Lew Rockwell Institute

As tourists complete their strolls to the White House from the east along Pennsylvania Avenue, they pass a relatively unremarkable, columned office building that overlooks Lafayette Square — oblivious that, behind its walls, bureaucrats are quietly inflicting poverty, illness and death on innumerable innocents around the world.

The Freedman’s Bank Building doesn’t house CIA or Department of Defense officials, but rather the US Treasury’s little-known Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Instead of orchestrating airstrikes or insurgencies, these bureaucrats impose mass suffering via economic warfare, collectively serving as the tip of the spear that is America’s ever-expanding economic sanctions regime.

The term “banality of evil” was coined by intellectual Hannah Arendt after she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who, from his post atop the inscrutably-named Office IV B 4, oversaw the grim logistics of funneling Jews into German concentration camps.

Arendt said she was struck to find Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Rather than a rabid ideologue or psychopathic antisemite, Arendt found herself observing a boring bureaucrat whose diligent performance of his assigned duties was largely motivated by a mere desire for career advancement. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt later wrote.

Arendt’s characterization sparked great controversy. In subsequent decades, some historians have challenged her assessment of Eichmann, and philosophers have wrestled with her proposition that one can do evil without being evil.

Whatever the appropriateness of Arendt’s application of “the banality of evil” to Eichmann, it’s safe to say the individual employees of OFAC — mostly lawyers — similarly aren’t perceived by people around them as malevolent. If you live in the vicinity of the capital, an OFAC worker might be the congenial coach of your child’s soccer team or a friendly face at a volunteer event.

However, regardless of their personalities and sincere convictions that they’re engaged in public service, the stark reality is that many OFAC employees spend their workdays carrying out the mass victimization of people who’ve done no harm to the United States or its citizens. To paraphrase Arendt, these people may be quite ordinary, but their deeds are monstrous.

Considering, just for starters, the direct and indirect effects of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon’s Central Command has arguably caused the most 21st-century harm to innocents of any organization in the world. However, staffed with a mere 300 or so bureaucrats, OFAC is surely the leader on a harm-per-employee basis.

Sanctions are often perceived as a welcome alternative to war. In fact, they are merely a different form of war — one that can also produce dead bodies and misery on a grand scale, with the vast majority of the victims having no responsibility for their governments’ supposedly offending actions. (While sanctions are also deployed against terrorists and drug cartels, my focus here is on economic warfare waged against entire countries.)

The power of American sanctions springs from the US dollar’s domination of international trade and finance. As the Washington Post recently explained:

“To deal in dollars, financial institutions must often borrow, however temporarily, from U.S. counterparts and comply with the rules of the U.S. government. That makes the Treasury Department, which regulates the U.S. financial system, the gatekeeper to the world’s banking operations. And sanctions are the gate.”

Sanctions come in a variety of flavors, including the freezing of assets, barring of financial transactions, and blocking of exports or imports. There are also “secondary sanctions” aimed at non-American parties who dare to conduct business with a sanctions target.

Though they’ve long been part of the American arsenal, sanctions use rose sharply during the 1990s and exploded after 9/11 with the “war on terror” and the accompanying surge in US foreign interventionism and regime-change campaigns. In 2000, there were 912 designated entities; by 2021, there were 9,421.

Via the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, presidents have broad, unilateral power to impose sanctions to “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security. The determination of what constitutes such a threat also rests in the president’s hands, and they unsurprisingly apply an expansive interpretation.

Sanctions can also originate in Congress. Eager to bolster their national security credentials and curry the favor of interest groups like pro-Israel organizations, legislators introduce them with abandon: In the 117th Congress that ended in January 2023, members introduced more than 350 sanctions bills.

“It is way, way overused, and it’s become out of control,” former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Caleb McCarry told the Post, casting OFAC employees as victims. “They are good professionals who have all this political work being shoved on them. They want relief from this relentless, never-ending, you-must-sanction-everybody-and-their-sister, sometimes literally, system.”

Washington’s bipartisan sanctions compulsion surely causes OFAC employees some workplace stress and perhaps a few skipped happy hours. For countless innocents in targeted countries, OFAC-enforced sanctions cause everything from unemployment, ruined career aspirations, financial insecurity and poverty to depression, hunger, disease and death.

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This interview is also available on Rumble and podcast platforms.

Modern borders represent mere lines in the sand when understanding the deep history behind the forces that drew them. In the contemporary Middle East, nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and most notably Palestine, cannot be fully understood without delving into the region’s intricate past—especially the pivotal role of the Ottoman Empire’s influence. Eugene Rogan, the Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East,” and explain how the modern geopolitical makeup of the region came to be.

While not the sole source of all conflict in the modern Middle East, studying the Ottoman Empire is essential for understanding both the region and the European powers that dominated during that era. World War I, in particular, marked a pivotal moment in the formation of modern nation-states. Britain, Russia, and France emerged as key beneficiaries of the early 20th-century battles that reshaped global power dynamics.

Rogan provides an in-depth analysis of the complex relationships between monarchs, religious leaders, ambassadors, and consuls, highlighting their crucial roles in shaping the region’s historical developments. His detailed and thorough examination provides a clear picture of how the region evolved as a result of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Rogan tells Hedges, “Britain had maintained that the preservation of the Ottoman Empire was in the best interest of the British Empire, that it was a buffer state that bottled up Russia, kept it out of the Mediterranean world, and that, were this Ottoman State to collapse, all that geo-strategic territory in the Mediterranean world would soon become the stuff of European rivalries that could lead to the next major European war.”

On the question of Palestine, Rogan notes, “Protestants in Britain, Catholics in France, Orthodox in Russia, all wanted a claim to the holy cities and the holy places of Palestine, and so Palestine was painted a kind of brown and internationalized.”

Rogan delves into the Zionist project, tracing its origins through collaboration with the British Empire and examining its evolving connection with the United States. He highlights the growing involvement of the U.S. in the region, which it thrusted itself into at the close of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st.

Chris Hedges

Max Jones

Diego Ramos

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Diego Ramos

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Welcome to The Chris Hedges Report. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner writes in his novel Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” Perhaps nowhere, historically, is this truer than in the Middle East. The fall of the Ottoman Empire — which for six centuries stood as the greatest Islamic empire in the world — in the wake of World War I saw the victorious imperial powers, especially Britain and France, carve up the Middle East into protectorates, spheres of influence and colonies. The imperial powers created new countries with borders drawn by diplomats in the Quai d’Orsay and the British Foreign Office who had little understanding of the often autonomous and at times antagonistic communities they were attempting to herd into new countries. They sponsored the colonization by Zionist settlers from Europe in the land of Palestine, setting off a conflict that continues with savage intensity today in the occupied Gaza

and the West Bank. They propped up autocratic dictators and monarchs – their descendants still

ruling countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan — to do their bidding, crushing the aspirations

of democratic independence movements. They flooded, and continue to flood, the region with

weapons to pit ethnic and religious factions against each other in the great imperial game that

often revolved, and still revolves, around control of Middle Eastern oil. The heavy-handed

intervention in the Middle East, often based on false assumptions and a gross misreading of the

political, cultural, religious and social realities, later exacerbated by the disastrous interventions

by the United States, have led to over a century of warfare, strife and immense suffering of

millions. It is impossible to grasp the conflicts of today in the Middle East if we do not examine

the causes and roots. There are three books that are vital to this understanding, David Fromkin’s

A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922, Robert Fisk’s The

Great War for Civilization and Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the

Middle East. We speak today with Eugene Rogan, the Professor of Modern Middle Eastern

History at the University of Oxford about his book The Fall of the Ottomans and the creation of

the modern Middle East.

Eugene Rogan: Well, first off, Chris, thank you so much for having me on, and it’s a real pleasure getting to have a little time to talk over the book with you. And, you know, as you rightly point out, it’s a book that had kind of family roots to it. It was a moment of exploration, having spent my career studying the Middle East and to better understand the Middle East of the 20th century, I was drawn into studying the Ottoman Empire, because all the origins of the modern Middle East can be traced back to the previous state that had ruled this area. So to answer your question, you know, the Ottomans first make their entry into the Arab world in 1516 and 1517, when they turf out the then ruling Mamluk Empire, based in Cairo. They had an empire that spanned all of Egypt, greater Syria and the Hejaz, Red Sea province of the Arabian Peninsula. And they were able to, you know, the Ottomans were able to draw on gunpowder technology to affect a total decimation of Mamluk ranks.

Mamluk’s knights in the old fashion, you know, they were trained in swordsmanship and in horsemanship, and they thought that real men fought like chivalric knights, and they found themselves up against real men with guns, and men with guns won. And that was to take the Middle East down the road of being part of what was then the largest, most successful Islamic empire in the world, and for a Europe or America that’s used to thinking of the West as dominant, I assure you that that Ottoman Empire was the most terrifying state in the whole of the Mediterranean basin, and was to remain so right through until the 18th century. Their last drive on a European capital would be in the 1680s when they laid their last siege to Vienna. So it’s just a corrective, you know, before we write this Ottoman Empire off and assume that it was slated to lose in the First World War, this was one very powerful empire that spanned three continents, and, you know, was basically the scourge of Europe right up until the 18th century. Chris, I assume you’d like shorter answers, rather than for me to go on with, great long speeches.

Chris Hedges: No, I’d rather that you go on. There’s no time constraint here.

Eugene Rogan: All right, very good.

Chris Hedges: So they get up to the gates of Vienna, but then they’re as you write, they’re rolled back. This is all before World War I. So the empire begins a kind of slow disintegration on the eve of the war, perhaps you can just explain what happened.

Eugene Rogan: Well, basically what happens is Europe takes off. I mean, the Ottoman Empire was a perfectly strong and viable empire in its own right, but it found its European neighbors taking off with two major developments. One is the enlightenment, and just the new ideas that spill into politics and how to organize a country better, more efficiently, better at raising tax money, and how to develop cities and whatnot. And then the other, of course, is going to be the Industrial Revolution. And those two developments, coming in the end of the 18th century, are going to impel Europe into a high gear that leaves the Ottoman Empire far behind. And in the 19th century, the Ottomans become increasingly aware that every time they go to the battlefield with their European neighbors, they’re losing and they’re losing territory. It starts with losing territory in the Crimea to Russia, they begin to lose territories to the Habsburgs in Vienna and the Ottomans begin to ask, what is it going to take for us to revitalize this one dominant empire?

And in the 19th century, they settled on a reform program. It spans the years 1839 to 1876, where they just try to affect a root and branch reform of the governments and the economy of the Ottoman Empire, so that they might be able to take advantage of the new ideas of the Enlightenment, the new technologies of industrial Europe, and re-emerge as a player and as a power. But by the time they reach the 20th century, the challenges the Ottomans are facing are almost insurmountable. The gulf between where they stand and where the European neighbors stood was almost unbridgeable. And you know, if you’re trying to buy the technology for your own development from your adversaries, it’s a game you’ll never win. You’ll never overtake Britain and France by trying to buy their own technologies or ideas, they’ll always keep you one step behind. And I think that’s where the Ottomans found themselves in the beginning of the 20th century, as they were sort of coming into their first real conflict of total war with the most powerful states of Europe in World War I.

Chris Hedges: And so on the eve of World War I, there are all sorts of independence movements in the Balkans, the Ottomans are pushed back. Maybe you can explain a little bit about how that happened, and they ultimately built an alliance with Germany. One of the interesting conflicts, of course, within the British government, was that it had been a cornerstone of British policy to essentially leave the Ottoman Empire intact. This is, you know, that battle is lost by the end of World War I, but so just get us up to the eve of the war.

Eugene Rogan: So among the ideas to come out of the European enlightenment, nationalism was to be one of those contagious. And for a multinational, multi-ethnic empire like the Ottomans, it was really an existential threat. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the Balkans. We’re starting with Greece’s uprising in the 1820s. You’ll have a century between 1820s Greece right up until Albania declares its bid for independence in 1913, where virtually every Christian majority territory of the Balkan Peninsula seeks its independence from the Ottoman Empire. All those are territories the Ottomans had conquered from the Byzantine Empire, going back to the 14th and 15th centuries and by the 20th century, you know, on the eve of war, they pretty much lost every last bit of their European territories except a little bit of Thrace, which is that little piece of Europe in modern Turkey, which Istanbul straddles. And, you know, in 1908 the reformists come back to power in a revolution which overturns Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who had, in many ways, tried to put the power right back into the Sultanate and take it away from government, the Young Turk Revolution 1908 reverses that.

It’s a moment where I think many in the Ottoman Empire believed there would be a process of renewal, particularly binding the Muslims of the Empire, recognizing the Balkans were a lost cause. But in the course of the first years after that revolution, the Ottomans were just hammered by a succession of wars. The Italians make a bid for Libya. They want their own patch of imperium in North Africa and invade the territory, to squeeze the Ottomans to finally give up on Libya, the Italians lean on their relations in Montenegro to rise in what becomes the First Balkan War. The Ottomans are thrashed in the First Balkan War of 1912 and then this is when they really lose most of their remaining Macedonian and Albanian and Thracian territories in the Balkans. And then there’s a second Balkan War in 1913 where the Ottomans take advantage of the Balkan states like Bulgaria and Greece and Serbia falling out among themselves over the division of loot, like so many thieves, and are able to reclaim the city of Edirne, and that little stretch of Thrace, as I said before, is still part of modern Turkey. So the Ottomans are just rocked.

By 1914, their economy was, you know, exhausted. They took $100 million loan from France to try and rebuild their economy. Their army was broken. They reached out to Prussia to help them rebuild the Ottoman army. And they needed to reach naval parity with their great adversary, Greece, and they reached out to the British for help with rebuilding their navy. They even commissioned two state of the art dreadnoughts from the Harland shipyards in Northern Ireland. So the Ottomans, by the time they reach 1914, have had enough with revolution and war. They’re counting on a period of calm and peace so they can try and rebuild their empire, their military, their navy, to withstand the challenges of the 20th century. But they just weren’t left much of a breathing period from that sort of autumn and spring of 1914 to the guns of summer in August of 1914.

Chris Hedges: And just a little footnote, Trotsky covered the Balkan War. His book’s actually very good, and then used whatever three or four months there to, after the Bolshevik Revolution, make him Minister of War. So one of the things about the Ottoman Empire is that it, and you make this point in your book about you know, once the war begins, is the diversity of nationalities, ethnicities, not just Shia and Sunni, but Christian, Yazidi, Kurdish, that incorporated, they played such a major role after the war when Sykes–Picot essentially when they redrew the maps and created these modern Middle States. But you also note that the battles in the Middle Eastern battlefields, you say, were often the most international of the war. Australians, New Zealanders, every ethnicity in South Asia, North African, Senegalese and Sudanese made common cause with French, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish soldiers against Turkish, Arab, Kurdish, Armenian, Circassian and their German and Austrian allies.

I mean, that was one aspect of the war, which I didn’t know. The other was a point you make, for instance, on the I think it’s on the Gallipoli campaign, where you talked about how you could be on the Western Front, it could be dormant for months. That wasn’t true in places like Gallipoli. So talk a little bit about, and I think that when we see the creation of the modern Middle East, especially when the imperial powers went in, in order for their own ends, they started pitting these groups, ethnicities—and that’s my dog there, sorry— that these ethnicities, one against the other, but talk about that international aspect.

Eugene Rogan: Oh, it’s one of the most interesting things about studying the First World War from the perspective of the Middle East. I argue that it’s really the Middle East that turned a European conflict into a world war. If you look to what went on in both the Pacific Theater and in the African theater of the war, it really had nowhere near the depth of gravity of the First World War in the Middle East. And I think the expression I use in the book as I describe these battlefields with all these different nations and nationalities as a virtual sort of Tower of Babel, and that just meant that some of those battlefields were absolute chaos, and this gives rise to some funny anecdotes. You know, one of my favorites from Gallipoli was very early after the Allied landing in the beaches of Gallipoli, which went off very badly. They they found themselves coming up against deeply entrenched Ottoman forces who were waiting for them and mowed them down with machine gun fire, or else they found themselves trying to scale cliffs that their maps just hadn’t prepared them for. So they arrived often separated where soldiers and commanders were not together. Soldiers without commanders often really don’t know how to take initiative in the battlefield, and in one case, a group of brown men come up to British commanders and asked to, you know, meet their commanding officers. And so the lieutenants take them to the captains, and the captains take them to the major. And these guys maintain that they’re Indian soldiers looking for their colonel, and instead, they wind up capturing like five or six British officers, because those were Turks in disguise pretending to be Indian soldiers, taking advantage of the credulity of these confused Tower of Babel soldiers. So yeah, it’s an element of the First World War that, you know, you think about the battlefields of the Somme, you know, Germans and Frenchmen and Englishmen fighting against white men. That was not the Middle East. The Middle East was truly a battlefield of diversity.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk a little bit about the Ottomans were kind of agnostic as to who their allies would be. They ended up, of course, aligned with Germany, almost by default. The Germans also sent quite a bit of money so the Ottomans could build their forces. But I think, as you said, the main concern was the preservation of the empire they had left. They didn’t, it doesn’t appear that they really cared at that point, which of the warring powers would ensure that. Is that correct?

Eugene Rogan: Well, I mean, if anything, there was a tendency to see Germany as a more reliable ally than either Britain or France. You’re dead right. On the outbreak of war, the Ottomans were willing to cut a deal with virtually any great power to enter into a defensive alliance and protect the territory from the fallout of war. They knew that in February of 1914, Russia’s government had passed policy that in the cloud of war or the fog of war, Russia would seek to take the city of Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, under Russian rule, as well as the vital straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. These are the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles themselves. This is a really important sea corridor for all of Russia’s exports, from Ukraine and Russia, to the Mediterranean world. And of course, you know, the coming war, it was going to be an important line of communications, were it open, between the Entente powers. So Russia had geo-strategic as well as cultural reasons for wanting to try and seize these Ottoman territories. And they wanted to make this bid because they’d seen how in two Balkan Wars, the Ottomans have proved quite weak. And I think Russia was worried that maybe the Greeks would get to Constantinople first, as protectors of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Russia really wanted Constantinople, the Hagia Sophia Basilica, and all of the Byzantine treasures to come to their credit.

So, you know, with these drivers, the Ottomans were very concerned to keep their longest standing rival, Russia, at arms length. And if they could have carved a deal with France, who, as I just said, had given the Ottomans, in the spring of 1914, a $100 million loan. Or the British, who, as I just said underwrote a mission to help rebuild the Ottoman Navy, and had commissioned, you know, dreadnoughts for the Ottoman navy. If they could have gotten the British or the French to sign a deal that would protect their lands against the Russians, they would have done it. But of course, there’s no way that the British or French were going to guarantee Ottoman territory against their ally, Russia. Germany, by contrast, had no territorial ambitions in the Ottoman Empire. They never colonized an inch of Ottoman land. The French had, the British had, the Russians had. And so, they were militarily strong. They were technologically strong, very ahead of most of European powers. And if you were taking a bet, if you were a betting man, Chris, in the opening days of summer war of 1914 you might well have thought that Germany was going to win that war. I think the Ottomans made a bid to go with Germany, in the hope that their bet would pay off and that they’d be among the victors being able to reclaim lands that they’d lost to the Balkan neighbors, or to Russia, or islands to Greece, having been on the winning side of the First World War in siding with Germany. But the question is, what did the Germans get out of making an alliance with a country that most of Europe really did see as the sick man of Europe? And I guess that’s the harder one to explain.

Chris Hedges: Well, the British certainly furthered that process by seizing the dreadnoughts.

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John O’Sullivan is one of the grand old men of literature-posing-as-journalism. Plus, if you want to start a newspaper from scratch, a big, national newspaper, like say, Canada’s putatively conservative National Post, you call John. He has worked everywhere of note.

John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review, editor of Australia’s Quadrant, founding editor of The Pipeline, and President of the Danube Institute. He has served in the past as associate editor of the London Times, editorial and op-ed editor for Canada’s National Post, and special adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He is the author of The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World

I am running short – 1-3 minute reads – excerpts from a new book, Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You – a book of essays to which I contributed, along with forty-one others on just what happened. It will be published on September 10th. My purpose is that you come away from this somewhat enlightened as to what the hell happened, and how a once respectable profession became seedy and dishonest. The book provides a clear direction towards root and branch reform. And perhaps you will buy the book.

Through the Revolving Door – How the Fourth Estate Vanished

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. “Through the Revolving Door: How the Fourth Estate Vanished,” by John O’Sullivan:

For most of my lifetime the balance of temperaments in newsrooms, both in America and the U.K., has been weighted—this is plainly not a scientific judgment—strongly toward the bohemian, rebellious, and creative, and away from the respectable, conformist, and administrative on something like 70 lines to 30 lines. That division strikes me today as a pretty good corporate personality mix if you want to produce a lively, controversial, and unpredictable newspaper, magazine, television, or internet current affairs program. It didn’t track too well with partisan political divides between liberals and conservatives—which was a good thing because it meant that the common journalistic mission could and sometimes did override politics and ideology. Most newsrooms had a liberal majority but relaxed ideological attitudes. Bohemian Tories were more popular than liberal ideologues, for instance, and the most significant question you could ask about any newsroom was “Does it have an esprit de corps?”

That had less to do with the administrative virtues—important though getting expenses paid on time is to basic morale—than with bold and courageous editorial leadership shown by people as different as Arnaud de Borchgrave in The Washington Times, Roger Wood on the New York Post, Andrew Neil on the London Sunday Times, and Colin Welch as deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. All of them had the necessary buccaneering self-confidence to drive their papers to excel in challenging not only governments but also all the respectable people, institutions, opinions, and causes mired in groupthink and self-congratulation—whom the Brits summarize ironically as “the Great and the Good”—who exercise enormous social and cultural power but too often get a pass when criticisms are being handed out.

Though we didn’t all realize it at the time, the era from the early 1980s to the start of the century was a golden age of journalism financially, technically, and creatively. And that produced freer countries and better governments. Those active in the press of those days drew a high card in the lottery of life.

You really can’t hate them enough.

So, what went wrong? Many things, as we’ll see, but one unnoticed cause was that even in those glory days, journalism wasn’t a particularly good launching pad for a career in high society (in which, incidentally, there are many mansions, not only on Park Avenue but also in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Washington, Los Angeles, and London). That didn’t sit well with the growing number of lawyerly minded and socially ambitious journalists who were entering the trade not as copy boys but as former editors of Ivy League papers on special entry programs. They wanted more, better, and earlier avenues to the top than were offered by the relatively few senior positions in major media corporations.

That was hard to fashion directly but what they found was a sidedoor—a revolving door in fact between government and the media and vice versa. Opening it allowed reporters, editors, and columnists to leave the media to serve in government, and politicians to exchange jobs on Capitol Hill for jobs in the newsroom, and a few especially ambidextrous people to go back and forth through it several times as their talents permitted, or the voters insisted.

Opening that door was an important moment in the decline of American journalism, after which the door’s locks were permanently removed and the traffic through it increased exponentially. And it happened publicly at a 1988 dinner at the Washington Press Club in honor of David Broder, The Washington Post’s political correspondent, who was well-regarded by all as a good man and a scrupulous reporter but neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary.

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Ever since1984 (after the CIA had become too well-known for setting up coups), America’s coup-machine has been the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), not the CIA. The U.S. coup that seized control over Bangladesh in August this year is a typical example:

The U.S. regime wanted to place an air-force base on a particular Bangladeshi island, because that location for such a base would endanger China’s national security and weaken China’s ability to protect itself from a U.S. invasion.

On 28 May 2024, the Indian Express headlined “China praises Bangladesh PM Hasina for refusing to permit foreign air base”, and reported:

China on Tuesday praised Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for her decision to deny permission for a foreign military base, commending it as a reflection of the Bangladeshi people’s strong national spirit and commitment to independence.

Without naming any country, Hasina, 76, on Sunday said that she was offered a hassle-free re-election in the January 7 polls if she allowed a foreign country to build an airbase inside Bangladeshi territory.

Hasina, ruling the strategically located South Asian nation since 2009, secured a fifth overall term in the one-sided election in January, which was boycotted by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by former prime minister Khalida Zia.

“If I allowed a certain country to build an airbase in Bangladesh, then I would have had no problem,” The Daily Star Bangladesh newspaper quoted Hasina as saying.

Replying to a question on Hasina’s remarks at a media briefing here, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said, “China has noted Prime Minister Hasina’s speech, which reflects the national spirit of the Bangladeshi people to be independent and not afraid of external pressure.” Though the Bangladesh prime minister did not name the country that had made the offer to her, she emphasised that the “offer came from a White man”.

Mao said some countries seek their own selfish interests, openly trade other countries’ elections, brutally interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, undermine regional security and stability, and fully expose their hegemonic, bullying nature.

This U.S. coup culminated on 4 August 2024 when the democratically elected Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Ms. Sheikh Hasina, resigned and was flown out from a Bangladesh Air Force base into neighboring India, aboard a Bangladesh Air Force Lockheed Martin C-130J military transport plane, heading to UK, which Government informed her in-flight that her asylum-request would be denied, and, since India had already told her that she could have at least temporary asylum there, she landed in India, intending it to be only temporary.

On August 5th, India’s Express News headlined “Meet General Waker-Uz-Zaman, the man in charge of Bangladesh after PM Sheikh Hasina’s resignation”, presented video of the General’s 10-hour press conference, and opened their accompanying printed news-report:

After Sheikh Hasina resigned as the prime minister of Bangladesh and fled the country on Monday, General Waker-Uz-Zaman, the Chief of Army Staff, stepped forward to announce the formation of an interim government. Addressing the nation from a podium with the world’s media capturing every moment, he declared, “I’m taking all responsibility (of the country). Please cooperate.”

They noted: “His career includes two tours as a UN peacekeeper,” and, “He received his education at the Bangladesh Military Academy and pursued advanced studies at the Defence Services Command and Staff College in Mirpur and the Joint Services Command and Staff College in the UK. Additionally, he holds degrees in Defence Studies from the National University of Bangladesh and King’s College, University of London.”

The normal procedure for a U.S. coup is to appoint someone as a “caretaker” governmennt until a ‘legitimate’ head-of-state who is heavily dependent upon the U.S. Government can be installed.

On August 9th came this explanatory news report on whom the U.S. regime chose:

——

https://x.com/BrianJBerletic/status/1821871322676527203

https://archive.is/xSXvX

9 August 2024

Brian Berletic

@BrianJBerletic

Muhammad Yunus, just sworn in as head of Bangladesh gov following US-backed regime change, had begged the US to aid in changing Bangladesh’s laws on his behalf in 2009, according to US diplomatic cables.

Yunus was in regular contact with the US government through the US embassy as well as trips to Washington D.C.

In 2009, he asked the US to pressure PM Sheikh Hasina to reverse a law giving the gov control over choosing the chair of his bank; 

The US embassy agreed to pressure the PM & promised to “note the potential negative consequences ” for the gov of refusing to reverse the law; 

The same cable admits the US government supports Yunus in the context of challenging the ruling government;

Yunus was a US State Dept. Fulbright scholar, received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Congressional medal, as well has having signed at least 1 letter circulated by the National Endowment for Democracy – all as part of building him up as the head of a potential client regime; 

Source: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09DHAKA469_a.html [also see this from 2007 when Yunus informed the U.S. Consulate in Kolkata of his “strong intent to plunge into the maelstrom of Bangladesh politics” — which information at that time was entirey private, unknown to the public — and, from that time forward, he sought the U.S. Government’s help to make him the leader of Bangladesh; and, now, 17 years later, the U.S. Government has delivered to him that prize].

11:29 AM · Aug 9, 2024

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On August 11th, Economic Times and India Times bannered “Sheikh Hasina alleges US role in ouster, says could’ve remained in power if she surrendered sovereignty of Saint Martin Island”, and reported:

Former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, now in India, accused the US of orchestrating her ousting over disputes regarding Saint Martin Island, which she claimed was to assert control over the Bay of Bengal. In a statement, Hasina justified her resignation to avoid further violence and urged Bangladeshi citizens not to fall prey to radical manipulation. She expressed sorrow over the ongoing violence and leadership killings in Bangladesh, reaffirming her commitment to the Awami League and her hope for the country’s future. Hasina also denied inciting student protests, claiming her words were misrepresented.

Former Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina who is currently in India has accused the USA of ousting her from power for not handing over [control] of Saint Martin Island that would have enabled them to have “sway over the Bay of Bengal” and cautioned Bangladeshi nationals not to get manipulated by radicals.

In a message conveyed through her close associates and made available to ET Hasina said, “I resigned, so that I did not have to see the procession of dead bodies. They wanted to come to power over the dead bodies of students, but I did not allow it, I resigned from premiership. I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin Island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal. I beseech to the people of my land, ‘Please do not be manipulated by radicals.”

“If I had remained in the country, more lives would have been lost, more resources would have been destroyed. I made the extremely difficult decision to exit. I became your leader because you chose me, you were my strength,” Hasina emphasised.

“My heart cries upon receiving news that many leaders have been killed, workers are being harassed and their homes are subjected to vandalism and arson…With the grace of almighty Allah I will return soon. Awami League has stood up again and again. I shall forever pray for the future of Bangladesh, the nation which my great father strived for. The country for which my father and family gave their lives.”

Referring to the quota movement and student protests, Hasina said, “I would like to repeat to the young students of Bangladesh. I have never called you Razakars. Rather My words were distorted to incite you. I request you to watch the full video of that day. Conspirators have taken advantage of innocence and used you to destabilise the nation.”

Hasina had to flee to Bangladesh on Monday and took refuge in India.

Before the quota movement Hasina in April had told parliament that America is pursuing a strategy of regime change in her country. “They are trying to eliminate democracy and introduce a government that will not have a democratic existence.” …

On 15 December 2023 Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suddenly said at a press briefing that if Sheikh Hasina comes to power in the next election, America will use all its powers to overthrow her government. She had warned that America will create a situation like the ‘Arab Spring’ [another NED operation] to bring about a chaotic regime change. It may be recalled that a decade ago in the Middle East the ‘Arab Spring’ was initially led by university, college, school students [a common NED method].

Presumably, St. Martin Island was the land which the U.S. regime was seeking in the May 28th news-story.

On that same day, August 11th, Brian Berletic at New Eastern Outlook headlined “What’s Behind Regime Change in Bangladesh”, and he documented that participating in this U.S. coup were: the U.S. Ambassador to Bangladesh, NED, the BNP (main opposition Party to Hasina’s Awami League Party), Jammat-e-Islami (fundamentalist Sunni movement to turn Bangladesh into an Islamic state allied with Saudi Arabia and supporting the U.S. Government in international affairs), “Dhaka University’s political science department including Nahid Islam and Nusrat Tabassum, both of whom have their own profile on the US and European government as well as Open Society-funded Front Line Defenders database,” and who led their students to organize  the crowds to overthrow Hasina. “Its department of political science in particular, from which these ‘leaders’ emerged, regularly conducts activities with Western-centric organizations and forums. The department is staffed by professors involved in US government-funded programs, including the so-called ‘Confronting Misinformation in Bangladesh (CMIB) project’. This includes professors Saima Ahmed and Dr. Kajalei Islam, who both serve as part of the project’s head team alongside US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) grantees and US State Department Fulbright scholars.” And the AP was quoted, “A key organizer of Bangladesh’s student protests said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was their choice as head of an interim government, a day after longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned.”

Ben Norton on August 15th, did a superb hour-long video, “Exposing US gov’t role in Bangladesh regime change: Why PM Sheikh Hasina was overthrown”, demonstrating how important for the U.S. regime its capture of St. Martin Island would be especially for choking off the supply of oil from the Arab nations to China, which is the world’s largest oil-importer. His video is also a comprehensive, and fully documented, history of the U.S. regime’s efforts, ever since 1975, to grab control over Bangladesh. He describes and documents how those efforts have finally succeeded.

In the immediate wake of America’s coup, the Yunus government is doing everything it can to discredit not only Hasina but her Party and her Administration. For examples, here are some recent headlines from India Times, Economic Times: “Interim govt chief Muhammad Yunus accuses Sheikh Hasina of destroying every institution of Bangladesh”, “Bangladesh interim govt revokes ousted PM Sheikh Hasina’s diplomatic passport”, “Bangladesh’s former textile and jute minister arrested in Dhaka”, and, “Bangladesh starts economic clean-up after Sheikh Hasina’s exit”.

The empire grows, by subversion, sanctions, coups, invasions, and in any way it can, even at the same time as it might also be shrinking elsewhere when independent Governments, such as Georgia now, steel themselves against the world’s only remaining voracious, world-conquest-demanding, imperialistic power. When Barack Obama and other American leaders have claimed that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation”, meaning that all others are “dispensable,” this is what they are saying — that the U.S. Government’s goal is a dictatorship over the entire world. It’s the core belief of neoconservatism, and no American billionaire opposes it; all of them, both the Democrats and the Republicans, fund only politicians who are neoconservatives.

However, the closer that this Government gets to achieving its objective, the more intensely the leaders of the nations that aren’t yet its colonies (‘allies’) will resist it. That’s why we’re again heading into very violent times, perhaps even into WW3 — because of this voracious destructive force, like the Nazis were before WW2.

Reprinted with permission from Eric’s Substack.

The post How America Perpetrates Its Coups Now: The Bangladesh Coup appeared first on LewRockwell.