By John Catalinotto
August 6, 2024

The exchange of 24 prisoners held on various charges in multiple countries grabbed headlines in the U.S.-based corporate media. The prisoners included spies and/or journalists charged with being spies, and others.

Both the U.S. and the Russian governments celebrated getting people out of prison and repatriating people they considered on their side.

The events, for anyone born early enough in the last century, reminded one of tense prisoner exchanges at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, at the border between two hostile social systems. They raised the following questions:

Is this a return of the Cold War, even though the Soviet Union no longer exists and Russia is no longer socialist?

Does the Russian government see no advantage of waiting to make the deal with Donald Trump, should he win the presidential election?

The U.S. corporate media skipped answering those questions. Okay, we will skip them too for the moment. We did notice that the U.S. media used the event to wage a two-day, no-holds-barred propaganda attack on Russia. In terms of the cascade of lies and exaggerations, it did bring back Cold War memories.

The spasm of Cold War mentality must have relieved the veteran agents of the State Department, the CIA and the ruling-class media. Like old times, Russia — it, along with 14 other republics used to be the Soviet Union — was treated as the epitome of evil while the U.S. citizens were viewed as Sunday school innocents.

The New York Times claimed only the Russians were serious agents. One article even discussed alleged dangers that prisoner exchanges invited evildoers to kidnap innocent U.S. citizens en masse and make them hostages.

Let’s clarify the situation. The wildly expensive U.S. military operates more than 800 bases abroad, watching, patrolling, ready to bomb worldwide. The CIA intervenes through NGOs and through individuals it hires, as it has for decades.

Is there any reason to believe for one instant that the U.S. has no agents operating in countries it considers its enemies?

Does Washington arrest and hold journalists on spurious charges? Consider Julian Assange. Does Washington arrest and hold business people making trades that counter its interests? Alex Saab is a recent example. He helped Venezuela make trades to avoid sanctions. The U.S. held him in prison and denied him treatment for cancer.

It’s true that some U.S. allies have avoided holding journalists in prison. The Israeli government simply executes them — having killed close to 200 journalists in Gaza in the recent genocidal slaughter. Washington supplies the weapons and provides the excuses.

The lessons are: Don’t believe the lies of the corporate media. And realize that the lies they told about the prisoner exchange are just tiny ones compared, for example, to those they tell against the current government of Venezuela and against all their “enemies” from West Asia to the Pacific. And realize too that the “axis of evil” has its hub in Washington.