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berlin wall
Gov Abbott, Tear Down This Wall!
Simple-minded and cruel governmental policies—policies wrapped in razor wire—keep no one safe.
Jul 27, 2023
“A 4-year-old girl passed out in 100-degree heat after she was pushed back toward Mexico by Texas National Guard personnel. A pregnant woman became trapped in razor wire and had a miscarriage. A state trooper said he was under orders not to give migrants any water.”
Yes, these are scenes from something called “Operation Lone Star,” but the director isn’t John Ford; it’s Texas Gov. Greg Abbott—and this is real life, as reported by USA Today.
And in real life, at least 853 migrants died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the past 12 months. And God knows how many merely endured—and continue to endure—various forms of hell.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall...
The “border problem” cannot be resolved by minimizing our connection to all of humanity and all of the natural world.
The wall Robert Frost wrote about in his classic poem “Mending Wall,” published in 1914, was a hand-built stone wall separating an apple orchard from a pine forest. The narrator of the poem expressed ambivalence about walls in general—what’s their point?—and smirked when his neighbor said: “Good fences make good neighbors.” But here he was, working with his neighbor to repair it. This was an annual ritual; hunters were always knocking part of the wall down, and the winter weather—the frost—also inflicted regular damage. The wall was simply part of their lives, so every spring they put it back together.
Interestingly, the poem started claiming a spot in the national political consciousness in the early ’60s, after the Soviets constructed a wall dividing East and West Berlin. Yeah, something there is that doesn’t love a wall. The line had Cold War resonance, at least when it was directed at the communists, who were arrogantly creating a barrier that must not be crossed.
Quite obviously, this was not a wall constructed by equals. It was a one-sided declaration to an enemy: Stay out. Ameria, the good guys, told the Soviets with moral certainty: Tear down that wall. This puts the present moment, and the obsession of certain powerful Americans with “border security” (and, for God’s sake, razor wire), in an interesting context.
Consider these words of Martin Luther King, Jr.,, when he visited Berlin in 1964: “It is indeed an honor to be in this city, which stands as a symbol of the divisions of men on the face of the earth. For here on either side of the wall are God’s children and no manmade barrier can obliterate that fact. Whether it be East or West, men and women search for meaning, hope for fulfillment, yearn for faith in something beyond themselves, and cry desperately for love and community to support them in this pilgrim journey.”
I guess those are easy words to embrace when they’re directed at a declared enemy. But King’s context was a little larger than that. He told his audience of Berliners that, while he was hardly an expert in German politics, he knew about walls. I think he could very well have said the same words in El Paso or Laredo or Eagle Pass—any Texas border city.
“For here on either side of the wall are God’s children and no manmade barrier can obliterate that fact.”
Are you aware of that, Gov. Abbott?
Simple-minded and cruel governmental policies—policies wrapped in razor wire—keep no one safe.
So am I saying that border protection is one hundred percent wrong and our borders should be wide open? In my heart, yes, but I’m also aware that the matter is way more complicated than that, and the flow of refugees into a country can create complex difficulties for the current social structure, financial and otherwise. What I am saying is that the flow of refugees is a global matter—kind of on the order of climate change, not to mention war—and we... all of us... have to devote far more energy and awareness to addressing it than we have so far. Dehumanizing the refugees, then simply focusing on keeping them out, as though they were vermin, betrays an excruciating lack of moral intelligence.
And the damage is widespread, cultural and environmental. As the Center for Biological Diversity points out: “Border walls built over the past several decades along the U.S.-Mexico border are a dark stain on American history. Hundreds of miles of wall have been built through protected public lands, communities, and sovereign tribal nations. These barriers cut through sensitive ecosystems, disrupt animal migration patterns, cause catastrophic flooding, and separate families.”
And a diverse array of endangered and rare species are threatened by our militarized protection of an imaginary line, including, as the center notes: “Sonoran pronghorns, lesser long-nosed bats, Quino checkerspot butterflies, cactus ferruginous pygmy owls, and larger predators like jaguars, Mexican gray wolves, and ocelots...”
The “border problem” cannot be resolved by minimizing our connection to all of humanity and all of the natural world. What we call government is our collective identity. It’s more than just bureaucracy. It’s more than just rules and guns and razor wire. And now is the time for it to wake up, but this will only happen if we demand that it expand its awareness... expand its sense of empathy. This is the only way it can “protect” us from our self-created problems.
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What the Dismantling of the Berlin Wall Means 30 Years Later
And the return of war-as-the-answer.
Oct 28, 2019
Some anniversaries are less about the past than the future. So it should be with November 9, 1989. In case you've long forgotten, that was the day when East and West Germans began nonviolently dismantling the Berlin Wall, an entirely unpredicted, almost unimaginable ending to the long-entrenched Cold War. Think of it as the triumph of idealistic hope over everything that then passed for hard-nosed "realism." After all, Western intelligence services, academic Kremlinologists, and the American national security establishment had always blithely assumed that the Cold War would essentially go on forever--unless the absolute malevolence of Soviet Communism led to the ultimate mayhem of nuclear Armageddon. For almost half a century, only readily dismissed peaceniks insisted that, in the nuclear age, war and endless preparations for more of it were not the answer. When the Berlin Wall came down, such idealists were proven right, even if their triumph was still ignored.
Yet war-as-the-answer reasserted itself with remarkable rapidity. Within weeks of the Wall being breached by hope--in an era that saw savage conflicts in Central America, the Philippines, and South Africa transformed by a global wave of nonviolent resolution--the United States launched Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama by a combat force of more than 27,000 troops. The stated purpose of that act of war was the arrest of Panama's tinhorn dictator Manuel Noriega, who had initially come to power as a CIA asset. That invasion's only real importance was as a demonstration that, even with global peace being hailed, the world's last remaining superpower remained as committed as ever to the hegemony of violent force.
Who Ended the Cold War?
While President George H.W. Bush rushed to claim credit for ending the Cold War, the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev was the lynchpin of that historic conclusion. It was he who, in the dramatic autumn of 1989, repeatedly ordered Communist forces to remain in their barracks while throngs of freedom-chanters poured into the streets of multiple cities behind the Iron Curtain. Instead of blindly striking out (as the leaders of crumbling empires often had), Gorbachev allowed democratic demands to echo through the Soviet empire--ultimately even in Russia itself.
Yet the American imagination was soon overtaken by the smug fantasy that the U.S. had "won" the Cold War and that it was now a power beyond all imagining. Never mind that, in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan issued his famed demand in then still-divided Berlin, "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall," the Soviet leader was already starting to do precisely that.
As the wall came down, the red-scare horrors that had disturbed American dreams for three generations seemed to dissolve overnight, leaving official Washington basking in triumphalism. The U.S. then wrapped itself in a self-aggrandizing mantle of virtue and power that effectively blinded this country's political leadership to the ways the Cold War's end had left them mired in an outmoded, ever more dangerous version of militarism.
After Panama, the self-styled "indispensable nation" would show itself to be hell-bent on unbridled--and profoundly self-destructive--belligerence. Deprived of an existential enemy, Pentagon budgets would decline oh-so-modestly (though without a "peace dividend" in sight) but soon return to Cold War levels. A bristling nuclear arsenal would be maintained as a "hedge" against the comeback of Soviet-style communism. Such thinking would, in the end, only empower Moscow's hawks, smoothing the way for the future rise of an ex-KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. Such hyper-defensive anticipation would prove to be, as one wag put it, the insurance policy that started the fire.
Even as the disintegration of the once-demonized USSR was firmly underway, culminating in the final lowering of the hammer-and-sickle flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, the United States was launching what would prove to be a never-ending and disastrous sequence of unnecessary Middle Eastern wars. They began with Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush's assault on Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1990. In American memory, that campaign, which crushed the Iraqi autocrat's army and forced it out of Kuwait, would be a techno-war made in heaven with fewer than 200 U.S. combat deaths.
That memory, however, fits poorly with what was actually happening that year. An internationally mounted sanctions regime had already been on the verge of thwarting Hussein without the U.S.-led invasion--and, of course, what Bush the father began, Bush the son would, with his 2003 shock-and-awe recapitulation, turn into the permanent bedrock of American politics.
As the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War approaches, it should be obvious that there's been a refusal in the United States to reckon with a decades-long set of conflagrations in the Greater Middle East as the inevitable consequence of that first American invasion in 1990. Above all, Desert Storm, with its monumental victory parade in Washington D.C., brought the Pentagon's Cold War raison d'etre back from the brink of obsolescence. That campaign and what followed in its wake guaranteed that violence would continue to occupy the heartlands of the U.S. economy, its politics, and its culture. In the process, the world-historic aspirations kindled by the miracle of the Berlin Wall's dismantling would be thoroughly dashed. No wonder, so many years later, we hardly remember that November of hope--or the anniversary that goes with it.
Out of the Memory Hole
By revisiting its astonishing promise as the anniversary approaches, however, and by seeing it more fully in light of what made it so surprising, perhaps something of that vanished positive energy can still be retrieved. So let me call to mind the events of various earlier Novembers that make the point. What follows is a decade-by-decade retracing of the way the war machine trundled through recent history--and through the American psyche--until it was finally halted in a battle-scarred, divided city in the middle of Europe, stopped by an urge for peace that refused to be denied.
Let's start with November 1939, only weeks after the German invasion of Poland that began what would become World War II. A global struggle between good and evil was just then kicking into gear. Unlike the previous Great War of 1914-1918, which was fought for mere empire, Hitler's war was understood in distinctly Manichaean terms as both apocalyptic and transcendent. After all, the moral depravity of the Nazi project had already been laid bare when Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes everywhere in Germany were subject to the savagery of Kristallnacht, or "the night of broken glass." That ignition of what became an anti-Jewish genocide took place, as it happened, on November 9, 1938.
The good-versus-evil absolutism of World War II stamped the American imagination so profoundly that a self-righteous moral dualism survived not only into the Cold War but into Washington's twenty-first-century war on terror. In such contests against enemies defined as devils, Americans could adopt the kinds of ends-justify-the-means strategies called for by "realism." When you are fighting along what might be thought of as an axis of evil, anything goes--from deceit and torture to the routine sacrifice of civilians, whose deaths in America's post-9/11 wars have approached a total of half a million. Through it all, we were assured of one certain thing: that God was on our side. ("God is not neutral," as George W. Bush put it just days after the 9/11 attacks.)
From Genocide to Omnicide
But what if God could not protect us? That was the out-of-the-blue question posed near the start of all this--not in August 1945 when the U.S. dropped its "victory weapon" on two cities in Japan, but in August 1949 when the Soviet Union acquired an atomic bomb, too. By that November, the American people were already in the grip of an unprecedented nuclear paranoia, which prompted President Harry Truman to override leading atomic scientists and order the development of what one called a "genocidal weapon," the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Then came the manic build-up of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to proportions suitable less for genocide than for "omnicide." Such weapons mushroomed (if you'll excuse the word in a potentially mushroom-clouded world) from fewer than 200 in 1950 to nearly 20,000 a decade later. Of course, that escalation, in turn, drove Moscow forward in a desperate effort to keep up, leading to an unhinged arms race that turned the suicide of the human species into a present danger, one measured by the Doomsday Clock, of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was set at two minutes to midnight in 1953--and then again in 2019, all these Novembers later.
Now, let's flash forward another decade to November 1959 when the mortal danger of human self-extinction finally became openly understood, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began issuing blatant threats of nuclear war over--you guessed it--Berlin. Because part of that city, far inside Communist East Germany, was still occupied by American, French, and British forces, it amounted to a tear in what was then called the Iron Curtain, separating the Soviet empire from Western Europe. With thousands fleeing through that tear to the so-called Free World, the Soviets became increasingly intent on shutting the escape hatch, threatening to use the Red Army to drive the Allies out of Berlin. That brought the possibility of a nuclear conflict to the fore.
Ultimately, the Communists would adopt a quite different strategy when, in 1961, they built that infamous wall, a concrete curtain across the city. At the time, Berliners sometimes referred to it, with a certain irony, as the "Peace Wall" because, by blocking escape from the East, it made the dreaded war between the two Cold War superpowers unnecessary. Yet within a year the unleashed prospect of such a potentially civilization-ending conflict had hopscotched the globe to Communist Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 caused the world to shudder as incipient nuclear war between Washington and Moscow suddenly loomed. That moment, just before Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy stepped back from doomsday, might have changed something; a relieved world's shock of recognition, that is, might have thrown the classic wooden shoe of sabotage into the purring engine of "realism." No such luck, however, as the malevolent power of the war state simply motored on--in the case of the United States directly into Vietnam.
By November 1969, President Richard Nixon's cynical continuation of the Vietnam War for his own political purposes had already driven the liberal-conservative divide over that misbegotten conflict into the permanent structure of American politics. The ubiquitous "POW/MIA: You Are Not Forgotten" flag survives today as an icon of Nixon's manipulations. Still waving over ball parks, post offices, town halls, and VFW posts across the nation, that sad black banner now flies as a symbol of red state/blue state antagonism--and as a lasting reminder of how we Americans can make prisoners of ourselves.
By 1979, with the Vietnam War in the past, President Jimmy Carter showed how irresistible November's tide--the inexorable surge toward war--truly was. It was in November of that year that militant Iranian students overran the American embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage--the event that was credited with stymying the formerly peace-minded president. In reality, though, Carter had already initiated the historic anti-Soviet arms build-up for which President Ronald Reagan would later be credited.
Then, of course, Carter would ominously foreshadow America's future reversals in the deserts of the Levant with a failed rescue of those hostages. Most momentously, however, he would essentially license future Middle East defeats with what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine--the formally declared principle that the Persian Gulf (and its oil) were "vital interests" of this country, worthy of defense "by any means necessary, including military force." (And of course, his CIA would lead us into America's first Afghan War, still in a sense going on some 40 years later.)
Retrieving Hope?
Decade by decade, the evidence of an unstoppable martial dynamic only seemed to accumulate. In that milestone month of November 1989, Washington's national security "realists" were still stuck in the groove of such worst-case thinking. That they were wrong, that they would be stunned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union, should mandate thoughtful observance of this coming 30th anniversary.
During the late 1980s, a complex set of antiwar and antinuclear countercurrents seemed to come out of nowhere. Each of them should have been impossible. The ruthlessly totalitarian Soviet system should not have produced in Mikhail Gorbachev a humane statesman who sacrificed empire and his own career for the sake of peace. The most hawkish American president in history, Ronald Reagan, should not have responded to Gorbachev by working to end the arms race with him--but he did.
Pressuring those two leaders to pursue that course--indeed, forcing them to--was an international grassroots movement demanding an end to apocalyptic terror. People wanted peace so much, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower had predicted in 1959, that, miracle of all miracles, governments got out of their way and let them have it. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall that November 9th--a transformation accomplished by ordinary citizens, not soldiers--the political realm of the possible was substantially broadened, not only to include prospective future detente among warring nations, but an eventual elimination of nuclear weapons themselves.
Yet, in November 2019, all of that seems lost. A new Cold War is underway, with East-West hostilities quickening; a new arms race has begun, especially as the United States renounces Reagan-Gorbachev arms-control agreements for the sake of a trillion-plus dollar "modernization" of its nuclear arsenal. Across the globe, democracy is in retreat, driven by pressures from both populist nationalism and predatory capitalism. Even in America, democracy seems imperiled. And all of this naturally prompts the shudder-inducing question: Were the worst-case realists right all along?
This November anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall should offer an occasion to say no to that. The Wall's demise stopped in its tracks the demonic dynamic set in motion on the very same date in 1938 by that Kristallnacht. If idealistic hope could so triumph once, it can so triumph again, no matter what the die-hard realists of our moment may believe. I've referred to that November in Berlin as a miracle, but that is wrong. The most dangerous face-off in history ended not because of the gods or good fortune, but because of the actions and efforts of human beings. Across two generations, countless men and women--from anonymous community activists and union organizers to unsung military officials, scientists, and even world leaders--overcame the seemingly endless escalations of nuclear-armed animus to make brave choices for peace and against a war of annihilation, for life and against death, for the future and against the doom-laden past.
It can happen again. It must.
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Manufacturing War With Russia
We are in a new and more perilous point in a 50-year nuclear arms race
Jun 03, 2019
Despite the Robert Mueller report's conclusion that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, the new Cold War with Moscow shows little sign of abating. It is used to justify the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, a move that has made billions in profits for U.S. arms manufacturers. It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class and the party's subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit detente between the world's two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas--including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela. This new Cold War predates the Trump presidential campaign. It was manufactured over a decade ago by a war industry and intelligence community that understood that, by fueling a conflict with Russia, they could consolidate their power and increase their profits. (Seventy percent of intelligence is carried out by private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, which has been called the world's most profitable spy operation.)
"Why do we like communist leaders in Russia better than we like Russia's anti-communist leader? It's a riddle."
"This began long before Trump and 'Russiagate,' " Stephen F. Cohen said when I interviewed him for my television show, "On Contact." Cohen is professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, where he was the director of the Russian studies program, and professor emeritus of Russian studies and history at New York University. "You have to ask yourself, why is it that Washington had no problem doing productive diplomacy with Soviet communist leaders. Remember Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev? It was a love fest. They went hunting together [in the Soviet Union]. Yet along comes a post-Soviet leader, Vladimir Putin, who is not only not a communist but a professed anti-communist. Washington has been hating on him ever since 2003, 2004. It requires some explanation. Why do we like communist leaders in Russia better than we like Russia's anti-communist leader? It's a riddle."
"If you're trying to explain how the Washington establishment has dealt with Putin in a hateful and demonizing way, you have to go back to the 1990s before Putin," said Cohen, whose new book is "War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate." The first post-Soviet leader is Boris Yeltsin. Clinton is president. And they have this fake, pseudo-partnership and friendship, whereas essentially the Clinton administration took advantage of the fact that Russia was in collapse. It almost lost its sovereignty. I lived there in the '90s. Middle-class people lost their professions. Elderly people lost their pensions. I think it's correct to say that industrial production fell more in the Russian 1990s than it did during our own Great Depression. It was the worst economic and social depression ever in peacetime. It was a catastrophe for Russia."
In September 1993 Russians took to the streets to protest the collapse of the economy--the gross domestic product had fallen by 50% and the country was convulsed by hyperinflation--along with the rampant corruption that saw state enterprises sold for paltry fees to Russian oligarchs and foreign corporations in exchange for lavish kickbacks and bribes; food and fuel shortages; the nonpayment of wages and pensions; the lack of basic services, including medical services; falling life expectancy; the explosion of violent crime; and Yeltsin's increasing authoritarianism and his unpopular war with Chechnya.
In October 1993 Yeltsin, after dissolving the parliament, ordered army tanks to shell the Russian parliament building, which was being occupied by democratic protesters. The assault left 2,000 dead. Yet during his presidency Yeltsin was effusively praised and supported by Washington. This included U.S. support for a $10.2 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia during his 1996 re-election campaign. The loan enabled the Yeltsin government to pay huge sums in back wages and pensions to millions of Russians, with checks often arriving on the eve of the election. Also, an estimated $1.5 billion from the loan was used to directly fund the Yeltsin presidential campaign. But by the time Yeltsin was forced out of office in December 1999 his approval rating had sunk to 2%. Washington, losing Yeltsin, went in search of another malleable Russian leader and, at first, thought it had found one in Putin.
"Putin went to Texas," Cohen said. "He had a barbecue with Bush, second Bush. Bush said he 'looked into his eyes and saw a good soul.' There was this honeymoon. Why did they turn against Putin? He turned out not to be Yeltsin. We have a very interesting comment about this from Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, who wrote, I think in 2003, that his own disillusion with Putin was that he had turned out not to be 'a sober Yeltsin.' What Washington was hoping for was a submissive, supplicant, post-Soviet Russian leader, but one who was younger, healthier and not a drinker. They thought they had that in Putin. Yeltsin had put Putin in power, or at least the people around Yeltsin did."
"When Putin began talking about Russia's sovereignty, Russia's independent course in world affairs, they're aghast," Cohen said of the Washington elites. "This is not what they expected. Since then, my own thinking is we were pretty lucky after the 1990s to get Putin because there were worst contenders in the wings. I knew some of them. I don't want to name names. But some of these guys were really harsh people. Putin was kind of the right person for the right time, both for Russia and for Russian world affairs."
"We have had three years of this," Cohen said of Russiagate. "We lost sight of the essence of what this allegation is. The people who created Russiagate are literally saying, and have been for almost three years, that the president of the United States is a Russian agent, or he has been compromised by the Kremlin. We grin because it's so fantastic. But the Washington establishment, mainly the Democrats but not only, have taken this seriously."
"I don't know if there has ever been anything like this in American history," Cohen said. "That accusation does such damage to our own institutions, to the presidency, to our electoral system, to Congress, to the American mainstream media, not to mention the damage it's done to American-Russian relations, the damage it has done to the way Russians, both elite Russians and young Russians, look at America today. This whole Russiagate has not only been fraudulent, it's been a catastrophe."
"There were three major episodes of detente in the 20th century," Cohen said. "The first was after Stalin died, when the Cold War was very dangerous. That was carried out by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president. The second was by Richard Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger--it was called 'the Nixon detente with Brezhnev.' The third, and we thought most successful, was Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev. It was such a successful detente Reagan and Gorbachev, and Reagan's successor, the first Bush, said the Cold War was over forever."
"The wall had come down," Cohen said of the 1989 collapse of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Germany was reunifying. The question became 'where would a united Germany be?' The West wanted Germany in NATO. For Gorbachev, this was an impossible sell. Twenty-seven point five million Soviet citizens had died in the war against Germany in the Second World War on the eastern front. Contrary to the bunk we're told, the United States didn't land on Normandy and defeat Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazi Germany was done primarily by the Soviet army. How could Gorbachev go home and say, 'Germany is reunited. Great. And it's going to be in NATO.' It was impossible. They told Gorbachev, 'We promise if you agree to a reunited Germany in NATO, NATO will not move--this was Secretary of State James Baker--one inch to the east. In other words, NATO would not move from Germany toward Russia. And it did."
"As we speak today, NATO is on Russia's borders," Cohen said. "From the Baltics to Ukraine to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. So, what happened? Later, they said Gorbachev lied or he misunderstood. [That] the promise was never made. But the National Security Archive in Washington has produced all the documents of the discussion in 1990. It was not only [President George H.W.] Bush, it was the French leader Francois Mitterrand, it was Margaret Thatcher of England. Every Western leader promised Gorbachev NATO would not move eastward."
"What do you end up with today?" he asked. "Betrayal. Any kind of discussion about Russian-American relations today, an informed Russian is going to say, 'We worry you will betray us again.'... Putin said he had illusions about the West when he came to power."
"Trump comes out of nowhere in 2016 and says, 'I think we should cooperate with Russia,' " Cohen said. "This is a statement of detente. It's what drew my attention to him. It's then that this talk of Trump being an agent of the Kremlin begins. One has to wonder--I can't prove it--but you have to think logically. Was this [allegation] begun somewhere high up in America by people who didn't want a pro-detente president? And [they] thought that Trump, however small it seemed at the time that he could win--they really didn't like this talk of cooperation with Russia. It set in motion these things we call Russiagate."
"The forefathers of detente were Republicans," Cohen said. "How the Democrats behaved during this period of detente was mixed. There was what used to be called the Henry Jackson wing. This was a very hard-line, ideological wing of the Democratic Party that didn't believe in detente. Some Democrats did. I lived many years in Moscow, both Soviet and post-Soviet times. If you talk to Russian, Soviet policymakers, they generally prefer Republican candidates for the presidency."
Democrats are perceived by Russian rulers as more ideological, Cohen said.
"Republicans tend to be businessmen who want to do business in Russia," he said. "The most important pro-detente lobby group, created in the 1970s, was called the American Committee for East-West Accord. It was created by American CEOs who wanted to do business in Soviet Russia."
"The single most important relationship the United States has is with Russia," Cohen went on, "not only because of the nuclear weapons. It remains the largest territorial country in the world. It abuts every region we are concerned about. Detente with Russia--not friendship, not partnership, not alliance--but reducing conflict is essential. Yet something happened in 2016."
The accusations made repeatedly by James Clapper, the former director of the National Security Agency, and John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, concerning the Kremlin's supposed control of Trump and Russia's alleged theft of our elections are deeply disturbing, Cohen said. Clapper and Brennan have described Trump as a Kremlin "asset." Brennan called Trump's performance at a news conference with the Russian president in Finland "nothing short of treasonous."
Clapper in his memoir, "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence," claims Putin's interference in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump was "staggering."
"Of course, the Russian efforts affected the outcome," writes Clapper. "Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians."
Brennan and Clapper have on numerous occasions been caught lying to the public. Brennan, for example, denied, falsely, that the CIA was monitoring the computers that Senate staff members were using to prepare a report on torture. The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, took to the Senate floor to accuse Brennan and the CIA of potentially violating the U.S. Constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to spy on and thwart her committee's investigations into the agency's use of torture. She described the situation as a "defining moment" for political oversight. Brennan also claimed there was not a "single collateral death" in the drone assassination program, that Osama bin Laden used his wife as a human shield before being gunned down in a U.S. raid in Pakistan, and insisted that torture, or what is euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation," has produced valuable intelligence. None of these statements are true.
Clapper, who at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon unit responsible for interpreting spy-satellite photos and intelligence such as air particles and soil samples, concocted a story about Saddam Hussein spiriting his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the documents that verified his program to Syria on the eve of the invasion. He blatantly committed perjury before the Senate when being questioned about domestic surveillance programs of the American public. He was asked, "Does the NSA [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded, "No, sir. ... Not wittingly." It was, as Clapper knew very well, a lie.
Our inability to oversee or control senior intelligence officials and their agencies, which fabricate information to push through agendas embraced by the shadow state, signals the death of democracy. Intelligence officials seemingly empowered to lie--Brennan and Clapper have been among them--ominously have in their hands instruments of surveillance, intimidation and coercion that effectively silence their critics, blunt investigations into their activities, even within the government, and make them and their agencies unaccountable.
"We have the Steele dossier that was spookily floating around American media," Cohen said of the report compiled by Christopher Steele.
The report was commissioned by Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Bob Woodward reported that Brennan pushed to include the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment of Russian election interference.
"He [Steele] got it from newspapers," Cohen said. "I don't think he had a single source in Russia. Steele comes forward with this dossier and says, 'I've got information from high-level sources.' The Clinton campaign is funding this operation. But Steele is very important. He's a former U.K. intelligence officer, if he's really former, who had served in Russia and ran Russian cases. He says he has this information in the dossier about Trump frolicking with prostitutes. About Trump having been corrupted decades ago. He got it from 'high-level' Kremlin sources. This is preposterous. It's illogical."
"The theory is Putin desperately wanted to make Trump president," Cohen said. "Yet, guys in the Kremlin, around Putin, were feeding Trump dirt to a guy called Steele. Even though the boss wants--does it make any sense to you?"
"Why is this important?" Cohen asked. "Right-wing American media outlets today, in particularly Fox News, are blaming Russia for this whole Russiagate thing. They're saying that Russia provided this false information to Steele, who pumped it into our system, which led to Russiagate. This is untrue."
"Who is behind all this? Including the Steele operation?" Cohen asked. "I prefer a good question to an orthodox answer. I'm not dogmatic. I don't have the evidence. But all the surface information suggests that this originated with Brennan and the CIA. Long before it hit America--maybe as early as late 2015. One of the problems we have today is everybody is hitting on the FBI. Lovers who sent emails. But the FBI is a squishy organization, nobody is afraid of the FBI. It's not what it used to be under J. Edgar Hoover. Look at James Comey, for God's sake. He's a patsy. Brennan and Clapper played Comey. They dumped this stuff on him. Comey couldn't even handle Mrs. Clinton's emails. He made a mess of everything. Who were the cunning guys? They were Brennan and Clapper. [Brennan,] the head of the CIA. Clapper, the head of the Office of [the Director of] National Intelligence, who is supposed to oversee these agencies."
"Is there any reality to these Russiagate allegations against Trump and Putin?" he asked. "Was this dreamed up by our intelligence services? Today investigations are being promised, including by the attorney general of the United States. They all want to investigate the FBI. But they need to investigate what Brennan and the CIA did. This is the worst scandal in American history. It's the worst, at least since the Civil War. We need to know how this began. If our intelligence services are way off the reservation, to the point that they can try to first destroy a presidential candidate and then a president, and I don't care that it's Trump, it may be Harry Smith next time, or a woman; if they can do this, we need to know it."
"The second Bush left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002," Cohen said. "It was a very important treaty. It prevented the deployment of missile defense. If anybody got missile defense that worked, they might think they had a first strike [option]. Russia or the United States could strike the other without retaliation. Once Bush left the treaty, we began to deploy missile defense around Russia. It was very dangerous."
"The Russians began a new missile program which we learned about last year," he said. Hypersonic missiles. Russia now has nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system. We are in a new and more perilous point in a 50-year nuclear arms race. Putin says, 'We've developed these because of what you did. We can destroy each other.' Now is the time for a serious, new arms control agreement. What do we get? Russiagate. Russiagate is one of the greatest threats to national security. I have five listed in the book. Russia and China aren't on there. Russiagate is number one."
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