blinken, anthony SoS

no diff from trump admin?!

an 7 25 cowardice profile award?

https://www.alternet.org/send/blinken-uganda/

death for hiv trans 3 23

===

an 9 24

Even though he said he's willing to testify, House Republicans are still likely to vote in favor of holding one of President Joe Biden's Cabinet secretaries in contempt of Congress.

Politico reported Tuesday that Republicans are aiming to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt, claiming he is obstructing their duty to investigate the U.S. military's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) accused Blinken of failing to comply with a subpoena issued on September 18 to testify today, while Blinken is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

“I wish we were not here today. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken brought this upon himself,” McCaul said. “I take no joy in this procedure.”

READ MORE:['Cease fire now!' Blinken testimony repeatedly interrupted by protesters against military aid to Israel

In a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this week, Blinken emphasized that he was "willing to testify" but that his job as the United States' top diplomat required him to be at the United Nations. Blinken is expected to speak at the UNGA about the Biden administration's ongoing efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza and return hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, as well as about the United States' efforts to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia.

"I am profoundly disappointed you have once again chosen to send me a subpoena and threaten contempt, rather than engage with me and the department in a meaningful way to resolve this matter through the constitutionally-mandated accommodation process," Blinken wrote. "As I have made clear, I am willing to testify and have offered several reasonable alternatives to the dates unilaterally demanded by the Committee during which I am carrying out the President's important foreign policy objectives."

McCaul insisted that he made "numerous, good-faith" attempts to bring Blinken before the committee. However, Democrats disagreed with that characterization. Ranking member Gregory Meeks (D-New York) accused McCaul and other Republicans of orchestrating a "political stunt made for Fox News."

“That’s what this is: a political stunt, plain and simple,” Meeks told Politico. “Why is there suddenly a rush to hold this contempt vote when the secretary has made it clear time and time again that he’s willing to testify?”

As the U.S. was winding down the war in Afghanistan and preparing to withdraw all troops from the war-torn nation, Taliban fighters killed 13 American service members in a bombing at the Kabul airport. Republicans have seized on the tragedy as a central point to argue that Biden's oversight was to blame, given that he had assumed the oath of office several months before the attack.

However, as Vice President Kamala Harris pointed out during her September debate with former President Donald Trump, the Biden administration was simply carrying out the peace plan that Trump and his then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo negotiated with the Taliban in 2020. That deal established the timeline for U.S. withdrawal, with all parties agreeing that the U.S. would withdraw from Afghanistan by May of 2021 after roughly 20 years of war.

Blinken is the third of Biden's cabinet secretaries to be pursued by House Republicans. The House GOP impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this year over the Biden administration's immigration policy, and held Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over his refusal to provide the GOP with audio of Biden's deposition with Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur.

Click here to read Politico's report in full.

READ MORE:['That's false': Trump caught lying about Afghanistan withdrawal to families of slain veterans

===

aha-ish biden basically runs/appeal based on competent mgmt/govt so gop must degrade image, plus war is their turf?

A far right wing U.S. Congressman hijacked the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Afghanistan on live TV Monday, accusing the President of the United States of treason then trying to block the Secretary of State from responding to his attacks.

After accusing President Joe Biden of manipulating intelligence coming out of Afghanistan, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) declared, "in my opinion that's absolutely aid and comfort to the enemy," which is the definition of treason.

"I absolutely wonder if you were complicit in this as well. I find it hard to believe that President Biden would do that without you being aware of this and these are things that we deserve to know, better answers, have better hearings on this, I do not believe a word that you're saying on this. Simply put, I do not wish to hear from you," Congressman Mast told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

As Blinken tried to respond, Mast took over the hearing, talking over Blinken and repeatedly telling him he did not want to hear him, calling him a liar, and announcing he would not listen to him.

"I do not believe a word that you're saying on this," he interjected. "I do not wish to hear from you. I'm not yielding you a moment of time. I don't wish to hear your lies."

Mast's time had already expired, and Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) tried to get it back under control.

"What the Congressman said is simply wrong," Blinken replied. "Period."

"I think every member of this committee has been apprised of or had access to the intelligence assessments throughout the year – and you know what they were, and you know what they are," Blinken charged.

The Florida congressman did manage to introduce lies into the record, including the common GOP-told falsehood that the U.S. forfeited tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban.

521 gaza

The world is reeling in horror at the latest Israeli massacre of hundreds of men, women and children in Gaza. Much of the world is also shocked by the role of the United States in this crisis, as it keeps providing Israel with weapons to kill Palestinian civilians, in violation of U.S. and international law, and has repeatedly blocked action by the UN Security Council to impose a ceasefire or hold Israel accountable for its war crimes.

In contrast to U.S. actions, in nearly every speech or interview,U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkenkeeps promising to uphold and defend the "rules-based order." But he has never clarified whether he means the universal rules of the United Nations Charter and international law, or some other set of rules he has yet to define. What rules could possibly legitimize the kind of destruction we just witnessed in Gaza, and who would want to live in a world ruled by them?

We have both spent many years protesting the violence and chaos the United States and its allies inflict on millions of people around the world by violating the UN Charter's prohibition against the threat or use of military force, and we have always insisted that the U.S. government should comply with the rules-based order of international law.

But even as the United States' illegal wars and support for allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia have reduced cities to rubble and left country after country mired in intractable violence and chaos, U.S. leaders have refused to even acknowledge that aggressive and destructive U.S. and allied military operations violate the rules-based order of the United Nations Charter and international law.

President Trump was clear that he was not interested in following any "global rules," only supporting U.S. national interests. His National Security Advisor John Bolton explicitly prohibited National Security Council staff attending the 2018 G20 Summit in Argentina from even uttering the words "rules-based order."

So you might expect us to welcome Blinken's stated commitment to the "rules-based order" as a long-overdue reversal in U.S. policy. But when it comes to a vital principle like this, it is actions that count, and the Biden administration has yet to take any decisive action to bring U.S. foreign policy into compliance with the UN Charter or international law.

For Secretary Blinken, the concept of a "rules-based order" seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrovsuggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with "other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else."

The UN Charter and the rules of international law were developed in the 20th century precisely to codify the unwritten and endlessly contested rules of customary international law with explicit, written rules that would be binding on all nations.

The United States played a leading role in this legalist movement in international relations, from the Hague Peace Conferences at the turn of the 20th century to the signing of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in 1945 and the revised Geneva Conventions in 1949, including the new Fourth Geneva Convention to protect civilians, like the countless numbers killed by American weapons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Gaza.

As President Franklin Roosevelt described the plan for the United Nations to ajoint session of Congress on his return from Yalta in 1945:

"It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries - and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join. I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginning of a permanent structure of peace."

But America's post-Cold War triumphalism eroded U.S. leaders' already half-hearted commitment to those rules.The neocons argued that they were no longer relevant and that the United States must be ready to impose order on the world by the unilateral threat and use of military force, exactly what the UN Charter prohibits. Madeleine Albright and other Democratic leaders embraced new doctrines of "humanitarian intervention" and a "responsibility to protect" to try to carve out politically persuasive exceptions to the explicit rules of the UN Charter.

America's "endless wars," its revived Cold War on Russia and China, its blank check for the Israeli occupation and the political obstacles to crafting a more peaceful and sustainable future are some of the fruits of these bipartisan efforts to challenge and weaken the rules-based order.

Today, far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about fifty important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything from children's rights to arms control. Its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are themselves violations of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.

So is Blinken's "rules-based order" a recommitment to President Roosevelt's "permanent structure of peace," or is it in fact a renunciation of the United Nations Charter and its purpose, which is peace and security for all of humanity?

In the light of Biden's first few months in power, it appears to be the latter. Instead of designing a foreign policy based on the principles and rules of the UN Charter and the goal of a peaceful world, Biden's policy seems to start from the premises of a $753 billion U.S. military budget, 800 overseas military bases, endless U.S. and allied wars and massacres, and massive weapons sales to repressive regimes. Then it works backward to formulate a policy framework to somehow justify all that.

Once a "war on terror" that only fuels terrorism, violence and chaos was no longer politically viable, hawkish U.S. leaders—both Republicans and Democrats—seem to have concluded that a return to the Cold War was the only plausible way toperpetuate America's militarist foreign policy and multi-trillion-dollar war machine.

But that raised a new set of contradictions. For 40 years, the Cold War was justified by the ideological struggle between the capitalist and communist economic systems. But the U.S.S.R. disintegrated and Russia is now a capitalist country. China is still governed by its Communist Party, but has a managed, mixed economy similar to that of Western Europe in the years after the Second World War - an efficient and dynamic economic system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in both cases.

So how can these U.S. leaders justify their renewed Cold War? They have floated the notion of a struggle between "democracy and authoritarianism." But the United States supports too many horrific dictatorships around the world, especially in the Middle East, to make that a convincing pretext for a Cold War against Russia and China.

A U.S. "global war on authoritarianism" would require confronting repressive U.S. allies like Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, not arming them to the teeth and shielding them from international accountability as the United States is doing.

So, just as American and British leaders settled on non-existent "WMD"s as the pretext they could all agree on to justify their war on Iraq, the U.S. and its allies have settled on defending a vague, undefined "rules-based order" as the justification for their revived Cold War on Russia and China.

But like the emperor's new clothes in the fable and the WMDs in Iraq, the United States' new rules don't really exist. They are just its latest smokescreen for a foreign policy based on illegal threats and uses of force and a doctrine of "might makes right."

We challenge President Biden and Secretary Blinken to prove us wrong by actually joining the rules-based order of the UN Charter and international law. That would require a genuine commitment to a very different and more peaceful future, with appropriate contrition and accountability for the United States' and its allies' systematic violations of the UN Charter and international law, and the countless violent deaths, ruined societies and widespread chaos they have caused.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder ofCODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, includingInside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author ofBlood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES