Illustrative Image
Written by Eric Zuesse
The U.S. Government and its news-media claim that they are a democracy and “lead the free world” (to use their now-anachronistic phrase, whose meaning ended when the Soviet Union did — it’s now purely a propaganda-phrase to promote regime-change by America’s Government anywhere in the world). However, Ryan Grim’s great reporting on the U.S. coup that had overthrown the extremely popular democratically elected leader of Pakistan and installed there a brutal stooge-regime of corrupt Pakistani generals — and that did this merely because this democratically elected leader had refused to buckle to the U.S. regime’s demand for him to condemn Russia and join the U.S.-imposed sanctions against Russia — demonstrates, now, for all the world to see, what ‘American democracy’ today is actually all about — which is conquest, and especially America’s craving to conquer Russia.
What this is actually about is the possibility, at last, to collapse the largest empire that the world has ever known, which is today’s U.S. empire — an empire that, like all empires, is based on lies.
Any empire is an international dictatorship, because each of its colonies loses its sovereignty to the imperial regime, and this means that every colonial resident is living under that dictatorship’s (the empire’s) regime and has no real say in how the country ultimately is governed. Today’s American dictatorship, which started on 25 July 1945, is now the largest empire that the world has ever known, and it wants to become larger still, by absorbing not only Venezuela, and Syria, and Libya, and Iraq, and Iran, but even Russia and China — which possess the means to resist no matter what (which could produce WW III if the U.S. regime is willing to push things that far).
And the U.S. regime demands to restore its dictatorship over Pakistan. The U.S. coup against Pakistan’s democracy was carried out when the extremely popular Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, told his nation in a televised address to his nation on 30 March 2023, that “America has — oh, not America but a foreign country I can’t name” had sent the Government a message demanding that he be removed as Prime Minister.
On Friday, 31 March 2023, TRTWorld headlined “Pakistan’s Imran Khan accuses US of meddling; Washington denies charge: PM Imran Khan lashes out at US, claiming Washington has conspired with opposition parties against him and that America wants “me, personally, gone”. It opened:
Prime Minister Imran Khan has accused the United States of meddling in Pakistan’s politics –– a claim quickly denied by Washington –– as a debate on a no-confidence motion against him in parliament was postponed.
Fighting for his political life, Khan addressed the nation late on Thursday, appearing to blunder when he named the United States as the origin of a “message” he said showed meddling in Pakistan’s affairs.
“America has – oh, not America but a foreign country I can’t name. I mean from a foreign country, we received a message,” he said.
Local media have reported the message was in a briefing letter from Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, recording a senior US official telling him they felt relations would be better if Khan left office. … In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters there was “no truth” to the allegations.
The next day, on April 1st, America’s National Public Radio bannered “Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan accuses the U.S. of trying to oust him”. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper headlined on Friday, April 7th, “Supreme Court restores National Assembly, orders no-confidence vote”, and reported that Pakistan’s legislature, both of whose two main Parties represented different factions of Pakistan’s aristocracy and opposed Imran Khan, should hold a vote on whether Khan should be overthrown. Then on April 10th, Reuters headlined “Frontrunner for next Pakistani PM seen as ‘can-do’ administrator”, and propagandized for the newly installed Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shebaz Sharif, from the billionaire Sharif dynasty, and who is the brother of the former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who “has lived for the last two years in London since being let out of jail, where he was serving a sentence for corruption, for medical treatment.”
On May 12th, Ryan Grim at The Intercept did an interview with Pakistani journalist Waqas Ahmed, who reported:
Imran Khan was illegally arrested yesterday. You can say he was abducted by paramilitary forces, not the police. There was no warrant. They broke into court premises where Imran Khan was having his hearing, and during that hearing, they took him, kidnapped him, put him in a Rangers van; Rangers is a paramilitary force that answers to the Pakistani military. They put him in a Ranger’s van and they took him away.
They took him to an unknown location, not a police station. It was said they took him to an ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] safe house. He has been there since, and this is where we are at. …
He did have a hearing on Wednesday, and he said that by the NAB authorities he was reached OK, but the police kept him awake all night. They mishandled him, they roughed him up a bit. And he was taken from one location to another in the middle of the night. He thinks that his life is in danger. He feels, he said that — the message he sent out through his lawyers — was that they might inject him with something that would cause slow poisoning. So these are the fears that he has communicated to the outside world.
On June 5th, Grim headlined his interview of Imran Khan, “IMRAN KHAN: U.S. WAS MANIPULATED BY PAKISTAN MILITARY INTO BACKING OVERTHROW”, which included Khan’s saying, “The entire senior leadership is in jail. The only way they can get out of jail is if they say that they’re leaving my party.” And, “My name is not allowed to be mentioned on television, on any electronic media or print media.” Khan said that the military, and not the U.S. Government, were the principal reason for his ouster, and that the U.S. Government was against him because “the Biden administration; they somehow thought I was critical of the Americans, and I was sort of pro-Taliban. It’s total nonsense.” Grim summed up by saying, “Khan, in the interview, also speculated that the U.S. had turned on him because of his skepticism of the global war on terror and due to a misperception that he had aligned Pakistan with the Taliban.”
However, on August 9th, Grim and his The Intercept colleague Murtaza Hussain headlined “SECRET PAKISTAN CABLE DOCUMENTS U.S. PRESSURE TO REMOVE IMRAN KHAN”, and reported the entire cable sent from Washington D.C., which had produced Khan’s ouster, introducing it by saying:
The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the [Pakistani] ambassador [to the U.S., in Washington, after his meeting there with two State Department officials] and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.
The document, labeled “Secret,” includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.
The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military. … The cable reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Prime Minister Imran Khan … In the cable, the U.S. objects to Khan’s foreign policy on the Ukraine war. Those positions were quickly reversed after his removal, which was followed, as promised in the meeting, by a warming between the U.S. and Pakistan. …
The day before the meeting, Khan [had] addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine. “Are we your slaves?” Khan thundered to the crowd. “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?” he asked. “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.”
In the meeting, according to the document, Lu spoke in forthright terms about Washington’s displeasure with Pakistan’s stance in the [Ukraine] conflict. The document quotes Lu saying that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” Lu added that he had held internal discussions with the U.S. National Security Council and that “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.”
Lu then bluntly raises the issue of a no-confidence vote: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu said, according to the document. “Otherwise,” he continued, “I think it will be tough going ahead.”
So, whereas on June 5th, Grim’s headline story from Khan had been that “IMRAN KHAN: U.S. WAS MANIPULATED BY PAKISTAN MILITARY INTO BACKING OVERTHROW”, Khan’s understanding of the situation at that time was actually false: the U.S. had, in fact, demanded his ouster, and not because of ‘terrorism’ or ‘the Taliban’, but because Khan wouldn’t buckle to the U.S. Government’s Ukraine position and sanctions against Russia. And, whereas on March 31st the “Local media have reported the message was in a briefing letter from Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, recording a senior US official telling him they felt relations would be better if Khan left office,” that message had instead come from Pakistan’s current Ambassador, in Washington — the U.S. regime had communicated its demand for the coup to the generals in Karachi, through Pakistan’s official representative in Washington.
Khan’s initial interpretation had been that “they somehow thought I was critical of the Americans, and I was sort of pro-Taliban,” and that somehow it had been communicated via a former Pakistani Ambassador. But this had actually been a direct Government-to-Government communication, of a purely imperialistic demand, instead of any anti-Taliban recommendation, for Pakistan’s generals to overthrow Khan, which they then carried out.
Then, on August 16th, Grim and Hussain bannered “PAKISTAN CONFIRMS SECRET DIPLOMATIC CABLE SHOWING U.S. PRESSURE TO REMOVE IMRAN KHAN: After initially suggesting the cable published by The Intercept was inauthentic, Pakistani officials now claim it doesn’t reveal a conspiracy.”
And on August 21st, they headlined “IMRAN KHAN BOOKED UNDER PAKISTAN STATE SECRETS LAW FOR ALLEGEDLY MISHANDLING SECRET CABLE IN 2022”, and reported that
Last week, the Pakistani authorities moved to charge Khan under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act for his alleged mishandling of a classified diplomatic cable, known internally as a cipher. The March 7, 2022, cable had been at the center of a controversy in Pakistan, with Khan and his supporters claiming for a year and a half that it showed U.S. pressure to remove the prime minister. Khan publicly revealed the existence of the document in a late March 2022 rally. …
Pakistan’s legislature, widely believed to be acting as a rubber stamp for the military, recently approved changes to the state secrets law that Khan was being charged under. …
The additions to the Official Secrets Act specifically target leakers and whistleblowers, outlining new offenses for the disclosure of information to the public related to national security and effectively criminalizing any news reporting that the military deems to be against its interests. Khan is expected to be indicted soon under the new law.
So: Khan will probably be indicted under a law that didn’t even exist at the time of America’s coup against Pakistan.
This was yet another U.S. coup — and one which overthrew Pakistan’s democracy and re-installed Pakistan’s military, who represent Pakistan’s own aristocracy, against Pakistan’s public.
This is therefore yet another instance where the U.S. Government was clearly on the side of the dictators, and against democracy.
The U.S. Government’s position in international relations is for dictatorship and against democracy. That’s the exact OPPOSITE of what it pretends.
Even Imran Khan didn’t know the full extent of the U.S. Government’s imperialistic evilness.
The Emperor’s ‘democratic’ clothing is stripped away, and the nude that now can be seen by all is the would-be global dictator, ugly as sin.
The myth of a benign, pro-democracy, U.S. Government — the myth that sustains its actual grasping hegemonic global imperialism — has here been stripped away by Grim’s June 5th and August 9th reports, to reveal the ugly face behind that benign mask.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
