4, 2018 I welcome all who have gathered to mark the thirtieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Moscow and the US-Soviet summit. I think it was a truly historic event. It was a kind of summing up of the work we had done, starting in Geneva and then going through Reykjavik and Washington to Moscow. It was not an easy path. Its first major milestone was the Joint US-Soviet Statement which declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and that “the two sides will...

(Russia President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump shake hands during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in 2017. Photo: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images) By Gordon M. Hahn 5 July, 2018 The Trump-Putin summit was successfully delayed by the liberal/neocon, Washington/NATO deep state network. By the time, Trump fought his way free from the morass of the collapsing ‘Russiagate’ investigation, relations were so bad that Putin rejected Trump’s invitation to the White House and agreed to meet in neighboring Finland. This suggests the level of distrust Putin has towards Washington, his low expectations for a successful summit, and the high price he is likely to demand for concessions on his part. With the summit at hand, it is important for the Trump administration to understand what are the key problems that have tightly wound the Russian-Western knot, for only by understanding the way the...

  By Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister July 14, 2018 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has shared his view on what would be an “ideal” outcome of a Trump-Putin meeting, in an interview with Larry King that covered a wide range of topics, from Crimea to NATO and Syria. Relations between the US and Russia are now at such a low point that a mere resumption of a normal dialog following a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin could already be regarded as a success, Lavrov told the veteran TV host, on his show Politicking, aired on RT America. Read the article and see the interview here at RT Question More.   Note The Transnational conveys important peace-oriented research about our world. Its aim is, however, not research for the sake of research, it is to assist in public education and, not the least serve...

By John Schwarz July 11, 2018 2 Jun 2018 – At the beginning of Seymour Hersh’s new memoir, “Reporter,” he tells a story from his first job in journalism, at the City News Bureau of Chicago. City News stationed a reporter at Chicago’s police headquarters 24 hours a day to cover whatever incidents were radioed in. Hersh, then in his early 20s, was responsible for the late shift. One night, he writes, this happened: Two cops called in to report that a robbery suspect had been shot trying to avoid arrest. The cops who had done the shooting were driving in to make a report. … I raced down to the basement parking lot in the hope of getting some firsthand quotes before calling in the story. The driver – white, beefy, and very Irish, like far too many Chicago cops then – obviously did not see me as he...