He said that 18 UAVs had been fired at the Abqaiq oil facility and seven cruise missile had been fired at the Khurais oilfield, three of which had fallen short of the target.
This assemblage of junk put on display for the media proves absolutely nothing.
Regardless, it will be used by the medieval kingdom and US neocons to blame Iran.
In response to the charred collection of metal, Donald the Clueless decided to impose yet another round of sanctions designed to punish the people of Iran.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he ordered a major increase in sanctions on #Iran as #SaudiArabia displayed remnants of drones and missiles it said #Tehran used in a crippling weekend attack on its oil facilities. https://t.co/fKeXKdKa30
Col. Al-Maliki thinks you’re an idiot—and you are if you believe Iran is the top sponsor of terror in the world. That designation is reserved for Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel.
We’re told Iran supports the “terrorism” of Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
Let’s not forget that Hamas was shepherded by Israel. Back in the day, the Zionists figured they could defeat the PLO by nurturing Palestinian Islamists. After the so-called Six Day War, Israel released Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from prison. Yassin went about building Hamas in the 1980s. The Israelis subsequently assassinated the wheelchair-bound imam with a Hellfire missile fired from a US-manufactured Apache helicopter.
David Shipler, a former New York Times reporter, later recounts that he was told by the military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, that the Israeli government had financed the Islamic movement to counteract the PLO and the communists. According to Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, “we saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism”… Yassin also receives funding from business leaders in Saudi Arabia who are also hostile to the secular PLO for religious reasons. The Saudi government, however, steps in and attempts to halt the private funds going to Yassin, because they view him as a tool of Israel.
As for Hezbollah, we never get a straight answer from the corporate propaganda media. If we follow the “news,” it appears Hezbollah came out of nowhere with a psychopathic desire to kill Americans and Israelis.
Brookings and others claim Hezbollah is an Iranian “export.”
Hezbollah’s methods have evolved as its military and political powers and sophistication have expanded since the mid-1980s, with Lebanon itself rather than American citizens now held hostage. But then as now, Hezbollah serves as the most successful, and the most deadly, export of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
This completely ignores the fact Hezbollah came together in southern Lebanon after Israel invaded the country. Consider the following from the neocon-tinged and humanitarian interventionist “non-partisan” globalist think tank:
Enmeshed in poverty and high rates of illiteracy, Shiite peasants concentrated in the south also suffered disproportionately from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) attacked Israel from southern Lebanon, and the Israelis retaliated in kind. Given years of PLO abuses, Shiite residents of the south briefly welcomed the 1982 Israeli invasion, although Israeli tactics quickly alienated them, driving thousands from ancestral villages to the slums of Beirut’s impoverished southern suburbs.
Samia A. Halaby provides perspective, not that we should expect the “Newspaper of Record,” The New York Times, to tell us the truth about the Hezbollah self-defense organization.
I think residents of the southern Lebanon, of Palestine, and Iraq, especially the poorer ones and the working class are tired—way, way beyond feeling that this is ‘unfair’. We have suffered US/Israel behavior since way before 1948. Hezbollah is resistance to this historic attack.
The formation of Hezbollah is a direct result of Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon (Operation Litani) and the 1982 civil war in Lebanon.
The Academic website cites Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh (The Path Of Hizbullah):
The Israelis killed more than one thousand civilian Shiites, leading to a mass exodus of yet more Shiites refugees to the Beirut slums. Israel’s 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon bolstered the fortunes of Hizbullah by “providing a politic-military environment that legitimated the group and gave a rationale for its guerrilla warfare. Similarly, the presence of the Western foreign troops in Lebanon, particularly of the U.S. Marines, also boosted the fortunes of Hezbollah, which considered fighting such forces to be as legitimate as fighting the Israeli occupation.”
Is it possible self-defense forces would be organized in Washington State if Chinese troops landed at the Port of Grays Harbor? If US citizens were shelled, massacred, and taken prisoner as thousands of Shia Lebanese were, do you think there might be an uprising and “terrorist attacks” on the invaders?
If Americans suffered like the Shia of southern Lebanon did—particularly those tortured (including children) at the Khiam detention center—wouldn’t resistance and retribution be justified?
" During the torture sessions they would operate a noisy engine in order to cover our cries of pain…" Former detainees from the #Khiam prison tell L’OLJ about the torture they suffered at the hands of #AmerFakhoury 👇 #ALShttps://t.co/piKGwPnTQV
The SLA was closely allied with Israel. It supported the Israelis by fighting the PLO in southern Lebanon until the 1982 invasion. After that, SLA support for the Israelis consisted mainly of fighting other Lebanese guerrilla forces led by Hezbollah until 2000 in the “security zone” (the area under occupation after a partial Israeli withdrawal in 1985). In return Israel supplied the organization with arms, uniforms, and logistical equipment.
Following the alleged attack on the Saudi facilities, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, ventured to Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, back home in the indispensable nation, the neocon warmonger from South Carolina said the attack represents an “act of war.”
☝️☝️Senator Lindsey Graham: "This attack on the oil refinery, by any reasonable definition, is an act of war. It is attacking the world economy the stability of the oil markets throughout the world."🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝 pic.twitter.com/KwAEOZco7C
At this point, it is unlikely Trump will unleash the dogs of war on Iran—that is if he wants to be re-elected next year. He has vacillated repeatedly on Iran and this drives the neocons to distraction. More false flags are likely in the works.
However, this time may be different. It is reported Trump is drawing up plans to hit Iran. “Donald Trump is drawing up a hit-list as he hatches plans to clobber Iran following the attacks on the world’s largest oil plant in Saudi Arabia,” reports the ever-so factual and unbiased British newspaper The Sun.
Saudi Arabia attack – Donald Trump draws up plans for military strike on Iran as Tehran vows to shoot down US planes as war fears grow https://t.co/fACaPOp4cY
Trump would be a fool to attack Iran. It has the capability to bring oil shipments to a halt and launch missiles at US troops and hardware in the region. This would undoubtedly take down the global economy and precipitate a world war.
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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Like all European environmental parties, without any exception, Luigi Di Maio’s Five-Star Movement is deeply anti-nuclear. It campaigned vehemently on this theme. And like all European environmental parties, when they come to power, they defend NATO, its wars and its nuclear policy.
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Is there finally a Minister of Foreign Affairs who will commit to Italy joining the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?
The neo-minister Luigi Di Maio subscribed in 2017 to the Ican Parliamentary Pledge, the international coalition to which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize [1]. In doing so, the political leader of the 5 Stars Movement – the current Minister of Foreign Affairs – has pledged to “promote the signature and ratification of this Treaty of Historic Importance” by Italy.
The Ican Commitment was also subscribed to by other current 5-star ministers –Alfonso Bonafede (Justice), Federico D’Incà (Relations with Parliament), Fabiana Dadone (Public Service) – and by other M5S parliamentarians, like Roberto Fico and Manlio Di Stefano.
But there is a problem. Article 4 of the Treaty states:
“Each State Party which has nuclear weapons owned or controlled by another State on its territory shall ensure the prompt withdrawal of such weapons”.
To accede to the UN Treaty, Italy should ask the United States to withdraw B-61 nuclear bombs from its territory (which already violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty) and not to install the new B61 -12 or other nuclear weapons. Moreover, since Italy is one of the countries which (as NATO itself states) “provide the Alliance with aircraft equipped to carry nuclear bombs, over which the United States retains absolute control, and staff trained for this purpose “, to accede to the UN Treaty, Italy should ask to be exempted from this function.
Unthinkable requests from the second Conte government which, like the first, considers the United States as a “privileged ally”.
Here is where the cards are shown. The Ican Commitment was subscribed to in Italy by more than 200 parliamentarians, mostly from the Pd and the M5S (about 90 each), the current government parties. With what result?
On September 19, 2017, the day before the Treaty was opened for signature, the House approved a Pd motion (also voted by Forza Italia and Fratelli d’Italia) which committed the Gentiloni government to “evaluate the possibility” of joining to the UN Treaty. For its part, the M5S did not ask for the accession to the UN Treaty, and therefore the withdrawal from Italy of nuclear weapons, but to “declare the unavailability of Italy to use nuclear weapons, and not to buy the necessary components to make the F-35 aircraft fit for the transport of nuclear weapons “. Ergo: that the F-35 planes, designed for nuclear attack especially with the B61-12, be used by Italy with a kind of security that prevents the use of nuclear weapons.
The following day, the North Atlantic Council, with full Italian support, rejected and attacked the UN Treaty. It has so far been signed by 70 countries, but, because of pressure from the US and NATO, ratified only by 26 while it takes 50 to enter into force.
The same thing happened with the Treaty on Intermediate Nuclear Forces buried by Washington. Whether at the NATO, UN or EU headquarters, the first Conte government has lined up behind the US decision, giving the go-ahead for the installation of new US nuclear missiles in Europe, Italy included.
The solemn undertaking pledged by Pd, 5 Étoiles and others has therefore proved, based on the test of facts, to be a demagogic expedient to collect votes. If for any of them this is not so, let them demonstrate it in fact.
Because of the “inevitable link with the United States”, reaffirmed yesterday by Conte in his speech in the House, Italy finds itself deprived of its own sovereignty and transformed into the front line of US nuclear strategy. With multi-partisan consensus and complicit silence.
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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated from Italian by Roger Lagassé.
Award winning author Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Conceding that their grip on the economy is slipping, central bankers are proposing a radical economic reset that would shift yet more power from government to themselves.
Central bankers are acknowledging that they are out of ammunition. Mark Carney, the soon-to-be-retiring head of the Bank of England, said in a speech at the annual meeting of central bankers in August in Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
“In the longer-term, we need to change the game.”
The same point was made by Philipp Hildebrand, former head of the Swiss National Bank, in an August 2019 interview with Bloomberg.
“Really there is little if any ammunition left,” he said. “More of the same in terms of monetary policy is unlikely to be an appropriate response if we get into a recession or sharp downturn.”
“More of the same” meant further lowering interest rates, the central bankers’ stock tool for maintaining their targeted inflation rate in a downturn. Bargain-basement interest rates are supposed to stimulate the economy by encouraging borrowers to borrow (since rates are so low) and savers to spend (since they aren’t making any interest on their deposits and may have to pay to store them). But over $15 trillion in bonds are now trading globally at negative interest rates, yet this radical maneuver has not been shown to measurably improve economic performance. In fact new research shows that negative interest rates from central banks, rather than increasing spending, stopping deflation, and stimulating the economy as they were expected to do, may be having the opposite effects. They are being blamed for squeezing banks, punishing savers, keeping dying companies on life support, and fueling a potentially unsustainable surge in asset prices.
So what is a central banker to do? Hildebrand’s proposed solution was presented in a paper he wrote with three of his colleagues at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, where he is now vice chairman. Released in August to coincide with the annual Jackson Hole meeting of central bankers, the paper was co-authored by Stanley Fischer, former governor of the Bank of Israel and former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve; Jean Boivin, former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada; and BlackRock economist Elga Bartsch. Their proposal calls for “more explicit coordination between central banks and governments when economies are in a recession so that monetary and fiscal policy can better work in synergy.” The goal, according to Hildebrand, is to go “direct with money to consumers and companies in order to enliven consumption,” putting spending money directly into consumers’ pockets.
It sounds a lot like “helicopter money,” but he was not actually talking about raining money down on the people. The central bank would maintain a “Standing Emergency Fiscal Facility” that would be activated when interest rate manipulation was no longer working and deflation had set in. The central bank would determine the size of the Facility based on its estimates of what was needed to get the price level back on target. It sounds good until you get to who would disburse the funds: “Independent experts would decide how best to deploy the funds to both maximize impact and meet strategic investment objectives set by the government.”
“Independent experts” is another term for “technocrats” – bureaucrats chosen for their technical skill rather than by popular vote. They might be using sophisticated data, algorithms and economic formulae to determine “how best to deploy the funds,” but the question is, “best for whom?” It was central bank technocrats who plunged the economies of Greece and Italy into austerity after 2011, and unelected technocrats who put Detroit into bankruptcy in 2013.
In short, Hildebrand and co-authors are not talking about central banks giving up their ivory tower independence to work with legislators in coordinating fiscal and monetary policy. Rather, central bankers would be acquiring even more power, by giving themselves a new pot of free money that they could deploy as they saw fit in the service of “government objectives.”
Carney’s New Game
The tendency to overreach was also evident in the Jackson Hole speech of BOE head Mark Carney, in which he said “we need to change the game.” The game changer he proposed was to break the power of the US dollar as global reserve currency. This would be done through the issuance of an international digital currency backed by multiple national currencies, on the model of Facebook’s “Libra.”
Multiple reserve currencies are not a bad idea, but if we’re following the Libra model, we’re talking about a new, single reserve currency that is merely “backed” by a basket of other currencies. The question then is who would issue this global currency, and who would set the rules for obtaining the reserves.
Carney suggested that the new currency might be “best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies.” This raises further questions. Are central banks really “public”? And who would be the issuer – the banker-controlled Bank for International Settlements, the bank of central banks in Switzerland? Or perhaps the International Monetary Fund, which Carney is in line to head?
The IMF already issues Special Drawing Rights to supplement global currency reserves, but they are merely “units of account” which must be exchanged for national currencies. Allowing the IMF to issue the global reserve currency outright would give unelected technocrats unprecedented power over nations and their money. The effect would be similar to the surrender by EU governments of control over their own currencies, making their central banks dependent on the European Central Bank for liquidity, with its disastrous consequences.
Time to End the “Independent” Fed?
A media event that provoked even more outrage against central bankers last month, however, was an August 27th op-ed in Bloomberg by William Dudley, former president of the New York Fed and a former partner at Goldman Sachs. Titled “The Fed Shouldn’t Enable Donald Trump,” it concluded:
There’s even an argument that the [presidential] election itself falls within the Fed’s purview. After all, Trump’s reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed’s independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020.
The Fed is so independent that, according to former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, it is answerable to no one. A chief argument for retaining the Fed’s independence is that it needs to remain a neutral arbiter, beyond politics and political influence; and Dudley’s op-ed clearly breached that rule. Critics called it an attempt to overthrow a sitting president, a treasonous would-be coup that justified ending the Fed altogether.
Perhaps, but central banks actually serve some useful functions. Better would be to nationalize the Fed, turning it into a true public utility, mandated to serve the interests of the economy and the voting public. Having the central bank and the federal government work together to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy is actually a good idea, so long as the process is transparent and public representatives have control over where the money is deployed. It’s our money, and we should be able to decide where it goes.
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The so-called “Extinction Rebellion” set to begin later this month with “Global Climate Strikes” could be a scheme cooked up by the Alt-Establishment, which refers to the con game being played by the current power brokers who deceptively misportray themselves as the “anti-establishment” through the various proxy organizations that they bankroll.
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The Mainstream Media has started promoting the so-called “Extinction Rebellion” in recent weeks that’s set to begin later this month with “Global Climate Strikes”, which are being presented as a “global revolution” of sorts carried out by people from all walks of life and cultures uniting for the sake of the planet’s future.
The idea, as it’s being sold to the masses, is that walking out of one’s school or job to participate in these “historic” events will somehow or another convince one’s educational administrators or employers to throw their support behind the “climate change” movement through active donations and other means in order to ensure that this general agenda is eventually advanced by every government across the world “before it’s too late”.
The climate campaign has become extremely popular in recent years as inclement weather adds credence to the claims that the climate is indeed changing despite the disagreements (some of which are obviously politicized) about who or what is to blame, but there’s no doubt that it’s become an all-inclusive worldwide movement that by its very nature is vulnerable to exploitation, and therein lies the problem with the “Extinction Rebellion”.
At risk of sounding what will be smeared as “conspiratorial” by critics, there’s a very conceivable chance that the many well-intended but extremely gullible people participating in these planned events might be manipulated by what can be described as the “Alt-Establishment”, which refers to the con game being played by the current power brokers who deceptively misportray themselves as the “anti-establishment” through the various proxy organizations that they bankroll.
To be more direct, it wouldn’t be surprising if links were discovered between Big Oil and some of the “NGOs” involved in organizing the “Global Climate Strikes”. For as counterintuitive as this might initially sound, it would make sense from their perspective to want to groom, co-opt, and/or control legitimately anti-establishment sentiment as manifested in the “climate change” movement for their own ends which could include eventually discrediting them or even using them as a “bargaining chip” with lawmakers (e.g. offering to reduce pressure on them in exchange for certain concessions, whether public or secret).
The reason for this speculation is that groups such as “Black Lives Matter” and other movements/organizations supported by establishment foundations will be participating in some of the “Extinction Rebellion’s” events, and as the cliched saying goes, “birds of the same feather flock together”.
To be clear, that’s not to imply “guilt by association” for everyone associated with any of those entities, but just to challenge folks to think outside of their comfort zone and attempt to understand the larger dynamics of social movement manipulation, “classically” manifested through Color Revolutions but having evolved over the past two decades into seemingly apolitical movements like the “climate change” one that nevertheless rely on the same pressure tactics pioneered by Gene Sharp.
Having said that, legitimately anti-establishment and revolutionary movements can cleverly use those to advance their own interests, but they become part of the establishment or a “useful idiot” thereof if any financial link can be establishment between vested interests and them and/or their partners, which is why the “Extinction Rebellion” is so suspicious and should therefore be treated with the utmost caution by all.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
“My whole life in politics was marked by a political version, on a small scale, of the epic global contest that is now under way between inclusive cooperation—involving networks and diverse people working toward a common goal—and the reassertion of tribal nationalism,” he told me. With the world aflame and even some in posh Chappaqua feeling the country to be in a kind of civil war, Clinton could not escape the possibility that his side was losing the ‘epic global contest’ that had defined his career. His neighbor, if zany, had recently been backed up in his analysis by the writer Pankaj Mishra, who said of this explosive global moment of terrorist violence, raging xenophobia, and political upheaval, ‘Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third—and the longest and strangest—of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.’”
“Many plutocrats objected to Darren Walker’s shining the spotlight on inequality, instead of the issues they were more comfortable talking about, like poverty or opportunity. They disliked that he framed the issue in a way that blamed them rather than inviting them to participate in a solution. They disliked his focus on how money is made rather than how it is given away. ‘I just think you should stop ranting at inequality,’ a friend in private equity had snapped at him a few nights before the KKR event. ‘It’s a real turn-off.’ Walker had broken what in his circles were important taboos. Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.” Anand Giridharadas, “Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World”
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The United Nations has made its 2030 Sustainable Development Goals the hallmark of its contribution to the world, and to humanity. In effect, the SDG’s are the justification for the existence of the United Nations. There is one major problem with this goal: as is evident, without major transformation in the global economic architecture, the SDG’s will not only fail to be achieved, but, according to several expert reports, progress toward achievement of these goals has actually been reversed.
While the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are a crucial target toward maximizing the fulfillment and happiness of every human being throughout the world, and are of course, the noblest humanitarian goal toward which the United Nations, or any/every organization should aspire, it is acknowledged by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that failure to meet to goals of the SDG is a great danger, and there is a plea for funding for the SDG’s which is a Pyrric search, as the United Nations lacks the courage to confront the fact that the distorted pernicious priorities of its principle funders, the United States, Great Britain, etc., which spend trillions of dollars on their military and especially nuclear weapons development are the problem, the most dangerous and perverted developments of monopoly capitalism. The one trillion dollars that the United States has committed to the development of more sophisticated and deadly forms of nuclear explosives could fund the entire Sustainable Development Goals, fulfilling the entire 2030 Agenda.
Professor Armida Saisiah Alisjahbana, Executive Secretary of the UN Regional Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), has warned that the vast region of more than four billion people for which she is responsible, is set to miss all of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals which underpin the 2030 Agenda. In fact, it is harrowing, and shocking that there is evidence that the region is going backward.
While the United Nations boasts about fulfilling the 2030 Agenda, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals which are intended to transform the world into a paradise on earth, the UN Security Council is imposing sanctions on nations such as the DPRK and many other countries, sanctions which are a form of “economic terrorism” described by Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and are transforming those countries into a Hell on Earth. It is particularly the nations that have economic systems designed to provide for their citizens the very economic and social endowments that are rhetorically advocated by the SDG’s that are the targets of sanctions. These brutal sanctions are destroying viable and effective health care systems and educational systems such as those in the DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba, the former USSR and China, nations that have socialist systems prioritizing, by constitution and by law, those very fundamental rights to health and education that the SDG’s claim to advocate.
Instead of confronting the “Elephant in the Room,” and mandating transformed investment priorities of all United Nations member states through a new Economic Security Council, (there are methods of accomplishing this, though ignored by the UN hierarchy) there is now the dangerous possibility and tendency of the United Nations becoming hijacked by the agenda of the Western capitalist powers. This embarrassing and duplicitous trend is highlighted in an article by Barbarra Crosette: “As the SDGs Falter, the UN Turns to the Rich and Famous.” Crosette describes the new “strategic partnership” with the World Economic Forum, ‘the international organization for public-private partnership.’ Crosette quotes former UN official Steven Browne, writing of the first “public-private partnership” arrangement, the Global Compact:
“’The Global Compact has carried risks for the UN, leaving it open to accusations of associating with companies indulging in corporate malpractice…The Global Compact cannot wholly avoid ‘blue wash’ (the UN equivalent of whitewash in the eyes of critics)…Companies are in a large majority on the GC Board and are the principle contributors to the trust fund which supports the GC secretariat. Critics have claimed that the GC serves as a platform for the promotion of corporate interests at the UN, and not the other way around, as originally intended.’”
Who Controls Whom?
Historically, numerous corporations had ‘interests’ in nations such as Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953), Chile (1973), Indonesia (1965), (the list is much longer) countries whose democratically elected governments and economies guaranteed fulfillment of most of what are today’s SDG’s, and planned to use their resources for the benefit of their own people, raising their standard of living by providing free or subsidized health care, education, and protection of their natural resources. The multinational corporations found such an equitable distribution of wealth intolerable. These were the government programs which corporate capitalism demonized as “socialist,” and proceeded to destabilize each and every such economy, culminating in coups d’etat which installed militarized corporate control in each targeted state. In each case, historically, the corporations wrested control over the governments and economies and distribution of assets of these progressive humanitarian economies, and established fascist dictatorial control.
Private corporations investing in the UN SDG’s have the potential to jeopardize the entire agenda; corporations are dependent on the global market, and when there are severe downturns, as in 2008, or worse, corporate assets deplete, the size of their contributions to the UNSDG’s diminish drastically, and corporations, clearly, are therefore not a sustainable source of funding, thereby eliminating ‘Sustainability’ from the Sustainable Development Goals.
Even more hazardous is the historic record: countries in which corporations have invested have failed to control these corporations. In every case, the corporations succeeded in imposing their own agenda, causing economic distortions and, indeed perversions, with resulting impoverishment of massive sectors of the populations in each case.
There is little reason for hope or assurance that the UN will or can maintain independence of corporate control, and like the frog who is boiled to death, as the temperature of its bath is raised so stealthily that it remains oblivious to its own peril, before it is able to leap out of its boiling bath to save its own life, it has already been boiled to death.
In a personal conversation with brilliant UN Deputy-Secretary General Amina Mohammed she mentioned her awareness that there will have to be a paradigm shift in the global economic system to avert a looming crisis. The UN SDG’s are an almost pathetic attempt to acknowledge and address this crisis. Multiple expert sources offer dismal predictions: The organization “Social Progress Imperative,” predicts that the SDG’s “If current trends continue the world will not achieve these goals until 2073.”
In 2009 Stjepan Mesic, former President of the Republic of Croatia addressed the UN General Assembly stating:
“Our world is, finally, still dominated by an economic model which is self-evidently exhausted and has now reached a stage where it is itself generating crises, causing hardship to thousands and hundreds of thousands of people. If one attempts to save this already obsolete model at any cost, of one stubbornly defends a system based on greed and devoid of any social note worthy of mention, the result can be only one: social unrest harbouring the potential to erupt into social insurgence on a global scale.”
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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.
I only listened to a small part of the Greta Thunberg‘s U.S. congressional hearings this morning but was rather stupefied by the general ignorance and hubris of several of the U.S. commentators. Two main ideas stood out for the short period during which I listened to several U.S. government speakers and the commonality behind the two ideas – other than climate change – is that the U.S. has cause and effect backwards.
Climate change does not threaten the economy
First off is the idea that climate change is a “threat” to the economy (everything is a “threat” in the U.S. but climate change is a real one and an existing one). Sorry, that is wrong as the chain of cause and effect would posit that the economy is a threat to the climate. It is our consumer oriented capitalist economy that is destroying the environment, the whole environment and not just climate. It has poisoned land, sea, and air. It has destroyed forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, coral reefs and many other features.
One representative held up a chart purportedly showing that since 1970, the U.S. economy has grown enormously (as per GDP, a highly manipulated number in itself) while carbon output has decreased. I have not fact checked that and it may well be true, but the unstated reality is that after 1970 much of the U.S. industrial production, and much of its agricultural production was outsourced to other countries where cheap labour, poor environmental standards and poor working conditions combined with IMF “structural adjustment programs” promoted corruption in other countries while promoting the harvesting of cash crops for U.S. consumption and the harvesting of other resources in order to maintain their own technologically “clean” society.
Another much younger pundit argued that innovation was the way to go, not deconstructing the economy. That would be nice it had a chance of succeeding, but in a capitalist society the money will remain on the big ticket items, most of which rely on a combination of the above mentioned environmental outsourcing and our continual artificial demand for more and more consumer products and unnecessary creature comforts.
Climate change does not threaten “national security”
The idea that climate change does not threaten security is a hard one for the U.S. and other western nations to swallow. As the foremost militarized nation in the world, and as stated by the New York Times mouthpiece Thomas Friedman, it is the U.S. military that is the “hidden hand” of the military that supports U.S. corporate endeavours around the world. That hand is no longer hidden but is very much exposed – in reality it always has been for those that have understood U.S. history – especially since 9/11 and the consequent foreign wars and domestic surveillance and control.
National security as practiced by the U.S. is one of the major threats to the climate and the environment in general, including the lives of tens of millions around the world. “Security” means maintaining the largest institutional user of carbon products in the world, the U.S. military. “Security” means protecting dictators and monarchs who help the U.S. military industrial complex control the usage of the almighty petrodollar for without oil products bought and sold globally using the US$ that same dollar would collapse. “Security” means threatening and attacking anyone who tries to not use the US$ for its transactions with other countries as witnessed by many countries recently – Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Syria.
It is also why the “security” state is making so much noise about Russia and China, threatening and acting against them in mostly economic sanction terms, but also in indirect military terms. Fortunately, not withstanding any problems China and Russia may have domestically, they both are creating a multipolar world in which the U.S. “security” vis a vis its military-financial empire is being contained and restrained. While that is not the answer to global climate change, it does create opportunities if dealt with wisely (I know, not likely with the ignorance and hubris of the U.S. and their allies) for climate and the environment to be dealt with more constructively.
Yes, climate change is a threat
It is true that there are threats arising from climate change. But we need to recognize that it is not climate threatening the economy or security, but it is the imperial security state and the economy that is destroying the climate and the overall environment. Of the many species bound for extinction, our current societal structures are helping determine that homo sapiens will be one of the species facing extinction.
Greta Thunberg is to be commended for speaking a simple truth to power. Unfortunately for her and current and future generations of young people, the inertia of society, and the ignorance as demonstrated by the reversal of the “threat” idiom as indicated by the U.S. congress, the path ahead will be very difficult.
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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
These genocide warnings concern current threats to the peoples of Cameroon1, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi. Beyond the primary concern for all the people in national groups, a pattern is emerging globally which should remind North Americans of past genocides against native American peoples: the masses of people forced from their homelands, the refugee camps which are meant to both save and contain the displaced, the senseless killing of civilians, the slaughter by hunger, arms and disease which lower the population numbers, and the relentless attack on native cultures to incapacitate the will to resist. The inability to recognize genocide at home limits the ability to understand other contemporary genocides in progress.
After a massive loss of life in Rwanda, Libya, and Ivory Coast where the old leadership was removed by war and these were wars won by forces with Euro-American support, there’s an increased sensitivity to the early warnings of war such as destabilization. These population losses in Africa have followed the extreme example presented by the destruction of Iraq and its infrastructure by bombs and missiles. The process of replacing uncooperative government leaders with tractable puppets was and is a disaster for each person of the millions displaced, forced into exile, in mourning for all those lost whether to armed violence, or sickness and hunger.
In areas of Africa with increasingly high numbers of displaced persons we’re likely to find the covert hand of colonialism reasserting its need for corporate profits. The current news from Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi, lends insight into how and why genocides do occur or could occur., while the challenge of understanding is to stop them.
1. Cameroon2
Concerned with the increasing violence and repression in Cameroon the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michele Bachelet visited the country last May to meet with government ministers, opposition leaders, and Cameroon’s President Biya who assured full cooperation with the UN on issues of Human Rights.
To summarize the situation: 20% of the French speaking country is Anglophone, and the sparse public services are particularly diminished for the English-speaking areas. A portion of Anglophone leaders support secession of an English speaking region, of an Anglophone state, Ambazonia, abutting Nigeria. Not far from the inland portion of Ambazonia, in Nigeria, begins Boko Haram territory. Since about 2009 Boko Haram, a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group, worked northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and Chad.
A Boko Haram military tactic was and is, reprisal, answering occasional military defeats with wiping out rural Christian villages in Cameroon. In Cameroon the government responded with an ongoing low intensity conflict to protect the area’s Muslim and Christian population. Cameroon’s forces became veterans of war against a military known for atrocities and kidnapping young women and entire schools.
In 2015 Boko Haram pledged allegiance to a larger Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group, ISIS, known for its atrocities in Syria and Iraq.
In 2016 Cameroon’s Anglophone lawyers whose rights were not well-respected, chose to go on strike. The nonviolent strike was joined by Anglophone teachers and students. Responding with military force and arrests the government imprisoned a number of lawyers to try for treason, which led to more violence. When forced to extremes the struggle for Anglophone rights made people choose sides. The result suggests it’s better not to force language struggles to extremes.
In 2017 Ambazonia declared itself a separate Anglophone country which initiated its own defense forces, militias etc. The region’s educational system was / is periodically shut down with threats effected against those who try to teach or attend school. The Cameroon government’s police stations are burned, government police dismembered, government forces engaged. Human rights violations by government forces were / are brutal and recurring. The separatist Ambazonian leader, Julius Sisiku Ayuk Tabe was recently sentenced to life in prison which occasioned more violence and military reprisal. About half a million people have left their homes in Cameroon.
On August 26th 2019, Lawyers Rights Watch Canada3 with the support of two human rights NGOs, presented a statement4 to the United Nations Human Rights Council noting crimes by Cameroon’s government against the country’s Anglophone minority, as well as responsive “violent acts” against the government. The statement requests international concern and encourages international action to prevent “further mass atrocities.” It asks the Government of Cameroon to end its violence and investigate the human rights abuses. The statement relies on and furthers the evidence and guide supplied by the report, “Cameroon’s Unfolding Catastrophe: Evidence of Human Rights Violations and Crimes against Humanity,”5 authored by the two NGOs supporting the statement.
What can be said for Paul Biya’s dictatorial democracy and rule for 36 years, is that in 2018 he was supported by 70% of the voters (Anglophone parties refused to vote). UN News reports “Cameroon is also hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Central African Republic and Nigeria,”6 And Paul Biya has allowed Cameroon to survive without the epidemics, starvation, aggressions, war, massacres or genocide, which have tormented many African countries since their Independences from colonial rule in the 1960s.
Until 2016 found the government’s military forces suddenly engaged on two fronts – against ISIS in the far North and Anglophone militias in the West. Few journalists or reports mention both fronts in the same article and for example, LRWC’s multi NGO statement to the Human Rights Council addresses only the Anglophone problem. This is also true of the NGO jointly authored “Report.” Neither mentions that the country is engaged in a war.
There is no mention at all in the LRWC statement or the “Report,” of Northern Cameroon’s Christian communities. When these are targeted by Boko Haram / ISIS they’re wiped out. Fulani tribesmen are also blamed for the attacks. With last July’s attacks on villages 1100 additional families were displaced.7 A Bible translator was killed, his wife’s left hand cut off. The rainy season until October makes it hard for government troops to deploy to villages. Christian sources note that across the border in Nigeria “Tens of thousands have died over the last 20 years.”8 Last November in Bamenda 80 students were kidnapped from the Presbyterian school, not by ISIS but Ambazonian separatists.9 Generally the region’s Muslims and Christians get along. In mid-August Bishop George Nkuo of Kumbo in the northwest made a plea to end the conflict and within hours two priests were kidnapped.10
The U.S. which provided military aid to Cameroon’s fight against ISIS has reacted to reports of the military’s human rights violations by withdrawing aid. The rights violations against Anglophones receive international coverage. Cameroon is only twenty percent Anglophone so Anglophone and Ambazonian leaders have encouraged intervention by outside forces.
Is Anglophone strategy to initiate conflict that would require outside intervention? This pattern of gaining outside support and cutting in foreign interests was followed in Cote d’Ivoire and led to the current head of state Alassane Ouattara ‘s victory. The Christian group revolutionary leader was replaced with a Muslim group’s former World Bank employee and friend of France’s Nicholas Sarkozy more friendly to French business interests.
Since LRWC, CHRDA and RWCHR are lobbying the UN Human Rights Council to encourage intervention in Cameroon, shouldn’t we know more about them?
Lawyers Rights Watch Canada affirms the rights of lawyers globally and addresses points of international law. Logically it would have to address Anglophone lawyers’ evidence of their government’s persecution.
LRWC is joined by the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA)11 with offices in Cameroon and the U.S. CHRDA was founded in 2017 by the Cameroon Anglophone attorney, Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongo, who has studied at universities in Cameroon, Nigeria, the U.S. (Notre Dame), Brussells and Leipzig. He has worked in human rights for the U.N.. When imprisoned for treason during the 2016 lawyers’ strike in Cameroon, the Ontario Bar and the U.S. RFK Human Rights NGO and his former professor at Notre Dame among others, protested until he was released. An eloquent lobbyist for the Anglophone cause in Cameroon his NGO encourages “democracy” for all African peoples. He’s among the original lawyers who misjudged the regime’s response which resulted in Cameroon’s 2016 destabilization.
The third NGO presenting the UN with encouragement to intervene is the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) founded by former Canadian Minister of Parliament / Minister of Justice, expert on international law, Professor Irwin Cotler. Both Cotler and Nkongo introduce the “Report” on Cameroon.
With its roots in WWII’s Holocaust of European Jewry RWCHR is a heavy hitter for human rights. And like many Canadian human rights NGOs it is…sanctified. But it takes political rather than moral stands. For example this NGO has declared the BDS movement anti-Semitic and it generally supports Israel politically. According to Wikipedia RWCHR recently advised Canada’s government that Venezuela’s President Maduro is responsible for war crimes. RWCHR attempted to persuade European Parliament to take the Venezuelan government to International Criminal Court. RWCHR is providing legal representation for Venezuela’s opposition leader, Leopoldo Eduardo López Mendoza. And the NGO was very supportive in the referral of Venezuela to the International Criminal Court made by members of the Organization of American States. In any case, RWCHR’s position aligns with U.S. and Canadian government policy in the attempt to take over a sovereign nation, Venezuela. The NGO is apparently not against aggressive Euro-American takeover of a sovereign state.
To consider Cameroon then, the media haven’t noticed that the Boko Haram / ISIS attacks on Cameroon complement the interests of the Ambazonia secessionists, and vice versa. Both destabilize the State and so encourage outside intervention. A supplier of Ambazonian arms is found to be an Anglophone leader (Marshall Foncha, chair of the Ambazonia Military Council) living in the United States12. Other Ambazonian arms are sourced from English speaking Nigeria. Boko Haram / ISIS is said to steal its sometimes advanced weaponry from Nigerian military and security forces. But there’s also verified evidence that ISIS is supported in Yemen by both the U.S. and Israel.13 Is Boko Haram /ISIS at the service of foreign interests in the destabilization of Nigeria and Cameroon?
Why did the leaders of the Anglophone movement initiate strikes and secession at a time when the country’s resources were strained by refugees, and when villagers of Cameroon were beng massacred by foreign forces? The more uncompromising Anglophone leadership is, the more inevitable the armed conflict in a country where 41% of the population has malaria14 and Médecins Sans Frontières has warned of a cholera epidemic in the north.15
On September 10th President Biya ordered his government to start a “national dialogue” to resolve the language conflict and he asked foreign nations to stop Cameroon’s diaspora from furthering the violence which is increasing in his country.16
2. The Democratic Republic of Congo17
Neo-colonial inroads in the Democratic Republic of Congo are seen in the overt resource exploitation of the country’s East and terrible cost in human lives and displaced people, refugees and exiles. Death toll from the First and Second Congo Wars (1996-2003) could be as high as 6.2 million people. UNHCR the UN Refugee Agency in 2017 estimated 4.5 million displaced people within the country and in 2019, 856,043 hosted in other African countries.
Currently18 the DRC is suffering an Ebola epidemic which continues the depopulation of a resource rich region. The epidemic demands cooperation with countries which are otherwise stripping the country’s resources and with the United Nations World Health Organization. WHO has become entirely necessary globally to counter epidemics, plagues and biological warfare. It also provides and distributes pharmaceuticals.
As the number of Ebola cases passes 3000 (2000 deaths) two new pharmaceutical treatments for Ebola are being applied in the Congo without massive pre-testing: REGN-EB3 and mAb114. These are proving at least 90% effective on application19. Fears of the lack of containment of Ebola in the city of Goma were eased by the announcement of success in the trials of new drugs. The new drugs use monoclonal antibodies to directly attack the Ebola virus. Testing of two less successful drugs was dropped. The difference in fatalities among various drug testing programs may have added to the anxiety of those withholding their trust in the doctors administering products of different pharmaceutical companies. Uganda is testing another drug (Jansen pharmaceuticals) on 685 Ugandans and expects the results to show them how long the drug’s effectiveness will last. A follow-up study for those receiving anti-Ebola medication during the West African epidemic in 2013-2016 found an abnormally high rate of subsequent kidney disease, re-hospitalization and death.20
As of September the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention has 30 responders working in the DRC. The CDC is overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) which is providing the pharmaceutical producer Merck 23 million dollars (in addition to the 176 million already invested in the inoculative drug), toward doses of an Ebola vaccine it hopes will obtain licensing.21
Unlike the Ebola epidemic the efforts to combat measles have received only 2.5 million dollars of the 8.9 million required.22 In the world’s largest outbreak of measles currently, from January through August 2019, the disease killed 2700 children in the DRC, among the 145,000 infected. Médecins Sans Frontières has been able to vaccinate 474,863 children.
Faced with terrifying biological challenges endangered countries could become entirely reliant on the Euro-American pharmaceutical companies which can provide the cures, or lose portions of their populations.
The purpose of the Euro-American corporations is profit. Curative drugs and vaccines can be extremely expensive or withheld. Historically, disease (smallpox and tuberculosis) was used in North America in the genocide of North Americans. Slow to admit the practice of genocide at home, North Americans are reluctant to question the possibilities of contemporary application.
Corporate and government agency transparency is necessary. Information about contemporary U.S. biological warfare and disease experiments rarely reaches the public. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention monitored the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from 1957 until 1972 when a whistleblower exposed it to the newspapers. The experiment studied impoverished African American sharecroppers with syphilis who weren’t told they had the disease and were denied treatment. During the Vietnam war the U.S. Army experimented with release of bacteria in the New York City subways as one of 239 biological warfare experiments nationally in its covert testing from 1949 to 1969.
Ebola was first recognized in 1976, in South Sudan and in the same year, in the Congo Belge / Zaire / DRC. It is a hemorrhagic fever virus extremely similar to the Marburg virus and the CDC considers both Category A Bioterrorism Agents. The Marburg virus first appeared in a Marburg German laboratory in 1967.23
3. Burundi24
The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Burundi has issued a report25 which states conditions exist in Burundi which lead to genocide. Conditions weren’t good last year and are worse now. As many as 400,000 have fled into exile.The UN has suspected the possibility of genocide occurring in Burundi for several years now. The Government of Burundi doesn’t agree.
In a health emergency not noted by the world’s press the Voice of America reported in 2017 that according to the WHO in 2016, 73 percent of Burundians were affected by malaria.26 Others say at least half the 11 million population of Burundi has malaria which is the leading cause of death. The disease is usually countered with pharmaceuticals but Burundi is the 2nd poorest country in the world.
The Voice of America blames Burundi’s violence and unrest on President Nkurunziza’s decision in 2015 to run for a third term which may have countered the country’s constitutional law. A similar instance of President Kagame’s third term in Rwanda didn’t bother the U.S.. Burundi’s government tends to blame the unrest on Kagame and Tutsi controlled Rwanda. Hutu controlled Burundi shows a Hutu / Tutsi ratio of 85% / 15%. Rwanda thinks Burundi is hiding Hutu participants in Rwanda’s genocide.
Burundi’s government isn’t convinced by the UN’s good intentions and has denied UN investigators access. Burundi does have a history of events which could be defined as tribal warfare, civil wars, or genocides. If the incipient divisions are forced to extremes as they were in Rwanda it would likely be caused by exterior destabilization.
It could be argued that outside pressures forced the destabilization of Rwanda to the point of genocide in 1994. These should be noted by any monitoring of Burundi. Both Rwanda and Burundi of similar culture and language have dealt with the simplicities of tribal difference for over 500 years. One could argue that the responsibility for any contemporary genocide could only rest with “First World” interference, supplying armaments and taking sides to its own advantage. Burundi’s national language is African, Kirundi.
US / UN support for the Kagame Tutsi government’s official narrative of the Rwandan Genocide has both ignored and denied the genocide of Hutu during the recognized genocide of Tutsi at Kagame’s takeover of Rwanda, to the point of imprisoning those who have attempted to memorialize Hutu victims.
The UN report on Burundi includes without specifically identifying covert programs, the threat of foreign attempts to intervene in the country’s politics and elections. With elections approaching next year the foreign media has stepped up its attacks on the present government. The BBC and Voice of America are no longer licensed to operate in Burundi. Since 2015 the European Union and US have applied selective sanctions to the country so Burundi has closed down all foreign NGOs. The Anglican Church of Burundi at work in the region since the 1930s is still able to provide its health, educational, environmental, community and religious services and programs.
International pressure for intervention in Burundi began as early as November 2016.27 By January 11, 2017 Night’s Lantern notes:28 : “the government cabinet Minister of the Environment has been assassinated. This continues a lethal back and forth between the government and its opposition, which threatens the region with a lapse into violence. Euro-American policies suggest military intervention to preclude the possibility of a genocide (see previous), an intervention likely to lead to corporatization of the country’s assets. This is a strong factor encouraging a genocide. Calls for intervention have coincided with major mining contracts gained by Russian and Chinese companies. Destabilization is encouraged by the privatization of Burundi’s coffee industry at the insistence of the World Bank; private interests have delayed delivery of pesticides and fertilizers; the crop and industry have been damaged. The Parliament of Burundi has had to place controls on international NGO’s in Burundi who are considered to support rebels against Burundi’s President Nikurunziza. Burundi has also withdrawn from the International Criminal Court so the Euro-American human rights industry is not well disposed toward President Nikurunziza and any non-African reporting on Burundi should require multiple verification. The attempt to wrest political power from African leaders who are uncooperative with US/NATO corporate takeovers is familiar.”
Night’s Lantern has noted Burundi’s people as a national group under genocide warning since 2015. The UN report’s conclusion places an additional genocide warning for the people. To avoid interference by corporate interests Burundi’s government will have to be angelic in resisting attempts to subvert it. If the society continues to break down and a genocide is initiated will it be Burundians who are responsible?
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Notes
1 Although a Francophone country, “La république du Cameroun,” Western institutions, media and NGOs insist on the English spelling -“Cameroon.”
2 The author’s previous considerations of Cameroon are linked from Night’s Lantern “Genocide warnings,” http://www.nightslantern.ca/02.htm#cam.
3 To maintain transparency: although not involved with its response to this issue the author is a non-lawyer member of LRWC and supports many of LRWC’s statements and position papers for the Human Rights Council.
4 “Human rights Catastrophe in Cameroon.” “Written statement* submitted by Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status,” A/HRC/42/Ngo/1, Aug. 21, 2019. Human Rights Council 42nd Session 9-27September 2019.
5 “Cameroon’s Unfolding Catastrophe” Evidence of Human Rights Violations and Crimes against Humanity,” June 3, 2019, Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa & Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
6 “Cameroon: Clear ‘window of opportunity’ to solve crises rooted in violence – Bachelet,” May 6, 2019, UN News.
7 “Boko Haram displaces Thousands in Northern Cameroon,” July 23, 2019, Persecution.
8 “Nigeria is the biggest killing ground of Christians today,” current / Sept. 14, 2019, Persecution.
9 “The political conflict in Cameroon threatens the freedom of Christians,” Jonatán Soriano, Dec. 5, 2018, Evangelical Focus.
10 “Cameroon bishop: ‘I am not safe; after speaking out against conflict,” Crux staff, Aug. 20, 2019, Crux.
11 This should not be confused with the United Nations Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Central Africa (CHRDCA) – headquartered in Cameroon’s capital, which is the regional office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
12 “Cameroon’s Separatist Movement Is Going International,” Gareth Browne, May 13, 2019, Foreign Policy.
13 “The Smoking Gun in the Islamic State Conspiracy: Documents Prove US Arming Islamic State,” Gearóid Ó Colmáin, Sept. 5, 2019, American Herald Tribune.
14 “Chinese Mosquito Coils Breaking Grounds in Malaria Control in Cameroon,” Sept. 15, 2019, Journal du Cameroun.com.
15 “Project Update,” Aug. 21, 2019, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
16 “Cameroon: Biya Orders Immediate Dialogue to Solve Cameroon’s Problems,” Moki Edwin Kindzeka, Sept. 11, 2019, Voice of America.
17 The author’s previous considerations of the Democratic Republic of Congo are linked from Night’s Lantern “Genocide Warnings,” http://www.nightslantern.ca/02.htm#co
18 Suppressed News: Democratic Republic of Congo, July 17, 2019, Night’s Lantern http://www.nightslantern.ca/2019bulletin.htm#jul17drc.
19 “New Ebola Drugs Show Exciting Promise With Up to 90 Percent Cure Rate,” Global Information Network, Aug. 14, 2019, Black Agenda Report.
20 “Ebola survivors may face increased risk of death after hospitalization,” Chris Galford, Sept. 6, 2019, Home Preparedness News.
On Saturday, September 14th, two oil refineries and other oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia were hit and set ablaze by 18 drones and 7 cruise missiles, dramatically slashing Saudi Arabia’s oil production by half, from about ten million to five million barrels per day. On September 18, the Trump administration, blaming Iran, announced it was imposing more sanctions on Iran and voices close to Donald Trump are calling for military action. But this attack should lead to just the opposite response: urgent calls for an immediate end to the war in Yemen and an end to US economic warfare against Iran.
The question of the origin of the attack is still under dispute. The Houthi government in Yemen immediately took responsibility. This is not the first time the Houthis have brought the conflict directly onto Saudi soil as they resist the constant Saudi bombardment of Yemen. Last year, Saudi officials said they had intercepted more than 100 missiles fired from Yemen.
This is, however, the most spectacular and sophisticated attack to date. The Houthis claim they got help from within Saudi Arabia itself, stating that this operation “came after an accurate intelligence operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men within the Kingdom.”
This most likely refers to Shia Saudis in the Eastern Province, where the bulk of Saudi oil facilities are located. Shia Muslims, who make up an estimated 15-20 percent of the population in this Sunni-dominated country, have faced discrimination for decades and have a history of uprisings against the regime. So it is plausible that some members of the Shia community inside the kingdom may have provided intelligence or logistical support for the Houthi attack, or even helped Houthi forces to launch missiles or drones from inside Saudi Arabia.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, however, immediately blamed Iran, noting that that the air strikes hit the west and north-west sides of the oil facilities, not the the south side that faces toward Yemen. But Iran is not to the west or northwest either – it is to the northeast. In any case, which part of the facilities were hit does not necessarily have any bearing on which direction the missiles or drones were launched from. Iran strongly denies conducting the attack.
CNN reported that Saudi and US investigators claim “with very high probability” that the attack was launched from an Iranian base in Iran close to the border with Iraq, but that neither the U.S. nor Saudi Arabia has produced any evidence to support these claims.
But in the same report, CNN reported that missile fragments found at the scene appeared to be from Quds-1 missiles, an Iranian model that the Houthis unveiled in July under the slogan, “The Coming Period of Surprises,” and which they may have used in a strike on Abha Airport in southern Saudi Arabia in June.
A Saudi Defence Ministry press briefing on Wednesday, September 18th, told the world’s press that the wreckage of missiles based on Iranian designs proves Iranian involvement in the attack, and that the cruise missiles flew from the north, but the Saudis could not yet give details of where they were launched from.
Also on Wednesday, President Trump announced that he has ordered the U.S. Treasury Department to “substantially” increase its sanctions against Iran. But existing U.S. sanctions already place such huge obstacles in the way of Iranian oil exports and imports of food, medicine and other consumer products that it is hard to imagine what further pain these new sanctions can possibly inflict on the besieged people of Iran.
U.S. allies have been slow to accept the U.S. claims that Iran launched the attack. Japan’s Defense Minister told reporters “we believe the Houthis carried out the attack based on the statement claiming responsibility.” The United Arab Emirates (UAE) expressed frustration that the U.S. was so quick to point its finger at Iran.
Tragically, this is how U.S. administrations of both parties have responded to such incidents in recent years, seizing any pretext to demonize and threaten their enemies and keep the American public psychologically prepared for war.
If Iran provided the Houthis with weapons or logistical support for this attack, this would represent but a tiny fraction of the bottomless supply of weapons and logistical support that the U.S. and its European allies have provided to Saudi Arabia. In 2018 alone, the Saudi military budget was $67.6 billion, making it the world’s third-highest spender on weapons and military forces after the U.S. and China.
Under the laws of war, the Yemenis are perfectly entitled to defend themselves. That would include striking back at the oil facilities that produce the fuel for Saudi warplanes that have conducted over 17,000 air raids, dropping at least 50,000 mostly U.S.-made bombs and missiles, throughout more than four long years of war on Yemen. The resulting humanitarian crisis also kills a Yemeni child every 10 minutes from preventable diseases, starvation and malnutrition.
The Yemen Data Project has classified nearly a third of the Saudi air strikes as attacks on non-military sites, which ensure that a large proportion of at least 90,000 Yemenis reported killed in the war have been civilians. This makes the Saudi-led air campaign a flagrant and systematic war crime for which Saudi leaders and senior officials of every country in their “coalition” should be held criminally accountable.
That would include President Obama, who led the U.S. into the war in 2015, and President Trump, who has kept the U.S. in this coalition even as its systematic atrocities have been exposed and shocked the whole world.
The Houthis’ newfound ability to strike back at the heart of Saudi Arabia could be a catalyst for peace, if the world can seize this opportunity to convince the Saudis and the Trump administration that their horrific, failed war is not worth the price they will have to pay to keep fighting it. But if we fail to seize this moment, it could instead be the prelude to a much wider war.
So, for the sake of the starving and dying people of Yemen and the people of Iran suffering under the “maximum pressure” of U.S. economic sanctions, as well as the future of our own country and the world, this is a pivotal moment.
If the U.S. military, or Israel or Saudi Arabia, had a viable plan to attack Iran without triggering a wider war, they would have done so long ago. We must tell Trump, Congressional leaders and all our elected representatives that we reject another war and that we understand how easily any U.S. attack on Iran could quickly spiral into an uncontainable and catastrophic regional or world war.
President Trump has said he is waiting for the Saudis to tell him who they hold responsible for these strikes, effectively placing the U.S. armed forces at the command of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has conducted U.S. foreign policy as a puppet of both Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, making a mockery of his “America First” political rhetoric. As Rep. Tulsi Gabbardquipped,
“Having our country act as Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not ‘America First.’”
Senator Bernie Sanders has issued a statement that Trump has no authorization from Congress for an attack on Iran and at least 14 other Members of Congress have made similar statements, including his fellow presidential candidates Senator Warren and Congresswoman Gabbard.
Congress already passed a War Powers Resolution to end U.S. complicity in the Saudi-led war on Yemen, but Trump vetoed it. The House has revived the resolution and attached it as an amendment to the FY2020 NDAA military budget bill. If the Senate agrees to keep that provision in the final bill, it will present Trump with a choice between ending the U.S. role in the war in Yemen or vetoing the entire 2020 U.S. military budget.
If Congress successfully reclaims its constitutional authority over the US role in this conflict, it could be a critical turning point in ending the state of permanent war that the U.S. has inflicted on itself and the world since 2001.
If Americans fail to speak out now, we may discover too late that our failure to rein in our venal, warmongering ruling class has led us to the brink of World War III. We hope this crisis will instead awaken the sleeping giant, the too silent majority of peace-loving Americans, to speak up decisively for peace and force Trump to put the interests and the will of the American people above those of his unscrupulous allies.
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We are the Houthis and we’re coming to town. With the spectacular attack on Abqaiq, Yemen’s Houthis have overturned the geopolitical chessboard in Southwest Asia – going as far as introducing a whole new dimension: the distinct possibility of investing in a push to drive the House of Saud out of power.
Blowback is a bitch. Houthis – Zaidi Shiites from northern Yemen – and Wahhabis have been at each other’s throats for ages. This book is absolutely essential to understand the mind-boggling complexity of Houthi tribes; as a bonus, it places the turmoil in southern Arabian lands way beyond a mere Iran-Saudi proxy war.
Still, it’s always important to consider that Arab Shiites in the Eastern province – working in Saudi oil installations – have got to be natural allies of the Houthis fighting against Riyadh.
Houthi striking capability – from drone swarms to ballistic missile attacks – has been improving remarkably for the past year or so. It’s not by accident that the UAE saw which way the geopolitical and geoeconomic winds were blowing: Abu Dhabi withdrew from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s vicious war against Yemen and now is engaged in what it describes as a “peace-first” strategy.
Even before Abqaiq, the Houthis had already engineered quite a few attacks against Saudi oil installations as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In early July, Yemen’s Operations Command Center staged an exhibition in full regalia in Sana’a featuring their whole range of ballistic and winged missiles and drones.
The Saudi Ministry of Defense displays drones and parts from missiles used in the refinery attack.
The situation has now reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl – that’s why they rely on mercenaries.
Orientalism strikes again
The US intel refrain that the Houthis are incapable of such a sophisticated attack betrays the worst strands of orientalism and white man’s burden/superiority complex.
The only missile parts shown by the Saudis so far come from a Yemeni Quds 1 cruise missile. According to Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Sana’a-based Yemeni Armed Forces,
“the Quds system proved its great ability to hit its targets and to bypass enemy interceptor systems.”
This satellite overview handout image from the US government shows damage to oil/gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaiq.
“This operation is one of the largest operations carried out by our forces in the depth of Saudi Arabia, and came after an accurate intelligence operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men within the Kingdom.”
Notice the key concept: “cooperation” from inside Saudi Arabia – which could include the whole spectrum from Yemenis to that Eastern province Shiites.
Even more relevant is the fact that massive American hardware deployed in Saudi Arabia inside out and outside in – satellites, AWACS, Patriot missiles, drones, battleships, jet fighters – didn’t see a thing, or certainly not in time. The sighting of three “loitering” drones by a Kuwaiti bird hunter arguably heading towards Saudi Arabia is being invoked as “evidence”. Cue to the embarrassing picture of a drone swarm – wherever it came from – flying undisturbed for hours over Saudi territory.
UN officials openly admit that now everything that matters is within the 1,500 km range of the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone: oil fields in Saudi Arabia, a still-under-construction nuclear power plant in the Emirates and Dubai’s mega-airport.
My conversations with sources in Tehran over the past two years have ascertained that the Houthis’ new drones and missiles are essentially copies of Iranian designs assembled in Yemen itself with crucial help from Hezbollah engineers.
US intel insists that 17 drones and cruise missiles were launched in combination from southern Iran. In theory, Patriot radar would have picked that up and knocked the drones/missiles from the sky. So far, absolutely no record of this trajectory has been revealed. Military experts generally agree that the radar on the Patriot missile is good, but itssuccess rate is “disputed” – to say the least. What’s important, once again, is that the Houthis do have advanced offensive missiles. And their pinpoint accuracy at Abqaiq was uncanny.
This satellite overview handout image shows damage to oil/gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia. Courtesy of Planet Labs Inc
For now, it appears that the winner of the US/UK-supported House of One Saudi war on the civilian Yemeni population, which started in March 2015 and generated a humanitarian crisis the UN regards as having been of biblical proportions, is certainly not the crown prince, widely known as MBS.
Listen to the general
Crude oil stabilization towers – several of them – at Abqaiq were specifically targeted, along with natural gas storage tanks. Persian Gulf energy sources have been telling me repairs and/or rebuilding could last months. Even Riyadh admitted as much.
Blindly blaming Iran, with no evidence, does not cut it. Tehran can count on swarms of top strategic thinkers. They do not need or want to blow up Southwest Asia, which is something they could do, by the way: Revolutionary Guards generals have already said many times on the record that they are ready for war.
Professor Mohammad Marandi from the University of Tehran, who has very close relations with the Foreign Ministry, is adamant: “It didn’t come from Iran. If it did, it would be very embarrassing for the Americans, showing they are unable to detect a large number of Iranian drones and missiles. That doesn’t make sense.”
Marandi additionally stresses, “Saudi air defenses are not equipped to defend the country from Yemen but from Iran. The Yemenis have been striking against the Saudis, they are getting better and better, developing drone and missile technology for four and a half years, and this was a very soft target.”
A soft – and unprotected – target: the US PAC-2 and PAC-3 systems in place are all oriented towards the east, in the direction of Iran. Neither Washington nor Riyadh knows for sure where the drone swarm/missiles really came from.
Readers should pay close attention to this groundbreaking interview with General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force. The interview, in Farsi (with English subtitles), was conducted by US-sanctioned Iranian intellectual Nader Talebzadeh and includes questions forwarded by my US analyst friends Phil Giraldi and Michael Maloof and myself.
Explaining Iranian self-sufficiency in its defense capabilities, Hajizadeh sounds like a very rational actor. The bottom line: “Our view is that neither American politicians nor our officials want a war. If an incident like the one with the drone [the RQ-4N shot down by Iran in June] happens or a misunderstanding happens, and that develops into a larger war, that’s a different matter. Therefore we are always ready for a big war.”
In response to one of my questions, on what message the Revolutionary Guards want to convey, especially to the US, Hajizadeh does not mince his words: “In addition to the US bases in various regions like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Emirates and Qatar, we have targeted all naval vessels up to a distance of 2,000 kilometers and we are constantly monitoring them. They think that if they go to a distance of 400 km, they are out of our firing range. Wherever they are, it only takes one spark, we hit their vessels, their airbases, their troops.”
Get your S-400s or else
On the energy front, Tehran has been playing a very precise game under pressure – selling loads of oil by turning off the transponders of their tankers as they leave Iran and transferring the oil at sea, tanker to tanker, at night, and relabeling their cargo as originating at other producers for a price. I have been checking this for weeks with my trusted Persian Gulf traders – and they all confirm it. Iran could go on doing it forever.
Of course, the Trump administration knows it. But the fact is they are looking the other way. To state it as concisely as possible: they are caught in a trap by the absolute folly of ditching the JCPOA, and they are looking for a face-saving way out. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned the administration in so many words: the US should return to the agreement it reneged on before it’s too late.
And now for the really hair-raising part.
The strike at Abqaiq shows that the entire Middle East production of over 18 million barrels of oil a day – including Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – can be easily knocked out. There is zero adequate defense against these drones and missiles.
Well, there’s always Russia.
Here’s what happened at the press conference after the Ankara summit this week on Syria, uniting Presidents Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan.
Question: Will Russia provide Saudi Arabia with any help or support in restoring its infrastructure?
President Putin: As for assisting Saudi Arabia, it is also written in the Quran that violence of any kind is illegitimate except when protecting one’s people. In order to protect them and the country, we are ready to provide the necessary assistance to Saudi Arabia. All the political leaders of Saudi Arabia have to do is take a wise decision, as Iran did by buying the S-300 missile system, and as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did when he bought Russia’s latest S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft system. They would offer reliable protection for any Saudi infrastructure facilities.
President Hassan Rouhani: So do they need to buy the S-300 or the S-400?
President Vladimir Putin: It is up to them to decide [laughs].
In The Transformation of War, Martin van Creveld actually predicted that the whole industrial-military-security complex would come crumbling down when it was exposed that most of its weapons are useless against fourth-generation asymmetrical opponents. There’s no question the whole Global South is watching – and will have gotten the message.
Hybrid war, reloaded
Now we are entering a whole new dimension in asymmetric hybrid war.
In the – horrendous – event that Washington would decide to attack Iran, egged on by the usual neocon suspects, the Pentagon could never hope to hit and disable all the Iranian and/or Yemeni drones. The US could expect, for sure, all-out war. And then no ships would sail through the Strait of Hormuz. We all know the consequences of that.
Which brings us to The Big Surprise. The real reason there would be no ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz is that there would be no oil in the Gulf left to pump. The oil fields, having been bombed, would be burning.
So we’re back to the realistic bottom line, which has been stressed by not only Moscow and Beijing but also Paris and Berlin: US President Donald Trump gambled big time, and he lost. Now he must find a face-saving way out. If the War Party allows it.
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This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
All images in this article are from Asia Times unless otherwise stated
“The more things change, the more they stay the same”, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, (Les Guêpes, July 1848)
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President Donald Trump’s acting national security adviser, former Reagan administration official Charles Kupperman, made an extraordinary and controversial claim in the early 1980s: nuclear conflict with the USSR was winnable and that “nuclear war is a destructive thing but still in large part a physics problem.”
Kupperman’s suggestion that the U.S. could triumph in a nuclear war went against dominant theories of mutually assured destruction and ignored the long-term destabilizing effects that such hostilities would have on the planet’s health and global politics.
Kupperman, appointed to his new post on Tuesday after Trump fired his John Bolton from the job, argued it was possible to win a nuclear war “in the classical sense,” and that the notion of total destruction stemming from such a superpower conflict was inaccurate. He said that in a scenario in which 20 million people died in the U.S. as opposed to 150 million, the nation could then emerge as the stronger side and prevail in its objectives.
His argument was that with enough planning and civil defense measures, such as “a certain layer of dirt and some reinforced construction materials,” the effects of a nuclear war could be limited and that U.S. would be able to fairly quickly rebuild itself after an all-out conflict with the then-Soviet Union.
“It may take 15 years, but geez, look how long it took Europe to recover after the Second World War,” Kupperman said.
Referring to the Japanese city on which the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb in 1945, he also claimed that
“Hiroshima, after it was bombed, was back and operating three days later.”
At the time, Kupperman was executive director of President Ronald Reagan’s General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. He made the comments during an interview with Robert Scheer for the journalist’s 1982 book, “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War.”
The National Security Council did not immediately respond to questions on whether Kupperman, 68, still holds the same views of nuclear conflict as he did in the early 1980s. Kupperman’s seemingly cavalier attitude toward the potential death of millions of people was criticized at the time both by Democratic politicians and arms control experts.
“It seems reasonable to suggest the crazies are in charge of the nukes,” Jeremy Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists, wrote about Kupperman and his colleagues in 1984.
Contemporary nuclear experts similarly criticize Kupperman’s beliefs as wrongheaded and dangerous.
“Kupperman’s comments might as well have come straight from the script of (the film) ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ He was part of a group of defense analysts at the time who weren’t shy about sharing such views,” said Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, who first noted Kupperman’s views in a Twitter post in January when Kupperman was hired as the deputy national security adviser.
“The simple fact is that a nuclear war can’t be won and must never be fought,” Reif said.
“Kupperman’s comments might as well have come straight from the script of ‘Dr. Strangelove.’”
But rather than being sidelined as a relic of Cold War hubris, Kupperman now holds one of the most powerful positions in the White House. Although his role is temporary, civil rights groups have also already called on him to resign over his extensive ties to the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Muslim think tank founded by conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney is a prominent anti-Muslim activist who repeatedly promoted the conspiracy theories that members of President Barack Obama’s administration were working to enforce Islamic law in the U.S., that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated top levels of government and that Obama was secretly Muslim himself. Kupperman served on the board of directors for Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy between 2001-2010.
“CSP has continuously promoted Islamophobic conspiracy theories, and anyone, like Mr. Kupperman, who has so closely associated with them for so long is ― at the very least ― complicit in their brand of anti-Muslim bigotry and should not be entrusted with one of the highest-ranking security roles in the United States,” Council on American-Islamic Relations Executive Director Nihad Awad said Tuesday.
Before joining the NSA, Kupperman served as an informal adviser to Bolton and worked as a defense industry executive at Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He was a critic of the Iranian nuclear deal and in 2017 co-signed a letter to Trump backing Bolton’s plan to withdraw from the agreement.
Here are excerpts of Kupperman’s comments from his interview with Scheer:
On what kind of life we could visualize after a nuclear attack:
It means that, you know, it would be tough. It would be a struggle to reconstitute the society that we have. It certainly wouldn’t be the same society [as] prior to an exchange, there is no question about that. But in terms of having an organized nation, and having enough means left after the war to reconstitute itself, I think that is entirely possible. It may take 15 years, but geez, look how long it took Europe to recover after the Second World War.
On disagreeing with the Physicians for Social Responsibility organization’s view of nuclear war:
Scheer: But in terms of nuclear war, do you factor in what those doctors were saying?
Kupperman: Yes, that is why I want to have a civil defense system, because it can be very effective in reducing casualties. That is my point. If doctors are so concerned about it, the answer isn’t necessarily disarming the United States or cutting our weapons programs. … it might be having a civil defense program. You can make a very good case that is exactly what those doctors ought to be shouting for.
Scheer: But they say that it is impossible to protect the population from nuclear attack.
Kupperman: Yes, but the thing is, nuclear weapons have certain effects and if you take steps to deny those effects, you save a lot of people. And unless you are right in the middle of ground zero, you are not going to have a lot of burn victims if you take those steps. And if you evacuate these people out of the targeted areas, or what you think are targeted areas, they are not going to get burned or destroyed.
On society surviving nuclear war:
Scheer: Is it possible to survive it with your civilization intact?
Kupperman: Well, it is possible to survive it with a certain amount of society intact, it depends on what steps we take to ensure that survivability. It certainly won’t be the same as before the war. But generally societies have been intact ― like Germany and Japan and Western Europe in the Second World War weren’t the same after the war as they were before. But generally societies have been intact. The question really gets down to political credibility in the conduct of your foriegn policy. If you look like you are serious about defending yourself and your allies with real civil defense programs and other measures, I think that has political credibility with the adversary. An adversaryisn’t going to take somebody seriously if they don’t take steps to protect themselves. Nuclear war is a destructive thing, but it is still in large part a physics problem.
Scheer: What do you mean?
Kupperman: Well, sheltering yourself against nuclear effects can be done, it just depends on how much effort and money one wants to spend on it, but a certain layer of dirt and some reinforced construction materials can assure the survivability of somebody, assuming they aren’t at ground zero of a detonation. Hiroshima, after it was bombed, was back and operating three days later. So it is certainly a destructive weapon, and nobody wants a nuclear war, but I don’t think the United States in the past has been serious enough about planning for its survival in the event of a nuclear war…
On winning nuclear war “in a classical sense”:
Kupperman: It depends on what one considers all-out. If the objective in a war is to try to destroy as many Soviet civilians and as many American civilians as is feasible, and the casualty levels approached 150 million on each side, then it’s going to be tough to say you have a surviving nation after that. But depending on how the nuclear war is fought, it could mean the difference between 150 casualties and 20 million casualties. I think that is a significant difference, and if the country loses 20 million people, you may have a chance of surviving after that.
Scheer: Would that mean the other nation would survive as well? You’re not talking about winning a nuclear war, you’re talking about a stalemate of some kind.
Kupperman: It may or may not be a stalemate, depending on who had more surviving national power and military power.
Scheer: So you think it is possible to win?
Kupperman: I think it is possible to win, in the classical sense.
Scheer: What does that mean, “in the classical sense”?
Kupperman: It means that it is clear after the war that one side is stronger than the other side, the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side.
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Nick Robins-Early is a Senior World News Reporter, HuffPost.
Comments Off on “Crazies” in Charge of America’s “Nuclear Button”: Trump’s New (Acting) National Security Adviser Said Nuclear War with USSR Was Winnable
With the U.S, Russia, and China all jostling for position in Iraq’s oil and gas industry both north and south, Iraq’s oil ministry last week reiterated its desire to have one or more foreign partners in the Mansuriya gas field. Situated in Diyala province, close to the Iran border, Mansuriya is estimated to hold around 4.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, with plateau production projected at about 325 million standard cubic feet per day.
For the U.S., encouraging Iraq to optimise its gas flows so that it reduces its dependency for power from Iran is the key consideration. For Russia, Rosneft essentially bought control of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq in November 2017, so power in southern Iraq figuratively will complete the set.
Securing oil and gas contracts across all of Iraq will allow Russia to establish an unassailable political sway across the entire Shia crescent of power in the Middle East, stretching from Syria through Lebanon (by dint of Iran), Jordan, Iraq (also helped by Iran), Iran itself, and Yemen (via Iran). From this base, it can effectively challenge the U.S.’s vital oil, gas, and political ally in the region – Saudi Arabia. China, in the meantime, is operating to its own agenda in South Pars Phase 11 and its West Karoun holdings.
Iraq, like Turkey, is still – nominally at least – not committing to either the Russia or the U.S., preferring to play each off against the other for whatever they can get, and the same applies in microcosm to the field of Mansuriya. Turkey itself was a key player in this gas field through its national oil company Turkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortakligi (TPAO) until the middle of last year – holding a 37.5 per cent stake – along with the Oil Exploration Company (25 per cent), Kuwait Energy (22.5 per cent), and South Korea’s KOGAS (15 per cent).
TPAO had signed the original development deal for Mansuriya back in 2011, promising Iraq’s oil ministry that it could be trusted to reach plateau production within 10 years at most,
a senior figure in the ministry told OilPrice.com last week. This was not an unreasonable schedule, for which TPAO would be remunerated US$7.00-7.50 per barrel of oil equivalent, a relatively generous amount compared to many of the previous awards from the ministry. TPAO agreed that the first phase would mean production of at least 100 million cubic feet a day within 12 months from the signing date.
Unsurprisingly, given the rise of Islamic State at the time, TPAO suspended all operations on Mansuriya in 2014, but more surprisingly was that it refused to resume development work in September 2017 when asked to do so by then-oil minister, Jabar al-Luaibi. There were many subsequent requests from the ministry to TPAO to resume work before the ministry rescinded the contract last July.
As it stands, Iraq’s oil ministry has made it clear that it needs Mansuriya to be properly up and running and gradually increasing production towards the 325 million standard cubic feet per day figure so that it can be used as a feedstock for the country’s calamitous power sector. Peak summer power demand every year exceeds domestic generation capacity, frequently leading to up to 20 hours per day of blackouts in many areas. Without Mansuriya and similar gas fields coming online, this will get worse, as Iraq’s population is growing at a rate of over one million per year, with electricity demand set to double by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
This supply-demand imbalance has resulted in Iraq’s being dependent on neighbouring Iran for a considerable amount of gas and electricity imports – around one third of its total energy supplies, in fact. Specifically, Iraq pipes in up to 28 million cubic metres of Iranian gas a day for power generation and also directly imports up to 1,300 megawatts of Iranian electricity. Even the U.S. has been forced to grant waivers for Iraq to continue to do this, given the absence of other options currently.
Playing the game of pitting one side against the other for optimal gain, the Secretary General of the Iran-Iraq Joint Chamber, Seyed Hamid Hosseini, stated recently that Iran’s gas and electricity exports to Iraq are expected to reach US$5 billion by the end of the current Iranian calendar year, ending on 21 March 2020. This comment was made at the same time as a U.S. consortium led by Honeywell signed a memorandum of understanding for a deal that would reduce the country’s current level of gas flaring by nearly 20%. Part of this deal included processing associated gas at the Siba gas field, the original deal for which was also done in 2011 and also with TPAO.
In the running at the time for both fields was Russia. So interested is it in securing gas sites in north and south Iraq, which it will eventually be able to move via its vast pipeline capabilities and networks, that even before the latest announcement on Mansuriya’s availability was made public, Gazprom Neft (the oil arm of Russia’s gas giant, Gazprom) communicated to Iraq’s current oil minister, Thamir Ghadhban, that it was ‘very interested’ in taking a role in the Mansuriya field.
“Gazprom Neft often acts as the point man for Gazprom in initial conversations, as it is a slick, well-run, Western-style company, whereas Gazprom is a bit more old-style Soviet,” said the Iraq source. “It [Gazprom Neft] also made it clear that it would be interested in other sites, such as Siba,” he added. “It should be remembered that Gazprom was in the prime position to develop the other key gas fields of North Pars, Kish, and Farzad A and B before the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] last year,” he concluded.
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Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author.
A psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University has slammed the medical and psychiatric industries for what he says is reckless and irresponsible treatment of patients who claim to be transgender.
Paul McHugh, a renowned psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University, told The College Fix he believes transgender people are being experimented on because the doctors treating transgender patients with hormones “don’t have evidence that (the treatment) will be the right one.” He also criticized the manner of treatment given to many children who claim to be transgender.
“Many people are doing what amounts to an experiment on these young people without telling them it’s an experiment,” he told The Fix via phone.
“You need evidence for that and this is a very serious treatment. It is comparable to doing frontal lobotomies.”
Vast majority of gender minorities report mental health issues
A recent study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that 80 percent of gender minority students report having mental health problems, nearly double the rate of “cisgender” students. McHugh believes that in many cases the patient’s gender dysphoria is precipitated by mental illness.
“I think their mental problems, often depression, discouragement are the things that need treatment,” not gender dysphoria, he argued.
“I’m not positive about this. It’s a hypothesis, but it is a very plausible hypothesis, and it would explain why many of the people who go on to have treatment of their body discover they are just as depressed, discouraged and live just as problematic lives as they did before because they did not address the primary problem,” he added.
Possible ‘contagion effect’
“I believe that these gender confusions are mostly being driven by psychological and psychosocial problems these people have. That explains the rapid onset gender dysphoria Lisa Littman has spelled out,” McHugh said.
The Lisa Littman to whom the professor referred is a researcher at Brown University, who last year published a bombshell report suggesting that some transgender-identified children might suffer from “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” a phenomenon in which “one, multiple, or even all of the friends [in a group] have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe.”
There was significant backlash following Littman’s publication of the study, after which Brown censored the report. The study was eventually validated with its results unchanged.
Long-term effects of child transgender treatment
Asked about the possible long-term consequences of the growing practice of helping children develop transgender identities, including with hormones, McHugh expressed pessimism.
“They’re going to be in the hands of doctors for the rest of their lives, many of them are going to be sterilized not able to have their own children, and many will regret this,” McHugh said.
“Can you imagine having a life where you need to seek doctors all the time, for everything, just to live? Getting your hormones checked, getting everything checked. That is something doctors should like to spare people of,” he added.
McHugh thinks that eventually our society will look back on this craze as something of an historical shame.
“I believe it will be something like how we think of eugenics now. We will come to regret it when we discover how many of the young people that were injured regret it themselves,” he told The Fix.
The doctor stressed that medical professionals should stick to a higher standard of evidence when considering treatment for individuals who claim a transgender identity.
“You can think whatever you want without proof. Be my guest. You can think anything you want, if you like it that way. But don’t ask me as a doctor to prescribe hormones or operate on you when I try to do things which are for your benefit,” he said.
“My aim isn’t to stop people. It’s when they draw medical people in. That’s when I insist on evidence and what makes more sense.”
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Maria is a sophomore at Franciscan University of Steubenville, double majoring in political science and communication arts. She enjoys being active in her church by being a cantor and volunteers at her local hospital and soup kitchen.
According to an incisive report by Deutsche Welle, “genetically modified mosquitoes are currently breeding in Brazil”.
Under the researchers’ original plan, “all released mosquitoes and their offspring should have died.” But that did not happen.
” An attempt to contain the populations of the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti in Brazil may have failed. It appears that gene mutations have been transferred to the local population.”
The British company Oxitec had released about 450,000 male mosquitoes every week in the city of Jacobina in the Bahia region with official permission over a period of 27 weeks. The experiment was designed to control the infectious diseases dengue, zika and yellow fever.
The gene modification called OX513A in the mosquitoes was designed in such a way that the first descendant generation of the mosquitoes, known as F1, would not reach the adult stage and thus not be able to reproduce.
The gene modification of the released mosquitoes also produced a fluorescent protein that made it possible to distinguish the first F1 generation from other mosquitoes.
Researchers at Yale University have examined the mosquitoes found in the region for their genetic alterations one year after the release, as well as 27 to 30 months after the release.
They came to the conclusion that parts of the gene alteration had unexpectedly migrated into the target population of local mosquitoes.Deutsche Welle
Was it “unexpected”?
The gene modification was in theory intended to contain the yellow fever Aedes aegypti mosquito as well as the transmission of dengue, yellow fever and zika.
In some regards it had exactly the opposite results. The process of gene modification was passed on to the broader aegypti target mosquito population.
In an attempt to control the mosquito-borne diseases yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika fevers, a strain of transgenically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes containing a dominant lethal gene has been developed by a commercial company, Oxitec Ltd.
If lethality is complete, releasing this strain should only reduce population size and not affect the genetics of the target populations.
Approximately 450 thousand males of this strain were released each week for 27 months in Jacobina, Bahia, Brazil.
We genotyped the release strain and the target Jacobina population before releases began for >21,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Genetic sampling from the target population six, 12, and 27–30 months after releases commenced provides clear evidence that portions of the transgenic strain genome have been incorporated into the target population.
Evidently, rare viable hybrid offspring between the release strain and the Jacobina population are sufficiently robust to be able to reproduce in nature. The release strain was developed using a strain originally from Cuba, then outcrossed to a Mexican population.
Thus, Jacobina Ae. aegypti are now a mix of three populations. It is unclear how this may affect disease transmission or affect other efforts to control these dangerous vectors. These results highlight the importance of having in place a genetic monitoring program during such releases to detect un-anticipated outcomes.
Introduction
Mosquito-borne diseases take a tremendous toll on human health and economies especially in Third World countries. Effective vaccines and drugs are available for only a few so the major means of controlling these diseases is to control the mosquitoes that transmit them. As traditional methods of control, such as insecticides, have become less effective and acceptable, alternative methods have been sought1. Methods based on genetic manipulations are among the most appealing and actively pursued2. One such genetic-based program has involved releasing a strain of Aedes aegypti (OX513A) that was transgenically modified to be homozygous for a conditional dominant lethal3,4.
This strain also carries a fluorescent protein gene that allows detection of OX513A X wild type F1offspring. Release of this strain in large numbers has been effective in reducing populations of Ae. aegypti by up to 85%5. The largest such releases to date have been carried out in the city of Jacobina in Bahia, Brazil6. We monitored the Jacobina Ae. aegypti population to determine if the releases have affected the genetics of the natural population by transferring genes, introgressing.
If lethality is complete, such releases should result only in population reduction and not affect the genetics of the target population. However, it is known that, under laboratory conditions, 3–4% of the offspring from matings of OX513A with wild type do survive to adulthood although they are weak and it is not known if they are fertile4.
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Nothing happened on September 2 in central London. Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, did not initiate a protest outside the Home Office. He did not sing and play the Floyd classic ‘Wish You Were Here’, or say:
‘Julian Assange, we are with you. Free Julian Assange!’
The renowned journalist and film-maker John Pilger did not say:
‘The behaviour of the British government towards Julian Assange is a disgrace – a profanity on the very notion of human rights.
‘It’s no exaggeration to say that the persecution of Julian Assange is the way dictatorships treat a political prisoner.’
None of this happened for any major UK or US newspaper, which made no mention of these events at all. Readers of Prensa Latina, Havana, were more fortunate with two articles before and after the event, as were readers of Asian News International in New Delhi. Coverage was also provided by Ireland’s Irish Examiner (circulation 25,419) in Cork, which published a Press Association piece that was available to the innumerable other outlets that all chose to ignore it.
Four months after he was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange is still locked up in solitary confinement for 21 hours a day or more. He is still being denied the basic tools to prepare his case against a demand for extradition to the United States where he faces incarceration and torture. He is not allowed to call his US lawyers, is not allowed access to vital documents, or even a computer. He is confined to a single cell in the hospital wing, where he is isolated from other people. Pilger commented at the protest:
‘There is one reason for this. Julian and WikiLeaks have performed an historic public service by giving millions of people facts on why and how their governments deceive them, secretly and often illegally: why they invade countries, why they spy on us.
‘Julian is singled out for special treatment for one reason only: he is a truth-teller. His case is meant to send a warning to every journalist and every publisher, the kind of warning that has no place in a democracy.’
On the Sydney Criminal Lawyers website, journalist Paul Gregoirediscussed Assange’s declining health with his father, John Shipton, who said:
‘His health is not good. He’s lost about 15 kilos in weight now – five since I last saw him. And he’s in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day, in the hospital ward of the gaol.’
Gregoire responded:
‘As you’ve just explained, Julian is being held in quite extreme conditions. He’s isolated from other inmates. And as well, his visits are restricted and so are his communications with his legal representation. Yet, he’s only being held for breach of bail, which is a rather minor charge.’
‘Yes, very minor.’
‘How are the UK authorities justifying the restrictions around his imprisonment seeing he’s being incarcerated on such a minor offence?’
‘I don’t know if they feel the necessity to justify these decisions. Their decisions are arbitrary.’
‘So, they’re giving no explanation as to his treatment.’
‘No.’
It does seem extraordinary, in fact medieval, for such brutal treatment to be meted out to someone for merely breaching bail, with almost zero ‘mainstream’ political or media protest. This is only one reason, of course, why the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, penned an article titled, ‘Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange’. Melzer commented:
‘What may look like mere mudslinging in public debate, quickly becomes “mobbing” when used against the defenseless, and even “persecution” once the State is involved. Now just add purposefulness and severe suffering, and what you get is full-fledged psychological torture.’
Investigative journalist Peter Oborne courageously challenged conventional wisdom on Assange this month in a British Journalism Review piece titled, ‘He is a hero, not a villain’. Oborne described how, in July, the Mail on Sunday had published a front-page story revealing the contents of diplomatic telegrams – ‘DipTels’ – sent to London by the British ambassador to the US. The memos described President Trump’s administration as ‘inept’ and Trump himself as ‘uniquely dysfunctional’.
‘All hell broke loose. The May government announced an official leak inquiry. The Metropolitan Police launched a criminal investigation. The intelligence services got involved.
‘The Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Neil Basu warned the press not to publish any further documents as this could “constitute a criminal offence”. The Mail on Sunday paid no attention. It published further leaks and other papers came to its support. So did politicians. Tory leadership candidates Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt were among those who criticised Basu’s comments.
‘Hunt, who was then foreign secretary, said: “I defend to the hilt the right of the press to publish those leaks if they receive them and judge them to be in the public interest…’
‘Meanwhile, that leaker-in-chief Julian Assange continued to languish in Belmarsh prison, where he is serving 50 weeks for skipping bail…
‘Julian Assange is a controversial figure, to be sure. Many of those who have dealt with him have found him difficult. But I find myself wondering what exactly the difference is between his alleged crime of publishing leaked US diplomatic cables and the Mail on Sunday’s offence of publishing leaked Foreign Office cables.
‘Why is Assange treated by the bulk of the British media as a pariah? And the Mail on Sunday as a doughty defender of press freedom? After all, Julian Assange is responsible for breaking more stories than all the rest of us put together.’
Oborne commented:
‘This looks to me like a monstrous case of double standards, even by the ocean-going standards of Britain’s media/political class.’
Focusing On Other Issues
Assange was offered rare ‘mainstream’ support on September 12 when Guardian columnist George Monbiot tweeted:
‘Never forget: #JulianAssange is still in Belmarsh prison, facing the prospect of extradition and life imprisonment in the US, for the “crime” of releasing information that governments have withheld from us. This is not justice.’
Tweeter jaraparilla was quick to spot what happened next:
‘George Monbiot just posted this tweet supporting Julian Assange then deleted it within minutes (before I could respond).’
‘I realised that the US extradition issue was tangled up with the Swedish one, and that I don’t yet know enough about Assange’s legal situation, exactly what he is awaiting and why. I will read up and return to the issue.’
In response, we recommended Melzer’s superb work in challenging the establishment smear campaign. Monbiot replied:
‘Thank you. Has he written a paper on the subject? I find it much easier to absorb information in writing.’
‘Amazed you need to ask, have you really not been following his interviews and written pieces? Mind you, according to ProQuest, @NilsMelzer has been mentioned twice in the Guardian this year – so maybe it’s not so strange. See here, for example’
Monbiot tweeted: ‘No, I’ve been focusing on other issues.’
It was curious that Monbiot felt the need to ‘read up and return to the issue’. After all, as jaraparilla noted, Monbiot has tweeted about Assange and WikiLeaks dozens of times. Many of these comments make for grim reading. For example:
‘Moral line on #Assange is crystal clear: we shld support qu-ning on rape charges & oppose any extrad attempt by US. #wikileaks’
In his latest piece on Assange, Oborne discussed this egregious error:
‘His critics attach special weight to rape charges laid against Assange in Sweden. But it’s important to remember there have never been any “charges” in Sweden.
‘This is a myth reported literally hundreds of times. There has only ever been a “preliminary investigation” in Sweden looking into allegations of rape.’
‘To me Assange looks unaccountable, paranoid, controlling and prone to blame others for his mistakes. #wikileaks’
As we now know, Assange’s ‘paranoia’ was actually astute awareness that ‘they’ really were out to get him.
And: ‘Why does Assange still have so much uncritical support? Seems to me he’s acting like a tinpot dictator.’
And: ‘#JulianAssange takes Kremlin’s dollar, reversing all he claimed to stand for: bit.ly/wT4PoO Love #wikileaks, not Assange’
To his credit, Monbiot subsequently tweeted the deleted tweet defending Assange a second time.
In April 2019, Monbiot won huge applause for using harsh language and calling for the overthrow of capitalism. He insisted that, to save the planet, we need to forget ‘pathetic, micro-consumerist bollocks’:
‘We have to overthrow this system which is eating the planet with perpetual growth…. We can’t do it by just pissing around at the margins of the problem; we’ve got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.’
And yet, as Oborne noted, Assange is ‘responsible for breaking more stories than all the rest of us put together’, ‘each and every one in the public interest’, ‘which any self-respecting reporter would sell his or her grandmother to obtain’. One could hardly think of a more powerful example of someone not ‘pissing around at the margins of the problem’.
Monbiot is hardly alone in ‘focusing on other issues’, year after year, while Assange rots. Fellow Guardian great white leftist hope, Owen Jones, last mentioned Assange in his Guardian column in 2014. In fact, this was his only ever mention in the paper, a single comment in passing focused on then Respect MP George Galloway:
‘his past praise for dictators and appalling comments about rape following allegations against Julian Assange have left him largely isolated’.
Like Monbiot, Paul Mason – a former BBC and Channel 4 broadcaster who has somehow reinvented himself as a war-supporting, NATO-loving, Trident-renewing ‘man of the people’ (with 618,000 followers on Twitter) – has never mentioned Assange in the Guardian.
It seems likely that Guardian columnists have felt under increasing pressure to back off from supporting Assange over the last five years. As Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis reported this month:
‘The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues… The few journalists who were replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, started at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.
‘”It seems they’ve got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way,” one current Guardian journalist told us.’
Kennard and Curtis concluded:
‘The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further.’
Venezuela, Gaza And Yemen
This pattern of sparse, or non-existent commentary extends to other issues. In 2018, Monbiot tweeted of the Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro:
‘Just because Maduro claims to be on the left does not mean we should support him. There are far better ways of breaking the power of the old elites. #Venezuela’
Monbiot thus simply wrote off the democratically elected President of Venezuela who had won entirely credible elections after the death of Hugo Chavez. Because Monbiot is respected by many readers as an honest, principled progressive, this will have looked to many like the final nail in the coffin of Maduro’s credibility. Many doubtless assumed that Monbiot knows and cares a great deal about Venezuela, that he has strongly supported the Bolivarian revolution. And in 2015, Monbiot didwrite this in the Guardian:
‘Between 1989 and 1991 I worked with movements representing landless rural workers in Brazil. As they sought to reclaim their land, thousands were arrested; many were tortured; some were killed…
‘In Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Uruguay and Chile, similar movements transformed political life. They have evicted governments opposed to their interests and held to account those who claim to represent them. Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by the Latin American experience.’
Many readers will have hailed these comments as evidence that Monbiot is an outspoken leftist. After all, in 2003 he had written in the Guardian:
‘While younger activists are eager to absorb the experience of people like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Lula, Victor Chavez, Michael Albert and Arundhati Roy, all of whom are speaking in Porto Alegre [the World Social Forum], our movement is, as yet, more eager than wise, fired by passions we have yet to master.’ (Our emphasis)
But according to the ProQuest media database, the single sentence from 2015 contains Monbiot’s only mention of Venezuela in his Guardian column in the last ten years. Monbiot has mentioned Hugo Chavez’s name exactly twice, in passing, in two articles. He has mentioned Maduro – who is facing relentless internal and external state-corporate attempts at regime change, not least by means of US sanctions – once, in passing, in July 2019. Monbiot has said not a word to challenge the military, economic and propaganda campaign to overthrow Maduro.
According to ProQuest, Owen Jones has never mentioned the Venezuelan President in his Guardian column. Paul Mason’s only mention of Maduro in the Guardian damned Maduro’s use of the ‘repertoire of autocratic rule’ in his supposed ‘crackdown’, being ‘clearly engaged in a rapid, purposive and common project to hollow out democracy’.
Ironically, corporate dissidents like Monbiot, Jones and Mason benefit enormously from the fact that they are published by tyrannical, monopolistic, unaccountable, power-friendly media that filter ‘all the news fit to print’. How so?
It is precisely because these systems of power function as such forensic, long-armed Thought Police that even tiny crumbs of compromised dissent – a single sentence on ‘landless rural workers’ here, a four-letter word on the need for revolution there – elicit pitiful shrieks of delight and admiration from corporately incarcerated consumers who need to believe that ‘mainstream’ media are not that bad, not that destructive. In other words, public awareness is heavily skewed by a version of ‘Stockholm syndrome’.
Consider Gaza as a further example. Again, we can find this dissenting comment from Monbiot in the Guardian in 2006:
‘I agree that Hizbullah fired the first shots. But out of the blue? Israel’s earlier occupation of southern Lebanon; its continued occupation of the Golan Heights; its occupation and partial settlement of the West Bank and gradual clearance of Jerusalem; its shelling of civilians, power plants, bridges and pipelines in Gaza; its beating and shooting of children; its imprisonment or assassination of Palestinian political leaders; its bulldozing of homes; its humiliating and often lethal checkpoints: all these are, in Bush’s mind, either fictional or carry no political consequences.’
Again, leftists will have lapped up this rare supportive comment in a major UK newspaper. A search for further comments finds this sentence from Monbiot in November 2007:
‘In February 2001, according to the BBC, it [Israel] used chemical weapons in Gaza: 180 people were admitted to hospital with severe convulsions.’
And a sentence from September 2013, when Monbiot wrote in passing of how Israel ‘refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention’ having ‘used white phosphorus as a weapon in Gaza’. A further sentence appeared in September 2014:
‘In Gaza this year, 2,100 Palestinians were massacred: including people taking shelter in schools and hospitals.’
‘Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians (including 500 children), in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”.’
But, remarkably, these are the only substantive comments Monbiot has made about one of the great crimes and tragedies of our time. The last quote above, his most recent, was published nearly five years ago, in October 2014.
While other progressives like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Norman Finkelstein, Jonathan Cook and others have written whole books, made whole films, and written reams of articles about the catastrophe being inflicted on the people of Gaza, Monbiot has said virtually nothing.
According to ProQuest, Owen Jones’ sole, substantive article devoted to Israel’s assault on Gaza came in July 2014. Even this was a philosophical piece on the ‘moral corruption that comes with any occupation’, with few details about the suffering in Gaza. Stockholm syndrome ensured that the title alone, ‘How the occupation of Gaza corrupts the occupier’, persuaded many readers that here was a stellar example of a principled journalist who really cared about Gaza, who was shouting the truth from the rooftops. Jones’ last mention of Gaza in the Guardian was also five years ago, a mention in passing in August 2014.
Paul Mason’s last substantive mention of Gaza was, again, five years ago, in November 2014, an emotive reference to a harrowing report he made from Gaza while working for Channel 4 News, with little detail on conditions. Mason referenced the same Channel 4 coverage in August 2014.
Or consider Yemen – how much have Monbiot, Jones and Mason written about the blood-drenched, UK-backed Saudi Arabian war that began in 2015? Monbiot wrote in June 2017 of then Prime Minister Theresa May:
‘She won’t confront Saudi Arabia over terrorism or Yemen or anything else.’
Ironic words, given that, according to ProQuest, this is Monbiot’s only meaningful comment on the Yemen war (in April 2019, he noted in passing that climate change ‘has contributed to civil war’ in Yemen). In the Morning Star, Ian Sinclair reported that the editor of the Interventions Watch website had conducted a search of Monbiot’s Twitter timeline in December 2017:
‘He found Monbiot had mentioned “Syria” in 91 tweets and “Yemen” in just three tweets.’
To his credit, Owen Jones has written several substantial pieces focused on the war in Yemen here, here and here. In June 2017, Paul Mason wrote one substantial paragraph on the conflict:
‘Saudi Arabia is meanwhile prosecuting a war on Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen, using more than £3bn worth of British kit sold to it since the bombing campaign began. In return, it has lavished gifts on Theresa May’s ministers: Philip Hammond got a watch worth £1,950 when he visited in 2015. In turn, Tory advisers are picking up lucrative consultancy work with the Saudi government.’
Again, we can celebrate an example of superficial dissent, or reflect on the fact that this is Mason’s onlycomment on the Yemen war in the Guardian.
It is important to remember that the most popular and revered British dissidents – including radical comedians like Russell Brand, Frankie Boyle and Eddie Izzard – were made famous by corporate media. The difference between a ‘cult’ following and national fame is often the difference between popular and ‘mainstream’ support. People willing to compromise from the start, to jump through the required corporate hoops to achieve fame, are (often unwittingly) stooges of a system that must allow glimpses of dissent, a semblance of free and open discussion.
The system needs an occasional honest paragraph on Gaza from a Monbiot, a comment on Yemen from a Mason, if it is to retain credibility. Nobody is fooled by total silence, by a complete lie – a half-lie is far more potent. We are complicit in this charade when we make dissident mountains out of molehills, loaves out of corporate crumbs, and keep buying the product.
Update – 17 September 2019
A reader has reminded us that Owen Jones also mentioned Julian Assange in an online, April 2019 article in the Guardian opposing his extradition to the US.
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The United States and Russia have quite the bumpy relationship. Talk of war between the two powerful countries isn’t anything new, and anyone who is paying attention knows that such a war would be devastating for much of the world.
Two recent research projects show just how bad things would be if the US and Russia unleashed their nuclear arsenals on each other.
A war between the US and Russia would cause a global nuclear winter.
Several months ago, researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research ran a simulation to see what a nuclear war between the US and Russia would do, and the findings were not pretty: Such a war would plunge the planet into a nuclear winter, with clouds of soot and smoke covering the planet. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, found that the nuclear detonations would inject about 147 million tons of soot into the atmosphere. That soot would then spread around the stratosphere, blanketing the Earth in darkness:
Current nuclear arsenals used in a war between the United States and Russia could inject 150 Tg of soot from fires ignited by nuclear explosions into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. We simulate the climate response using the Community Earth System Model‐Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model version 4 (WACCM4), run at 2° horizontal resolution with 66 layers from the surface to 140 km, with full stratospheric chemistry and with aerosols from the Community Aerosol and Radiation Model for Atmospheres allowing for particle growth.
We compare the results to an older simulation conducted in 2007 with the Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE run at 4° × 5° horizontal resolution with 23 levels up to 80 km and constant specified aerosol properties and ozone. These are the only two comprehensive climate model simulations of this scenario. Despite having different features and capabilities, both models produce similar results. Nuclear winter, with below freezing temperatures over much of the Northern Hemisphere during summer, occurs because of a reduction of surface solar radiation due to smoke lofted into the stratosphere. WACCM4’s more sophisticated aerosol representation removes smoke more quickly, but the magnitude of the climate response is not reduced. In fact, the higher‐resolution WACCM4 simulates larger temperature and precipitation reductions than ModelE in the first few years following a 150‐Tg soot injection. A strengthening of the northern polar vortex occurs during winter in both simulations in the first year, contributing to above normal, but still below freezing, temperatures in the Arctic and northern Eurasia.
Not only would explosions, fires, and radiation exposure kill millions in targeted cities, but the resulting nuclear winter – which could last many years- would drastically alter the Earth’s climate. The growing season would be slashed by nearly 90 percent in some areas, and death by famine would threaten nearly all of the Earth’s 7.7 billion people.
According to the model, the soot would not visibly clear for around seven years. Temperatures would drop by an average of 9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit) across the globe, the researchers wrote, and it would take around three years for surface light to return to 40 percent of its pre-attack level.
More than 90 million immediate casualties would result.
Researchers at Princeton University created a simulation to see just how bad a nuclear war between the US and Russia would be for humanity, and the picture they paint is terrifying. The team used the Pentagon’s own plans (which were recently leaked) to “highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of current US and Russian nuclear war plans,”
The risk of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the past two years as the United States and Russia have abandoned long-standing nuclear arms control treaties, started to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons and expanded the circumstances in which they might use nuclear weapons. (source)
Researchers at Princeton’s Science and Global Security Lab created this video, which shows just how widespread the devastation from a nuclear war would be.
Does that simulation remind anyone else of the 1983 movie War Games? In that film, a young hacker accidentally accesses a US military supercomputer system called War Operation Plan Response (WOPR). Believing it is a video game, the hacker gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation – and the computer nearly starts World War III.
At the end of the movie, the computer tells Professor Falken, who is attempting to stop the WOPR from launching war, that nuclear war is “a strange game” in which “the only winning move is not to play.”
How many nuclear weapons are there?
Nine countries together possess nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons. The US and Russia have the most (6185 and 6500, respectively).
According to ICAN, “The United States and Russia maintain roughly 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert status – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning. Most are many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.”
If all of the nuclear weapons in the world were detonated at once, what would happen? The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell attempts to demonstrate the aftermath in this video.
Is nuclear war between the US and Russia inevitable?
Such a war would be suicide for both countries, so why either would resort to such a thing baffles the mind. Earlier today, CNBC reported that Russia is conducting massive military drills with China, India, and Pakistan, in what experts say could be Moscow “sending a powerful message to the West.” Some sourcesreport that tensions between the US and Russia are escalating to “new Cold War” levels. Others believe that the ousting of war hawk John Bolton might be a sign of the potential for a Russia-China-US alliance.
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Dagny Taggart is the pseudonym of an experienced journalist who needs to maintain anonymity to keep her job in the public eye. Dagny is non-partisan and aims to expose the half-truths, misrepresentations, and blatant lies of the MSM.
As NATO media are currently mourning the departure of Neocon, John Bolton, and incited support for US bombing of Iran because Yemeni patriots engaged in a retaliatory bombing of an oil refinery in Saudi occupied Arabia, no attention is given to ongoing war crimes by the Trump and Erdogan regimes, against Syria, nor of the continuing terror attacks, including the bombing of a real hospital.
On 15 September, illicit US forces brought a convoy of dozens of military vehicles from Iraq into Syria, turning them over to the SDF separatist terrorists to strengthen them in al-Jazira, northeast of the country near Qamishli. The SDF terrorists continue to engage in attempted ethnic cleansing of Syrians, murdering, kidnapping boys for war criminal military training camps, blocking roads, stealing or destroying homes.
Two brothers, aged 12 and 13, were injured by landmines left behind by terrorists in Mrat Village, Deir Ezzor countryside, on 15 September. They were rushed to the al-Assad Hospital, where one was reported in serious condition.
Also on Sunday, terrorists attempted to blow up the al Rahi Hospital, in northeastern Aleppo countryside, by remote detonation of a nearby parked truck, filled with explosives. The savages succeeded in destroying part of the facility, and in martyring an undisclosed number of Syrian civilians, in addition to wounding others.
Sunday was a busy day for the NATO-armed terrorists, as they also fired rockets into al-Rassif village in northwest Hama countryside. One young girl was injured, and several homes and businesses damaged.
Deadly infighting among various terrorist gangs in Idlib did not stop al-Nusra Front armed terrorists from blocking the Abu al Duhour corridor in southeastern Idlib countryside, which was prepared to receive civilians wishing to leave takfiri-occupied areas of the governate.
Syrian authorities found another huge depot of weapons and telecommunications devices left behind by the criminally insane gangs in the liberated area of Daraa.
On 17 September, three civilians were injured and a father and son martyred in al-Bowaida village, northern Hama countryside, in yet another mine blast. The deranged human garbage, armed and funded by NATO and their Gulfies underlings, continue to bury landmines and other explosive devices in agricultural fields to maximize the most brutality in liberated areas. Despite the signing of an MoU between the Syrian government and the UN Mine Action Service in mid-2018, the United Nations group has done little to assist in clearing the destructive weapons provided by many of its member states.
The injured were rushed to the Hama National Hospital for treatment.
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“Why do people continue to believe that NGOs such as 350.org/1Sky that are initiated and funded by Rockefeller Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Ford, Gates, etc. would exist to serve the people rather than the entities that create and fund them? Since when do these powerful entities invest in ventures that will negatively impact their ability to maintain power, privilege and wealth? Indeed, the oligarchs play the “environmental movement” and its mostly well-meaning citizens like a game of cards.” -Cory Morningstar, Keystone XL: The Art of NGO Discourse
“If activists fail to address the crucial issue of liberal philanthropy now this will no doubt have dire consequences for the future of progressive activism – and democracy more generally – and it is important to recognize that liberal foundations are not all powerful and that the future, as always, lies in our hands and not theirs.” — Michael Barker Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions?
April 22nd , when this episode first went to air, was Earth Day, an occasion when ecologically conscious community members around the globe attempt to channel their energies toward protection of our natural world. [1]
Human generated climate change, of course, is very much top of mind at this time in human history. Indeed, the twenty-first century climate movement has been compared to the anti-war, civil rights, gay rights, and women’s liberation movement in terms of its dynamism and its presentation as a political force to be reckoned with. [2]
Spearheading this movement have been the big environmental Non-Governmental Organizations, including Greenpeace, The Sierra Club and most notably the group 350.org. Tactics employed by these NGOs have involved the mobilization of people in New York City and around the world for the Peoples Climate March in September of 2014, direct actions frustrating attempts to build TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, petitions, divestment campaigns and a 40,000 person protest outside the White House in February of 2013. [3][4][5][6]
It is widely believed that the movement is enjoying success in terms of fundamentally shifting the priorities of political leaders like US President Barrack Obama. We are presented then with a classic ‘David vs. Goliath’ narrative where grassroots activists are pushing the Powers That Be into compliance with the demands of the world’s peoples for a secure future for our children and grandchildren.
But to borrow a term from Al Gore, there is at least one “inconvenient truth” complicating this heroic story-line. Elite funders like the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill Gates, and the Clintons finance and foster these NGOs; or so argues Cory Morningstar.
Cory Morningstar has written extensively on the role of these NGOs in playing into the hands of their Wall Street benefactors.
Morningstar attended the COP15 UN Climate Conference and was on hand to video-record the following press conference by Lamimba Di-Aping, the chief negotiator for the G77 bloc of developing countries. In this conference, Di-Aping blasts the international NGO community for not embracing the ambitious (science-based) reduction targets favoured by the G77 and the Alliance of Small Island States, in favour of the compromise targets restricting global temperature rise above pre-industrial levels to (as much as) 2 degrees Celsius. This goal would mean, in Di-Aping’s words, “certain death for Africa” and “certain devastation of small island states.”
“…and I will say this to our colleagues from Western civil society — you have definitely sided with a small group of industrialists and their representatives and your representative branches. Nothing more than that. You have become an instrument of your governments.” -Lamumba Di-Aping
On the Earth Day edition of the Global Research News Hour, Morningstar talks about fossil fuel divestment as a flawed climate strategy, the failure of climate activists to address imperialism, a critical UN Advisory Group report which environmental groups conspired to keep buried from public view, and other inconvenient truths plaguing the non-profit industrial complex.
This episode also includes a brief clip from a 2016 Winnipeg talk by celebrated author, journalist, and 350.org Board member Naomi Klein.
It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia Canada. – Tune in every Saturday at 6am.
For as close as Russia has once again become to India following its support of the latter’s “Israeli”-like unilateral moves in Kashmir and the restoration of their unofficial alliance after the recent Eastern Economic Forum, its flagship international media outlet RT proved that it still retains some degree of editorial balance by interviewing both the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (PMIK) and the Taliban within the past week, signaling that Moscow still has an intent (however vague at this point and imperfectly practiced) to “balance” regional affairs.
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Russian-Indian relations have returned to the unofficial alliance that used to characterize their ties during the Old Cold War following Moscow’s support of its partner’s “Israeli”-like unilateral moves in Kashmir and the successful outcome of the recent Eastern Economic Forum, but that doesn’t mean that Russia has given up on its 21st-century grand strategy of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia.
The “Multilateral Strategic Stability” (MSS) proposal that some of its experts made last week to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly hints that there’s a desire among certain figures who contribute to formulating foreign policy to see to it that their country retains as much strategic autonomy as possible despite the rapidly changing global situation, something that isn’t always messaged by its publicly financed international media which have more or less taken India’s side when reporting on regional issues.
That’s why it’s all the more commendable that Russia’s flagship international media outlet RT recently aired exclusive interviews with the Pakistani Prime Minster and the Taliban, both of which India is adamantly opposed to, thus showing that that the company still retains some degree of editorial balance in spite of the enormous strides that Indian influence has made in Russia since this summer. Coupled with the recent MSS proposal that interestingly coincided with these interviews, it’s clear that Moscow is signaling that it still has an intent (however vague at this point and imperfectly practiced) to “balance” regional affairs. India might have thought that it had succeeded in “buying off” Russia after Modi clinched billions of dollars’ worth of deals at the Eastern Economic Forum the week prior, so it must have been extremely surprising for observers from that country to all of a sudden see RT of all outlets making very unexpected editorial decisions.
That doesn’t mean that the outlet’s traditional bias in favor of India is going to immediately disappear, but just that its executives clearly made the choice to “balance” that out a bit with the two interviews that they just conducted despite India officially being against both of their guests.
It should be noted that these interviews were extremely high-level ones that couldn’t have taken place without approval from the company’s leadership, especially in the case of the Taliban since they’re still formally designated as a terrorist group per Russian legislation, but an exception must have been made owing to the unique circumstances of their political representatives’ arrival in Russia following the abrupt collapse of the US’ promising peace talks with the group. Through this publicly financed entity’s actions, Russia was able to indirectly send the message to India that its foreign policy won’t be “bought off” no matter how many billions of dollars its partner pours into the country.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The focus of this particular summit was on restoring peace and stability in Syria by forming a committee to draft a new Syrian constitution, as well as defeating terrorist factions in Idlib.
The Trump administration last week made its first major step to create a Greek-centric NATO corridor following United States Ambassador to Greece, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, announcement that his country intends to acquire the strategic port of Alexandroupoli.
Turkish President Erdogan’s recently announced proposal to build a “refugee city” in Northern Syria amounts to demographic engineering intended to stop the creation of a “Kurdish Corridor” there and also prevent the region from fully reintegrating into Damascus’ fold after the war.
Recent news of Bangkok signing a 6.5 billion Thai Baht deal with China to procure a naval landing ship (a landing platform dock or LPD) further illustrates growing ties between Beijing and Bangkok in the sphere of military matters.
The UK government’s decision to prorogue parliament till 14th October is to be scrutinised by the highest court in the land on Tuesday, after it was ruled by a Scottish court last week that it ‘misled the Queen’ by suspending parliament.
Magnitskiy did not uncover corruption then get arrested on false charges of tax evasion. He was arrested on credible charges of tax evasion, and subsequently started alleging corruption. That does not mean his accusations were unfounded. It does however cast his arrest in a very different light.
At a time when farm income has fallen dramatically over the past several years, the Trump Environmental Protection Administration just dealt a further severe blow to the market for corn used to produce ethanol for E10 fuels.
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The fifth Syria-focused Astana process summit took place in Turkey’s capital, Ankara on Monday. Since the summit’s inception in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have engaged in trilateral discussions regarding resolving the Syrian conflict. The focus of this particular summit was on restoring peace and stability in Syria by forming a committee to draft a new Syrian constitution, as well as defeating terrorist factions in Idlib.
Immediately prior to the summit in Ankara, President Rouhani blamed Israel and the United States for tensions in the Middle East. He stated,
“Today, what is taking place in this region and has concerned many countries of the world is the result of erroneous plans and conspiracies of the United States,” he also said, “We have declared time and again that regional issues must be resolved by regional countries and through dialogue.”
President Rouhani said,
“If we want the establishment of real security in this region, a full stop must be put to acts of aggression by the US and provocative interventions by the Zionist regime. Otherwise we will witness the continuation of insecurity.”
President Rouhani also stated that weapons and intelligence are being provided to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates by the United States and Israel to carry out military activities in Yemen.
Since last year when US President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 JCPOA agreement also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, relations between Washington and Tehran have steadily devolved and worsened.
Over the weekend, Washington blamed an attack on Saudi oil fields on Iran even though Yemen’s Houthis claimed full responsibility. On Monday, in a national security meeting, U.S. military leaders provided President Trump with several possible actions that can be taken against Iran, including a cyber-attack or physical strike on Iranian oil facilities or on the Revolutionary guard assets.
“Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy. Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.”
“We call on all nations to publicly and unequivocally condemn Iran’s attacks. The United States will work with our partners and allies to ensure that energy markets remain well supplied and Iran is held accountable for its aggression.”
In the Syrian war, Iran and Russia are staunch supporters of the Syrian government whereas Turkey and the United States have called for President Bashar’s ouster and supported opposition factions including terrorist groups.
During the Ankara summit, Iranian President Rouhani stressed that constitutional reform and elections will naturally take place once security concerns are dealt with, he also made note of the United States negative role in the conflict.
President Rouhani said,
“We all support the unity of Syria and its territorial integrity, and we are all against the presence of foreign forces in … this country, who came here without any invitation by the lawful government of Syria,” criticizing the United States for their hand in prolonging the war and complicating the peace process.
President Erdogan said prior to the meeting that the three leaders will discuss the latest developments in Syria as well as “ensuring the necessary conditions for the voluntary return of refugees and discussing the joint step to be taken in the period ahead with the aim of achieving a lasting political solution.”
President Erdogan urged for the creation of a “peace corridor” for the return of refugees from Turkey back to Syria and insisted that the US backed Kurdish militias not be allowed to exist there, referring to them as terrorist groups. He also spoke against the separation of Syria.
In line with President Rouhani’s take President Erdogan noted the absence of positive steps taken by the United States in Syria, and that the countries participating in the trilateral talks would proceed in their efforts.
President Putin mentioned that diplomats from all three countries have worked on facilitating an agreement for forming Syria’s constitution with the involvement of both Syrian government and opposition representatives.
President Putin added that establishing a new political process would “contribute to security” not only in Syria but in the entire Middle Eastern region and made note of the importance and major concern of “fighting terrorism” in terrorist held Idlib province. “We agreed to continue our joint efforts to eradicate the terrorist hotbed,” in Idlib, Putin said, “and Russia is ready to support the Syrian army in launching local operations directed at rooting out the terrorist threat, wherever it appears.”
The irony of Turkey (much like the United States), allegedly fighting terrorism while simultaneously supporting terrorist organizations is a blatant contradiction and cannot be under-stated, both nations have neither the legal nor moral right to make decisions or impose their will on the sovereign Syrian nation and its people.
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The Trump administration last week made its first major step to create a Greek-centric NATO corridor following United States Ambassador to Greece, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, announcement that his country intends to acquire the strategic port of Alexandroupoli. If Athens is to accept such a proposal, the country would be contributing to a geopolitical escalation. The US is attempting to push Greece, a traditional rival to Turkey, closer to them at a time when Ankara continues to defy NATO by strengthening its relations with Russia.
The port of Alexandroupoli is of particular importance to US policy in not only the Balkans, but especially to Russia. It is also an important energy route as the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) pipeline and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) is in the region. The port is also important for transportation as it is strategically located close to the Turkish-controlled Dardanelles that connects the Aegean/Mediterranean Seas with the Black Sea, and therefore Russia.
With the acquisition of this port, NATO and US forces may be in the Balkans in only a few hours and can easily stop Russian trade with the world via the Black Sea by blockading the Dardanelles. With Turkey increasingly defying NATO – in which Greece is also a member state of – by improving relations with Russia and buying the S-400, the US can make Greece more aligned with it under the guise of ensuring Greece’s security.
Turkey violates Greece’s maritime and air space on a daily basis, Erdogan makes continued threats to invade the rest of Cyprus. Only weeks ago he made a speech in front of a map that shows Greece’s eastern Mediterranean islands occupied by Turkey, and days ago Turkey removed the inhabited Greek island of Kastellorizo from online maps to claim sovereignty over oil and gas reserves, while continuing threats to flood Greece again with illegal immigrants, among others. Greece undoubtably has an extremely aggressive neighbour.
With Turkey illegally occupying large areas of northern Syria and Cyprus, and illegally intervening in Iraq, Greece must deal with an extremely provocative and expansionist-driven neighbour. With Russia traditionally remaining silent on Turkish provocations towards Greece, it is unlikely that Moscow will stop doing so now that relations are flourishing between the two Black Sea neighbours.
The US are trying to capitalize on Erdogan’s aggression towards Greece by attempting to pivot Athens towards them. If the Greek leadership decide to accept the US offer, it will be a powerful blow towards Turkish expansionism in the Aegean and will create a major security threat for Russia. As Greece is a rival of Turkey, the fact it prioritized creating a powerful navy and air force that could block the Dardanelles if needed, might embolden Greece to take direct actions against Turkey’s continued aggressions and threats.
Despite Greece being an economically ruined country today with a demographic crisis, it still maintains high military standards. This is reflected with Greece having the best pilots in NATO, in which Turkey is also a member of. In maritime matters, Greece has a far superior navy and experience in the Aegean. The Greek Navy has a long tradition and has never been defeated in combat. For this reason, Greece’s navy is one of the most important world naval powers today, at a military and commercial level. Although Turkey’s army makes it one of the largest in the world, it is rendered useless in any war with Greece. Although Greece has a significant maritime border with Turkey, the land border is only 200km long, making it easy to fortify.
With security against Turkey’s continued aggression being a major priority for Greece, the US ambassador is trying to woo the country into allowing the privatization of the port of Alexandroupoli. He stated: “Alexandroupoli is a crucial link to European energy security, regional stability, and economic growth, so it makes sense that the United States and Greece have chosen here to work together to advance our shared security and economic interests.”
With his emphasis on security, it will likely spark huge debates in Athens as it needs security assurances but will also not want to provoke Russia, a country that Greeks see with fraternity when remembering their shared Christian Orthodox faith and Russia’s military and diplomatic role in securing Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. Although Russia is unlikely to back one side or another, a US-controlled port in Alexandroupoli can significantly weaken Russia’s Black Sea capabilities.
If comments by the National Defense Minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, of the newly elected neoliberal government is anything to go by, it can be expected that Athens will allow Alexandroupoli to become a US-controlled port. He said that the “use of the port by the US Armed Forces” will be allowed “when there is [certainly] a need” for it, especially as Greece’s current “strategic defense relationship with the US and cooperation” are strengthened, “thereby contributing to regional stability and security.” In direct reference to Turkey, he also said “Greece is ready at any time and moment to defend and safeguard in full its sovereign rights.”
In order to avoid a US naval base on the other side of the Dardanelles, Russia should take a position it has proven to be capable of, and something the US lacks experience in- peacebuilding. If Russia can act as a mediator between Greek and Turkey, it might be enough to avoid Athens pivoting towards the US so that it can ensure its security. Russia has proven in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere that it is willing to serve as a mediator in international affairs. With Moscow currently having amicable relations with Ankara, Russia being viewed positively by the majority of Greeks, being a regional country to both Greece and Turkey, and having its owned vested interests in the region, Russia is in a unique position to be able to mediate mutually to find a lasting peace between Greece and Turkey, and to prevent the US acquiring the port of Alexandroupoli.
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Paul Antonopoulos is director of the Multipolarity research centre.
Borrowing from the 1963 Lesley Gore song I’ll Cry If I Want to: “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, you would cry too if it happened to you.” Well, if you still subscribe to this phony Two Party/One Party system, as they say in the world of commerce ‘ Buyer beware!’. It is no coincidence that for as long as many of we baby boomers can remember, our nation has been controlled by this phony adversarial political system. Yes, as we can see in 2019 that the current party in power, the Republicans, have moved completely off the charts with their ultra right, Neo Fascist agenda. So much so that even socialists like yours truly are actually contemplating voting this one time (especially for those of us in Florida), for the ‘lesser of two evils’ Democrats. This violent, racist white supremacist mindset is becoming contagious and must be pushed back… finally!
Trump and his backers, the true ‘Deep State Military Industrial Empire’, have succeeded in sucking in millions of blue collar and white collar Americans. They play upon the covert and sometimes overt racism that many white citizens have.
The Republicans, for generations, have used the tactic of ‘Keepthe black and brown skins away from our neighborhood and our schools… and our children’ to get the votes needed.
Of course, along with that undertone of rhetoric, they also played the Fear Card of terrorism, both overseas and of course right here at home. It was they who concocted the use of the word Homeland to mirror what Goebbels used (Fatherland) to trumpet German ethnocentrism.
The Republicans always celebrated America having a strong military. How many times has this writer have had to hear ‘Thank you for your service’ when the embedded mainstream media interviews a military person? Did they ever consider doing the same for a sanitation worker who picks up and carries the nasty garbage away from our homes? Or to a teacher, earning 10% of the pay that military contractors AKA mercenaries earn? Of course , the real tragedy is when the Republicans, now under Trump and his super rich cabinet, peel away most of the regulations and safety net that the majority of his ‘Base’ need. It is tragic to see millions of Amerikan workers, continually screwed by Trump and Co.’s corporate pals, wearing those silly red hats as they scream and yell in joy at his rallies. Why? Well, what has always been the only alternative, according to the empire’s rulebook, that some of Trump’s base can turn to is…
The ‘lesser of two evils’ Democrats. This is the party, the national party, that made sure that Bernie Sanders was sabotaged in 2016. They wanted Neo Con Miss Hillary to assume the mantle that Neo Con Obama carried for this empire, after having it passed to him by Neo Cons Junior Bush & Cheney, who received it from Neo Con Bill Clinton.
As is the case today, when Sanders has to face a slew of middle of the road presidential hopefuls, with just about all of them marginalizing his ideas. They want him OUT! Why? Even though Sanders waited until just recently to really go after one of the two major roots of our nation’s demise, the obscene military spending and militaristic mindset, he has always and relentlessly gone after the other one. For years Sanders has explained how the super rich are getting a free ride on the backs of we working stiffs, many of whom are part of Trump’s base. Sanders wants to tax them accordingly and stifle the bountiful profits the corporate megaliths are earning.
He wants the ‘less than 1%’ to pay more to help subsidize a comprehensive Medicare for All, and not the watered down versions many in his own party are seeking. Sanders understands that tens of millions of working stiffs cannot afford the housing prices that this predatory absentee landlord culture is billing them. When his newest plan to protect renters and create millions of government run affordable housing units was just announced, all the hacks in the embedded media sang the usual tune.
They, along with Sanders’ own party members, will sing ‘How can we afford it?’ Well, if only Sanders and anyone else with even half a conscience would answer: Tax the super rich and drastically cut the military spending! Why is it that you never hear, even from so called ‘Progressive Democrats, that over HALF of our federal income tax revenues goes down that Pentagon created rabbit hole? Sanders occasionally does ‘dance around’ that, but it is taboo most of the time. HIs compatriots, (excluding Ms. Gabbard), and Sanders himself play that stupid ‘Russia did it’ card along with vitriol for Socialist run Venezuela.
Sadly, there is no hope for us within this Two Party/One Party con. Yet, for the time being, as Noam Chomsky has said on many electoral cycles: “Hold your nose and vote out the Republicans!”
And then, once we can see the racist, white supremacist anti LBGT rhetoric off of the mainstream, we true Socialists can begin speaking truth to the Democrats we helped place into power. We will need to educate our neighbors, especially the youth of this nation, to focus on curtailing this empire , the super rich and the two parties they control.
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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].
Recent news of Bangkok signing a 6.5 billion Thai Baht deal with China to procure a naval landing ship (a landing platform dock or LPD) further illustrates growing ties between Beijing and Bangkok in the sphere of military matters.
The Thai Royal Navy’s only other ship of similar capabilities is the HTMS Angthong, built by Singapore, Bangkok Post reported.
The deal comes in the wake of several other significant arms acquisitions made by Bangkok in recent years including 39 Chinese-built VT-4 main battle tanks (with another batch of 14 being planned), China’s Type-85 armoured personnel carriers and even the nation’s first modern submarine made by China expected to be in service by 2023.
These are more than merely arms deals. The purchasing of sophisticated weapons systems like submarines and ships will require closer military cooperation between Beijing and Bangkok in order to properly train crews, transfer critical knowledge of maintaining the vessels and operate them at sea.
The interoperability that is being created between Thai and Chinese armed forces (and arms industries) ensures ample opportunity for joint training exercises and weapon development programmes in the future, several of which have already been organised, with many more on the horizon.
The Myth of Thai Subservience to Washington
Thailand is often labeled a close “non-NATO ally” of the United States by both the United States itself and many analysts still clinging to Cold War rhetoric.
However, today’s Thailand is a nation that has significantly expanded its cooperation with China and not only in military matters, but across economic spheres as well.
Thailand’s lengthy history of weathering Western colonisation that otherwise consumed its neighbours is a story of adeptly playing great powers against one another and ensuring no single nation held enough power or influence over Thailand to endanger its sovereignty. This is a balancing act that continues today, with Thailand avoiding major confrontations and overdependence on outsiders by attempting to cultivate a diversity of ties with nations abroad.
Thai cooperation with nations like the United States, particularly now, is done cynically and as a means to keep the US from investing too deeply in the disruptive regime-change methods it has aimed at other nations including neighbouring Myanmar but also distant nations like Syria and Libya ravaged by US meddling.
Despite these efforts to appease Washington, the US still backs opposition parties determined to overthrow the current Thai political order and replace it with one openly intent on rolling back progress between Thailand and its growing list of Eurasian partners, especially China.
What little the US has to offer has been reduced to deals bordering bribery, such as offering free military hardware.
A recent deal included Thailand buying discounted, refurbished Stryker armoured vehicles under the condition that the US would provide 40 more for free.
However the Stryker is not a particularly sophisticated weapon system and will do little to bolster fading Thai-US military cooperation and interoperability. The Stryker system will likely be absorbed into Thailand’s own growing domestic defence industry which is already manufacturing wheeled armoured vehicles.
Blurring of Lines between Military and Economic Cooperation
So far has the balance of power shifted in Asia, that demands by the US for its “allies” to boycott China’s telecom giant Huawei have gone ignored. Thailand, as well as Malaysia and the Philippines, have included Huawei in their efforts to develop national 5G infrastructure.
While something like telecom appears to be more a matter of economics than of national defence, so entwined recently has telecom and information technology become with national security that choosing partners for developing telecom infrastructure really is a matter of defence.
How far will this peripheral cooperation go? The US is still using its control of Thai information space, particularly through Facebook’s primacy across Thai social media, to influence public opinion and sow political instability across Thai society.
The idea of Thailand cooperating further with China to develop domestic social media networks to regain control over this aspect of Thailand’s information space seems plausible. Thai cooperation with Russia for similar reasons has already been openly discussed by Thai policymakers.
A Shifting Global Balance of Power
Many analysts have tried to reduce growing cooperation between Thailand and China as a temporary trend spurred by the Thai military’s 2014 ousting of a US-backed government and the US decision to reduce ties with Bangkok.
However, Thailand’s pivot eastward is one made with the rest of Southeast Asia and in fact, with much of the non-Western world. It is part of the wider trend away from Western-dominated unilateralism and toward greater mulipolarism. It is also a process that began long before 2014.
The ability for Thailand to move its dependence away from US markets and financial systems dominated by Washington will be key in avoiding more aggressive attempts by the US to coerce Thailand politically or economically in the future as it is nations like North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia and now even China today.
Thailand is a relatively large Southeast Asian state with ASEAN’s second largest economy. What it does in regards to building military ties with China and strengthening its economic and political resilience against US “soft power” may set trends that are followed by others in ASEAN, opening up opportunities not only for China, but other Eurasian powers like Russia who can fulfill the role of balancing power not only against America’s dominant position in the region, but also against China from acquiring too much power and influence once US primacy collapses.
Expanding Thai-Chinese military cooperation is a sign of the times. It is a sign of US primacy fading, of China’s rise and of a shifting balance of power. It is a time when nations must carefully execute this shift, ensuring the threat the US poses to regional peace and prosperity is reduced but also that China is never tempted with the opportunity to simply replace the US as a regional and global menace.
So far, mulipolarism has shaped China’s policies in a much different manner than those pursued by the US over the past half century. Only time will tell of the success of multipolarism, but it is important to understand that Thai-Chinese cooperation is not a temporary trend. It is a new reality and one that reflects a fundamental shift in geopolitics from the Atlantic consensus to a much more global one.
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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Turkish President Erdogan’s recently announced proposal to build a “refugee city” in Northern Syria amounts to demographic engineering intended to stop the creation of a “Kurdish Corridor” there and also prevent the region from fully reintegrating into Damascus’ fold after the war.
Turkish President Erdogan proposed the building of a “refugee city” in Northern Syria after the latest trilateral talks with his Russian and Iranian counterparts in Ankara, declaring that
“for the refugees there (on the Syrian border), it is necessary to create a city for them to participate in agriculture. I explained to my colleagues that it is necessary to build infrastructure for them. It is necessary to prevent the formation of a terrorist corridor.”
The stated intention of his plans makes no secret of the fact that they’re supposed to thwart the creation of a “Kurdish Corridor” and therefore reinforce Turkey’s national security through the nascent “buffer zone” that it’s carving out there, which also implies that more than one “refugee city” would have to eventually be established in order to sustainably accomplish this. On the surface, this proposal is being portrayed in such a way as to maximize the support that it receives from the International Community, but it’s actually not as “purely” intended as it may seem.
Turkey’s self-interested reasons in massively returning the millions of refugees that came to its territory during the war do indeed overlap with some of the multilateral interests shared by the International Community, but the means through which they’re being pursued are a lot less noble. It’s true that the US-backed Syrian Kurds have conquered territory beyond their traditional regions in the country (where they only rarely constituted a majority in just a few local communities anyhow) and that there are credible reasons for believing that they’ve carried out ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Arab and “Turkmen” (a trendy term for simply referring to Syrian Turks) populations there, but it’s equally true that Turkey’s “refugee city” proposal also amounts to a form of demographic engineering too, and not just in the sense of returning Northern Syria back to its pre-war status (which is practically impossible to ever do anyhow). Only a fraction of the refugees and other Syrians that came to Turkey since 2011 are from that region, so literal “outsiders” would end up being relocated there.
They, however, aren’t being considered by Turkey as such because of their nationality as Syrians and their ethnicity as either Arabs or “Turkmen”, with the unstated notion being that citizens of the same country should have the right to move anywhere within its territory that they’d like. While that approach is generally the legal standard in most states, it’s clearly being exploited in this case for self-interested demographic but also geopolitical reasons. About the first-mentioned and going beyond the obvious intent of stopping the creation of a “Kurdish Corridor”, Turkey wants to populate this sparely inhabited region with non-Kurds in order to prevent the latter from ever reviving their expansionist dreams in the future, which they’ve since “moderated” by attempting to become “more inclusive” by emphasizing their political goal of “autonomy” instead of the blatant ethnic chauvinism that used to characterize their movement. To assist with Ankara’s ambitions, it’s likely going to rely on anti-government Syrians (both Arabs and “Turkmen” alike), which conforms with its geopolitical goals.
Although no universally accepted figures have ever been released, it’s widely thought that the majority of Syrians who moved to Turkey after 2011 are opposed to their country’s democratically elected and legitimate government, and this group of people regularly claims that they don’t feel safe returning back to their homes in the now-liberated majority of the country where they used to reside because they don’t trust the authorities to guarantee their well-being and truly ensure that no legal or other consequences befall them. For the record, the Syrian government has invited them to return and even recently issued a broad amnesty, though those folks still refuse to come back for whatever their personal and/or political reasons may be. Nevertheless, Turkey also doesn’t want to continue indefinitely hosting them, especially if there’s another influx of incomers in the event that the situation deteriorates even more around Idlib, hence why it wants to relocate all of them (both the minority of those originally from the North and everyone else from elsewhere alike) to Northern Syria.
Should this plan even partially succeed, then it would create a major stumbling block to Damascus’ drive to reintegrate that part of the country into the national fold without granting it special status like its future inhabitants might demand in exchange. Furthermore, that “refugee city” (or very likely “cities”) will probably be defended by the Turkish military for at least a transitional period and then secured through pro-Turkish armed proxies, thus making it even more difficult for Damascus to reintegrate with that region and its possibly significantly sized population without making political “concessions” such as the granting of autonomy whether for the whole region or just specific municipalities. All told, it’s understandable why Turkey is pushing for the implementation of its “refugee city” proposal because it strongly advances its strategic interests in Syria, though the most responsible members of the International Community should ask themselves if the end truly justifies the means, and if not, whether they’re even capable of modifying these plans or if they’re already a fait accompli.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The UK government’s decision to prorogue parliament till 14th October is to be scrutinised by the highest court in the land on Tuesday, after it was ruled by a Scottish court last week that it ‘misled the Queen’ by suspending parliament. Two cases are to be examined by the Supreme Court in London; the first being the one brought by activist Gina Miller, that Boris Johnson had no right to shut down parliament, and another will be the government’s appeal against the Scottish ruling that the suspension was unlawful.
Various scenarios are possible – the government could be vindicated by the court upholding the government’s appeal against the Scottish verdict and dismissing Gina Miller’s case (it could argue that the matter is a political one and not one for the courts). Or it could rule in favour of the Scottish court whilst ruling against Gina Miller. In this instance, because it upheld the Scottish verdict, the court would have to rule that it was unlawful overall. (It’s a complicated business in the UK as Scotland and England have their own separate legal systems; however the Supreme Court deals with both.) In any case, if either ruling does go against the government it will be extremely damaging for the government and in particular for Boris Johnson and his Brexit strategy.
Gina Miller’s lawyer today is to argue that if the courts do indeed ‘wash their hands’ of this case then it is setting a dangerous precedent for future governments to dismiss parliament as they please for any length of time required, without fear of the repercussions. Last week the Scottish court ruled:
“It was to be inferred that the principal reasons for the prorogation were to prevent or impede Parliament holding the executive to account and legislating with regard to Brexit, and to allow the executive to pursue a policy of a no-deal Brexit without further Parliamentary interference.”
The judges highlighted in particular the length of the suspension which they said was indicative that this was a deliberate tactic to avoid parliamentary scrutiny of Johnson’s Brexit plans.
Such an avoidance tactic is typical however of Prime Minister Johnson. When faced with an awkward situation, his instinct is to run a mile. One only has to recall how he avoided protestors during his visit to Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in July, when he left via the back door. Or more recently on Monday during his visit to Luxembourg, when he refrained from taking part in an outdoor press conference with the Prime Minister of Luxembourg for fear of being heckled by the angry anti-Brexit mob nearby. So the prorogation of parliament can equally be seen as Johnson’s bid to find an escape route: an easy way out, by which he doesn’t have to face any questions and can hide away from opposition.
The flippant way in which the lives of UK citizens are being played with during this Brexit saga was revealed in an interview with former Prime Minister David Cameron for ITV aired on Monday night. Cameron said that on the eve of his declaration that he would campaign to Leave the EU, Boris Johnson sent Cameron a text stating that he thought the Vote Leave campaign would be ‘crushed like a toad under the harrow’. Cameron elaborated by saying he thought Johnson simply wanted to be on the ‘romantic, patriotic, nationalistic, side of Brexit’ but never really expected his side would win.
Such a revelation only further indicates that Boris Johnson is currently a Prime Minister playing a game; and it wasn’t one he ever expected to be allowed to play. The fact that millions of citizens put their faith in this campaign – one built around mistruths and exaggerations – and voted to Leave does not likely perturb the PM however. Johnson is willing to push his party, country and own reputation to the brink for the sake of the Brexit experiment.
27 days ago when Boris Johnson met Angela Merkel to discuss a future deal, she gave him 30 days to do so. That time is almost up and European leaders have seen no fresh proposals from the UK government that would suggest it is serious about getting a deal. This, together, with the fiasco created by suspending parliament have only caused more concern in Europe about the UK’s intentions, expressed by the Prime Minister of Luxembourg on Tuesday when he said that EU leaders do not want to be blamed for the current ‘nightmare’ as he put it.
The Luxembourg meeting was supposed to be a key event in the Brexit calendar, but as one could have expected, with no new propositions from the UK government, it proved to be just another part of Boris Johnson’s charade. Still intent on pursuing a No Deal Brexit, he is simply going through the motions when it comes to persuading the world that he wants a withdrawal agreement.
Within several days we should have the verdict of the Supreme Court regarding both cases, a ruling which will have consequences of historical significance. With Britain’s future hanging in the balance, the stakes could not be higher…
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On September 16, the Houthis (Ansar Allah) warned of more strikes on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure. Brigadier General Yahya Sare’e advised foreigners to avoid the areas of Bqaiq and Khurais because they could be attacked again. He also said that Houthi forces will expand their operations against Saudi Arabia until the aggression against Yemen is stopped.
In own turn, Saudi Arabia claimed that Iranian weapons were used in aerial strikes over the weekend that interrupted much of the kingdom’s oil production, and that the attacks were not launched from Yemen. Saudi Arabia provided no evidence to confirm these claims. However, they clearly went in the framework of the US approach of directly blaming Iran.
Earlier, speculations appeared that the attacks on targets in eastern Saudi Arabia may have been launched not from Yemen. The first version of this speculations suggested that drones may have been launched by Iran-allied units of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units. Nonetheless, on September 16, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stressed that Iraq’s “territory was not used to carry out this attack”.
Mainstream media outlets, with help of various ‘anonymous sources’, are now pushing an idea that the strike was delivered by Iran. For instance, ABC News claimed citing “a senior Trump administration official” that “Iran launched nearly a dozen cruise missiles and over 20 drones from its territory”.
The level of tensions came to the level when US President Donald Trump said that the US is “locked and loaded” to respond with a force, waiting for verification of who was responsible and for word from Saudi Arabia on how to proceed.
The Trump administration has previously blamed Iran for the actions of the Houthis. However, so far, satellite images of the strike impact have been the only evidence that the US has released. This barely can serve as a confirmation of the Iranian involvement.
In this light, it would be interesting to look at this situation from another direction. Saudi Arabia currently has very complicated relations with the UAE and Qatar, located much closer to Buqayq and Khurais than Iran or any position of Iranian-backed forces. Furthermore, tensions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia grew to the level when UAE-backed and Saudi-backed forces openly clash in southern Yemen. The Qatari-Saudi relations have also been in a deep crisis since 2017. Therefore, these states have a direct interest in assisting to such a strike or, if we believe in the version that the Houthis were not involved, even delivering it by themselves.
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Centenas de jovens chineses, em frente ao Consulado Britânico, em Hong Kong, cantam “Deus Salve a Rainha” e gritam “Grã-Bretanha, salva Hong Kong”, apelo reunido em Londres por 130 parlamentares, que pedem para dar a cidadania britânica aos moradores da antiga colónia. Assim, a Grã-Bretanha é apresentada à opinião pública mundial, especialmente aos jovens, como garantia da legalidade e dos direitos humanos. Para fazê-lo, elimina-se a História. Portanto, é necessário, antes de outras considerações, o conhecimento dos acontecimentos históricos que, na primeira metade do século XIX, conduzem o território chinês de Hong Kong ao domínio britânico
Para penetrar na China, então governada pela dinastia Qing, a Grã-Bretanha recorreu à venda de ópio, que transporta por via marítima da Índia, onde detém o monopólio. O mercado de drogas espalha-se rapidamente no país, provocando graves danos económicos, físicos, morais e sociais que suscitam a reacção das autoridades chinesas. Mas quando elas confiscam, em Cantão, o ópio armazenado e o queimam, as tropas britânicas ocupam, com a primeira Guerra do Ópio, esta e outras cidades costeiras, constrangendo a China a assinar, em 1842, o Tratado de Nanquim.
No artigo 3 estabelece: “Como é obviamente necessário e desejável que os súbditos britânicos disponham de portos para os seus navios e para os seus armazens, a China cede para sempre a ilha de Hong Kong a Sua Majestade, a Rainha da Grã-Bretanha e aos seus herdeiros”.
No artigo 6 o Tratado estabelece: “Como o Governo de Sua Majestade Britânica foi forçado a enviar um corpo de expedição para obter uma indemnização pelos danos causados pelo procedimento violento e injusto das autoridades chinesas, a China concorda em pagar a sua Majestade Britânica, a quantia de 12 milhões de dólares pelas despesas envolvidas”.
O Tratado de Naquim é o primeiro dos tratados desiguais através dos quais as potências europeias (Grã-Bretanha, Alemanha, França, Bélgica, Áustria e Itália), a Rússia czarista, o Japão e os Estados Unidos asseguram na China, pela força das armas, uma série de privilégios: a transferência de Hong Kong para a Grã-Bretanha, em 1843, a forte redução de impostos sobre mercadorias estrangeiras (assim como os governos europeus estabeleceram barreiras alfandegárias para proteger as suas indústrias), a abertura dos portos principais a navios estrangeiros e o direito de ter áreas urbanas sob a sua administração (as “concessões”) subtraídas à autoridade chinesa.
Em 1898, a Grã-Bretanha anexou a Hong Kong, a península de Kowloon e os designados New Territories (Novos Territórios), concedidos pela China “por aluguer”, durante 99 anos. O descontentamento generalizado sobre estas imposições fez explodir uma revolta popular, no final do século XIX – a Revolta dosBoxers– contra a qual interveio um corpo expedicionário internacional de 16 mil homens sob comando britânico, no qual a Itália também participou.
Desembarcou em Tianjin, em Agosto de 1900, saqueia Pequim e outras cidades, destruindo numerosas aldeias e massacrando a população. Posteriormente, a Grã-Bretanha assume o controlo do Tibete, em 1903, enquanto a Rússia czarista e o Japão dividiram a Manchúria, em 1907.
Na China reduzida a condições coloniais e semi-coloniais, Hong Kong torna-se o principal porto de comércio baseado na pilhagem dos recursos e na exploração esclavagista da população. Uma massa enorme de chineses é forçada a emigrar, sobretudo para os Estados Unidos, Austrália e Sudeste Asiático, onde é coagida a condições semelhantes de exploração e discriminação.
Surge, espontaneamente, uma pergunta: em que livros de História estudam os jovens que pedem à Grã-Bretanha para “salvar Hong Kong”?
“The primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve the general welfare by informing the people and enabling them to make judgments on the issues of the time.”1 — Statement of Principles by the American Society of Newspaper Editors
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What is wrong with the Western media? Why have they not jumped at the opportunity to cover the scoop of the century — the wealth of crystal-clear evidence that proves the government has been lying about the attacks of September 11, 2001, for the past sixteen years?
That’s a question many of us in the 9/11 Truth community have wrestled with — even agonized over — ever since that world-changing, tragic day.
Consider, then, how much more investigative journalists, who are trained to delve for truth and adhere to the above-cited principles of their profession, have been agonizing — not just since 9/11, but for decades — over the disastrous breakdown of the press. Some of them have written volumes about their frustration and disillusionment, and in those volumes they have analyzed the causes of that breakdown.
Now that I’ve read their plethora of analyses probing what has gone wrong with the Western press, how can I possibly summarize these investigative journalists’ conclusions so that my readers will understand the enormity of the problem?
British journalist and media critic Nick Davies sums up my dilemma with this astute observation:
. . . there is a deeper difficulty that, since we are talking about the failure of the media on a global scale, the problem is simply too big to be measured with any accuracy. It is like an ant trying to measure an elephant.2
Precisely.
Nonetheless, because the role of the media is arguably the most powerful reason why good people become silent — or worse — about 9/11, I will do my best to measure and describe this elephant.
I will approach the subject as if we — my readers and I — are attending a courtroom hearing, listening to the testimony of one witness after another. In this courtroom, all of our witnesses are award-winning journalists and/or whistleblowers-turned-journalists. Each of them has a distinguished track record of truth-telling. After we listen to them present their evidence, which they have laid out in numerous books, articles, and interviews, I will attempt to distill this testimony into a simple summary of the key reasons for the media censorship we observe today.
Then, based on this summary, I will explain why there has been no serious truth-seeking in the mainstream media’s coverage of the September 11, 2001, events. The same case can be made, unfortunately, for the absence of truth-telling in much of the alternative media. My focus will be on the American media, but there will be occasional references to the international media, which likewise have refused to violate the taboo against questioning the official account of 9/11.
The next four installments — or “acts” — of this series will focus on the media. (The terms “media” and “press” will be used interchangeably throughout.) I will explore such topics as:
Who and what are the obstacles to reporting on the most critical story of the 21st century?
Is there any chance the topic of 9/11 will ever be seriously broached and honestly investigated by the media anytime soon?
What is the history of the media?
How have the institutions charged with delivering the news changed over time?
How do we recognize propaganda and disinformation?
How do we ferret out the truth in a world where mendacity and calumny are the norm?
Finally, what are the solutions to this dismal failure of the media to fulfill its primary duty — namely, to report the truth — so that citizens can make informed decisions?
To illustrate the depth of the problem, I will tell a story about my encounter with a well-socialized American who holds a firm faith in the unfettered freedom of this country’s press.
An urbane American on the patio
It was a gorgeous summer day in 2005. I was at a housewarming party in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Denver, Colorado, chatting amicably with an urbane man I had just met on the red-flagstone patio of my friend’s lovely home. Between bites of appetizers and sips of drinks, we inadvertently found ourselves on the sensitive subject of 9/11. So I mentioned that I was reading an article indicating that elements within our government may have at least cooperated with those who attacked us.
His eyes widened as he retorted without hesitation: “I’ve neverheard of this and I read The New York Times! Surely if there were anything to this accusation, we would have heard of it from our liberal media. The Times is constantly Bush-bashing, so that liberal rag would have certainly reported such evidence, if it were credible.”
At the time I was fairly naïve about our media but was at least aware that it was anything but “liberal.”3 Had it been, we would have seen political pundits at least questioning the sanity of bombing and invading Iraq. Instead, columnists and reporters had militantly cheered the upcoming invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
I responded to his remark by describing the stunning evidence of air defense failure that I had learned from watching Barrie Zwicker’s DVD, The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw.4 I also mentioned the intelligence breakdown described in Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed’s book, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001.5 Then I concluded, in a matter-of-fact tone, that there seemed to be a media blackout on evidence that contradicted the official story.
Hearing me question the media’s integrity, my acquaintance’s eyes now narrowed with suspicion. His body language let me know that he was unwilling to give me any more of his precious time on this beautiful, sunny afternoon. He abruptly headed toward the snack tray on the far side of the patio, leaving me standing there quite alone. Clearly, his faith in America’s “free press” was unshakeable.
We skeptics of the official story of 9/11 are painfully aware of the mythological nature of our “free and liberal press.” This awareness, however, is not unique to us. Nor do we have the distinction of being the lone recipients of silent treatment and ridicule by the mainstream — as well as much of the so-called alternative — media, as will be seen by the following accounts from our “witnesses.” Similar censorship was imposed on the early opponents of slavery and on the suffragettes. By studying these historical examples, we can be encouraged that the media’s mockery cannot prevent the ultimate success of those who endeavor to reverse egregious policies and practices.6
Stepping back
But let’s step back for a moment. A reader brand new to this subject may be wondering if journalists should publish material that contradicts the official 9/11 narrative. After all, is there really strong enough evidence to warrant their deviating from the authorized version of these catastrophic events?
My answer is an unqualified “yes.” For one thing, many of the 9/11 victims’ relatives posed questions that were never answered by the 9/11 Commission, despite its promise to these grieving families. For another, a plethora of books, DVDs, and websites have already addressed the contradictory evidence, which is voluminous. One book that ably refutes the party line on 9/11 is Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11, written by Canadian journalist and media critic Barrie Zwicker. He devotes a full chapter to listing 26 “exhibits” from 9/11 that he contends warranted articles by investigative journalists. Had these articles been allowed to be penned and published, Zwicker observes, the newspapers in which they appeared would have sold like hotcakes.7 I’ll refer readers to several handy “cliff-notes” studies in the endnotes.8
The most powerful reason good people become silent
To reiterate, the role of the media is the primary reason why good people become silent — or worse — about 9/11. The media’s prominence is so embedded in our culture that its influence must not be underestimated. As noted in Part 2, the “early adopters” in any society influence the population to consider — or not consider — the reality of a new idea. In ours, it is neither the shaman, nor the tribal chieftain, nor the wise elder whose edicts, opinions, and ideas we hold in such high regard.
Rather, in modern Western societies, if a new idea is covered in a serious way on television or in the newspaper, then, and only then, is it considered “real.” Well, at least it becomes discussable in polite company.
But, at the time of this writing, 16 years after 9/11, the idea that elements within the United States government could pull off such a massive false flag operation as 9/11 is stillnot discussable in polite company. For many Americans, the very notion is shocking and disgusting, or at least discomfiting. It brings a pall to any party.
Let’s imagine that, soon after 9/11, some of the mainstream media had even begun to research and carefully question aspects of the official account of the day’s events. It’s fair to say that readers and listeners would have realized that they, too, had permission to question the government-sanctioned narrative — even in polite company. The official story would not have garnered such a unified consensus.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the media became loyal stenographers of the government’s account, resulting in the official story becoming solidly anchored in the public mind.9
In other words, if, early on, the media had honestly investigated and questioned the official pronouncements about 9/11, and had continued being honest, many of us would not have been as thoroughly caught in the trap of the psychological dynamics that are explained in the earlier installments of this series.
Polls and third rails
For a wider perspective, let’s explore for a moment two institutions Americans are trained to trust: the media and our leaders whom we’ve elected to be our protectors. Both are authority figures, and in Part 3 of this series, we learned that fully two-thirds of us believe and obey authorities, even when doing so betrays some of our most sacred values.
But in recent years the edges of that trust have been fraying. The Gallup Poll has been assessing respondents’ feelings about the media since 1972. In 2016, pollsters found that “Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media ‘to report the news fully, accurately and fairly’ [had] . . . dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media.”10 That nadir compares to a 1976 peak of 72% in the wake of news coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, when Americans clearly appreciated the media’s honest reporting and high professional standards.11
Dissecting the 2016 poll results, we learn that trust in the media plummeted among younger voters and Republicans — likely spurred by the contentious presidential election. In the same polls, there was only a marginal decline in trust in the media among older voters and Democrats. That gap should not be surprising, considering that for the past 20 years, Democrats’ confidence in the fourth estate has consistently exceeded that of Republicans.12
According to Gallup, “Before 2004, it was common for a majority of Americans to profess at least some trust in the mass media, but since then, less than half of Americans feel that way. Now, only about a third of the U.S. has any trust in the Fourth Estate, a stunning development for an institution designed to inform the public.”13
In 2016 the print media fared even worse than the overall media. As Gallup put it: “The 20% of Americans who are confident in newspapers as a U.S. institution hit an all-time low this year, marking the 10th consecutive year that more Americans express little or no, rather than high, confidence in the institution.”14
Gallup has been checking on Americans’ confidence level in 14 institutions for more than three decades. It found that between 2006 and 2016, trust in banks, organized religion, media, and Congress dropped more precipitously than in the other 10 institutions — and more than in the previous two decades. Winning the trust of only 9% of the public in 2016, “Congress has the ignominious distinction of being the only institution sparking little or no confidence in a majority of Americans,” declared Gallup. In fact, the polling firm asserted, “Even as Americans regain confidence in the economy . . . they remain reluctant to put much faith in [most of these 14] institutions at the core of American society.”15
Confidence in the executive branch of the federal government fluctuates greatly, depending on circumstances. In times of war, the Commander in Chief generally receives high ratings. For example, in March 1991, shortly after Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait in the Gulf War, George H. W. Bush enjoyed the highest confidence rating any president has ever received — 72%. Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in 2001, George W. Bush’s ratings increased — to 58% — before diving to 25% in his seventh year of office — an all-time record low for any U.S. president.16 Weekly “job-approval” polls indicate, however, that by the end of his tenure in office, President Donald Trump might set a new low for Americans’ trust in the executive branch.17
So, which institutions do Americans trust the most? Well, the mass media and Congress both rate at the bottom of the barrel, but the real answer depends upon circumstances as well as upon which Americans are being asked. For example, an older person who votes the Democratic ticket when a Republican is president will likely trust the media more during those years. A Republican who supports Donald Trump, on the other hand, likely has a very low view of the media, which have scorned him, but a high degree of trust in the president.18
Like citizens of other countries, citizens of the United States want to believe that their leaders are trustworthy. After all, they are ostensibly there to protect and represent us. This could be one reason why, in wartime, a majority of Americans across the board rally around the Commander in Chief.
Despite their paltry confidence in the media, consumers of news still seem to be swayed by that institution’s monolithic decision to air or not to air. Have you ever noticed that only when a recognizable news source publishes a story on an issue do you feel you have, in a sense, been given permission to safely discuss the topic? If, on the other hand, a story is suppressed by the mainstream media, are you reluctant to discuss it for fear of being shunned? And if that story is also suppressed by the alternative media, are you even more reluctant to share it — except with like-minded colleagues?
I see first-hand evidence of that phenomenon when I participate in street actions in Colorado. When the subject of 9/11 comes up with visitors at our People’s Fair booth, for example, it’s no surprise to hear them exclaim, “Oh, yes, I saw something about that on TV!” The reference they’re making is to one of the several programs aired in recent years on Colorado Public Television’s Channel 12 (CPT12) — perhaps 9/11: Blueprint for Truth or 9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out. My point: The topic had become discussible thanks to the station’s courageous decision to touch the highly charged “third rail” topic of 9/11.
The term “third rail” is a metaphor referring to the high-voltage third rail in some electric railway systems. Stepping on this rail would usually result in electrocution.19 Thus, political third rail issues are those that are considered “charged” and “untouchable,” promising that any public official or media outlet that dares seriously broach these topics will suffer. This is a lesson the courageous former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) learned the hard way when she questioned the official 9/11 narrative in Congress. Her outspokenness on the sensitive subject was political suicide.20 Theoretically, a dedicated group of politicians could nonetheless escape “electrocution” if they worked together, especially if they were to receive even minimal serious reporting from the press.
Returning to and wrapping up our discussion of the Gallup Poll results, confidence in media is steadily declining, yet one-third of Americans continue to hold the mainstream media in esteem, despite the painfully obvious deterioration in journalism’s standards in recent decades. They cling to the traditional notion that the media are training their ever-watchful eyes on — and directing their ever-skeptical questions to — all branches and layers of government in order to keep our leaders in line. Such sacred myths and outworn beliefs have enormous inertia, as we witnessed with the urbane man at the housewarming party. They die a protracted death, as we discovered in Part 8 on brain research. But at least they do eventually die, as the Gallup polls confirm — sometimes when people change their views to fit new facts, and other times, unfortunately, by the death of members of the current older generation. Younger people are not as calcified in their worldview, so change can often occur when they take their place as adults in society — a fact also reflected by these surveys.
The foregoing goes to show that if the media were to expose government shenanigans, stand on the side of truth, and thus regain the admiration it earned in the mid-1970s, the public would once again trust investigations conducted by respected journalists at prestigious publications. Why, the public would even trust news stories that actually challenge presidential pronouncements — were any investigative reporter bold enough to write them.
Some of us remember the days when gumshoe journalists were once allowed by their bosses to seek, find, and share truth, no matter how inconvenient. They wore the mantle of this terrible and wonderful responsibility with pride. What has happened to those esteemed members of the fourth estate?
Warriors for truth
They are still in our midst, though they must remain silent to keep their jobs. Despite the prima facie evidence that today’s media are censoring truth, there are in fact reporters who are chomping at the bit to expose the mounds of evidence that clearly contradict the official tale of 9/11. They are eager to interview insiders and whistleblowers, to follow the evidence trail, to connect the dots, and to provide the context.21
The truth about 9/11 — and the chance to tell it to an audience that hungers for honesty — would be the blockbuster story of the 21stcentury. It would far surpass in substance, scope, and significance the 20th century’s publicly perceived iconic journalism — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé of the Watergate burglary.
What’s that? “Publicly perceived” iconic journalism? Meaning not actually iconic? Yes, I am afraid so. For many years I was as fooled as the average citizen about this so-called epitome of investigative journalism. Then I read about a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) document that was released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch in July 2016.22
Well before that FOIA request was granted, though, several journalists were painstakingly researching and writing books about the deeper politics of Watergate. Russ Baker is one such muckraker. His page-turner, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years,23chronicles the convoluted intrigue that wormed its way through the halls of power during the Nixon years. According to Baker’s analysis of the conspiracy, the Watergate debacle was an elaborate clandestine affair orchestrated by the CIA, in which Nixon was the target of a plot rather than the planner of the break-in. It appears that the CIA’s goal was to rout President Nixon out of the White House. In other words, Watergate was a soft coup, and one that could not succeed without the CIA having its tentacles deeply embedded in The Washington Post, the employer of Woodward and Bernstein. To keep Woodward off the trail of the agency, CIA agents fed him only the information they wanted him to know.
The reason for the soft coup? As Baker tells it, Nixon was playing fast and loose with the oil depletion allowance, a tax break for investors in exhaustible mineral deposits24 that costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. In so doing, the President was seen as disloyal by those who brought him into power — the Bush family and other oil-baron elites.
Here we have two perfect examples of deep state actions: (1) the CIA illegally embedding itself within media organizations and (2) the CIA illegally and deceptively meddling in U.S. political affairs. Both are indicative of a corrupt agency responsive to wealthy individuals who operate behind the scenes in Washington politics — that is, outside normal democratic processes — for the purpose of shaping public policy to benefit themselves.25 (For further reading on the deep state, see Part 13 of this series.)
Later, we shall learn that Watergate was not an isolated deception by the CIA involving the press — but that, in fact, the CIA has long been secretly embedded in the media for the purpose of doing the bidding of behind-the-scenes powerful individuals.
Idealistic investigative journalists enter their profession because they are attracted to the heroic job of delving into and exposing crimes. Their motivation appears to be a desire to make the world a better place to live. I am in awe of these warriors for truth.
So why haven’t even a handful of our journalist watchdogs — especially those who still work for establishment media outlets — reported on the story of the 21st century? A story that would likely reverse the United States’ inexorable march toward a closed society.26 A story that could halt the misdirected, perpetually warring course upon which our country is dangerously careening in its imperialistic pursuit of the planet’s resources. A story that could stop the murder and devastation of the lives of millions of the men, women, and children who just happen to reside in oil-rich nations.
For an answer, we need look no further than the “Great Game for Oil,” which investigative reporter Charlotte Dennett calls “the missing context” so essential to a comprehensive discussion of 9/11.27 She observes that in their coverage of the seemingly endless Middle East wars sparked by 9/11, the mainstream media — and even much of the alternative press — avoid mentioning oil as a key reason for the fighting.
Why the reluctance? Because oil, which the military of each country relies upon to transport troops and weapons, is deemed a national security issue. Very succinctly, here’s the background: In 1911, Winston Churchill concluded, in his role as First Lord of the Admiralty, that if the British Empire were to retain its position as a preeminent world power, its Navy would need to be modernized by converting its fuel source from coal (of which Britain had plentiful supplies) to cheaper and more efficient oil (of which Britain had none). Quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Churchill declared that if the Empire were to “take arms against a sea of troubles,” oil was required to maintain economic might and military mastery. Thus, by the time World War I started in 1914, the “Great Game for Oil” was off and running, with every world power scouring the globe to locate — then gain access to and control over — this prize resource. But if a journalist were to explain this race for oil and link it to wars, such honest reporting would be deemed a threat to national security and would thus cost him his job.28
Below, we shall delve into the miserable mismatch of journalist detectives and the corporate entities for which they work — or for which they once worked. We shall also discover how investigations crucial to an open and democratic society are, across the board, being thoroughly censored by editors, by media’s corporate owners, and by intelligence agencies. And we shall see that this censorship is not unique to the topic of 9/11 — not by a long shot.
In former CBS reporter and freelance journalist Kristina Borjesson’s award-winning anthology, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myths of a Free Press,29 highly acclaimed journalists tell their stories — how their well-researched, well-documented exposés of high crimes by officials were thwarted from making it into print or broadcast news. They explain how, even if their stories did make the news, editors had rendered them into watered-down, impotent versions, unrecognizable to the authors.
With four case histories — three from Borjesson’s remarkable anthology and one from a 9/11 whistleblower — I will demonstrate the extent to which the holders of power and the owners of media institutions will go to censor stories that, by any rational standard of truth-telling, should have been reported.
Michael Levine
Take, for example, Michael Levine’s story, “Mainstream Media: The Drug War’s Shills.”30
A “shill,” according to Merriam-Webster, is a person who is paid to describe someone or something in a favorable light. Levine describes a shill as a con man who entices suckers (that’s most of us) into a phony game to convince those watching the game that it is being played fair and square. In this way, the mainstream media shill for the official line of the “War on Drugs” — a war first declared in 1971 by President Nixon — yet they remain dead silent about CIA drug trafficking.
A twenty-five-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and now a whistleblower and journalist, Levine narrates, in what reads like a murder mystery novel, his personal experiences with the mainstream media — a media that became strangely silent about the CIA’s drug running. Not once, but time after time.
Composed of undercover DEA agents who were honestly trying to prevent illegal drugs from entering America’s streets, Levine’s unit was charged with investigating all heroin and cocaine smuggling through the Port of New York. This meant scrutinizing every major smuggling operation known to law enforcement.
Witnessing CIA protection of major drug traffickers around the world, therefore, became unavoidable.
These traffickers, writes Levine, included “the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the Bolivian cocaine cartels, the top levels of the Mexican government, top Panama-based money launderers, the Nicaraguan Contras, right-wing Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others.”31
In every case, just as a sting was about to succeed, the CIA stoppedLevine and his DEA agents! On those occasions when the CIA did not manage to stop the bust and the cases warranted investigation, the media cooperated with the con game, presenting the CIA in a favorable light. Levine explains:
It was also clear to us that CIA protection of international narcotics traffickers depended heavily on the active collaboration of the mainstream media as shills. Media’s shill duties, as I experienced them firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the United States; second, to divert the public’s attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were permitted to interdict as though they were major “victories” when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets.32 [Emphasis added.]
What Levine came to realize is that the mainstream media and the CIA are not entirely separate entities.
He also learned that the CIA, to avoid having to account to the U.S. Congress for its every action and expenditure, has made drug trafficking a major source of funding for covert operations. This is the realpolitik, the underlying reality, Levine tells us. The con game is the illusion propagated by the media that the “War on Drugs” is a reality and that it is succeeding.33
Similarly, those of us who are suspicious of the official 9/11 account are sorely aware that the mainstream media and many of the alternative news outlets shill for the government’s version of the events surrounding 9/11. When we credibly question this official version, we are met with silence or scorn. It’s fair to observe that, except for a few independent news sources, the “War on Terror,” designed to rise from the ashes of 9/11, is presented unanimously by media outlets as a necessary response to a real attack by dangerous outside enemies.
It is worth noting that, in a court of law, shills are considered co-conspirators of the con men.34
Michael Levine surely must be one of those warriors for truth who would love to expose the crime of the 21st century. Why do I say that? Listen to Levine’s parting missive in his superb exposé:
If you go back to the beginning of this chapter and substitute “World Trade Center” for “Drug War,” perhaps you’ll come to realize how very dangerous a shill game is being run on us right now.35
So the longer “we the people” buy into the con games and the shilling, the more emboldened become the cons and shills. Doubters of the official line on 9/11 intuit that we have come to a crossroads. We still have a choice to return to our roots — a constitutional republic, or what I call a “constitutional democratic republic”36 — rather than remain the imperialistic, relatively closed society our country has become. If we do not act now, at this 9/11 crossroads, will the con men and con women in power up the ante of violence, domination, and deception in the near future — to a point of no return?
Kristina Borjesson
On July 17, 1996, twelve minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 230 people aboard.
Investigative journalist and news producer Kristina Borjesson was assigned to look into the story by the executive director of CBS television.
After months of probing and analysis by the FBI, the CIA, and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the official investigation ended with the NTSB’s final report determining that the “probable” cause of the accident was an explosion inside the center wing fuel tank, sparked by faulty wiring.
One of the problems with this account is that many of the eyewitnesses reported seeing a streak of light that shot up and exploded upon intersecting with the plane. “For instance, 94 percent of the witnesses who saw the streak early enough to note its origin, said it rose from the ocean’s surface,” writes Borjesson. “Of the 134 witnesses who provided information related to the rising streak’s trajectory, 116 are inconsistent with the official (CIA video) explanation for the streak.”37
The CIA became involved in this case because the eyewitness reports suggested that TWA Flight 800 may have been downed by a terrorist missile.38 What’s interesting, though, is that the same intelligence agency then put together a team that produced a patently false, invalid animation designed to debunk the eyewitness accounts. How so? The narrator in the video tells the witnesses that the surface-to-air streak they saw was simply an optical illusion — that what they actually saw was “jet fuel streaming down from the crippled craft after it had exploded.”39
Needless to say, the CIA’s video did not go over well with the eyewitnesses. Yet because the media, including The New York Times,unquestioningly accept the CIA as a credible official source, they regurgitated its bogus analysis and assessment without even talking to the witnesses.40 Is it possible that the elaborately contrived video was really meant for the media? That is, did the CIA intend for the media to buy into its concocted theory and then churn out a tale that would persuade the public it was true? I strongly suspect so.
But this contradiction of the witnesses was only one of many problems with the official account, as Borjesson discovered.
Within her anthology Into the Buzzsaw, Kristina Borjesson’s article of the same name41 describes her punishing ordeal as she tried to report evidence contrary to the official assertions about the demise of Flight 800.
She opens her account with:
I had no idea that my life would be turned upside down and inside out — that I’d been assigned to walk into what I now call “the buzzsaw.” The buzzsaw is what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country’s large institutions — be they corporate or government — want kept under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling.42
Those of us who have innocently walked into the 9/11 Truth buzzsaw can easily relate to her chilling description, which continues:
You feel like you’re being followed everywhere you go. You feel like you’ve been sucked into a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It gets harder and harder to distinguish truth and reality from falsehood and fiction. The sense of fear and paranoia is, at times, overwhelming. Walk into the buzzsaw and you’ll cut right to this layer of reality. You will feel a deep sense of loss and betrayal. A shocking shift in paradigm. Anyone who hasn’t experienced it will call you crazy. Those who don’t know the truth, or are covering it up, will call you a conspiracy nut.43
Borjesson’s page-turner reveals what happened to her as she followed the evidence trail that strongly suggested TWA Flight 800 was destroyed by a missile. The extent that officials went to conceal this forbidden trail and the extent to which the media went in faithfully parroting the official account will remind those readers who’ve seen the impossibilities of the official 9/11 account of their own frustrating, futile efforts to interest politicians and journalists in the evidence and facts that clearly contradict the government’s explanation of what happened before, during, and after September 11, 2001 — the ill-fated day that changed the world.
As a seasoned investigative journalist, Kristina Borjesson understood that on sensitive stories such as the demise of TWA 800, she would need to be especially leery of official government sources. She knew she could inch closer to the truth by asking questions of the people who were not allowed to talk to the press — those, for example, who worked at the crash site recovering the debris. “One of my rules of investigative reporting is: The more sensitive the investigation, the more you avoid ‘official’ sources and the harder you try to get to the firsthand people.”44
The plethora of parallels between the evidence undermining the official account of the TWA explosion and the evidence undermining the official account of the 9/11 attacks five years later is uncanny. A few examples will suffice to make the point:
1. Flight 800: Metal from the plane recrystallized, indicating the existence of higher temperatures than jet fuel could have delivered. 9/11: Huge steel beams from the World Trade Center (WTC) Twin Towers were bent smoothly, without cracks; molten metal was seen flowing from the South Tower and running beneath the debris pile; and meteorite-like fusion of concrete and other debris all indicated higher temperatures than jet fuel could have delivered.
2. Flight 800: Traces of PETN and RDX (explosives used in missiles) were found in the wreckage. 9/11: Red/gray chips were found in the WTC dust, determined by independent researchers to be nano-thermite, but explained away by officials as primer paint chips.45 Also, iron-rich microspheres, which are a byproduct of thermitic reactions, were found in the WTC dust.
3. Flight 800: The NTSB ordered NASA to test red residue found on the top surface of the fuel tank, but NASA was prohibited from doing the very tests that would have discovered if the red material contained explosives. 9/11: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) refused to test for explosives in the WTC dust.
4. Flight 800: Based on a report that included a provably false story about how weeks before Flight 800 blew up in the sky, explosive residue had been left inside the plane after a bomb-sniffing dog training exercise, the FBI explained away evidence of explosive residue found both inside and outside the aircraft. 9/11: NIST has no explanation for the red/gray chips or the iron-rich microspheres found in the WTC dust — and apparently does not acknowledge their existence.46
5. Flight 800: Attempts were made to shame independent investigators for their efforts to uncover the truth. They were accused of preventing the victims’ families from finding peace of mind and closure. 9/11: Ditto.
6. Flight 800: Data concerning the investigation into the demise of the carrier was falsified by officials. 9/11: Analyses show NIST’s report on the destruction of WTC 7 to be fraudulent, leading to the suspicion that its omissions and distortions served a political purpose rather than a scientific one.47
7. Flight 800: Physical evidence from the wreckage was confiscated by officials. 9/11: The physical evidence at both the WTC and the Pentagon was illegally removed by officials.
8. Flight 800: Independent investigators and even the NTSB’s own crash investigators, who said that the physical evidence did not support government conclusions, wanted access to physical evidence and information that the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies refused share. 9/11: To this day, NIST refuses to release the input data for its computer models of WTC 7’s collapse. NIST explained, not facetiously, that release of the data might jeopardize public safety.48
9. Flight 800: Independent journalists — as well as film director Oliver Stone, who attempted to do an episode on the TV series Declassified about the TWA tragedy — were disparaged as “conspiracy theorists,” “conspiracists,” or “bottomfeeders” by official government sources and other journalists. 9/11: Activists and researchers for 9/11 Truth are commonly referred to as “conspiracy theorists,” among other derogatory terms.
10. Flight 800: Initial news coverage about the plane’s demise reported observable evidence that pointed to a bomb or a missile, but later reports conformed to the government line, no questions asked. 9/11: Initial news coverage of the demise of the three WTC buildings and Flight 93 reported observable evidence, such as:
secondary explosions;
the destruction of the three WTC buildings appearing to be controlled demolitions; and
the absence of any evidence of an airliner at the alleged crash site in the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, field.
Later reports avoided all of these initial observations and adhered closely to the official line about these events, no questions asked.
11. Flight 800: Ad hominem hit pieces were published by mainstream media about reporters who dared question the official account. 9/11: When Colorado Public Television’s Channel 12 (CPT12) aired 9/11 documentaries featuring evidence that exposed the lies of officialdom, The Denver Post printed two hit pieces smearing the station.49
Since there is an unwritten code among media outlets not to criticize each other, such attacks as the one leveled at CPT12 are rare, except when one media competitor is determined to silence the dissenting voice of another — or when powerful entities such as the CIA are part of the investigation, as in Michael Levine’s narrative. Additionally, journalists who step outside the echo chamber of an official account tend to be shunned by their peers at social or work functions. As I mentioned in the Introduction to this series, humans’ greatest fear may be social ostracism or even physical banishment. At a primal level, we’re aware of our dependence upon one another for survival as well as our strong need to belong and to connect with our fellow beings. Thus, there can be devastating psychological effects on reporters who are shunned or avoided in social or business functions.
Why did Kristina Borjesson’s investigative work not air on CBS — or any other mainstream station, for that matter? Her own employer plus other media giants turned a blind eye to the documented facts and physical evidence she had unearthed, and instead faithfully bolstered the statements emanating from the FBI and NTSB. After a heroic struggle, Borjesson finally realized that “there was no way CBS was going to air a story that would rile the Pentagon. Silly me.”50
So, my dear, “silly” 9/11 Truth activists, one of my reasons for providing lengthy summaries of these accounts by Michael Levine and Kristina Borjesson is to demonstrate that idealistic journalists with integrity do exist. In order that humanity may benefit from their commitment to transparency, these two have answered the clarion call to expose high crimes — also known as State Crimes Against Democracy.51
This commitment to truth can be seen as one manifestation of the “hero’s journey”52 popularized by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. When individuals accept the call of the hero’s journey, no matter its nature, they tread an arduous path of personal growth that transforms them in unpredictable but positive ways. As difficult as these journeys can be, they take us in the direction of increased integrity and to a meaningful life in which one’s destiny is fulfilled. Refusing to accept the hero’s mantle tends to take us in the opposite direction — toward becoming a villain or else a victim in need of rescue or even a bored person living a life devoid of enthusiasm and meaning.
My other reason for summarizing these stories is to inspire fellow 9/11 skeptics to hang in there. We are in very good company indeed — the company of these dedicated detectives who did not throw in the towel, despite unrelenting and daunting obstacles. When higher-ups rejected their stories, they wrote books and articles, gave lectures and interviews, and/or made documentaries. In other words, they themselves became the media so they could share their hard-won, immensely valuable information with the public.
Soul-tired from the ripping of the “buzzsaw,” at one point Kristina wanted to throw in the towel, to abort this unborn story. She tried to do just that, but perhaps fate did not want to cooperate with her longing for respite. Indeed, one step led to another, and she found herself writing and directing a documentary, TWA Flight 800,53with scientific help from physicist Tom Stalcup. The film features six former members of the official crash investigation breaking their silence to refute the official account and expose how the investigation was systematically undermined.
Thus, on June 20, 2013 — 17 years, nearly to the day, after the explosion of Flight 800 — the production of the film was completed and promoted on Democracy Now!, with Borjesson and Stalcup as guests.54
I am reminded of the locust that emerges from underground, after metamorphosing for 17 long years in the dark, to finally fly.
Monika Jensen-Stevenson
Another powerfully moving account in Borjesson’s anthology is “Verdict First, Evidence Later: The Case for Bobby Garwood,”55 by former Emmy-winning 60 Minutes producer Monika Jensen-Stevenson.
Jensen-Stevenson trod where other journalists refused to tread when she exposed the U.S. government’s pitiless persecution of Marine Private First Class (Pfc.) Robert R. (Bobby) Garwood and the cover-up of 3,500 prisoners of war (POWs) left behind in Vietnam and Laos.
The forsaken Garwood cunningly transmitted word of his status to a Finnish diplomat, who was savvy enough to take Bobby’s note to the British Broadcasting Channel (BBC) rather than to U.S. authorities. As a result, after 14 years in the brutal Vietnamese penal system, Garwood was finally released in 1979.
But why would his release be problematic for U.S. authorities?
Monika Jensen-Stevenson
When the Vietnam War ended in 1973, the government had declared that all troops missing in action (MIA) had been accounted for and that all POWs had been returned. Garwood’s sudden appearance was a glaring and embarrassing exposure of this lie. How would the U.S. government cover for itself?
Thinking he was returning a free man in 1979, the Marine was instead summarily met on his home soil with charges of desertion.
At the time, Garwood estimated that there were still 200 POWs still left in Vietnam. Yet, the media sat on this statement and continued to regurgitate the government’s assertions that he was a deserter and traitor, not a prisoner.
Why did both the U.S. and Vietnamese governments, former enemies, cooperate in creating this monstrous deception? The North Vietnamese communists initially held the POWs to ensure that the U.S. would fulfill its secret promise, made by Nixon, to pay more than $3 billion in reparation monies. But the U.S. did not pay and had no intention of paying. Therefore, by 1979 the American POWs had become worthless pawns. Washington convinced the poverty-stricken Vietnamese not to reveal the existence of the prisoners if they wanted to exchange ambassadors and establish trade relations.56
After all, abandonment of war prisoners was the kind of mistake that could destroy not only careers, but entire political administrations. No amount of effort or money was spared in preventing that from happening . . . . Garwood’s court-martial ended up being the longest in U.S. history.57
Although Garwood was cleared of desertion charges, he was found guilty of collaborating with the enemy. The media ignored the lackof evidence backing up this charge.
Then, to add horrific insult to injury, early in the court-martial, “headlines shrieked from every supermarket tabloid: ‘Garwood Accused of Child Molestation.’”58 Even though he was thoroughly cleared of this specious charge in a separate trial, the original tabloid slur “festered on.” Obviously, character assassination was the strategy of both the military and the cooperating media against Garwood, thus to ensure that in the public mind he was crucified, one way or another.
As Jensen-Stevenson continued to follow the Bobby Garwood story, she was also working on a 60 Minutes program, “Dead or Alive?” on the general issue of POWs and MIAs. Despite continuing pressure and threats that Jensen-Stevenson received from intelligence agencies — particularly the National Security Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — and despite pressure put on CBS’s news correspondents and the CBS president by the head of Pentagon covert operations, urging the station to drop the story due to “sensitive matters of national security,” 60 Minutesnevertheless aired Jensen-Stevenson’s “Dead or Alive?” in December 1985.59
Yet despite her best efforts, CBS would not allow Jensen-Stevenson to do a full story on television about Pfc. Garwood, not even after she got film footage of him in Vietnam that proved his prisoner status. His court-martial conviction, coupled with the ongoing government propaganda against him, made networks unwilling to tell his story.60
Jensen-Stevenson’s book, Spite House: The Last Secret of the War in Vietnam,61 was published in 1997, exposing the full story of Bobby Garwood’s ordeal. Learning of his story, veterans invited Garwood to speak to more than 200,000 Vietnam veterans near the Vietnam Memorial. When he came to the stage, they erupted into wild cheers of “Welcome home,” and “We love you, Bobby!”62
Filled with emotion, Garwood could not speak. One highly decorated soldier and then two more jumped to the stage to prop him up. In this soldier’s embrace, he finally began to speak. A hush settled over the crowd as Bobby spoke only of the country he loved and of the darkness he felt in his heart, knowing that his brothers, both dead and alive, were left behind.63
Garwood suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which could only have been exacerbated by his government’s and its puppet media’s brutal betrayal. So it was an especially touching moment when his stateside military mates finally gave him the welcome home and tribute he so richly deserved.
Due to the participation in “Dead or Alive?” by Lieutenant General Eugene F. Tighe, Jr., who headed the DIA from 1978 to 1981 and who had a worldwide reputation as one of the finest intelligence professionals ever in the U.S., Congress screened this program several times. These screenings resulted in the formation of a DIA commission on MIAs and POWs chaired by General Tighe. The Tighe Commission concluded in 1986 that prisoners had been left behind and that there was strong evidence many were still alive. Nevertheless, the report was immediately classified, without public explanation.64
From 1991 to 1993, U.S. Senator John Kerry chaired a Senate select committee on POWs, which exposed explosive scandals on the issue. The “committee established one indisputable fact: American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam and other countries where we fought secret wars.”65Yet the media provided no coverage of this shocking finding.
From these three examples, as well as from most of the other stories in Buzzsaw, emerges an obvious pattern: A story screams to be told in the mainstream media, yet the media do nothing but avoid the evidence and bolster the official account received from intelligence agencies, the military, and the White House. It’s a media that, except for the 60 Minutes “Dead or Alive?” exposé, feed the American public whatever story line the military and government want us to believe.
I am unavoidably reminded of the words of former CIA Director William Casey, who remarked in early February 1981 to then-incoming President Ronald Reagan: “We’ll know our disinformation program is a success when everything the American public believes is false.”66
So, once again, we see that big media, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and big business are all tightly intertwined.
Sibel Edmonds: A 9/11 story offered on a silver platter
The stories investigated by Levine, Borjesson, and Jensen-Stevenson are highly sensitive issues — issues that, had the truth about them been laid bare, would have seriously threatened key figures in the U.S. power structure during those years. As sensitive as they are, however, the evidence that disproves the official 9/11 story surely surpasses them as an intolerable threat to those in power.
The forensic facts of 9/11 are a peril to the powerful, in part because they are being kept alive by an international truth movement. That movement has persevered and grown over the past 16 years. Its researchers, analysts, and activists continue to exert pressure on the media to report the facts that question the official proclamation.
Will 9/11, therefore, eventually be treated seriously by the media? Health sciences librarian and author Elizabeth Woodworth has written a three-part series, “The Media Response to the Growing Influence of the 9 /11 Truth Movement,”67 in which she surveyed media coverage of 9/11 from 2009 through 2014. She found that recent reporting, especially in Europe and Canada, has been more balanced than was the news coverage in the years closer to the tragedy. We may hope this trend will persist, but there are further facts about the media that we should also take into consideration.
It makes sense that on the heels of the devastating 9/11 attacks, journalistic questioning of the official account would have been sparse. After the initial shock was over, however, when family members of the 9/11 victims and independent researchers were digging for answers to anomalies, the press should have begun seriously scrutinizing the official story — and would have, if it had been open-minded, inquisitive, and functioning as a true fourth-estate force to check government assertions.
No such response, however, was forthcoming. And to this day, mainstream media and the “foundation-funded alternative media”68 have still refused to treat this subject with any seriousness or depth — even when an explosive story was offered to them on a silver platter.
Sibel Edmonds blew the whistle when, as a translator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), she discovered and reported malfeasance by the department. Some of these allegations include information that could blow wide open the official 9/11 story.
Dubbed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America,” Edmonds was subject to the rarely applied “State Secrets Privilege” law. Violating it would mean facing prison. Nevertheless, she argues, this privilege cannot be used to cover up illegal activities that have consequences to public health, security, safety, and welfare.
So in spite of the gag orders, Edmonds offered to go public on any mainstream media outlet — print or broadcast — that would fullycover her story.69 “This is criminal activity. That’s why I went to Congress, to the Courts, to the IG [Inspector General of the FBI]. I am obligated to do so. And that’s what I’ve been doing since 2002.”70
But is Edmonds credible? Let’s see: Her allegations have been confirmed by none other than the “FBI Inspector General, several sitting Senators, both Republican and Democratic, several senior FBI agents, the 9/11 Commission, and dozens of national security and whistleblower advocacy groups.”71 One might conclude, therefore, that any rational media owner would consider her information a safe topic for coverage.
What’s going on, then? In an interview on the subject, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg put the situation in perspective:
I’d say what she has is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers . . . . in that it deals directly with criminal activity that may involve impeachable offenses . . . . There will be phone calls going out to the media saying “don’t even think of touching it, you will be prosecuted for violating national security.”72
Ellsberg further explained that Edmonds’ story will stay off the radar without mainstream corporate media attention. Thus, her damaging contentions will never be allowed to do harm to the powers that be. Besides, Ellsberg reasoned, Bush, Congress, and the media are all incapable of shame. In his words:
She’s not going to shame the media, unless the public are aware that there is a conflict going on. And only the blog-reading public is aware of that. It’s a fairly large audience, but it’s a small segment of the populace at large. As long as they [the media] hold a united front on this, they don’t run the risk of being shamed.73
Even more perplexing, Sibel Edmonds claims that many of the major publications already have in their hands the information she would reveal. How does she know this?
I know they have it because people from the FBI have come in and given it to them. They’ve given them the documents and specific case-numbers on my case. These are agents that have said to me, “if you can get Congress to subpoena me I’ll come in and tell it under oath.” 74
Apparently, there are honest employees in the FBI who would very much like this evidence to see the light of day.
Power and structure
So, who and what has censored the truth about crucial stories that we need to know in order to make better decisions in open societies?
What we know from Michael Levine’s experiences is that the infamous CIA itself thwarted his story of high crimes from being reported to the public. From Kristina Borjesson, we learn that the FBI, NTSB, and the Pentagon did everything possible to stop her investigation and to cover up the probable accidental shoot down of TWA 800. Monika Jensen-Stevenson’s investigation of Bobby Garwood’s ordeal was blocked by the intelligence community and the Pentagon. As for the gagging of Sibel Edmonds, we find the FBI and the Department of Justice at the top of the culprit list.75
As though in a legal hearing, these four journalists and whistleblowers are our witnesses, testifying to us of their experiences — experiences that patently demonstrate how our corporate-owned media and much of the alternative media have become controlled. Unlike the officially managed media in closed societies, such as the state-operated radio, television, and print press in the former Soviet Union, media control in relatively open Western societies is invisible to ordinary citizens. Ironically, then, the Western media, covertly directed from behind the scenes, has become an even more effective tool for disseminating propaganda.
Award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger pungently observes:
Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. “In our country,” said one of them, “to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What’s the secret?”
The secret is a form of censorship more insidious than a totalitarian state could ever hope to achieve. The myth is the opposite. Constitutional freedoms unmatched anywhere else guard against censorship; the press is a “fourth estate,” a watchdog on democracy. The journalism schools boast this reputation, the influential East Coast press is especially proud of it, epitomised by the liberal paper of record, The New York Times, with its masthead slogan: “All the news that’s fit to print.”
It takes only a day or two back in the US to be reminded of how deep state censorship runs. It is censorship by omission, and voluntary.76
Of course, in each of the four cases presented, the corporate-owned media and the foundation-funded alternative media became the shills, enabling the cover-ups of these State Crimes Against Democracy by loyally reporting only what those in charge wanted them to report.77
When one analyzes all of the 19 stories in Buzzsaw, a more complete list emerges of the entities that censor information from being given to or shared by the broadcast or print media. When the curtain is pulled back, we discover powerful puppeteers such as the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, military intelligence, media owners with conflicting political agendas, the White House, advertisers, powerful family dynasties, and extremely wealthy individuals pulling the strings of the marionette media.
To summarize: The press, an institution that should be the preeminent truth-teller in a democratic society, is thoroughly corrupt because of the inordinate influence wielded by hidden heavy-hitters. We can call this the “influence of the powerful.”
But that’s not the full picture.
Further analysis of Buzzsaw narratives — as well as accounts in many other books and films by media critics78 — reveals that the rest of the story of news suppression and journalist co-option involves the corporate structure itself. Our global media have become subsidiaries of massive corporate conglomerates that do business in many other industries, including the manufacture of weapons for the military. These mega-corporations, in turn, contribute huge sums of money to members of Congress as well as enormous research grants to universities. In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex.79But he surely knew that, in reality, the U.S. is saddled with the military-industrial-congressional-academic-media complex that is working overtime to achieve its own narrow goals, not for the benefit for the majority of citizens, not for the country as a whole.
But why is there an inherent conflict of interest between the corporate structure of the news media and truth-telling? In a nutshell, corporations must meet stringent requirements to be publicly traded on a stock exchange, such as the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. With their financial and reporting requirements, stock exchanges — and the institutional investors that own the stocks traded on them — pressure these mega-conglomerates to grow profits from one quarter to the next, one year to the next. Moreover, the news portion of the conglomerate is expected to generate the same financial results as its non-news counterparts. Therefore, profit-making, not truth-telling, necessarily becomes the bottom line for a publicly traded corporation. The primary aim of earning profits, accomplished through both cutting costs and boosting revenues, exerts tremendous pressure on news budgets. The effect of this facet of Wall Street on media conglomerates will be fleshed out in Part 22.
This media corporate structure is, of course, tightly tied to the previously discussed influence of the powerful. Just as bones and muscles seamlessly work together as a unit to control our physical actions, these two aspects of media — its structure and the influence of the powerful — seamlessly work together to control media’s actions. But in this case, regrettably, they cooperate for the exclusive benefit of the mega-conglomerates and the special interests of individuals holding positions of undue power. Obviously, this structure stunts the media’s ability and willingness to tell the truth — a key requirement for a healthy nation.
Pressure on the media to conform to a “consensus”80 view of the world, therefore, comes from both powerful entities and from the corporate structure itself. Pressure produces fear, and, not surprisingly, fears abound in the “news factories”:81
Fear of not meeting financial analysts’ expectations for the next quarter’s increase in profits.
Fear of low TV news ratings.
Fear of litigation by powerful corporations such as Phillip Morris and Monsanto or by other non-corporate but equally powerful entities.
Fear of the withdrawal of ads by Madison Avenue’s mega advertisers.
Fear of attacks by other media outlets if reporters or editors veer from a “consensus” viewpoint.
Fear of persecution by an employer if the reporter refuses to toe that media outlet’s party line.
Fear of the consequences of not telling a story that other media are telling, even if it is not a credible story.
Fear of offending influential local public figures or groups.
And so on. The stress resulting from those fears is enormous. Fear and stress, as we know, are anathema to truth-telling.82
Conclusion
At this point, we may be wondering: “Where are the truth-warrior journalists whose bread is not buttered by the media mega-corporations and who could therefore bring the 9/11 issue to the public’s attention?”
More specifically, we may be asking: Why do Amy Goodman, Chris Hedges, John Nichols, Matt Taibbi, Greg Palast, Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, Bill Moyers (one of my heroes), Robert Parry,83 Seymour Hersh, and others who speak up courageously and cogently on controversial issues — even Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — become strangely silent or else erupt in defensive anger or ridicule when questioned about 9/11 evidence that refutes the official account? There appears to be a 9/11 threshold over which none of them dare cross. They don’t need a degree in structural engineering to understand the obvious signature of controlled demolition of the three World Trade Center buildings — and, more importantly, the dire implications of that evidence. Nor do they need to be aerospace experts to understand 9/11’s air defense failures or spooks to grasp the intelligence agency failures. In short, each of them is intelligent enough to reach the conclusion that there’s something terribly amiss with the story we have been told by authorities.
So what gives?
Along with hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of other 9/11 skeptics, I’m dying to know, but can only speculate. I seriously doubt that any of these journalists, who are surely educated about the dark side of U.S. history — including the fact that false flag operations are routinely staged as pretexts for wars — are prone to denial as a means of avoiding cognitive dissonance. But I could be wrong.
Obviously, though, they’re savvy enough to realize that the subject is taboo. Several of my friends and I have speculated more than once about their motives. Are they worried about being blacklisted from reporting on the issues that are especially important to them? Afraid of relinquishing their bully pulpit? Dreading loss of funding from foundations that support them?84 Anxious at the thought of imperiling their lives or the lives of family members? Distrustful that telling the truth about 9/11 — a conspiracy that implies unprecedented perfidy by elements within our government — could eventually result in a healthier nation and world?
I finally decided to reach out to Kristina Borjesson with this question. After all, she’s been deeply entrenched in the profession, is well-known and respected as a truth-teller, and has suffered the consequences of attempting to report the facts about the controversial TWA 800 story. Her insider analysis certainly holds more weight than my outsider surmisings, so I share her answer with you:
They are talented journalists and have worked hard to navigate between reporting that goes right up to the line of what is acceptable to the powers-that-be and reporting that goes over the line and would cost them everything. It took Parry years to get over being blackballed for his Newsweek reporting on Iran-Contra. When he was at TheNew York Times, Hedges was reprimanded by his bosses after he criticized what was happening in Iraq while giving a commencement address in 2003. These individuals would immediately become targets for marginalization, loss of funding, and/or outlets for their work, or even worse forms of retaliation if they crossed the line, because they have achieved a “critical mass” audience — i.e., a big enough audience to create problems for the powers-that-be if used to counter official narratives on third rail issues. If they did that they would attract dangerous if not fatal attention from powers-that-be. The fact that they are widely viewed as good journalists not beholden to the powers-that-be makes them dangerous, but not too dangerous. They would only become dispensable if they invested that credibility in scrutinizing the ultimate third rail issue — 9/11. They’re doing a lot of good carefully hoeing the rows they’re hoeing now, and that would all go down the tubes if they turned their attention to looking into whether or not the official narrative about 9/11 is true. [My emphasis.]
Another exemplary investigative journalist — one who wishes to remain anonymous — had this to say:
Brave reporters know just how far they can go before risking their lives. Some have taken risks regardless, perhaps naïvely, perhaps not, and their “suicides” [or “accidents”] have sent a clear message. Gary Webb and Michael Hastings come to mind.85
Before I cease speculating, let me for one moment assume that I’m wrong — that at least some of these journalists are literally incapable of conceiving that criminal elements are embedded in our government. Were that the case, it is understandable that they would be in deep denial. For, as Graeme MacQueen writes in an article whose title includes the words “beyond their wildest dreams,” one must first be able to imagine — to conceive — that officials could have orchestrated the attacks of 9/11. “Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible,” then the hypothesis, the Canadian 9/11 researcher explains, “can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.”86
Alternatively, it is possible that some of these relatively independent journalists are not in denial at all, but rather that their clear grasp of the implications of the 9/11 evidence has them shaking in their boots at the thought of challenging fundamental beliefs about their own country. Gary Sick, President Carter’s National Security Council liaison, elucidates this phenomenon in his book, The October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan:
We in Washington are accustomed to the petty scandals of Washington politics. However, there is another category of offenses, described by the French poet Andre Chenier as “les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois,” crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. . . . For example, when the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986, both the Congress and the national mainstream media pulled up short. . . . The laws trembled at the prospect of a political trial that threatened to shatter the compact of trust between the rulers and the ruled, a compact that was the foundation upon which the very law itself rested. . . . . The lesson was clear: accountability declines as the magnitude of the crime and the power of those charged increase.87
Similar to Sick’s description is this revelation by former Pentagon official and retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski of what journalists have confided to her:
I have been told by reporters that they will not report their own insights or contrary evaluations of the official 9/11 story, because to question the government story about 9/11 is to question the very foundations of our entire modern belief system regarding our government, our country, and our way of life. To be charged with questioning these foundations is far more serious than being labeled a disgruntled conspiracy nut or anti-government traitor, or even being sidelined or marginalized within an academic, government service, or literary career. To question the official 9/11 story is simply and fundamentally revolutionary. In this way, of course, questioning the official story is also simply and fundamentally American.88
Whatever the reason each of the aforementioned journalists — and their other brave and gifted colleagues — have for their tomb-like silence about 9/11, I hold out the hope that one day we will hear their confessions — genuine, penitent confessions, not simply face-saving excuses.
Some Americans may fear that a real investigation into the events surrounding 9/11 could challenge our entire political system to the point of paralysis. But this is fear of fear itself and is a ruse of the mind. A real investigation would actually put our system to work as the framers of this country’s founding documents intended — preventing the further encroachment of tyranny.
Think of the alternative: If 9/11 is never officially uncovered as the cruel false flag that it was, more such monstrosities will surely be perpetrated by such conscience-less criminals. The results would include millions more deaths, many millions more refugees, even more extensive pollution and the ensuing illnesses engendered by massive military conflicts, and the exponential expansion of worldwide chaos. Which option would you choose: more false flags and other treacherous deceptions — with their accompanying fallout — or the righting of our government so it will operate by the people and for the people?
If we decided, as a nation, to shine light into the cave of corruption underlying 9/11, what would be required to expose the wrongdoing and the wrongdoers? Congress would have to find within itself the fortitude to commence an unbiased investigation or, better yet, to authorize an independent investigation with subpoena power and a mandate to grant immunity to insiders who tell all they know. These subpoena and immunity provisions would enable the independent prosecutor to convict and sentence 9/11’s key perpetrators.
That’s what would happen in a corruption-free system. And that’s what the 9/11 Truth Movement is demanding. In theory, our political system should already have brought us that official, impartial investigation. In practice, though, we find a different political reality.
A massive unearthing of the facts of this shockingly treacherous deed — a deed almost certainly planned and executed by U.S. political figures, military brass, intelligence operatives, corporate elites, and others (including foreign parties) — would allow us to peer into the inner workings of the minds, the values, and the system that have spawned and sustained our currently corrupted institutions. One would hope that, as part of this unearthing, the names of complicit members of the media who shilled for, ignored, or concealed the corruption would also be dredged up and exposed to the light. Perhaps this excavation of 9/11 will one day come to pass, as most of us believe was the case with World War II by way of the Nuremburg Trials,89 so that humanity can move beyond the inhumane, unjust, unsustainable conditions in which we now live, and toward the peaceful and sustainable world most of us can envision.
In the meantime, let’s be clear that our mainstream media and much of the so-called alternative media are simply extensions of our corporatized, crooked political system.
Yet to some, such as my urbane acquaintance on the patio in the foothills above Denver, The New York Times appears liberal and independent. Why?
One reason is that there are two types of political issues — with overlap, of course. On social issues such as abortion, race, gender, and immigration, the media have been given leeway to be liberal, even when this stance contradicts a conservative president or Congress. But with third rail issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, big-business profits, war, or the false flag nature of 9/11, mainstream media march in lockstep with their government and corporate news sources, repeating their narratives ad nauseam. Official suppression of the truth, journalists’ self-censorship, and prosecution of whistleblowers regularly accompany these third rail issues.90 As a journalist friend tersely remarked, “It’s okay to be liberal with domestic issues, but don’t mess with the empire.”
A side note: Occasionally, reports on third rail issues unexpectedly pop up in the corporate-owned press, but these online reports can be “disappeared” in a flash, since many mainstream media outlets do not allow their articles to be archived on the Internet. One example of this censorship is The New York Times’ threat in 2006 to sue WanttoKnow.info for posting a December 25, 2001, Times article that actually questioned the collapses of the Twin Towers on 9/11!91
Fortunately, some of the alternative media push boundaries and cross into these third rail territories. But, unfortunately, few of them dare cross the threshold of acceptability into the 9/11 issue.92
The preponderance of evidence we gathered from our exploration of the cases of Michael Levine, Kristina Borjesson, Monika Jensen-Stevenson, and Sibel Edmonds demonstrates that the corporate-owned media, by and large, remain loyal stenographers of those in power. Thus, I won’t hold my breath that they will address 9/11 seriously, honestly, or with any profundity. Rather, I predict they will not attempt to connect dots and draw a picture of reality — not as long as that reality differs from the contrived news that the holders of power insist we swallow. Nor will they report on the context of the 9/11 wars — though they ought to follow up on Charlotte Dennett’s marvelous, must-read article, “The Global War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context.”93 They most likely will do none of these things, at least not in my lifetime.
In summary, my study of the modern-day media has revealed that the active censoring parties are powerful institutions and individuals working seamlessly with the corporate media structure.But a critical, as-yet-unexamined piece of the puzzle is the self-censorship that naturally arises from the culture within the media monoliths. Indeed, it doesn’t take long for an astute journalist to learn to self-censor if he or she hopes to remain employed.
Former Federal Communications commissioner Nicholas Johnson (1966 – 1973) succinctly describes the process of self-censorship:
A reporter . . . first comes up with an investigative story idea, writes it up and submits it to the editor and is told the story is not going to run. He wonders why, but the next time he is cautious enough to check with the editor first. He is told by the editor that it would be better not to write that story. The third time he thinks of an investigative story idea but doesn’t bother the editor with it because he knows it’s silly. The fourth time he doesn’t even think of the idea anymore.94
“One might add a fifth time,” writes historian Michael Parenti, “when the reporter bristles with indignation at the suggestion that he is on an ideological leash and is not part of a free and democratic press.”95
As for the question I posed, “Whatever happened to investigative journalists?”: If my conclusion seems too conspiratorial, I urge you to examine the nineteen accounts of insider journalists in Buzzsaw.They are essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what happens to journalists when they attempt to report on issues inconvenient to power brokers or various elements within the corporate structure. From these accounts we learn how investigative reporters are ground up by the system that controls, suppresses, manipulates, and distorts the very facts we require to be informed and functioning citizens of a free society.
I trust you’ll also read the works of other insider journalists whom I will be citing in these four segments. Plus, you’ll probably find still other sources on your own. If you come to a conclusion that differs from mine, I hope you will contact me in the spirit of continuing this crucial conversation.
On a positive note, let me say that we 9/11 Truth activists have done exactly what Michael Levine, Kristina Borjesson, Monika Jensen-Stevenson, and Sibel Edmonds have done: We’ve become the media. Observe the research being undertaken; the books and films and articles and online blogs being written; the array of videos, from pithy to lengthy, that are being produced. Witness the perseverance and passion of 9/11 victims’ family members, who are intent on winning a real investigation into the greatest crime of the 21st century. All around me, I see warriors for truth who are refusing to let information be stifled and are mounting vigorous grassroots media efforts that, according to many polls,96 have successfully challenged the mainstream media’s repetition of the official 9/11 account.
My curiosity now takes me in a different direction and wonders, “Was the press always so intertwined with those in power? Were the media always such efficient transcribers of the “leaks” and press releases from the Pentagon, from the so-called intelligence community, and from the executive branch? How exactly does the organizational structure of the mainstream media promote censorship? What happened to the laudable goal of reporting the truth? In sum, what happened to our “free press” — our cherished fourth estate?
In the next installment, I will answer these questions by briefly chronicling the history of the American press. Then I’ll delve into more detail regarding the causes of censorship. First, though, to demonstrate the depth of denial — or perhaps vehement avoidance — that journalists are apt to display when confronted with questions about significant outside influences (notably the CIA) that dominate today’s news organizations, I’ll tell a personal story about a public altercation I had with a 40-year journalist from The New York Times.
4 This DVD can be found within the covers of Canadian journalist and media-critic Barrie Zwicker’s seminal book Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11 (New Society Publishers, 2006). Towers of Deception remains at the time of this writing the only book dedicated to analyzing the media cover-up of evidence that challenges the official 9/11 account. Find more information about this DVD at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrie_Zwicker or at https://www.amazon.com/Towers-Deception-Media-Cover-up-11/dp/0865715734.
5 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11, 2001 (Tree of Life Publications, 2002).
7 Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11(New Society Publishers, 2006), chap. 2.
8 Be aware that there are many websites, books, and DVDs that, while glitzy in their appearance and seductive in their allure, appear to be misinformation or disinformation, disseminated perhaps malevolently, perhaps innocently. The following are a few of the credible resources for your perusal and further study. The information contained in them is accessible to a wide range of readers, from the layperson to the scientifically minded:
For journalists, researchers, or other individuals researching the events of 9/11, the points made by a panel of experts at this site are clear statements on the best evidence opposing the official narrative: http://www.consensus911.org.
For a timeline from before the 9/11 attacks through 2014, see “9/11 Facts Summary: 10-Page Summary of 9/11 Facts From Major Media,” https://www.wanttoknow.info/911/9-11-facts.
For an 88-minute video featuring architects, engineers, and scientists testifying about the destruction of the three WTC buildings, download or purchase 9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrjcXOJIWw0.
9 The “anchoring effect” refers to the common human proclivity to rely heavily on the first piece of information offered (“the anchor”) when making a decision or judgment. There is a cognitive bias toward interpreting other information in relation to the anchor.
21 This eagerness has been reported to me by key 9/11 activists who have told me of their conversations with reporters working for mainstream news corporations. These journalists are keenly aware that any story they might write that contradicts the official 9/11 account would not be published. Furthermore, they would likely be terminated from their jobs or at least sidelined into meaningless positions within the company. So this situation is a “Catch-22,” in that if they were to slip the bonds of silence imposed on them and run with a verboten story, they would be silenced!
23 Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years(Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2009) chapters 9–11. Note: Speculation on the motivation for ousting President Nixon from the White House varies from author to author.
25 Peter Dale Scott, in The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (University of California Press, 2007). Scott defines the term “deep state” as the covert parts of government that respond to wealthy private influences as those influences shape government policy outside of normal democratic processes
26 A “closed society” is synonymous with a totalitarian one, in which there is no freedom of thought and expression without punishment by the state apparatus. For descriptions of both open and closed societies, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_society.
Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot(Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). Wolf shows ten steps that dictators or would-be dictators always take when they wish to close down an open society. She describes how each of those steps is being implemented in the U.S. today.
27 Charlotte Dennett, “The War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context,” Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Kristina Borjesson (Promethius Books, 2004).
28 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power(Simon & Schuster; 1st edition, January 1991).
29 Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Promethius Books, 2004).
30 Michael Levine, “Mainstream Media: The Drug War’s Shills,” Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Kristina Borjesson (Promethius Books, 2004).
31 Levine, “Mainstream Media,” 166.
32 Levine, “Mainstream Media,” 167.
33 A few exceptions appear to prove the rule that CIA involvement in drug running receives a stunning silence from the media.
More recently, on October 10, 2014, The Huffington Post broached this topic. See “Key Figures in CIA-Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin to Come Forward” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748.html. This article vindicates Gary Webb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The San Jose Mercury News, the paper that published his 1996 “Dark Alliance” series on the CIA/crack cocaine/Contra alliance, an exposé for which Webb was smeared by the mainstream media (via the hidden hand of the CIA) and for which he lost his job and perhaps his life. Webb’s story, featured in Into the Buzzsaw, and his supposed “suicide” are told in the 2014 movie Kill the Messenger.
Even more recently, in June 2017, to my astonishment, A&E Networks, via its History channel, aired “America’s War on Drugs,” an eight-hour series in four episodes, which actually tells the truth about the CIA’s overarching control of the worldwide drug trade. I say “actually” because let’s not forget that in these last 16 years, the History channel has played a major role in supporting the official 9/11 story and obfuscating facts that contradict that narrative. Since the drug war was declared 44 years ago by Nixon, does this mean that we will have to wait until 2045 — 44 years from September 11, 2001 — for the History channel to tell us the real story about 9/11? Maybe. But let’s hope that revelations of truth — on all fronts — will come at a much faster pace in today’s world.
Toward the end of the first episode of “America’s War on Drugs,” there is a taped conversation between John Ehrlichman, counsel and chief domestic advisor under President Nixon, and a Harper’s Magazine journalist, which took place decades after the “war on drugs” was declared. Here is Ehrlichman’s chilling admission of deep politics at play:
“The Nixon campaign had two enemies, the antiwar left and Black people,” Ehrlichman said. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
36 Some people call our system of government a democracy, but this is not technically correct. According to the founders, we have a republic (“if you can keep it,” quipped Benjamin Franklin). I prefer to use the term “constitutional democratic republic” because while our republican system of government is based in the U.S. Constitution, we use democratic processes for choosing our representatives.
37 Kristina Borjesson, “Into the Buzzsaw,” Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Kristina Borjesson (Promethius Books, 2004), 318.
41 Kristina Borjesson, “Into the Buzzsaw,” Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Kristina Borjesson (Promethius Books, 2004).
47 David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False (Olive Branch Press, 2010) chapters 7–10.
55 Monika Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First, Evidence Later: The Case for Bobby Garwood,” Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Kristina Borjesson (Promethius Books, 2004).
56 Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First,” 263 and 278.
57 Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First,” 263–264.
58 Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First,” 271.
59 Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First,” 260.
60 Ibid.
61 Monika Jensen-Stevenson, Spite House: The Last Secret of the War in Vietnam (W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st ed. edition, March 1997).
62 Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First,” 275–276.
63 Ibid.
64 Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First,” 260.
65 Jensen-Stevenson, “Verdict First,” 277.
66 In a personal e-mail to me, Barbara Honegger confirmed that she was the source of this quote, having been in attendance as the then-White House Policy Analyst at the February 1981 meeting in the White House Roosevelt Room with President Reagan and his new cabinet secretaries and agency heads. New CIA Director William Casey spoke these words in response to a question the President put to all of the cabinet secretaries and agency heads: “What are your main goals for your department or agency?” Having worked with radio show host Mae Brussell upon returning to California from the White House, Honegger was also the source for Brussell’s second-hand report about Casey’s words. Honegger also said she recalls Casey saying “. . . program is a success . . .,” rather than “. . . program is complete.” For further detail on Honegger’s account of this quote, see http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2015/01/15/did-cia-director-william-casey-really-say-well-know-our-disinformation-program-is-complete-when-everything-the-american-public-believes-is-false.
68 I have borrowed this term from Dr. Kevin Barrett, who has observed that the alternative media that receive major funding from foundations are the ones that refuse to report on evidence that contradicts the official 9/11 narrative, implying that they would lose their funding if they step over the 9/11 threshold. I cannot say with any certainty why these particular alternative media will not address 9/11 with any seriousness or depth, but I suspect his analysis is largely correct.
69 “Exclusive: Daniel Ellsberg Says Sibel Edmonds Case ‘Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers,’” http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5260.
70 “Exclusive: FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is Ready to Talk!” http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2498. This article contains a general list of Edmonds’ allegations.
77 For a thumbnail sketch of why the true events of 9/11 — as well as other issues that threaten powerful interests, our political system, or U.S. foreign policy — are not covered in the media, see Washington’s Blog, “7 Reasons that the Corporate Media Is Pro-War”: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/12/7-reasons-corporate-media-pro-war.html.
78 Here are a few books (besides Kristina Borjesson’s Into the Buzzsaw) illuminating how press censorship occurs, via both the influence of the powerful and the corporate structure:
Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 2004).
Kristina Borjesson, Editor, Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11—Top Journalists Speak Out (Prometheus Books, 2005).
Robert Cirino, Don’t Blame the People (Random House; First Vintage Books Edition, 1972).
Alex Constantine, Virtual Government (Feral House, 1997).
Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham And Her Washington Post Empire (Sheridan Square Press, 1991).
Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America(University of Texas Press, 2013).
Edward S.Herman, The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward S. Herman Reader (Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, November 1999).
Yahya R. Kamalipour and Nancy Snow, eds., War, Media, and Propaganda: A Global Perspective (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004).
Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect — Revised and Updated Third Edition (Three Rivers Press, 2014).
Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013).
Robert W. McChesney, Our Unfree Press (The New Press, 2004).
Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (The New Press; new edition June 2, 2015).
Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media(St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
Nancy Snow, Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech an Opinion Control Since 9-11 (Hushion House, Toronto, 2003).
Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11 (New Society Publishers, 2006).
And here are a few films about press censorship, each of which can be found by an Internet search: “The War You Don’t See” (John Pilger); “Buying the War” (Bill Moyers); “The Myth of the Liberal Media” (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky); “Fear and Favor in the Newsroom”; “Who’s Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?” (by Jim Gilmore on Frontline); and “Psywar” and “The Power Principle—Part 2: Propaganda” (two Metanoia Films by Scott Noble).
80 The term “consensus” has different meanings depending on the context. In this context, the term refers to the media echo chamber, which begins with some reporters parroting an official account and others jumping on the bandwagon without deeper investigation or analysis.
81 “News factories” is a descriptive term from Davies’ Flat Earth News.
82 This information is a compilation from Borjesson’s Into the Buzzsaw and Davies’ Flat Earth News. It is also found in dozens of media critics’ books, DVDs, and articles, some listed in endnote 78.
84 For compelling information on funding and relationships of some of the Left alternative media, which have been censoring 9/11 Truth, see “Norman Solomon: FAIR/Institute for Public Accuracy” at http://www.oilempire.us/solomon.html.
Whether these deaths were murders or not, the psychological agony, even terror, that intelligence agencies can inflict on reporters serves as a warning to other journalists to watch their step. Simply the controversy surrounding these deaths has an unmistakably chilling effect on any journalist who may be considering stepping into third rail territory.
88 David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2007), 26.
89 Many weaknesses purportedly plagued the Nuremberg trials, making them a less-than-ideal standard for future trials. Critics cite the double standard that exempted the Allies from being charged with crimes similar to those of the Nazis. Other faults may have existed, but this vast subject is beyond the scope of my essay. In the final analysis, though, these historic trials became the model and impetus for the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremberg Principles, the Convention on the Abolition of the Statute of Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, and the Geneva Convention.
To understand the roadblocks to indicting today’s U.S. war criminals, see an interview with Rebecca Gordon, Ph.D., regarding her book, American Nuremberg, on RT’s “Watching the Hawks,” April 6, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRNhg-R4Sg.
90 My thanks to Kristina Borjesson for the information in this paragraph and for educating me about the distinction between social issues and third rail issues and how they are each treated by the press.
93 Charlotte Dennett, “The War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context,” Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Kristina Borjesson (Promethius Books, 2004).
94 Quote found in Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, Second Ed. (St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1993) 41.
Centinaia di giovani cinesi, davanti al Consolato britannico a Hong Kong, cantano «Dio Salvi la Regina» e gridano «Gran Bretagna salva Hong Kong», appello raccolto a Londra da 130 parlamentari che chiedono di dare la cittadinanza britannica ai residenti dell’ex colonia. La Gran Bretagna viene fatta apparire così all’opinione pubblica mondiale, specie ai giovani, quale garante di legalità e diritti umani. Per farlo si cancella la Storia. E’ quindi necessaria, prima di altre considerazioni, la conoscenza delle vicende storiche che, nella prima metà dell’Ottocento, portano il territorio cinese di Hong Kong sotto dominio britannico.
Per penetrare in Cina, governata allora dalla dinastia Qing, la Gran Bretagna ricorre allo smercio di oppio, che trasporta via mare dall’India dove ne detiene il monopolio. Il mercato della droga si diffonde rapidamente nel paese, provocando gravi danni economici, fisici, morali e sociali che suscitano la reazione delle autorità cinesi. Ma quando esse confiscano a Canton l’oppio immagazzinato e lo bruciano, le truppe britanniche occupano con la prima Guerra dell’Oppio questa e altre città costiere, costringendo la Cina a firmare nel 1842 il Trattato di Nanchino.
All’Articolo 3 esso stabilisce: «Poiché è ovviamente necessario e desiderabile che sudditi britannici dispongano di porti per le loro navi e i loro magazzini, la Cina cede per sempre l’isola di Hong Kong a Sua Maestà la Regina di Gran Bretagna e ai suoi eredi».
All’Articolo 6 il Trattato stabilisce: «Poiché il Governo di Sua Maestà Britannica è stato costretto a inviare un corpo di spedizione per ottenere il risarcimento dei danni provocati dalla violenta e ingiusta procedura delle autorità cinesi, la Cina acconsente a pagare a Sua Maestà Britannica la somma di 12 milioni di dollari per le spese sostenute».
Il Trattato di Nanchino è il primo dei trattati ineguali attraverso cui le potenze europee (Gran Bretagna, Germania, Francia, Belgio, Austria e Italia), la Russia zarista, il Giappone e gli Stati Uniti si assicurano in Cina, con la forza delle armi, una serie di privilegi: la cessione di Hong Kong alla Gran Bretagna nel 1843, la forte riduzione dei dazi sulle merci straniere (proprio mentre i governi europei erigono barriere doganali a protezione delle proprie industrie), l’apertura dei principali porti alle navi straniere e il diritto di avere aree urbane sotto propria amministrazione (le «concessioni») sottratte all’autorità cinese.
Nel 1898 la Gran Bretagna annette a Hong Kong la penisola di Kowloon e i cosiddetti New Territories, concessi dalla Cina «in affitto» per 99 anni. Il vasto malcontento per tali imposizioni fa esplodere verso la fine dell’Ottocento una rivolta popolare – quella dei Boxer – contro cui interviene un corpo di spedizione internazionale di 16 mila uomini sotto comando britannico, al quale partecipa anche l’Italia.
Sbarcato a Tianjin nell’agosto 1900, esso saccheggia Pechino e altre città, distruggendo numerosi villaggi e massacrandone la popolazione. Successivamente, la Gran Bretagna assume nel 1903 il controllo del Tibet, mentre la Russia zarista e il Giappone si spartiscono la Manciuria nel 1907.
Nella Cina ridotta in condizione coloniale e semicoloniale, Hong Kong diviene la principale porta dei traffici basati sul saccheggio delle risorse e sullo sfruttamento schiavistico della popolazione. Una massa enorme di cinesi è costretta ad emigrare soprattutto verso Stati Uniti, Australia e Sud-Est asiatico, dove è sottoposta a condizioni analoghe di sfruttamento e discriminazione.
Sorge spontanea una domanda: su quali libri di storia studiano i giovani che chiedono alla Gran Bretagna di «salvare Hong Kong»?
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The recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Yemeni Houthi forces demonstrate once again that an aggressive foreign policy often brings unintended consequences and can result in blowback.
Trump’s bizarre infatuation with strongmen and dictators was on full display in his response to Saturday’s drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities.
When the Saudis agreed in the early 1970’s as head of OPEC and on behalf of OPEC, to sell crude only in US-dollars, the US Administration offered them in turn – “forever” military protection, in the form of multiple military bases in the Saudi territories.
“Saudi Arabia’s Bitch”. That’s what Democrat candidate Tulsi Gabbardcalls President Trump for his slavish reliance on Saudi Arabia to declare Iran responsible for last weekend’s attack on Saudi oil resources.
The attack on the Saudi Aramco oil facility over the weekend and President Donald Trump’s subsequent tweet that the United States is “locked and loaded” immediately prompted presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to fire back.
This weekend’s massive drone strike by Yemen’s Ansarullah rebels against the world’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia was a classic David vs. Goliath moment where a smaller force inflicted a devastating blow against their much larger opponent, one which even surpasses its legendary predecessor because of its potential global consequences.
Following an ambiguous and evidence-free description of the supposed attacks, the BBC even included an entire section titled, “Who could be behind the attacks?” dedicated to politically expedient speculation aimed ultimately at Tehran.
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Featured image: A fire boke out at the Saudi Aramco facility in the eastern city of Abqaiq on Saturday after a drone attack by Houthi rebels from Yemen. | Reuters
The recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Yemeni Houthi forces demonstrate once again that an aggressive foreign policy often brings unintended consequences and can result in blowback. In 2015 Saudi Arabia attacked its neighbor, Yemen, because a coup in that country ousted the Saudi-backed dictator. Four years later Yemen is in ruins, with nearly 100,000 Yemenis killed and millions more facing death by starvation. It has been rightly called the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet.
But rich and powerful Saudi Arabia did not defeat Yemen. In fact, the Saudis last month asked the Trump Administration to help facilitate talks with the Houthis in hopes that the war, which has cost Saudi Arabia tens of billions of dollars, could finally end without Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman losing too much face. Washington admitted earlier this month that those talks had begun.
The surprise Houthi attack on Saturday disrupted half of Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas production and shocked Washington. Predictably, however, the neocons are using the attack to call for war with Iran!
Sen. Lindsay Graham, one of the few people in Washington who makes John Bolton look like a dove, Tweeted yesterday that,
“It is now time for the US to put on the table an attack on Iranian oil refineries…”
Graham is the perfect embodiment of the saying, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” No matter what the problem, for Graham the solution is war.
Likewise, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – who is supposed to represent US diplomacy – jumped to blame Iran for the attack on Saudi Arabia, Tweeting that,
“Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply.”
Of course, he provided no evidence even as the Houthis themselves took responsibility for the bombing.
What is remarkable is that all of Washington’s warmongers are ready for war over what is actually a retaliatory strike by a country that is the victim of Saudi aggression, not the aggressor itself. Yemen did not attack Saudi Arabia in 2015. It was the other way around. If you start a war and the other country fights back, you should not be entitled to complain about how unfair the whole thing is.
The establishment reaction to the Yemeni oilfield strike reminds me of a hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee just before the US launched the 2003 Iraq war. As I was arguing against the authorization for that war, I pointed out that Iraq had never attacked the United States. One of my colleagues stopped me in mid-sentence, saying, “let me remind the gentleman that the Iraqis have been shooting at our planes for years.” True, but those planes were bombing Iraq!
The neocons want a US war on Iran at any cost. They may feel temporarily at a disadvantage with the departure of their ally in the Trump Administration, John Bolton. However, the sad truth is that there are plenty more John Boltons in the Administration. And they have allies in the Lindsay Grahams in Congress.
Yemen has demonstrated that it can fight back against Saudi aggression. The only sensible way forward is for a rapid end to this four-year travesty, and the Saudis would be wise to wake up to the mess they’ve created for themselves. Whatever the case, US participation in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen must end immediately and neocon lies about Iran’s role in the war must be refuted and resisted.
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The leader of the Iranian revolution Sayyed Ali Khamenei received on the 10th of Moharram, the Iraqi leader Sayyed Moqtada al-Sadr, brought to him by Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Brigade (IRGC-QB) and in presence of the IRGC commander Hossein Salame. The visit- and above all the pictures taken with Al-Sadr and the Iranian leader along with Soleimani and Salame – is a message Iran is sending to Saudi Arabia- who published in July 2017 a photo uniting al-Sadr with Saudi Crown Price Mohammad Bin Salman. The Sadr-Bin Salman meeting was meant to be received in Iran and among the “Axis of the Resistance” as a Saudi breakthrough in Iran’s backyard, and a capture of one of – what Saudi Arabia may believe – the pillars of this “Axis” in Iraq. Moqtada, albeit unwillingly, was giving signals to those unfamiliar with his “political style”, as a “new” alignment of al-Sadr, a move away from Iran and closer to Saudi Arabia. While Tehran is sending the ball back to the Saudis’ court, al-Sadr himself has a history of unpredictable behaviour and inconsistent political alignment. He has criticised Iran in many circumstances without being necessarily pro Saudi. What is the real position of Moqtada and why this “political jumping” from one extreme to the other?
It is all related to the history of Iran in Iraq just after the US occupation of the country, and in particular its approach to al-Sadr and his group since 2003. Moqtada al-Sadr expressed at that time his rejection of the US occupation. Iran found Moqtada very attractive to support. He is a Shia cleric, a Sayyed (descendent of the prophet), and a member of the well-known and respectful al-Sadr family with roots in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. Also, Moqtada enjoys the support of hundreds of thousands of followers he inherited from his father Sayyed Mohammad Sadeq, particularly among the southern Iraqi poor and in al-Sadr city in Baghdad.
By occupying Iraq in 2003, Tehran feared the US would turn its guns against its allies in Syria and Lebanon and end up attacking Iran once it had consolidated its presence in Mesopotamia. It was necessary to defeat the US forces in Iraq and stop their expansion plan or at least force their departure. Iran supported the Iraqi resistance against the occupation forces and transferred its experience and finance to those wishing to end the US control of Iraq.
Not that Moqtada has changed much since 2003 – Moqtada was very young and inexperienced, and over a decade later, his way to run his political aspirations is still amateurish. In 2004 he took control of Najaf and spread checkpoints throughout the city, including al-Rasoul street leading to the house of Sayyed Ali Sistani and to Imam Ali’s Shrine. I, as a foreigner walking down the street, was stopped once by his armed teenage militants and was only released by the Islamic Court, to which I was conducted by Sayyed Hashem Abu Rgheef.
Iran reached the peak of its support to Moqtada’s army (Jaish al-Mahdi) when he confronted the US forces in Najaf in August 2004. It continued to do so when Moqtada agreed to form a new group under the name of Asaeb Ahl al-Haq and gave the command to his assistant Sheikh Qais al-Khaz’ali. The group was trained and financed by Iran through Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, the actual vice head of the “Popular Mobilisation Forces” (PMF). The Asaeb group was responsible for several successful attacks against the US and British forces until 2008, a year after the arrest of Sheikh Qais al-Khaz’ali in Basra.
In 2006, Moqtada al-Sadr moved to Iran for several years for fear of being assassinated by the US. Nevertheless, he was considered an uneasy guest by the Iranian officials. The IRGC-Quds Brigade commander Soleimani didn’t know what to do with him, nor how to “bring some reason” to Moqtada. While in Iran, Moqtada planned to visit Prince Bandar Bin Sultan at a time when the Saudi Prince was Head of Intelligence Services, and the relationships between Iran and Saudi Arabia were far from being cordial.
In 2008, Iran encouraged the separation between the Asaeb Ahal al-Haq and Moqtada. It gave Sheikh Qais al-Khaz’ali full support to go solo with Asaeb. Iran organised a new, separate group under the leadership of Sheikh Aqram called “Harakat al Nujabaa”. It also supported the ex-head of Jaish al-Mahdi, Abu Mohammad Shibl al-Zaidi in forming his own group, Kataeb Imam Ali.
The Sadrist leader was and still is a rebel, unpredictable in his political choices and moves. But Moqtada is also very angry with Iran, accusing Soleimani of being responsible for the many splits in his organisation. He takes every opportunity to attack Iran. But Soleimani himself is clever enough to “contain” Moqtada and bring him closer, notwithstanding the Sadrist political attitude and choices. Indeed, Soleimani organised this week a “casual meeting” at “Imam Khomeini’s Husseyniyat” in Tehran, between Moqtada and Sayyed Ali Khamenei during the exceptional day for the Shia, who commemorate around the world the third Shiite Imam Hussein Ibn Ali’s killing, along with many members of his family and followers in Karbalaa, Iraq.
It is Iran’s way to send messages across the Middle East. For some time, Moqtada was believed to be totally anti-Iran, raising hopes for Gulf countries to have on their side a Shia cleric with 54 seats in the Parliament. These countries’ leaders missed out that Iraq is Iran’s backyard and that Soleimani well knows how to play his cards.
Although Moqtada’s political bloc, Sa’iroun, has more than any other political group – they won 54 seats in Iraq’s 329-member parliament – he failed to deliver his promises of reforms, technocratic leadership, and the anti-corruption agenda. It will surprise many of his own circle if he gathers a third of the seats he controls today in the forthcoming election. Moqtada’s group is today the image of their leader: spread thin and with no clear reference and direction.
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The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.
The myth is that Magnitskiy was an honest rights campaigner and accountant who discovered corruption by Russian officials and threatened to expose it, and was consequently imprisoned on false charges and then tortured and killed. A campaign over his death was led by his former business partner, hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who wanted massive compensation for Russian assets allegedly swindled from their venture. The campaign led to the passing of the Magnitskiy Act in the United States, providing powers for sanctioning individuals responsible for human rights abuses, and also led to matching sanctions being developed by the EU.
However the European Court of Human Rights has found, in judging a case brought against Russia by the Magnitskiy family, that the very essence of this story is untrue. They find that there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed engaged in tax fraud, in conspiracy with Browder, and he was rightfully charged. The ECHR also found there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed a flight risk so he was rightfully detained. And most crucially of all, they find that there was credible evidence of tax fraud by Magnitskiy and action by the authorities “years” before he started to make counter-accusations of corruption against officials investigating his case.
This judgement utterly explodes the accepted narrative, and does it very succinctly:
The applicants argued that Mr Magnitskiy’s arrest had not been based on a reasonable suspicion of a crime and that the authorities had lacked impartiality as they had actually wanted to force him to retract his allegations of corruption by State officials. The Government argued that there had been ample evidence of tax evasion and that Mr Magnitskiy had been a flight risk. The Court reiterated the general principles on arbitrary detention, which could arise if the authorities had complied with the letter of the law but had acted with bad faith or deception. It found no such elements in this case: the enquiry into alleged tax evasion which had led to Mr Magnitskiy’s arrest had begun long before he had complained of fraud by officials. The decision to arrest him had only been made after investigators had learned that he had previously applied for a UK visa, had booked tickets to Kyiv, and had not been residing at his registered address. Furthermore, the evidence against him, including witness testimony, had been enough to satisfy an objective observer that he might have committed the offence in question. The list of reasons given by the domestic court to justify his subsequent detention had been specific and sufficiently detailed. The Court thus rejected the applicants’ complaint about Mr Magnitskiy’s arrest and subsequent detention as being manifestly ill-founded.
“Manifestly ill founded”. The mainstream media ran reams of reporting about the Magnitskiy case at the time of the passing of the Magnitskiy Act. I am offering a bottle of Lagavulin to anybody who can find me an honest and fair MSM report of this judgement reflecting that the whole story was built on lies.
Magnitskiy did not uncover corruption then get arrested on false charges of tax evasion. He was arrested on credible charges of tax evasion, and subsequently started alleging corruption. That does not mean his accusations were unfounded. It does however cast his arrest in a very different light.
Where the Court did find in favour of Magnitskiy’s family is that he had been deprived of sufficient medical attention and subject to brutality while in jail. I have no doubt this is true. Conditions in Russian jails are a disgrace, as is the entire Russian criminal justice system. There are few fair trials and conviction rates remain well over 90% – the judges assume that if you are being prosecuted, the state wants you locked up, and they comply. This is one of many areas where the Putin era will be seen in retrospect as lacking in meaningful and needed domestic reform. Sadly what happened to Magnitskiy on remand was not special mistreatment. It is what happens in Russian prisons. The Court also found Magnitskiy’s subsequent conviction for tax evasion was unsafe, but only on the (excellent) grounds that it was wrong to convict him posthumously.
The first use of the Magnitsky Act was to sanction those subject to Browder’s vendetta in his attempts to regain control of vast fortunes in Russian assets. But you may be surprised to hear I do not object to the legislation, which in principle is a good thing – although the chances of Western governments bringing sanctions to bear on the worst human rights abusers are of course minimal. Do not expect it to be used against Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or Israel any time soon.
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Trump’s bizarre infatuation with strongmen and dictators was on full display in his response to Saturday’s drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. As our foremost Gulf expert, Kristian Ulrichsen, noted,
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The way you phrase it sounds like you are waiting for the Saudis to tell you what to do. https://t.co/CdSSb9ws9m
Trump actually said that he was waiting on the Saudis to determine the guilty party and to tell him what to do!
We all kept saying it is dangerous to have an erratic person like Trump in the White House in case there was a major global crisis. This might be it, folks.
The responsibility for the ten drone strikes on the Abqaiq and Khurais facilities is in dispute, with the Israelis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo fingering Shiite militias in Iraq, whereas the Houthi rebels of north Yemen claimed they sent the drones.
One anonymous Trump official even told ABC on Sunday that Iran directly launched drones and cruise missiles on Saudi Arabia. We await forensics, but this allegation should be provable from forensics. It hasn’t been, and sounds Gulf of Tonkinish to me. If it is true, buy an electric car quick.
One of the arguments for the Iraqi or Iranian provenance of the drones is that the Houthis were not known to have this capability before now. This allegation is not true. As I discussed in May, the Houthis used drones to hit Aramco pumping stations in al-Duwadimi (853 miles from Sana’a) and Afif (764 miles from Sana’a). The Houthis only had to go another hundred miles or so to reach Abqaiq from their stronghold at Saada (about 1,000 miles).
In May, the Houthis must have used Iran’s Shahed 129 UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or something very like it, which has a range of 1100 miles and has been used for similar strikes by Iranian forces in Syria. The advantage of drones for smuggling weapons to the Houthis by Iran is that they could simply be flown to them from a vessel offshore in the Red Sea.
If the drone can go 1,100 miles, there is no advantage to taking off from Iraq or Iran rather than Yemen.
In murder mysteries we look at means, motive and opportunity. The Houthis have the most motive of any of these actors, since the Saudis have dropped thousands of bombs on them for nearly four and a half years. Moreover, the Houthis have nothing to lose. They are already being hit as hard by the Saudis as they can be hit, and they have no resources that the Saudis can destroy.
In contrast, the Iraqi Shiite militias may not like the Saudis one little bit, but they don’t have anywhere near the same degree of motive as the Houthis. Moreover, they benefit mightily from Iraq’s oil facilities at Basra, which you wouldn’t think they would want to put at risk of a Saudi counter-strike.
For the same reason, Iran would have been foolish to plan or direct this attack, since its own oil facilities are vulnerable to a counter-attack. Neither Iran nor Iraq did this kind of damage to one another’s oil facilities in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, operating under a constraint of mutual assured destruction.
Finally, I think we should be suspicious of Israeli and Neoconservative intelligence on this matter. Israel has not been involved in the Yemen War and there is no advantage to it if the Houthis did it. Israel has developed a fear of the Iraqi Shiite militias, which are close to Iran and operating in Syria near Israel, and has struck them in Iraq several times with drones. It would be awfully convenient for Tel Aviv if the full force of the United States and the Saudis could be turned on the Iraqi Shiite militias, and even better if it could be turned on Iran itself.
Look, I’m no hardware expert and it is all the same to me whether the drones were launched from Basra or from Saada, so I have an open mind. But the argument that the Houthis absolutely couldn’t have done it makes no sense to me as a layperson, given the recent al-Duwadimi operation.
In the meantime, we Americans apparently must wait patiently for our marching orders from Riyadh. Or maybe, you know, the Saudis will bankrupt Trump by ceasing to rent all those rooms in the Trump Tower from him.
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The Venezuelan Minister for Tourism and Foreign Trade, Felix Plasencia revealed in an interview that Russia and Venezuela are analysing the possibility of opening commercial air routes between the two countries. The minister, who last week participated in the 23rd General Assembly of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in St. Petersburg, revealed that the proposed routes will not only connect Moscow and Caracas, but also St. Petersburg and other Venezuelan cities like Margarita and Barcelona.
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The head of Venezuelan Tourism said that although there is currently a tourist flow to Venezuela from Russia, it could be much greater. He also expressed his belief “that Venezuela is an attractive destination for Russian visitors.” With Venezuela in the midst of a crushing economic crisis, perpetuated by US sanctions and economic sabotage, Russian tourists can reinvigorate Venezuela’s tourist industry. In 2018, Russian citizens made 44,551,092 trips outside the Russia, for business and leisure. Venezuela does not even feature in the Top 10 favourite travel destinations for Russians despite its tropical climate and pristine beaches, while other sun-soaked destinations occupy 9 spots.
With most of the direct benefits of opening direct travel routes between the two countries going in favour of the South American country, Russia also benefits in other ways. This demonstrates that Russia is not just interested in Venezuela for economic and geopolitical reasons, but also to create cultural exchanges while supporting an ally through soft power approaches. The cultural exchanges and soft power approach will consolidate Russia as a friend of Venezuela in the minds of the local people. This further strengthens Russia’s support for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro against US-backed reactionaries, and allows Russia to continue to build strong relations in a region described as “America’s Backyard.”
Russia’s plans are all the more important considering that the US Department of Transportation ordered on May 15 the suspension of all flights between their country and Venezuela due to supposed security reasons. Long-time tensions between the US and Venezuela worsened in January when opposition deputy Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself “interim president” of the country, ignoring democratically elected Maduro, and obtained the support of several anti-Bolivarian countries, like the US, Brazil and Colombia. Maduro considered that the US decision was taken “out of frustration”, after failing to install Guaidó as president through various means, including the failed coup attempt on April 30.
With failed coup and assassination attempts, US President Donald Trump has increased the level of sanctions applied against Venezuela that it can only be comparable with three other countries – North Korea, Syria and Cuba. However, if Cuba is to be used as an example for Venezuela, the island country has been under intense US sanctions for well over half a century, but has still found different mechanisms to avoid economic sanctions.
It is clear that life in Cuba is more complicated, but the country, in spite of everything, has the possibility of cooperating with other states, including China, Russia and the European Union. Again, just like Cuba, Venezuela finds itself resisting significant economic sanctions against it thanks to the economic assistance from countries like Russia. Russia’s economic assistance has been so helpful that despite US-led sanctions against Venezuela, Plasencia recalled that the Venezuelan economy “has been based for more than 100 years an energy oil mono-production.” Because of this, Venezuela must diversify its economic as “Venezuela has everything necessary to be a power.”
Although at first it may sound exaggerated that Venezuela could be a power, but when considering the country has the largest oil reserves in the world, natural gas, perhaps the second largest gold reserve in the world, water for ten times its population of over 32 million people and arable lands of immense wealth, it very well could be. With the Bolivarian Revolution continuing the path of nationalization of Venezuela’s key industries, it can be seen why the US is aggressively trying to protect its economic interests in the Latin American country.
With the term “America’s Backyard” being used since the middle of the 1800’s on the back of the Monroe Doctrine, the US has always believed it had unhinged rights to treat Latin America as an extension of its own interests. With Russia this year alone finalizing economic deals worth billions of dollars and enhancing military ties with Venezuela, the Eurasian country has certainly challenged Washington’s claim that Latin America is its “backyard.”
However, what demonstrates that Moscow is not deterred by US efforts to oust Maduro in Venezuela are its ambitions to open these new direct flight routes between the two countries. The flock of Russian tourists that will surely follow will allow cultural exchanges to be made with Venezuelans. Venezuelans being able to meet Russians firsthand will only strengthen ties between the two peoples at a governmental and societal level. It is through cultural exchanges and meeting people directly that a true alliance can be formulated between states. With this pronouncement of opening flights between the countries, Russia is announcing that Latin America is no longer the US’ “backyard.”
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Paul Antonopoulos is director of the Multipolarity research centre.
The occupation of Palestine is always at the center of Middle East turmoil, and it would seem the name which is associated with conflicts in the region for over 23 years is Benjamin Netanyahu. It all began in 1996 with a paper prepared for him by Richard T. Perle, entitled “A Clean Break”.
The paper advocated regime change in Iraq, deposing Saddam Hussein, and aggressive action against Syria to break their ties with Hezbollah and Iran. This strategy was supposed to make “Israel” safer. It wasn’t until September 11, 2001, that the paper was dusted off and put into action. It should come as no surprise that Pres. George W. Bush would appoint Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, who had signed the 1996 paper for Netanyahu, and the paper’s author, Richard T. Perle, was made Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Rumsfeld and Perle would be credited as the architects of the US attack and invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In the summer of 2006, “Israel” began a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which entailed the indiscriminate bombing of the entire nation by the “Israeli” Air Force. The goal was to wipe-out Hezbollah, which is a Lebanese resistance movement. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was in Tel Aviv and was the first to coin the term “New Middle East”. Her ideology of creative destruction justified death as the means to create new world orders. She said, “What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East, not going back to the old one.”
In March of 2011, the US-NATO attack on Syria began, for regime change to fulfill the 1996 paper’s goal. The weapons and terrorists came flowing in from Jordan, who is an ally of Israel and the US. The only reason the ‘uprising’ began in Deraa was logistics: it sat on the border with Jordan. After 8 years of destruction, bloodshed, maiming, and mass migration the plan failed, thanks in part to the help of Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia.
The US, Europe, and Iran worked for many years to achieve a deal, which would prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. “Israel” opposed the deal from the outset, as it would relieve the harsh economic sanctions on Iran, which in turn could strengthen their participation in the resistance movement with their allies. Netanyahu convinced the new US Pres. Trump to make tearing up of the deal a cornerstone of his administration, which was seen as the US-“Israeli” solidarity. After Trump followed through on his promise, and the European signatories refused to hold up their promises to do business with Iran, there was a tit-for-tat game in the Arab Gulf involving ship attacks, drone attacks, and the resulting blame-game.
Saudi Arabia, the richest nation in the Middle East, is waging war on Yemen, the poorest nation in the Middle East. The Saudi military is backed by the US and UAE, while the Houthis in Yemen are backed by Iran. The worst humanitarian crisis of the Middle East, which affects the poorest civilians, though well covered by western media has continued unabated. Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA officer, and expert on Saudi Arabia said, “It’s time for America to say he must go.” He referred to Mohammed bin Salman, the son of the King of Saudi Arabia, and the architect of the war on Yemen, which pits the US against Iran. Very recently, the Houthis attacked the main oil-producing facility in Saudi Arabia, which has affected global oil prices.
Netanyahu now faces what could be defeat in his last election and possible jail time from corruption charges. From 1996 to 2019 he has been chasing a dream: to break the resistance movement.
The 2003 invasion and decimation of Iraq, and the 2006 attack and destruction of Lebanon, and the 2011 attack and monumental destruction of Syria have all failed to make “Israel” safer or to diminish the resistance movement. “Israel” in 2019 has bombed Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and Lebanon, with resulting destruction and loss of life; however, those actions only brought retaliation from the resistance which ended up with 2 “Israeli” soldiers dead in their vehicle, and Netanyahu being rushed into a bomb shelter while giving a campaign speech, after resistance missiles rained down on the area.
Perhaps the time has come to examine the root cause of the resistance movement: the brutal occupation of Palestine, and the denial of human rights to 5 million Palestinians. Could the “New Middle East” become peaceful through the end of all the need for resistance?
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Take nothing Trump says at face value. Time and again his rhetoric and actions diverge greatly.
That said, on Sunday he tweeted the following:
“Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!”
Reality is ignored and key questions aren’t asked. Throughout its 40-year history, the Islamic Republic of Iran never attacked another country.
Why would Iran attack another country now? Why would it strike another nation’s oil facilities — risking war, including retaliation against its own production and refining capabilities?
On Saturday, Yemeni Houthis struck two key Saudi Aramco oil facilities, the kingdom’s Abqaiq refinery (the world’s largest) and Khurais oil field.
Satellite images indicated considerable damage to Saudi energy facilities struck, halting over half the kingdom’s oil and gas operations until it’s repaired.
Houthis launched the attack either from Yemeni or Saudi territory its fighters captured near the border between both countries.
Pompeo blamed Iran for what happened, tweeting there was “no evidence the attacks came from Yemen (sic).”
No evidence suggests Iranian responsibility. Clearly the Islamic Republic wants greater regional war than already avoided. It wants ongoing conflicts ended.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal cited unnamed Trump regime officials, claiming without evidence that “the fiery blasts were the result of cruise-missile strikes launched from Iraq or Iran…”
Iraq denied its territory was used. Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif debunked Pompeo’s Big Lie about Tehran’s involvement, accusing him of “maximum lying (and) deceit.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi slammed
“futile (US) allegations and blind statements,” calling them “incomprehensible and meaningless within the framework of diplomacy,” adding:
Unacceptable Trump regime accusations “seem more like a plot being hatched by secret and intelligence organizations aimed at tarnishing a country’s image and setting the stage for future actions.”
On Sunday, Iranian President Rouhani said
“(t)oday what is taking place in this region and has concerned many countries of the world is the result of erroneous plans and conspiracies of the United States,” adding:
“We have declared time and again that regional issues must be resolved by regional countries and through dialogue.”
“If we want the establishment of real security in this region, a full stop must be put to acts of aggression by the US and provocative interventions by the (Israeli) Zionist regime. Otherwise we will witness the continuation of insecurity.”
So far, the extent of damage to Saudi oil and gas facilities is unclear. The WSJ said the following:
“About two million barrels a day could be restored by Monday, but it will take weeks to return to full capacity, people familiar with the damage estimates in Saudi Arabia said. One person familiar with the damage at Abqaiq (Riyadh’s crown jewel) said the facility was a wreck.”
Last week, Pompeo said Trump “is prepared to meet (Iranian President Rouhani) with no preconditions.”
Treasury Secretary said he’s willing to meet with Rouhani in late September on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly session with “no preconditions.”
Weeks earlier, DJT said
“I’ll meet (with Rouhani) anytime they want,” adding: It would be “good for the country, good for them, good for us, and good for the world.”
He made similar remarks a number of other times.
On Sunday, he tweeted the following:
“The Fake News is saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, ‘No Conditions.’ That is an incorrect statement (as usual!)” — contradicting his earlier statements.
Note: Rouhani and other Iranian officials reject talks with Trump unless his regime returns to the JCPOA it unlawfully abandoned and lifts illegally imposed sanctions.
In the wake of Houthi damage to key Saudi oil fields, falsely blamed on Iran, a Rouhani/Trump meeting under any conditions is even less likely.
Iran wants peace, not war, but is ready to retaliate if preemptively attacked, said IRGC aerospace commander Amirali Hajizadeh, adding:
“Everybody should know that all American bases and their aircraft carriers in a distance of up to 2,000km around Iran are within the range of our missiles.”
Saturday Houthi attacks on Saudi oil facilities were on a larger scale than the kingdom ever before experienced.
Riyadh has two options: Cease terror-bombing Yemen and lift the blockade on the country or face repeated Houthi strikes on its strategic targets, notably its oil and gas facilities.
If the Trump regime attacks Iran, all bets are off.
What’s unlikely is possible because White House and congressional Iranophobes want the country transformed into a US vassal state.
They want Israel’s key regional rival eliminated and US control gained over Iran’s vast energy resources.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
Those surprised by President Putin’s S-400 sales pitch to Saudi Arabia earlier this week while speaking in Ankara alongside his Turkish and Iranian counterparts clearly haven’t been following the rapid development of Russian-Saudi relations and are likely influenced by the discredited dogma spread by the Alt-Media Community which pretends that Russia is somehow just as strongly “against” Saudi Arabia as it supposedly is against “Israel” too, which isn’t true whatsoever and therefore deserves to be thoroughly debunked.
President Putin surprised many when he made a S-400 sales pitch to Saudi Arabia while speaking in Ankara alongside his Turkish and Iranian counterparts in response to a question about the latest regional developments, especially seeing as how this was preceded by him quoting a passage from the Quran (which begins at 42:26 in this English voiced-over video from RT’s Ruptly) emphasizing the religious righteousness of self-defense to protect one’s people. Importantly, he also quoted that Holy Book to make a plea for peace between all warring parties, which in a sense builds upon the impassioned defense that Rouhani made of the Yemeni people right before Putin’s speech but then took it in a drastically different direction after he used the opportunity to promote Russia’s “military diplomacy” with the Wahhabi Kingdom on the presumed basis that the Saudis are the victims — not the aggressors that Rouhani just said they were — who therefore require the S-400s in order to defend themselves and their infrastructure after last weekend’s Ansarullah drone strike.
The Iranian delegation responded by literally laughing out loud (43:35), either at the boldness of this sales pitch and/or out of how uncomfortable they felt that Putin would use the Quran to indirectly contradict them on Yemen (though RT curiously interpreted this as “admonishing the Saudi coalition’s war on Yemen”) and then proceed to use the second passage he quoted to segue into his S-400 sales pitch to Saudi Arabia. Whatever the reason behind their smiles may be, there’s no denying that this was an unprecedented outreach to a country that had long been regarded as one of Russia’s regional rivals, to say nothing of its present status as an enemy of both Putin’s Turkish hosts and their mutual Iranian partners. Unbeknownst to many except the wonks who closely follow Russian-Saudi relations, the two sides have been in the process of a rapidly developing rapprochement as part of Moscow’s 21st-century grand strategy of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia and are at the brink of a strategic partnership ahead of Putin’s planned trip there next month.
In fact, the Saudi King paid his first-ever visit to Moscow in October 2017 in the clearest sign yet that the times are changing, which the author elaborated on in his analysis at the time rhetorically asking “Is Saudi Arabia’s Grand Strategy Shifting?” The reason for such a headline is that Sputnik reported that the two parties signed agreements to purchase not just the S-400s, but also “Kornet-EM anti-tank missile systems, TOS-1A ‘Buratino’ heavy flame systems, AGS-30 grenade launchers, and Kalashnikov AK-103 assault rifles”, with the same publicly financed international media outlet also reporting that the TOS-1A rocket launchers have already been delivered as of earlier this year and can reasonably be assumed to have been deployed for use against the Ansarullah in Yemen. It needs to be noted that Russia supports the internationally recognized but Saudi-based Hadi government, not the Ansarullah, and even withdrew its diplomats from the Yemeni capital that’s under their control in late 2017 two months after the Saudi King’s visit after the group killed former President Saleh.
Demonstrating Russia’s increasingly close alignment with the official Saudi position towards Yemen, it joined the US in condemning the Ansarullah’s missile strikes in March 2018 carried out on the third anniversary of the war, and the author analyzed in his piece at the time that “Russia couldn’t have asked for a better advertisement of its S-400 defensive weaponry” after video footage emerged of American Patriot systems failing to intercept the incoming projectiles. That said, while the S-400s are extremely effective for stopping enemy missiles, they’re practically useless against much tinier drones that are better thwarted by the Pantsir system instead, which is why it almost defies belief that Putin would make a S-400 sales pitch to Saudi Arabia after last weekend’s attack when he should obviously know that. With this in mind, it can be concluded that he simply saw an opportunity to make a globally publicized sales pitch when asked about last weekend’s attack at the Ankara Summit, so he threw in some Quranic passages for maximum viral effect ahead of next month’s trip.
Considering the insistence with which Putin was pushing the S-400s as the ideal solution to Saudi Arabia’s recent security threats (having symbolically said in the same respect that Russia’s sales of this system and its predecessor to Turkey and Iran respectively have also succeeded in ensuring their security too), there’s every reason to believe that he might clinch such a big-ticket deal during his upcoming visit to the Wahhabi Kingdom. Unlike the discredited dogma regularly spread by the Alt-Media Community, Russia and Saudi Arabia are on excellent terms with one another and are drawing closer by the day despite what some might want to “wishfully” believe. After the fallout of the Khashoggi case (where the West condemned the Kingdom but Russia supported it) and the “hearty handshake” that Putin had with MBS shortly thereafter at the G20 Summit in Argentina, it’s self-evident that Russia is trying to save the Crown Prince’s reputation because “It Turns Out That Saudi Arabia Isn’t Exactly An American Puppet After All” following the Moscow-Riyadh rapprochement.
It’s trendy to think that Russia is “against” the US’ traditional partners such as Saudi Arabia and especially “Israel“, but in reality it’s doing its utmost to “poach” them from America’s grasp and replace Washington as their top strategic partner in order to restore “balance” to regional affairs according to Moscow’s envisaged end game. It’s precisely because of the adverse zero-sum impact that Russia’s two new aforementioned partnerships have on Iranian interests that Alt-Media (which largely stands in solidarity with Iran’s officially stated political goals against Saudi Arabia & “Israel” but inexplicably imagines that the Russian state does too despite much evidence to the contrary) usually puts forth a “No true Scotsman…” (or in this case, Russian) argument to pretend like none of this is happening because they can’t countenance the thought of Russia actively “balancing” Iran by wanting to sell Saudi Arabia S-400s for neutralizing the Islamic Republic’s legendary missile stockpile and allowing “Israel” to strike the IRGC and Hezbollah in Syria with impunity, though all objective observers should realize that the times have certainly changed and none of this should be surprising.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The American farm sector is undergoing its worst crisis since the 1980’s. Extreme snow and then unusually heavy rainfall across the Midwest farm belt this spring and summer have severely delayed or reduced crop plantings. That comes after several years of falling farm income. A US EPA series of waivers to the oil industry then sharply cut the market for corn ethanol. To make matters worse, in retaliation for Trump Administration tariffs on China goods, China has halted all import of US farm products. All this comes as US farmers struggle with record high debt with bankruptcies spreading. Some compare the situation to the crises of the Great Depression in agriculture. Farm production has long been a major pillar of the US economy and exports. Could this little-noted farm crisis become a factor that could determine if Donald Trump wins or loses re-election in 2020?
The Ethanol Fiasco
At a time when farm income has fallen dramatically over the past several years, the Trump Environmental Protection Administration just dealt a further severe blow to the market for corn used to produce ethanol for E10 fuels. On August 9, the EPA announced that it had approved 31 of its 38 pending small refinery exemptions, allowing the oil refiners to avoid mandatory blending of gasoline with corn ethanol. The approvals were retroactive to 2018, in violation of the Biofuels law, and allowed oil refiners to evade mandatory blending of more than 1 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol, a huge blow to US corn growers.
To make matters worse, the pro-oil Trump EPA, first under Scott Pruitt, a strong backer of the oil industry, and now his successor, Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry, have granted a record number of oil refiner exemptions including to companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, in direct violation of a law intended to help only small distressed refiners. The exemptions are to date some four times what was exempted under the Obama administration resulting in a major loss of corn ethanol consumption.
Acting retroactively, the EPA granted the equivalent of over 4 billion gallons of ethanol exemptions for the period 2016 through 2018, equivalent to losing a 1.4 billion bushel corn crop, the entire annual harvest of Minnesota, a major corn state. The US ethanol lobby organizations are demanding the Trump Administration restore that lost ethanol volume as required by law. Emily Skor, CEO of Growth Energy, an ethanol association, stated, “More biofuel plants are closing their doors with each passing week, and farm families have run out of options. The EPA must take immediate action to restore lost demand under the 2020 biofuel targets and repair the damage from abusive refinery exemptions granted to oil giants like Exxon and Chevron.”
The growing of corn to produce ethanol for blending with gasoline for fuel additive has become a major prop of US agriculture since the Bush Administration proposed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which amended the Clean Air Act, requiring the EPA to mandate annual volumes of biofuel, mostly corn ethanol, to be blended with gasoline fuel, heating oil or jet fuel. The growth of the US ethanol production has been such that today almost 40% of all US corn grown is for ethanol.Most USA gasoline today is E10 with 10% ethanol. Today the USA is the world’s largest corn producer by far, almost doublenumber two, China.
The EPA waivers to the oil industry have dealt a big blow to US corn farmers across the Midwest states, especially Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska and Indiana. To date the Trump Administration has made several gestures to address the loss of ethanol markets for corn farmers. But the farmers and ethanol associations claim it is far too little. Notably, in Iowa during the 2016 campaign, Trump pledged to protect the Renewable Fuel Standard of 2005, which mandates a certain amount of biofuel added to the fuel supply each year. Many farmers feel betrayed by the EPA.
The White House is now caught between its heavy support to the oil industry, a major campaign donor source, and to the farm belt, the heart of the trump “Make America Great Again” popular support in 2016 and critical to a re-election in 2020.
The ethanol EPA rulings are by no means the only actions farmers see as a negative coming from the White House. The China trade war has also dealt a huge blow to US farm exports.
China trade
Before the Trump China trade disputes, US ethanol producers were optimistic that the China market could be a major growth area as China increased efforts to deal with air pollution. China ethanol imports from the US were rising steadily until early 2018, when the Trump administration escalated its tariff wars and China reacted by targeting the US farm sector, raising ethanol import tariffs by July 2018 to70%. That essentially killed the China ethanol market for US corn farmers and ethanol producers. The US exports are being replaced by those from Brazil, a major producer of ethanol from sugar cane.
But loss of China ethanol exports has been a relatively minor part of the China damage to US agriculture. With pinpoint precision, Beijing has targeted their counter-measures to the Trump trade actions in the politically important US farm sector. Notable is that Xi Jinping spent some months in Iowa in his younger years in an exchange program, and knows the US farm region better than many foreign heads of state.
In early August China’s government reportedly ordered its state purchasing companies to stop imports of all us agriculture products after US President Trump announced he would order added 10% tariffs on another $300 billion in China imports as of September 1. Before that China had already cut imports of US soybeans to ten year lows.
In 2017 before the trade war began in earnest, China imported 19 million tons of US soybeans worth some $12 billion, some 60% of US total soybean production. China was the largest export market for US soybean farmers, a major sector of US farming. Soybean exports to China were the main export for Iowa agriculture. All told US agriculture exports to China before the trade war were estimated at nearly $20 billion. Since 2012 China had been the largest market for US agriculture exports. Now that is all but gone, a staggering blow to US farmers at a time they can ill afford it.
Compounding Problems
The loss of the ethanol market for corn due to the Trump EPA combined with the latest loss of the China agriculture export market would be grave but manageable except for the fact they hit at a time when American farmers are in precarious conditions. Record rainfall across the farm belt in the US Midwest earlier this season has meant a heavy reduction in both acres planted and yields for especially corn and soybeans. The government’s USDA estimate of the current US corn crop in “good-to-excellent” condition, as well as for soybeans, is the lowest since 2013.
For various reasons farm net income has dropped dramatically. US wheat prices since 2012 have dropped by some 50%. Corn prices are down by more than 50% since 2013. Net farm income is down in 2019 so far by 35% from its 2013 peak. This is before the impact of the current grain shortfall from flooding and the China and ethanol effects are weighed.
High Debt
Unfortunately, all this hits the American farm family at a time of near record debt. While net farm income has moved lower over much of the past decade, farm debt has risen significantly. The average farm debt as of beginning 2018 had risen to $1.3 million per farm, most long term. The current conjuncture of farm crises is leading to rising bankruptcies. With the Federal Reserve raising interest rates the past two years it is increasingly difficult for farmers to refinance the debt in hopes of better times. The result is rising bankruptcies.Already in 2018 net farm income fell to 12 year lows. This year 2019 is set to be far worse.
It is not surprising that some farmers are beginning to rethink their earlier backing for the Trump presidency. Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union noted in a radio interview end of August that it will take “decades” to reverse damage caused by Trump farm and trade policies. China, he added, is now a “lost market” for American farmers because of Trump’s trade war. Johnson added, “Farmers are in a lot of financial stress right now; net farm income is half of what it was six years ago. This is really tough. We’re in a really, really difficult spot right now.”
Ethanol producer Nick Bowdish, CEO of Elite Octane in Atlantic, Iowa, backed Trump in 2016 in part because he supported taking on China. Recently he said, “Since he got himself involved in agricultural policy issues, it has been a complete disappointment to any of us out here in the heartland.” He added in a Newsweek interview, “Where the president went wrong and made a serious misstep was when he made the decision to start destroying the market for agricultural products at home with these refinery waivers.” That he noted hit farmers just when they were being hard hit by the trade war with China, “…and that’s not acceptable.”
It‘s still some four months until the first Presidential primary and the outcome at this point is far from clear. Indications are that most farmers still back Trump, though that is weakening after the latest setbacks from China trade and ethanol. Now there are hints that China is willing to make a deal on soybeans in return for trade concessions from Trump. That might be a needed boost for the Trump farm support if it happens. The first 2020 Presidential primary is in February. It’s in Iowa…
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from NEO
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index
List Price: $25.95
Special Price: $18.00
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
Here, in the village of Stryszow in Southern Poland, you can hear the funeral ceremonies from the farmhouse on the hill where I reside during my time in this Country. The mournful cadences of the undertaker match the dull mechanical tolling of the church bell, as friends and relatives of the deceased, mostly in black, walk slowly and solemnly down the high street following the funeral cortege.
The sounds come floating up the hill and often cause me to suffer an involuntary shudder. Not because I fear the day of my own passing, I don’t; but because I fear for this time of great fluctuation for humanity as a whole, and the fate of all I hold dear.
The Holy Mass provides the ceremonial backing for Catholic funerals. It is heavy with a sense of fate and penitence. “One is small in the all seeing eye of God” it seems to be saying “Lower your head and know that one day it will be for you that the bell tolls.”
And here lies the essence of the great misfortune that overtook the human race in the last 2,000 years. The almost unspeakable fear of a life fully lived, and the attendant nagging doubt about one’s own capacities to be anything more than a cog in a machine.
The first great funeral then, is on the death of the will ‘to become’. To become enlightened to one’s actual potentiality. The manifestation of the seed whose origins rest with the omnipotent source from whence all life came.
In the abandonment of this great prize – this gift we were all accorded from the beginning, comes the opening of the door to our oppressors. An invitation to move into the vacated space and to seize control. Control of the destinies of all who are unwilling to plough their own furrow in the great field of life and who subsequently abdicate their responsibilities to those more than willing to take and use them for their own ends.
There were survivors. Those who held to the course they experienced as truth. But they were badly treated, ostracised from a society which preferred the narrow ‘safe’ road of conformity and subjection to the will of the despotic oppressor.
Who were these oppressors?
They took the form of those who felt the need to subjugate others to the experience of suffering; to pass on the suffering they themselves were subjected to in their formative years. One can trace the origin of this disease to the first appearance of monotheistic religion and the grip that its dogma exerted on all who fell for its version of ‘the truth’.
It was the Judeo-Christian doctrinaire insistence on the authority of an all powerful god, to whom one must fully submit, that started the great rot some 2,000 years ago. This god was, as one can testify from reading the Old Testament, a warlike authority figure who had no time for those who ‘sinned’ against his decrees and laws. What this man-invented god commanded – was to be carried-out, or else trouble was bound to ensue.
This was the first great repression brought to bear on humanity which was still, at this time, largely at peace with nature, the cosmos and fellow seekers of truth.
The ultimate suffering and redemption associated with the crucifixion of Jesus was a direct continuation of this ‘you must suffer to be free’ doctrine; in which freedom comes only after death – and then only if you had gone on your knees throughout your life and admitted that you were ‘a sinner’ in search of forgiveness.
The sacrifice of Jesus was a symbol of the self sacrifice of all who subscribed to the redeemer complex and salvationist creed[1]. So the fist funeral was a mourning of the passing of the spirit of independence, exploration and truth seeking; those qualities which are the essential attributes of true humanity. It was the first and most recognisable loss that our Western civilisation incurred and has still not fully recovered from.
What more was there for humanity to lose after losing the will to seek for truth, one may ask? Yet there was. Those who survived with at least some degree of sensitivity and self respect intact, were able to build on the older pagan traditions, dispensed with by the church, that connected man with nature and the Earth.
Within agricultural communities seasons were still celebrated with rituals. Rituals that reminded those who participated in them that it was the bounty of nature that sustained them – and that it was the elements of rain, sunshine, wind and storm that sculptured the patterns of the land and awoke the cosmic in country peoples’ souls.
This story was imprinted in the lines on the faces of peasant farmers. Here there was still a palpable sense of belonging. A sense that gave ‘place’ a richness of meaning and well defined character. Villagers fed themselves from the land whose soil they tilled. The land that immediately surrounded the village; the old strip-farming way. The emphasis was not on ownership, but on a sharing. The village remained, for a long time, a civilised place.
But one day a new edict came down from on high, that the medieval system of strip-farming was ‘inefficient’ and those who worked the land and provided the sustenance necessary for their families were not ‘educated’ enough to manage the land sustainability. Slowly but surely the village farmers were forced off their land and their long standing connection with their communities was broken. These edicts first came into being in England and then slowly spread across Europe.
Decaying hedges mark the lines of the straight field boundaries created by the 1768 Parliamentary Act of Enclosure of Boldron Moor, County Durham. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
They were known as ‘the enclosures’, a name which describes the development of a field by field rotational system of agriculture that was supposed to benefit the land, but chiefly benefited the yeoman farmers who took possession of the original strip-farmed land so as to practice this new manner of food production. No longer just for the family, village and community, but for sale ‘for profit’ in town and city market places.
The impact of this forced exit of peasant farmers from the land and their replacement with profit seeking yeoman farmers, marks the second great funeral to afflict the Western World and later all post industrial nations and civilisations of the planet. What we today call ‘globalisation’ and the super/hypermarket domination of the food chain, has direct origins in this cruel eviction of peasant farmers from the source of their self sufficiency. Mankind suffered its second great severing of connection with nature and with the fruits of its labour.
The third great funeral was called ‘The Industrial Revolution’. It followed hard on the heels of the enclosures. Once again it was the small island of England that was the first off the line.
One cannot overstate the impact of the shift of emphasis that The Industrial Revolution brought with it. From the grounded, season inspired life of the working countryside to the abstract nervous energy fuelled life of the hungry, restless city – the contrast was brutal and the sheer scale and decisiveness of this shift is what marks it out as a third great funeral. A funeral of the psychic, physical and spiritual well-being of much of that element of mankind that had somehow survived the first and second great funerals, at the hands of a an authoritarian dogma preaching priesthood and at the command of greedy land grabbers.
The fever of the machine age was like nothing else ever experienced. While the crafts of the field and forest had evolved steadily over centuries, the machine age arrived with a bang – and with it the almost wholesale forced abdication of the independence and self sufficiency which were part and parcel of a life on the land – as tough as it was at times to uphold.
The peasantry, already hard hit by the enclosures and struggling on on greatly reduced acreages, were offered ‘compensation’ and charity by none other than the church; the very church whose monotheistic authoritarianism had contributed to the first great funeral centuries before. Now a great swathe of countryside artisans and craftsmen were wrenched away from their rural homes to become the fundamental manpower behind the manning of the fossil fuel furnaces that would grow industrial England.
It was a revolution built on smoke, fumes and human sweat, and came at a high price to health and peace of mind. Down the airless pits, in tunnels barely high enough to stand up in, colliers hacked away at the coal face; while in the great steel mills above, thousands of tons of the resulting dark carbon nuggets burned hot and fierce to produce dense steel bars that would underpin the new infrastructures, transport systems and mass produced military armaments that ultimately marked Britain as the dominant power of the World.
Virtually all material utilities that we take for granted today, had their roots in the big, dirty and brutal industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. A funeral whose extended cremation of subtle beauty, sensitivity and sensuality of nature marked a seismic shift in the psychological stability of society as a whole. Nature became displaced as the foundation of human well being, inspiration and earthed spirituality; replaced by a hard edged drive for productivity, efficiency and hegemonic dominance, both in the market and in geopolitical empire building.
The authors, poets and landscape painters who emerged to counter the cruel incisions industrialisation perpetrated on the natural environment, offered a reminder of what had been lost that touched the psyche of all those still able to feel and respond to the deeper seams of a life under constant threat of extinction. The poet William Blake wrote of this time “Improvement makes straight roads; but crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.” It was precisely that undulating road of genius that was flattened and straightened out by the industrial revolution’s obsession with efficiency and material progress.
An obsession that continues to dominate mankind to this day, with a post industrial Western World still aggressively repeating the pattern by pushing its never satisfied hegemonic ambitions on countries whose own simple working people then become the focus of rabid exploitation, in the sweat shops producing ‘cheap goods’ for the bargain hunters of Western Super stores.
And so to the fourth funeral.
A number of thinkers, writers and artists of the late 19th century sensed the approach of World War One. They no doubt recognised that the rapid accumulation of increasingly disproportionate wealth into the hands of greedy despots, the newly established banks and the industrial arms trade – was bound to lead to some form of explosive outcome; and it did.
World War One saw an unprecedented carnage of human life, physical structures and the natural environment. All under the direction of a few mega wealthy (elite) families whose business enterprises benefited hugely from both causing the conflict in the first place and then from financially backing both sides for the duration of the war. This cold blooded act of genocide was ruthlessly exploited through full utilisation of the mass killing capacity of new military technologies developed out of the burgeoning coal fired steel mills of the industrial revolution.
But it was not just the physical loss of life and general destruction that defined the unique levels of destruction – the psychic, spiritual and humanitarian values of society as a whole – were subjected to a deeply traumatic sense of loss as time enduring values that had defined and knitted together the cultures of Europe for generations – were torn apart, causing scars that were beyond healing.
Then, only twenty one years after the Armistice that brought World War One to an abrupt end, Adolf Hitler, the German Fuhrer, raised the brutal spectre again by declaring war on Poland, thus sparking off World War Two. All the same horrors were repeated, with the same despotic cabal engineering the whole carnage once again.
By then the sophistication of the killing machine had spread into both air-born and strategic undersea warfare. The loss of life and infrastructure spiralled as a consequence. Between seventy five and eighty five million people perished.
The two World Wars marked a funeral so tragic and so dark that their imprint on the human psyche should have put an end to all large scale warfare on this planet for the foreseeable future. At least, concerning physical conflicts on this scale, they pretty much have. Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that if there is ever a Third World War, any war after that would be fought with sticks and stones.
Nevertheless, due to barely contained displays of superpower megalomania, principally emanating from the USA, the world hangs perilously on the brink of global conflict once again. And with manic ego driven ambitions to achieve ‘full spectrum dominance’ of Earth and Space being publicly lauded by US military strategists, we, the mortals who would perish along with most sentient life forms should such an ambition be aggressively acted upon, have suddenly realised that we, collectively, are the only force that can prevent it!
However, to do so, we ‘the people’ will have to recognise that the underlying war on humanity – key points of which I focus on in the essay – is being played-out on a covert level every day and every night of our lives. This war takes the form of attacks on the physical, psychic and spiritual membrane of humanity, and comes under the label ‘Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars’. The manual carrying this title is a declaration of international elite intent concerning the possibility of controlling the whole world from the push of a button. In 1986, this previously secret document came to light. It is purported to be one part of a series of predictive presentations which first took place in 1979.
The present underlying war on humanity incorporates these ‘silent weapons’ that cluster around advanced forms of mind control and scalar type weaponry. It involves mass propaganda and indoctrination on a scale matching the vast elite corporate wealth that backs it – on the explicit orders of the deep state. The hidden hands of the global puppet-masters, who with their ‘New World Order’, intend on achieving ‘full spectrum dominance’ and control over all life on Earth – and ultimately Space as well.
At the core of the control freak’s silent armoury is WiFi, in all its various forms, culminating in the planned roll-out of 5G microwave radiation – on Earth and from Space – to act as the engine of the ‘internet of things’. A microwave grid supplying commands to all electronically aligned household and business appliances at the swipe of a SIM card or chip embedded in human flesh.
With 5G controlled robotic self driving cars, smart cities and soulless automatons being relentlessly promoted as the solution to all our needs – the dawning of ‘robotic man’ appears to be fast approaching. Probably only a robot could survive the blitz of EMF radiation required for 5G to fulfil the expectations of its proponents.
But here, at the 11th hour and 59th minute of our demise as warm blooded, warm hearted sentient human beings (the great majority) comes the most dramatic wake-up call of all wake-up calls. The call to defend the sanctity of Life itself, or to become deeply imprisoned slaves to the anti-life would be masters of control.
The rising-up of humanity to meet this greatest challenge that any of us is ever likely to face – is happening at this very moment. It takes the form of a simmering sense of outrage, but will soon emerge as an unstoppable force, a trans-planetary uprising informed by the call of the life force itself, in each one of us. It is to give expression to the refusal to accept slavery. To outright refuse submission to that which would anaesthetize the beating heart of the natural world and sterilise love itself.
This is a drama in which passive spectators play no part, only actors. Actors who step forward to seize the flag of truth and justice in both hands and keep going until a turning point is reached and the foundations of a new vision of the meaning and purpose of life is laid. Here we are, having the extraordinary privilege of being called upon to meet the most momentous challenge of our era, with courage, conviction and the certainty of success. A certainty which comes from our deepest levels of being.
Those already positively responding to the task at hand are coming together and being united. Recognition of commonality of cause is felt, often almost instantly. The maturation of this unifying process brings with it direction and leadership. This in turn blossoms into the joyful discovery of a deep seem of connectivity extending through all seemingly disparate branches of humanity.
Here, if I might be so bold to suggest it – is a wedding in the making. A great wedding of souls. A wedding to which all are invited and in which all will joyfully participate. Such will be the illuminated energy given forth by the festivities surrounding this wedding that all the sadness and grief of earlier funerals will be banished to the four corners of the universe, and the perpetrators of the historical repression of humanity will go with them.
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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Julian Rose is an international activist, writer, organic farming pioneer and actor. In 1987 and 1998, he led a campaign that saved unpasteurised milk from being banned in the UK; and, with Jadwiga Lopata, a ‘Say No to GMO’ campaign in Poland which led to a national ban of GM seeds and plants in that country in 2006. Julian is currently campaigning to ‘Stop 5G’ WiFi. He is the author of two acclaimed titles: Changing Course for Life and In Defence of Life. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’is now available from Amazon and Dixi Books. Julian is a long time exponent of yoga/meditation. See his web site for more information www.julianrose.info
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[1] See John Lamb Lash’s ‘Not in HIS Image’ for more on this subject.
Permanent war is longstanding US policy. Today it’s military Keynesianism on steroids.
With all categories included, spending for militarism, warmaking, maintaining its global empire of bases, so-called homeland security, black budgets, and related areas is more than double official the so-called National Defense Authorization Act amount.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) put global military spending at $1.8 trillion dollars in 2018.
US military-related spending exceeds the rest of the world combined. Yet the nation’s only enemies are invented. No real ones existed since WW II ended.
Last December, Trump said
“(o)ur boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back (from Syria), and they’re coming back now (sic).”
“We have started returning United States troops home (sic) as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders added.
In mid-December, Trump said all US forces would be out of Syria in 30 days, in January extended to 120 days.
At the time, a State Department official said there’s “no timeline” for withdrawal of US troops from the country, adding:
“The president has made the decision that we will withdraw our military forces from Syria, but that it will be done in a deliberate, heavily coordinated way with our allies and partners.”
US forces remain, no plans to withdraw them. Pompeo, Bolton, and their henchmen undermined a pullout.
The US illegally occupies about 30% of Syrian northern and southern territory, numerous Pentagon bases maintained in the country.
Last week, Fars News said US troops “are currently stationed at 18 military bases and centers in the occupied regions of Syria.”
Along with CIA operatives and their proxies, there’s no ambiguity about the mission of Pentagon forces in all US combat and other theaters.
Along with propping up friendly despots, they’re involved in toppling sovereign independent governments, wanting them replaced with pro-Western puppet regimes.
There’s no prospect of ending hostile US involvement in Yemen, the second longest US war in modern times after Afghanistan.
Passed months earlier, Joint House/Senate Resolution 7 “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress” was meaningless, achieving nothing.
In March, Pompeo falsely said
“(w)e all want (the Yemen) conflict to end (sic). We all want to improve the dire humanitarian situation (sic),” adding:
“But the Trump (regime) fundamentally disagrees that curbing our assistance to the Saudi-led coalition (sic) is the way to achieve these goals.”
His remarks were code language for continued hostile US involvement in Yemen. He and Bolton undermined the notion of restoring peace and stability to the country.
Yemen’s strategic location makes it important for the US, why war to gain and maintain control of the nation rages endlessly.
On Sunday, member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council Muhammad Ali al-Houthi tweeted:
“Washington opposes all parties that want peace, including Congress. That’s why Adel al-Jubair (Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs) and Turki al-Maliki (anti-Yemen coalition spokesman) say the war has been imposed on them” by US hardliners.
On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif slammed Pompeo’s Big Lie, falsely claiming Iranian responsibility for strikes Saturday by Houthis on Riyadh’s key oil and gas facilities, shutting down over half the nation’s production for now.
“Having failed at ‘max pressure,’ @SecPompeo’s turning to ‘max deceit.’ US & its clients are stuck in Yemen because of illusion that weapon superiority will lead to military victory,” said Zarif.
“Blaming Iran won’t end disaster. Accepting our April ’15 proposal to end war & begin talks may,” he added.
The US doesn’t wage wars to quit, not since over a decade of Southeast Asia war ended in 1975. Forever wars replaced it, notably post-9/11.
US direct or proxy war on Iraq raged on and off intermittently since Jimmy Carter launched the Iran/Iraq war in September 1980 — nearly four decades of horrors inflicted on long-suffering Iraqis, continuing today.
US forces occupied the country in early 2003 with no intention of leaving, Iraqi puppet rule permitting it.
The same is true for Afghanistan, permanent occupation planned. Longstanding US policy aims to install pro-Western puppet rule in Iran, wanting control of Libya maintained the same way.
Transforming swords into plowshares is off the table in parts of the world where US wars rage — peace and stability considered anathema notions, equity and justice disdained the same way.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
What’s going on deep down in Hong Kong? For a former resident with deep cultural and emotional ties to the Fragrant Harbor, it’s quite hard to take it all in just within the framework of cold geopolitical logic. Master filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai once said that when he came up with the idea for Happy Together, he decided to shoot the story of his characters in Buenos Aires because that was as far away from Hong Kong as possible.
A few weeks ago I was walking the streets of far away Buenos Aires dreaming of Hong Kong. That Hong Kong that Wong Kar-Wai refers to in his masterpiece no longer exists. Unfortunately deprived of Christopher Doyle’s mesmerizing visuals, I ended up coming back to Hong Kong to find, eventually, that the city I knew also no longer exists.
I started my journey in my former ‘hood, Sai Ying Pun, where I lived in a studio in an average, slim, ultra-crowded Cantonese tower (I was the only foreigner) across the street from the beautiful, art deco St Louis school and not far from Hong Kong University. Although only a 20-minute walk over the hills to Central – the business and political heart of the city – Sai Ying Pun is mostly middle class with a few working-class pockets, only recently marching towards gentrification after a local MTR – subway – station was launched.
Mongkok, across the harbor in Kowloon, with an unfathomably large population density, is the haven of frenetic small business Hong Kong, always crammed with students in search of trendy bargains. In contrast, Sai Ying Pun is a sort of languid glimpse of Hong Kong in the 1950s: it could easily have been the set for a Wong Kar-Wai movie.
The busy streets of Hong Kong’s Sai Ying Pun district. Photo: Wikipedia Creative Commons
From retirees to Mrs Ling, the laundry lady – still there, but without her previous, sprawling cat population (“At home!”) – the refrain is unanimous: protests, yes, but they must be peaceful. In Kowloon the previous night I had heard harrowing stories of teachers brainwashing elementary school pupils into protest marches. Not at St Louis – they told me.
Hong Kong University is another story; a hotbed of protest, some of it enlightened, where the golden hit in humanities is to analyze China as a “perfect dictatorship” where the CCP did nothing but ratchet up crude nationalism, militarism and “aggression,” in propaganda and in dealing with the rest of Asia.
As we reach Central, the Hong Kong matrix of hyper turbo-capitalism, “protests” dissolve as an unwashed-masses, bad-for-business, dirty word, dismissed at the restaurants of the old, staid Mandarin and the glitzier Mandarin Oriental, the Norman Foster/IM Pei headquarters of HSBC and Bank of China, the headquarters of JP Morgan – with a swanky Armani outlet downstairs – or at the ultra-exclusive China Club, a favorite of old Shanghai money.
Prada meets class struggle
It’s on weekends, especially Sunday, that all of Hong Kong’s – and turbo-capitalism’s – internal contradictions explode in Central. Filipina maids for decades have been staging an impromptu sit-in, a sort of benign Occupy Central in Tagalog with English subtitles, every Sunday; after all they have no public park to gather in on their only day off, so they take over the vault of HSBC and merrily picnic on the pavement in front of Prada boutiques.
To talk to them about the protests amounts to a PhD on class struggle:
“It’s we who should have the right to protest about our meager wages and the kind of disgusting treatment we get from these Cantonese madames,” says a mother of three from Luzon (70% of her pay goes for remittances home). “These kids, they are so spoiled, they are raised thinking they are little kings.”
Virtually everyone in Hong Kong has reasons to protest. Take the cleaning contingent – who must do the heavy lifting after all the tear gas, burnt-out bins, bricks and broken glass, like on Sunday. Their monthly salary is the equivalent of US$1,200 – compared with the average Hong Kong salary of roughly $2,200. Horrible working conditions are the norm: exploitation, discrimination (many are from ethnic minorities and don’t speak Cantonese or English) and no welfare whatsoever.
As for the ultra-slim fringe practicing wanton destruction for destruction’s sake, they surely have learned tactics from European black blocs. On Sunday they set fire to one of the entrances to ultra-congested Wanchai station and broke glass at Admiralty. The “strategy”: breaking off MTR nodes, because paralyzing Chek Lap Kok airport – one of the busiest on the planet – won’t work anymore after the August 12/13 shutdown that canceled nearly 1,000 flights and led to a quite steep drop in passengers coming from China, Southeast Asia and Taiwan.
Two years ago, in Hamburg, Special Forces were deployed against black bloc looters. In France, the government routinely unleashes the feared CRS even against relatively peaceful Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vest protesters – complete with tear gas, water cannons and supported by helicopters, and nobody invokes human rights to complain about it. The CRS deploy flash ball strikes even against the media.
Not to mention that any occupation of Charles de Gaulle, Heathrow or JFK is simply unthinkable. Chek Lap Kok, on a weekday, is now eerily quiet. Police patrol all the entrances. Passengers arriving via the Airport Express fast train must now show passport and boarding pass before being allowed inside the terminal.
Western media accounts, predictably, focus on the radical fringe, as well as the substantial fifth-columnist contingent. This weekend a few hundred staged a mini-protest in front of the British consulate asking, essentially, to be given asylum. Some of them are holders of British National Overseas (BNO) passports, which are effectively useless, as the provide no working or residency rights in the UK.
Other fifth-columnists spent their weekend waving flags from Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Ukraine, US, Taiwan, and last but not least, the Hong Kong colonial flag.
Meet homo Hong Kong
Who are these people? Well, that necessarily brings us to a crash course on homo Hong Kong.
Not many people in Hong Kong can point to ancestors in place before the Opium War of 1841 and the subsequent rule of imperial Britain. Most don’t know much about the People’s Republic of China, so essentially there’s no grudge. They own their own homes, which means, crucially, they are insulated from Hong Kong’s number one problem: the demented, speculative property market.
Then there are the old China elites – people who fled Mao’s victory in 1949. At first they were orphans of Chiang Kai-shek. Then they concentrated on hating the Communist Party with a vengeance. The same applies to their offspring. The ultra-wealthy gather at the China Club. The less wealthy at least can afford $5 million apartments at The Peak. Canada is a preferred destination – hence Hong-Couver as a substantial part of Vancouver. For them Hong Kong is essentially a transit stop, like a glitzy business lounge.
It’s this – large – contingent that is behind the protests.
The lower strata of the Escape from China elites are the economic refugees of 1949. Tough luck: still today they don’t own property and have no savings. A great many of the easily manipulated teenagers taking over the streets of Hong Kong dressed in black and singing “Glory to Hong Kong” and dreaming of “independence” are their sons and daughters. It’s certainly a cliché, but it does apply to their case: trapped between East and West, between an Americanized lifestyle on steroids and the pull of Chinese culture and history.
Hong Kong cinema, with all its pulsating dynamism and exhilarating creativity, may offer the perfect metaphor to understand the inner contradictions of the Fragrant Harbor. Take Tsui Hark’s 1992 masterpiece New Dragon Gate Inn, with Donnie Yen and gorgeous Maggie Cheung, based on what happened at a crucial pass in the Ancient Silk Road six centuries ago.
Here we may place Hong Kong as the inn between imperial despotism and the desert. Inside, we find fugitives imprisoned between their dream of escaping to the “West” and the cynically exploitative owners. That connects with the ghostly, Camus-infused existential terror for the modern homo Hong Kong: soon he may be liable to be “extradited” to evil China before he has a chance to be granted asylum by the benevolent West. A fabulous line by Donnie Yen’s character sums it all up: “Rain in the Dragon Gate mountains makes the Xue Yuan tiger come down.”
Good to be a tycoon
The drama played out in Hong Kong is actually a microcosm of the Big Picture: turbo-charged, neoliberal hyper-capitalism confronted to zero political representation. This “arrangement” that only suits the 0.1% simply can’t go on like before.
In fact what I reported about Hong Kong seven years ago for Asia Times could have been written this morning. And it got worse. Over 15% of Hong Kong’s population now lives in actual poverty. According to figures from last year, the total net worth of the wealthiest 21 Hong Kong tycoons, at $234 billion, was the equivalent of Hong Kong’s fiscal reserves. Most of these tycoons are property market speculators. Compare it to real wages for low-income workers increasing a meager 12.3% over the past decade.
Beijing, later rather than sooner, may have awakened to the number one issue in Hong Kong – the property market dementia, as reported by Asia Times. Yet even if the tycoons get the message, the underlying framework of life in Hong Kong is not bound to be altered: maximum profit crushing wages and any type of unionization.
So economic inequality will continue to boom – as an unrepresentative Hong Kong government “led” by a clueless civil servant keeps treating citizens as non-citizens. At Hong Kong University I heard some serious proposals:
“We need a more realistic minimum wage. “We need real taxes on capital gains and on property.” “We need a decent property market.”
Will that be addressed before a crucial deadline – October 1st – when Beijing will be celebrating, with great fanfare, the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China? Of course not. Trouble will continue to brew at the Dragon Inn – as those underpaid, over-exploited cleaners face the bleakest of futures.
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This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Saudi Arabia says the recent drone attacks on the state-run oil company Aramco, led to a temporary closure of its facilities and disrupted the kingdom’s oil production and exports.
“[Saudi] Energy Minister, Abdulaziz bin Salman said the attacks led to the interruption in production of an estimated five-point-seven million barrels of crude per day. The amount is equivalent to five percent of the daily global supply of crude oil. Meanwhile, Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, said his country is willing and able to deal with Saturday’s drone strikes. Also, the U-S secretary of state has accused Iran of being behind the recent attacks. Mike Pompeo claimed there is no evidence to prove that the attacks were launched from Yemen. He was actually adamant about blaming Iran for the attack, without any shred of proof. This is while Yemen’s Ansarullah movement [the Houthis] has claimed responsibility for the drone strikes.”
Saudi stocks dropped dramatically following drone strikes on two Aramco facilities by Yemeni forces; an attack that halved the kingdom’s crude production.
Saudi shares have dropped three percent after Yemeni drone attacks on two major state-run Aramco oil facilities knocked out more than half the kingdom’s production.
Saudi Energy Minister, Abdulaziz bin Salman said the attacks led to the interruption in production of an estimated five-point-seven million barrels of crude per day. The amount is equivalent to five percent of the daily global supply of crude oil. Yemeni forces launched the massive drone attack in response to the Saudi-led coalition war that has lasted for more than 4 years on the impoverished nation on Saturday.
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PressTV: Could you please comment on the consequence of this reduction in the oil supply by Saudi Arabia?
Peter Koenig: First, lets make one thing crystal clear – Mr. Pompeo is a flagrant liar, has been in the past with everything he says against his own fabricated enemies, and he will very unlikely change, as the type of his hawkish aggressive warrior character will not change. Therefore, everything Pompeo says and pretends which such assurance that most people realize it’s a fabricated lie as he did not – and never does – provide any evidence. Therefore, whatever he says and pretends to be the truth without evidence, has to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
In fact, immediately blaming Iran for the drone attack on ARAMCO, is without any foundation; it is an outright lie, just to put more dirt on Iran, to further denigrate Iran. It is very clear to me – who have worked for 7 years in Yemen – that the Houthis have the capacity to develop their own drones – they have a flying range potential of at least 1,000 km.
It is very simple and very logical, the Houthis are gradually getting their strength back and are revenging themselves for the horrendous aggression launched for more than 4 year by the Saudis against their country – of course, with staunch support from the US, UK and the French.
Let’s just remind ourselves, that inhuman abhorrent aggression has cost tens of thousands of Yemeni lives – most of them children, women and the elderly and weak – from direct bomb attacks, from famine, and from cholera and other sanitation related diseases. Today still a million people are at risk of a cholera epidemic.
Having said this – the consequences or impact of a 5% oil output reduction due to the burning ARAMCO wells is insignificant. Of course, speculators – the Godman Sachs type, who are the chief manipulators behind oil prices – would like you to believe that this is ample ground for hefty fuel price increases – in reality not at all.
Of course, in our predatory capitalist world, the stock market wheelers and dealers, may try to cash-in on this event – which in reality has – or should have – zero impact on the world oil supply.
This shortfall could easily be made up by lifting sanctions o Iranian and Venezuelan oil sales… so it’s just a question of logics – and foremost – of justice, international law and Human Rights.
PressTV: What about the fragility of the Saudis military power?
PK: Of course, the Saudi military power is nothing without the full support and guidance, by weapons and technical and strategic advice directly from the Pentagon, CIA – and the European vassals, and – of course – from weapon manufacturers and weapon sales sharks, in the UK and in France.
The Saudis from day one – in October 2015 – were just launching a proxy war for the US against Yemen – Yemen has a key strategic location in the Gulf and Middle East, and also off-shore deep hydrocarbon deposits – and god forbid, may not be ruled by a people-friendly – a socialist leaning government. For the last 50-some years Yemen was ruled by a US puppet, or puppets – which was OK for the US, but once people get tired of injustice and corruption, they decided to dispose their nefarious regime and replace it with the popular Houthi movement.
When the Saudis agreed in the early 1970’s as head of OPEC and on behalf of OPEC, to sell crude only in US-dollars, the US Administration offered them in turn – “forever” military protection, in the form of multiple military bases in the Saudi territories. Without this protection, the Saudis would not have survived as long as they did with their horrendous discriminatory and corrupt government and, of course, without that protection, OPEC may not have stuck to the “dollar-only” rule to trade hydrocarbons. – We might be in another world today – but, we really don’t know how dynamics might have worked out.
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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Here we go again! Israel is caught red handed spying against the United States and everyone in Congress is silent, as are nearly all the mainstream media which failed to report the story. And the federal government itself, quick to persecute a Russian woman who tried to join the NRA, concedes that the White House and Justice Department have done absolutely nothing to either rebuke or punish the Israeli perpetrators. One senior intelligence official commented that “I’m not aware of any accountability at all.”
Only President Donald Trump, predictably, had something to say in his usual personalized fashion, which was that the report was “hard to believe,” that “I don’t think the Israelis were spying on us. My relationship with Israel has been great…Anything is possible but I don’t believe it.”
Ironically, the placement of technical surveillance devices by Israel was clearly intended to target cellphone communications to and from the Trump White House. As the president frequently chats with top aides and friends on non-secure phones, the operation sought to pick up conversations involving Trump with the expectation that the security-averse president would say things off the record that might be considered top secret.
The Politicoreport, which is sourced to top intelligence and security officials, details how “miniature surveillance devices” referred to as “Stingrays” imitate regular cell phone towers to fool phones being used nearby into providing information on their locations and identities. According to the article, the devices are referred to by technicians as “international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.”
Over one year ago, government security agencies discovered the electronic footprints that indicated the presence of the surveillance devices around Washington including near the White House. Forensic analysis involved dismantling the devices to let them “tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are.” One source observed afterwards that “It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible.”
The Israeli Embassy denied any involvement in the espionage and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adroitly and predictably lied regarding the report, saying
“We have a directive, I have a directive: No intelligence work in the United States, no spies. And it’s vigorously implemented, without any exception. It is a complete fabrication, a complete fabrication.”
The Israelis are characteristically extremely aggressive in their intelligence gathering operations, particularly in targeting the United States, even though Trump has done the Netanyahu government many favors. These have included moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, withdrawing from the nuclear deal and sanctioning Iran, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and looking the other way as Israel expands its settlements and regularly bombs Syria and Lebanon.
Israel’s high-risk spying is legendary, but the notion that it is particularly good at it is, like everything having to do with the Jewish state, much overrated. Mossad has been caught in flagrante numerous times. In 2010, an undercover Mossad hit team was caught on 30 minutes of surveillance video as it wandered through a luxury Dubai hotel where it had gone to kill a leading Hamas official. And the notion that Mossad and CIA work hand-in-hand is also a fiction. Working level Agency officers dislike their reckless Mossad counterparts. Newsweek magazine’s “Spy Talk” once cited a poll of CIA officers that ranked Israel “dead last” among friendly countries in actual intelligence cooperation with Washington.
The fact is that Israel conducts espionage and influence operations against the United States more aggressively than any other “friendly” country, including tapping White House phones used by Bill Clinton to speak with Monica Lewinski. Israeli “experts” regularly provide alarmist and inaccurate private briefings for American Senators on Capitol Hill. Israel also constantly manufactures pretexts to draw the U.S. into new conflicts in the Middle East, starting with the Lavon Affair in Alexandria Egypt in 1954 and including the false flag attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967. In short, Israel has no reluctance to use its enormous political and media clout in the U.S. to pressure successive administrations to conform to its own foreign and security policy views.
The persistent spying, no matter what Netanyahu claims, is a very good reason why Israel should not receive billions of dollars in military assistance annually. Starting in 1957, Israel’s friends stole enriched uranium from a Pennsylvania refinery to create a nuclear arsenal. More recently we have learned how Arnon Milchan, a Hollywood producer/billionaire born in Israel, arranged the illegal purchase of 800 krytron triggers to use in the production of nuclear weapons. The operation also involved current Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The existence of a large scale Israeli spying effort at the time of 9/11 has been widely reported, incorporating Israeli companies in New Jersey and Florida as well as hundreds of “art students” nationwide. Five “dancing” Israelis from one of the companies were observed celebrating against the backdrop of the twin towers going down.
While it is often observed that everyone spies on everyone else, espionage is a high-risk business, particularly when spying on friends. Israel, relying on Washington for billions of dollars and also for political cover in international fora like the United Nations, does not spy discreetly, largely because it knows that few in Washington will seek to hold it accountable. There were, for example, no consequences for the Israelis when Israeli Mossad intelligence officers using U.S. passports and pretending to be Americans recruited terrorists to carry out attacks inside Iran. Israelis using U.S. passports in that fashion put every American traveler at risk.
Israel, where government and business work hand in hand, has obtained significant advantage by systematically stealing American technology with both military and civilian applications. The U.S. developed technology is then reverse engineered and used by the Israelis to support their own exports. Sometimes, when the technology is military in nature and winds up in the hands of an adversary, the consequences can be serious. Israel has sold advanced weapons systems to China that incorporate technology developed by American companies.
The reality of Israeli large-scale spying in the United States is indisputable. One might cite Jonathan Pollard, who stole more highly classified information than any spy in history. And then there were Ben-Ami Kadish, Stuart Nozette and Larry Franklin, other spies for Israel who have been caught and tried, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage.” The 2005 report states
“Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.”
It adds that Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.
A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon. It says “Placing Israeli nationals in key industries …is a technique utilized with great success.” A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how Israeli citizens residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtained classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and passed sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users.
The GAO has concluded that Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” In June 2006, a Pentagon administrative judge ruled against a difficult to even imagine appeal by an Israeli denied a security clearance, saying that “The Israeli government is actively engaged in military and industrial espionage in the United States.” FBI counter intelligence officer John Cole has also reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department., making the Jewish state’s spying consequence free. He provides a “conservative estimate” of 125 viable investigations into Israeli espionage involving both American citizens and Israelis that were stopped due to political pressure.
So, did Israel really spy on Donald Trump? Sure it did. And Netanyahu is, metaphorically speaking, thumbing his nose at the American president and asking with a grin, “What are you going to do about it?”
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Surveillance video frame of Pollard in the act of stealing classified documents (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
This is an interview between Emanuel Pastreich and Larry Wilkerson.
Lawrence B. “Larry” Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Upon retirement, he has become a critic of US foreign policy. Emanuel Pastreich is an American author and academic based in South Korea.
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Emanuel Pastreich: The recent protests in Hong Kong were powered by a free-floating discontent among youth who feel they have no future. Yet, much of what we see taking place today cannot be explained in terms of the discontent of young people. Could it be that the US is interfering with, or participating in, the present political crisis in Hong Kong?
Larry Wilkerson: Of course we [the US] are involved–just as we were, and are, in Caracas. I saw just how fiercely we tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez, then the president of Venezuela, in 2002. And we did not give up on our hopes to alter the politics there. Now we are working on Nicolas Maduro. But we have only brought to Venezuela incompetence, and incompetence’s standard accomplice, failure. We were only successful in punishing hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans with sanctions and doing great damage to their economy.
Although the media never compares Caracas with Hong Kong, we have clearly deployed the usual suspects in Hong Kong, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has suddenly become very active under the dubious auspices of teaching the young citizens of Hong Kong about democracy.
My fear is that, just as we did in Hungary in 1956, we are setting up these young people for a crackdown. We will push them, as we did then, and then when there is a crackdown, we will do nothing, just as we did nothing when the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 and crushed that rebellion.
It is an open secret that one of the forces behind the National Endowment for Democracy, and other such NGOs, is the CIA.–sometimes wittingly, with regard to the NED itself, and sometimes unwittingly.
But there are aspects to this campaign that are different from what happened in Hungary. We use social media, and vivid breaking news broadcasts as part of a more sophisticated approach to conducting covert operations against our supposed enemies, in this case China.
Xi Jinping must be very cautious about how he responds, and whether or nothe ultimately cracks down hard on the protestorsbecause his actionswill send an unmistakable signal to the more than 23 millionpeople who live on the island of Taiwan. If Xi mishandles this case, Taiwan will be utterly opposed to any rapprochement with the mainland for a generation.
Pastreich: But Trump clearly does not have the sophistication to manage this sort of operation. Trump personally would rather open a few more Trump casinos in China. Who exactly are the forces driving this move back in DC?
Wilkerson: Up until now the entire show has been run by John Bolton. As national security advisor, John Bolton launched one operation after another to undermine relations with China and other countries. He did so with some help from the “Torture Queen” Gina Haspel at the CIA. One thing is certain, the shots are called by a handful of people.
Pastreich: So, will the departure of John Bolton offer us an opportunity for a real shift in US foreign policy?
Wilkerson: John Bolton’s departure, as I indicated on Chris Hayes’ show last week, changes very little. It is true that a true warmonger has left the position of National Security Advisor. But the influence of that position is entirely determined by the President. Ronald Reagan had six such advisors in just 8 years. The reason was simple: Reagan thought that being president meant making the decisions himself. The case was entirely different for Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. They shared power regarding foreign policy with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, respectively.
The best way to make sure the president makes all decisions is to change your national security advisor regularly.
Trump is not Reagan, not by quite a stretch. So, most likely the people around him, from Mike Pompeo, to Gina Haspel, to Stephen Miller and Steven Mnuchin at Treasury, will continue to pursue their agendas, for better or worse. Trump is incapable of managing them all single-handedly. But with the new appointment of Robert O’Brien as national security advisor, a more sycophantic assemblage around the President will in fact “make him President”. The decisions will be increasingly unaffected by any counsel and advice. They will be “all Trump”. You will have to determine for yourself if that’s a positive development. I rather think not.
It’s great that John Bolton is gone. I know him and I can say that despite all the hype about him being brilliant and evil, he’s only evil. Arron Burr was brilliant and evil; John Bolton is only evil.
Yes, it is excellent that an evil man has been removed from an important job. But the incompetent man who put him there in the first place, the President himself, remains there. That’s the rub.
Pastreich: Much of the rabble rousing in Hong Kong is directly linked to Taiwan, even encouraged by the current administration there. I was a bit surprised by President Tsai’s talk to the American Legion recently. Tsai made extreme statements that tried to paint all of China as a malevolent force, rather than logically and systematically addressing real concerns of citizens. I have not seen this sort of rhetoric on the Taiwan side since the 1980s, and it seems rather short-sighted. If anything, such talk by the President of Taiwan will encourage many Chinese to see Taiwan as a puppet of the Western far right.
Wilkerson: Chen Shui-Bian from time to time talked in a similar vein in the early 2000s. Recall that Tsai was addressing the American Legion, a red-meat audience that is most responsive to that sort of language. She made shrewd use of the somewhat limited audience list she is allowed to address. Even though Bolton may have wanted her to address a joint session of the US Congress a la Bibi Netanyahu, there remain one or two people in Trump’s administration who are not completely insane when it comes to China and Taiwan. From herperspective, the remarks were precisely what she thought were necessary for both her audiences, the American Legion and the US—as well as Beijing. In that regard I thought her remarks were circumspect and well-couched.
That said, she could have been more globally-oriented, as you suggest, with such existential threats as climate change leading the way. But for that particular audience such remarks would have been utterly wasted.
From her perspective, the remarks were precisely what she thought were necessary for both her audiences, the American Legion and the US—as well as Beijing. In that regard I thought her remarks were circumspect and well-couched.
That said, she could have been more globally-oriented, as you suggest, with such existential threats as climate change leading the way. But for that particular audience such remarks would have been utterly wasted.
Pastreich: Doubtless many youth became involved in these Hong Kong protests because they were concerned about the increasingly bleak future that they face. But their so-called leaders meet with Pence and Bolton, and their protests are silent about the impact of climate change on Hong Kong, the radical concentration of wealth in Hong Kong (worst of any other city in the world), the indifference of the elites to their problems right in Hong Kong. Why are the most critical issues left out?
Wilkerson: We are looking at an age-old phenomenon. People let the things closest to them fester while they reach out for the sexy, the dramatic, and the dangerous. Just look at Trump’s supporters in the US. Trump’s economic policies, whether it is his tax cuts for the rich or his trade tariffs, all punish his political base mercilessly. But they don’t seem to care so long as he promises to reverse Roe vs. Wade and to bring Christian prayer back to the White House.
The Hong Kong protesters are reaching for the stars while the Earth that they stand on grows sick, struggles, and may die in their lifetimes.
Pastreich: And then there is the simple logic of the Military Appropriations Bill. If that much money is suddenly slated for the preparations for a war with China, no matter how thoughtful government officials in the US may be, they will be under institutional pressure to drive for a confrontation with China.
Wilkerson: Are you referring to that of Taiwan, or of the US, or both?
Pastreich: The overwhelmingly significant budget is that of the US for military, now officially $750 billion dollars and much of the expensive systems funded by that budget are aimed at China.
Wilkerson: There is no question about the implications of the gargantuan size of the US national security budget—and it’s more like 1.3 trillion dollars, when you throw in Veterans Department, Homeland Security, nuclear weapons at Energy, the intelligence budget outside the Department of Defense, plus the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence and State’s International Affairs account. The threats that are promoted by that sort of a budget form self-fulfilling prophecies in many respects.
All one need do is look back at what happened during the Cold War to see how budgets drove the arms races, both nuclear and conventional, and impacted strategic decisions at every turn. A massive budget that supports a China-oriented military and economic strategy is an additional push for eventual war.
Pastreich: So what might be some ways we can take this source of tension and conflict and move it in a positive direction? Could we somehow organize an event and bring in people from Hong Kong and other local governments around the world to talk about real issues for youth, about climate change, about the threat of militarization of the economy (in US, but also in China)? Or might there be some other creative approach possible.
Wilkerson: We could try something positive. But I doubt any effort to promote a discussion of real issues would have much effect. Unless one has the assets — the money, the people, the organizational strength — tomatch, and even surpass, the CIA’s efforts — and perhaps MI6 as well — thereis not much hope of overcoming their efforts by promoting a wiser, smarter, and more relevant dialog. I do not say that to be discouraging, but just to suggest that organizers of such efforts must be realistic.
Pastreich: But Hong Kong is intimately connected to the question of what US policy in Asia should be. We should have a policy and it should be constructive.
What, concretely, might be a more effective policy?
Wilkerson: We should return to the position we took previously, since George H.W. Bush’s administration and the end of the Cold War: a watchful wariness coupled with the strategic intent to compete peacefully.
Our aim should be peace and economic integration. We should work together to meet the challenges of international crime, a changing climate, massive refugee flows –70 million now and growing—all over the world, and other challenges that no single nation can respond to successfully. All the while we need to hedge our bets by maintaining alliances such as those with Japan and Korea, expanding relationships with countries such as India, and prepare a ready, but far less costly, military. But all in all, our objective must be peace and peaceful competition.
Pastreich: There are many thoughtful American intellectuals who could visit Hong Kong, or Taipei, Shanghai or Beijing for deep and meaningful discussions with their peers about our shared future. If those scholars, together with ordinary citizens, started talking about common concerns, and engaging Chinese intellectuals, that could turn things around. If we have a meaningful dialog on climate change, social and economic problems, and the future of cyberspace, we could fill up that space in media with some positive messages.
Wilkerson: I agree that such a move would be most welcome. And it would help immensely if we had a president, and a national security council, a State and Treasury Department, filled with good leaders and with people who understood this wisdom.
Pastreich: Why does the current administration feel that it needs to conduct foreign policy in the shadows? How can we end these covert efforts to undermine other nations and go back to actual cultural engagement, thereby redirecting the real energy of youth in a positive direction?
Wilkerson: First things first: we need a new administration, a smart one. We need new members of Congress who understand the issues that we are discussing here. And we need a new media—one that doesn’t think that labeling China as the opponent in a new Cold War is its primary job. And then, of course, we need a wide range of committed scholars and citizens to carry forth the dialog.
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The proposal of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris that I should invite a person, to be chosen by myself, to a frank exchange of views on any problem that I might select affords me a very welcome opportunity of conferring with you upon a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face. This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering humanity from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we know it; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown.
I believe, moreover, that those whose duty it is to tackle the problem professionally and practically are growing only too aware of their impotence to deal with it, and have now a very lively desire to learn the views of men who, absorbed in the pursuit of science, can see world problems in the perspective distance lends. As for me, the normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling. Thus, in the enquiry now proposed, I can do little more than seek to clarify the question at issue and, clearing the ground of the more obvious solutions, enable you to bring the light of your far-reaching knowledge of man’s instinctive life to bear upon the problem. There are certain psychological obstacles whose existence a layman in the mental sciences may dimly surmise, but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom; you, I am convinced, will be able to suggest educative methods, lying more or less outside the scope of politics, which will eliminate these obstacles.
As one immune from nationalist bias, I personally see a simple way of dealing with the superficial (i.e. administrative) aspect of the problem: the setting up, by international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke its decision in every dispute, to accept its judgments unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees. But here, at the outset, I come up against a difficulty; a tribunal is a human institution which, in proportion as the power at its disposal is inadequate to enforce its verdicts, is all the more prone to suffer these to be deflected by extrajudicial pressure. This is a fact with which we have to reckon; law and might inevitably go hand in hand, and juridical decisions approach more nearly the ideal justice demanded by the community (in whose name and interests these verdicts are pronounced) in so far as the community has effective power to compel respect of its juridical ideal. But at present we are far from possessing any supranational organization competent to render verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce absolute submission to the execution of its verdicts. Thus I am led to my first axiom: the quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say, and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.
The ill-success, despite their obvious sincerity, of all the efforts made during the last decade to reach this goal leaves us no room to doubt that strong psychological factors are at work, which paralyze these efforts. Some of these factors are not far to seek. The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. This political power-hunger is wont to batten on the activities of another group, whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines. I have especially in mind that small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.
But recognition of this obvious fact is merely the first step towards an appreciation of the actual state of affairs. Another question follows hard upon it: How is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions? (In speaking of the majority, I do not exclude soldiers of every rank who have chosen war as their profession, in the belief that they are serving to defend the highest interests of their race, and that attack is often the best method of defense.) An obvious answer to this question would seem to be that the minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
Yet even this answer does not provide a complete solution. Another question arises from it: How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing people to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because people have within them a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.
And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control human mental evolution so that people can resist the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called “intelligentsia” that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form—upon the printed page.
To conclude: I have so far been speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible.
I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action.
Yours very sincerely, A. Einstein.
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Vienna, September, 1932
Dear Professor Einstein,
When I learned of your intention to invite me to a mutual exchange of views upon a subject which not only interested you personally but seemed deserving, too, of public interest, I cordially assented. I expected you to choose a problem lying on the borderland of the knowable, as it stands today, a theme which each of us, physicist and psychologist, might approach from his own angle, to meet at last on common ground, though setting out from different premises. Thus the question which you put me—what is to be done to rid mankind of the war-menace?—took me by surprise. And, next, I was dumbfounded by the thought of my (of our, I almost wrote) incompetence; for this struck me as being a matter of practical politics, the statesman’s proper study. But then I realized that you did not raise the question in your capacity as scientist or physicist, but as a lover of his fellow men, who responded to the call of the League of Nations much as Fridtjof Nansen, the Polar explorer, took on himself the task of succouring homeless and starving victims of the World War. And, next, I reminded myself that I was not being called on to formulate practical proposals, but, rather, to explain how this question of preventing wars strikes a psychologist.
But here, too, you have stated the gist of the matter in your letter—and taken the wind out of my sails! Still, I will gladly follow in your wake and content myself with endorsing your conclusions, which, however, I propose to amplify to the best of my knowledge or surmise.
You begin with the relations between Might and Right, and this is assuredly the proper starting-point for our enquiry. But, for the term “might,” I would substitute a tougher and more telling word: “violence.” In right and violence we have today an obvious antinomy. It is easy to prove that one has evolved from the other and, when we go back to origins and examine primitive conditions, the solution of the problem follows easily enough. I must crave your indulgence if in what follows I speak of well-known, admitted facts as though they were new data; the context necessitates this method.
Conflicts of interest between people are resolved, in principle, by recourse to violence. It is the same in the animal kingdom, from which humanity cannot claim exclusion; nevertheless people are also prone to conflicts of opinion, touching, on occasion, the loftiest peaks of abstract thought, which seem to call for settlement by quite another method. This refinement is, however, a late development. To start with, brute force was the factor which, in small communities, decided points of ownership and the question of whose will was to prevail. Very soon physical force was implemented, then replaced, by the use of various adjuncts; he proved the victor whose weapon was the better, or handled the more skilfully. Now, for the first time, with the coming of weapons, superior brains began to oust brute force, but the object of the conflict remained the same: one party was to be constrained, by injury or impairment of strength, to retract a claim or a refusal. This end is most effectively gained when the opponent is definitively put out of action—in other words, is killed. This procedure has two advantages; the enemy cannot renew hostilities, and, secondly, this fate deters others from following the example. Moreover, the slaughter of a foe gratifies an instinctive craving—a point to which we shall revert hereafter. However, another consideration may be set off against this will to kill: the possibility of using enemies for servile tasks if their spirits be broken and their lives spared. Here violence finds an outlet not in slaughter but in subjugation. Hence springs the practice of showing mercy; but the victor, having from now on to reckon with the craving for revenge that rankles in the victim, forfeits some personal security.
Thus, under primitive conditions, it is superior force—brute violence, or violence backed by arms—that lords it everywhere. We know that in the course of evolution this state of things was modified, a path was traced that led away from violence to law. But what was this path? Surely it issued from a single verity; that the superiority of one strong man can be overborne by an alliance of many weaklings, that l’union fait la force. Brute force is overcome by union, the allied might of scattered units makes good its right against the isolated giant. Thus we may define “right” (i.e. law) as the might of a community. Yet it, too, is nothing else than violence, quick to attack whatever individual stands in its path, and it employs the self-same methods, follows like ends, with but one difference; it is the communal, not individual, violence that has its way. But, for the transition from crude violence to the reign of law, a certain psychological condition must first obtain. The union of the majority must be stable and enduring. If its sole raison d’être be to fight some powerful individual, after whose downfall it would be dissolved, it leads to nothing. Someone else trusting to superior power, will seek to reinstate the rule of violence and the cycle will repeat itself unendingly. Thus, the union of the people must be permanent and well organized; it must enact rules to meet the risk of possible revolts; must set up machinery ensuring that its rules—the laws—are observed and that such acts of violence as the laws demand are duly carried out. This recognition of a community of interests engenders among the members of the group a sentiment of unity and fraternal solidarity which constitutes its real strength.
So far I have set out what seems to me the kernel of the matter: the suppression of brute force by the transfer of power to a larger combination, founded on the community of sentiments linking up its members. All the rest is mere tautology and glosses. Now the position is simple enough so long as the community consists of a number of equally strong individuals. The laws of such a group can determine to what extent the individual must forfeit personal freedom, the right of using personal force as an instrument of violence, to ensure the safety of the group. But such a combination is only theoretically possible; in practice the situation is always complicated by the fact that, from the outset, the group includes elements of unequal power, men and women, elders and children, and, very soon, as a result of war and conquest, victors and the vanquished—i.e. masters and slaves—as well. From this time on the common law takes notice of these inequalities of power, laws are made by and for the rulers, giving the servile classes fewer rights. Thenceforward there exist within the state two factors making for legal instability, but legislative evolution, too: first, the attempts by members of the ruling class to set themselves above the law’s restrictions and, secondly, the constant struggle of the ruled to extend their rights and see each gain embodied in the code, replacing legal disabilities by equal laws for all. The second of these tendencies will be particularly marked when there takes place a positive mutation of the balance of power within the community, the frequent outcome of certain historical conditions. In such cases the laws may gradually be adjusted to the changed conditions or (as more usually ensues) the ruling class is loath to reckon with the new developments, the result being insurrections and civil wars, a period when law is in abeyance and force once more the arbiter, followed by a new regime of law. There is another factor of constitutional change, which operates in a wholly pacific manner, viz: the cultural evolution of the mass of the community; this factor, however, is of a different order and can only be dealt with later.
Thus we see that, even within the group itself, the exercise of violence cannot be avoided when conflicting interests are at stake. But the common needs and habits of men who live in fellowship under the same “sky” favor a speedy issue of such conflicts and, this being so, the possibilities of peaceful solutions make steady progress. Yet the most casual glance at world history will show an unending series of conflicts between one community and another or a group of others, between larger and smaller units, between cities, countries, races, tribes and kingdoms, almost all of which were settled by the ordeal of war. Such wars end either in pillage or in conquest and its fruits, the downfall of the loser. No single all-embracing judgment can be passed on these wars of aggrandizement. Some, like the war between the Mongols and the Turks, have led to unmitigated misery; others, however, have furthered the transition from violence to law, since they brought larger units into being, within whose limits a recourse to violence was banned and a new regime determined all disputes. Thus the Roman conquests brought that boon, the pax romana, to the Mediterranean lands. The French kings’ lust for aggrandizement created a new France, flourishing in peace and unity. Paradoxical as it sounds, we must admit that warfare well might serve to pave the way to that unbroken peace we so desire, for it is war that brings vast empires into being, within whose frontiers all warfare is proscribed by a strong central power. In practice, however, this end is not attained, for as a rule the fruits of victory are but short-lived, the new-created unit falls asunder once again, generally because there can be no true cohesion between the parts that violence has welded. Hitherto, moreover, such conquests have only led to aggregations which, for all their magnitude, had limits, and disputes between these units could be resolved only by recourse to arms. For humanity at large the sole result of all these military enterprises was that, instead of frequent not to say incessant little wars, they had now to face great wars which, for all they came less often, were so much the more destructive.
Regarding the world of today the same conclusion holds good, and you, too, have reached it, though by a shorter path. There is but one sure way of ending war and that is the establishment, by common consent, of a central control which shall have the last word in every conflict of interests. For this, two things are needed: first, the creation of such a supreme court of judicature; secondly, its investment with adequate executive force. Unless this second requirement be fulfilled, the first is unavailing. Obviously the League of Nations, acting as a Supreme Court, fulfils the first condition; it does not fulfil the second. It has no force at its disposal and can only get it if the members of the new body, its constituent nations, furnish it. And, as things are, this is a forlorn hope. Still we should be taking a very short-sighted view of the League of Nations were we to ignore the fact that here is an experiment the like of which has rarely—never before, perhaps, on such a scale—been attempted in the course of history. It is an attempt to acquire the authority (in other words, coercive influence), which hitherto reposed exclusively on the possession of power, by calling into play certain idealistic attitudes of mind. We have seen that there are two factors of cohesion in a community: violent compulsion and ties of sentiment (“identifications,” in technical parlance) between the members of the group. If one of these factors becomes inoperative, the other may still suffice to hold the group together. Obviously such notions as these can only be significant when they are the expression of a deeply rooted sense of unity, shared by all. It is necessary, therefore, to gauge the efficacy of such sentiments. History tells us that, on occasion, they have been effective. For example, the Panhellenic conception, the Greeks’ awareness of superiority over their barbarian neighbors, which found expression in the Amphictyonies, the Oracles and Games, was strong enough to humanize the methods of warfare as between Greeks, though inevitably it failed to prevent conflicts between different elements of the Hellenic race or even to deter a city or group of cities from joining forces with their racial foe, the Persians, for the defeat of a rival. The solidarity of Christendom in the Renaissance age was no more effective, despite its vast authority, in hindering Christian nations, large and small alike, from calling in the Sultan to their aid. And, in our times, we look in vain for some such unifying notion whose authority would be unquestioned. It is all too clear that the nationalistic ideas, paramount today in every country, operate in quite a contrary direction. There are some who hold that the Bolshevik conceptions may make an end of war, but, as things are, that goal lies very far away and, perhaps, could only be attained after a spell of brutal internecine warfare. Thus it would seem that any effort to replace brute force by the might of an ideal is, under present conditions, doomed to fail. Our logic is at fault if we ignore the fact that right is founded on brute force and even today needs violence to maintain it.
I now can comment on another of your statements. You are amazed that it is so easy to infect men with the war-fever, and you surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction, amenable to such stimulations. I entirely agree with you. I believe in the existence of this instinct and have been recently at pains to study its manifestations. In this connection may I set out a fragment of that knowledge of the instincts, which we psychoanalysts, after so many tentative essays and gropings in the dark, have compassed? We assume that human instincts are of two kinds: those that conserve and unify, which we call “erotic” (in the meaning Plato gives to Eros in his Symposium), or else “sexual” (explicitly extending the popular connotation of “sex”); and, secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts. These are, as you perceive, the well-known opposites, Love and Hate, transformed into theoretical entities; they are, perhaps, another aspect of those eternal polarities, attraction and repulsion, which fall within your province. But we must be wary of passing overhastily to the notions of good and evil. Each of these instincts is every bit as indispensable as its opposite and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition. It seems that an instinct of either category can operate but rarely in isolation; it is always blended (“alloyed,” as we say) with a certain dosage of its opposite, which modifies its aim or even, in certain circumstances, is a prime condition of its attainment. Thus the instinct of self-preservation is certainly of an erotic nature, but to gain its ends this very instinct necessitates aggressive action. In the same way the love-instinct, when directed to a specific object, calls for an admixture of the acquisitive instinct if it is to enter into effective possession of that object. It is the difficulty of isolating the two kinds of instinct in their manifestations that has so long prevented us from recognizing them.
If you will travel with me a little further on this road, you will find that human affairs are complicated in yet another way. Only exceptionally does an action follow on the stimulus of a single instinct, which is per se a blend of Eros and destructiveness. As a rule several motives of similar composition concur to bring about the act. This fact was duly noted by a colleague of yours, Professor G. C. Lichtenberg, sometime Professor of Physics at Göttingen; he was perhaps even more eminent as a psychologist than as a physical scientist. He evolved the notion of a “Compasscard of Motives” and wrote: “The efficient motives impelling man to act can be classified like the 32 Winds, and described in the same manner; e.g. Food-Food-Fame or Fame-Fame-Food.” Thus, when a nation is summoned to engage in war, a whole gamut of human motives may respond to this appeal; high and low motives, some openly avowed, others slurred over. The lust for aggression and destruction is certainly included; the innumerable cruelties of history and daily life confirm its prevalence and strength. The stimulation of these destructive impulses by appeals to idealism and the erotic instinct naturally facilitates their release. Musing on the atrocities recorded on history’s page, we feel that the ideal motive has often served as a camouflage for the lust of destruction; sometimes, as with the cruelties of the Inquisition, it seems that, while the ideal motives occupied the foreground of consciousness, they drew their strength from the destructive instincts submerged in the unconscious. Both interpretations are feasible.
You are interested, I know, in the prevention of war, not in our theories, and I keep this fact in mind. Yet I would like to dwell a little longer on this destructive instinct which is seldom given the attention that its importance warrants. With the least of speculative efforts we are led to conclude that this instinct functions in every living being, striving to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. Indeed it might well be called the “death-instinct”; whereas the erotic instincts vouch for the struggle to live on. The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of certain organs, it directs its action outwards, against external objects. The living being, that is to say, defends its own existence by destroying foreign bodies. But, in one of its activities, the death instinct is operative within the living being and we have sought to trace back a number of normal and pathological phenomena to this introversion of the destructive instinct. We have even committed the heresy of explaining the origin of human conscience by some such “turning inward” of the aggressive impulse. Obviously when this internal tendency operates on too large a scale, it is no trivial matter, rather a positively morbid state of things; whereas the diversion of the destructive impulse towards the external world must have beneficial effects. Here is then the biological justification for all those vile, pernicious propensities which we now are combating. We can but own that they are really more akin to nature than this our stand against them, which, in fact, remains to be accounted for.
All this may give you the impression that our theories amount to a species of mythology and a gloomy one at that! But does not every natural science lead ultimately to this—a sort of mythology? Is it otherwise today with your physical science
The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever people desire, there flourish races whose lives go gently by, unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk. The Bolsheviks, too, aspire to do away with human aggressiveness by ensuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between people. To me this hope seems vain. Meanwhile they busily perfect their armaments, and their hatred of outsiders is not the least of the factors of cohesion amongst themselves. In any case, as you too have observed, complete suppression of aggressive tendencies is not at issue; what we may try is to divert it into a channel other than that of warfare.
From our “mythology” of the instincts we may easily deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war. If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand. All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote. These ties are of two kinds. First, such relations as those towards a beloved object, void though they be of sexual intent. The psychoanalyst need feel no compunction in mentioning “love” in this connection; religion uses the same language: Love thy neighbor as thyself. A pious injunction easy to proclaim, but hard to carry out! The other bond of sentiment is by way of identification. All that brings out the significant resemblances between people calls into play this feeling of community, identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of human society.
In your strictures on the abuse of authority I find another suggestion for an indirect attack on the war-impulse. That people are divided into leaders and the led is but another manifestation of their inborn and irremediable inequality. The second class constitutes the vast majority; they need a high command to make decisions for them, to which decisions they usually bow without demur. In this context we would point out that people should be at greater pains than heretofore to form a superior class of independent thinkers, unamenable to intimidation and fervent in the quest of truth, whose function it would be to guide the masses dependent on their lead. There is no need to point out how little the rule of politicians and the Church’s ban on liberty of thought encourage such a new creation. The ideal conditions would obviously be found in a community where everyone subordinated instinctive life to the dictates of reason. Nothing less than this could bring about so thorough and so durable a union between people, even if this involved the severance of mutual ties of sentiment. But surely such a hope is utterly utopian, as things are. The other indirect methods of preventing war are certainly more feasible, but entail no quick results. They conjure up an ugly picture of mills that grind so slowly that, before the flour is ready, people are dead of hunger.
As you see, little good comes of consulting a theoretician, aloof from worldly contacts, on practical and urgent problems! Better it were to tackle each successive crisis with means that we have ready to our hands. However, I would like to deal with a question which, though it is not mooted in your letter, interests me greatly. Why do we, you and I and many an other, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life’s odious importunities? For it seems a natural thing enough, biologically sound and practically unavoidable. I trust you will not be shocked by my raising such a question. For the better conduct of an inquiry it may be well to don a mask of feigned aloofness. The answer to my query may run as follows: because every people has a right over their own lives and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame humanity, obliging them to murder fellow human beings against their will; it ravages material amenities, the fruits of human toil, and much besides. Moreover wars, as now conducted, afford no scope for acts of heroism according to the old ideals and, given the high perfection of modern arms, war today would mean the sheer extermination of one of the combatants, if not of both. This is so true, so obvious, that we can but wonder why the conduct of war is not banned by general consent. Doubtless either of the points I have just made is open to debate. It may be asked if the community, in its turn, cannot claim a right over the individual lives of its members. Moreover, all forms of war cannot be indiscriminately condemned; so long as there are nations and empires, each prepared callously to exterminate its rival, all alike must be equipped for war. But we will not dwell on any of these problems; they lie outside the debate to which you have invited me. I pass on to another point, the basis, as it strikes me, of our common hatred of war. It is this: we cannot do otherwise than hate it. Pacifists we are, since our organic nature wills us thus to be. Hence it comes easy to us to find arguments that justify our standpoint.
This point, however, calls for elucidation. Here is the way in which I see it. The cultural development of mankind (some, I know, prefer to call it civilization) has been in progress since immemorial antiquity. To this processus we owe all that is best in our composition, but also much that makes for human suffering. Its origins and causes are obscure, its issue is uncertain, but some of its characteristics are easy to perceive. It well may lead to the extinction of humanity for it impairs the sexual function in more than one respect, and even today the uncivilized races and the backward classes of all nations are multiplying more rapidly than “the cultured elements.” This process may, perhaps, be likened to the effects of domestication on certain animals—it clearly involves physical changes of structure—but the view that cultural development is an “organic” process of this order has not yet become generally familiar. The psychic changes which accompany this process of cultural change are striking, and not to be gainsaid. They consist in the progressive rejection of instinctive ends and a scaling down of instinctive reactions. Sensations which delighted our forefathers have become neutral or unbearable to us; and, if our ethical and aesthetic ideals have undergone a change, the causes of this are “ultimately organic.” On the psychological side two of the most important phenomena of culture are, firstly, a strengthening of the intellect, which tends to master our instinctive life, and, secondly, an introversion of the aggressive impulse, with all its consequent benefits and perils. Now war runs most emphatically counter to the psychic disposition imposed on us by the growth of culture; we are therefore bound to resent war, to find it utterly intolerable. With pacifists like us it is not merely an intellectual and affective repulsion, but a constitutional intolerance, an idiosyncrasy in its most drastic form. And it would seem that the aesthetic ignominies of warfare play almost as large a part in this repugnance as war’s atrocities. How long have we to wait before the remainder of humanity turns pacifist? Impossible to say, and yet perhaps our hope that these two factors—people’s cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take—may serve to put an end to war in the near future, is not chimerical. But by what ways or by-ways this will come about, we cannot guess. Meanwhile we may rest on the assurance that whatever makes for cultural development is working also against war.
With kindest regards and, should this exposé prove a disappointment to you, my sincere regrets,
Yours, Sigmund Freud
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Source of original German text: Albert Einstein und Sigmund Freud, “Warum Krieg?” Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, League of Nations, 1933, pp 15-47.
“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”—Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting, Colten v. Kentucky, 407 U.S. 104 (1972)
Forget everything you’ve ever been taught about free speech in America.
It’s all a lie.
There can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.
Unfortunately, this is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble in public and challenge the status quo.
This police overkill isn’t just happening in troubled hot spots such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Md., where police brutality gave rise to civil unrest, which was met with a militarized show of force that caused the whole stew of discontent to bubble over into violence.
A decade earlier, the NYPD engaged in mass arrests of peaceful protesters, bystanders, legal observers and journalists who had gathered for the 2004 Republican National Convention. The protesters were subjected to blanket fingerprinting and detained for more than 24 hours at a “filthy, toxic pier that had been a bus depot.” That particular exercise in police intimidation tactics cost New York City taxpayers nearly $18 million for what would become the largest protest settlement in history.
In the college town of Charlottesville, Va., protesters who took to the streets to peacefully express their disapproval of a planned KKK rally were held at bay by implacable lines of gun-wielding riot police. Only after a motley crew of Klansmen had been safely escorted to and from the rally by black-garbed police did the assembled army of city, county and state police declare the public gathering unlawful and proceed to unleash canisters of tear gas on the few remaining protesters to force them to disperse.
To be clear, this is the treatment being meted out to protesters across the political spectrum.
The police state does not discriminate.
As a USA Today article notes,
“Federally arming police with weapons of war silences protesters across all justice movements… People demanding justice, demanding accountability or demanding basic human rights without resorting to violence, should not be greeted with machine guns and tanks. Peaceful protest is democracy in action. It is a forum for those who feel disempowered or disenfranchised. Protesters should not have to face intimidation by weapons of war.”
Even the color of a police officer’s uniform adds to the tension. As the Department of Justice reports,
“Some research has suggested that the uniform color can influence the wearer—with black producing aggressive tendencies, tendencies that may produce unnecessary conflict between police and the very people they serve.”
You want to turn a peaceful protest into a riot?
Bring in the militarized police with their guns and black uniforms and warzone tactics and “comply or die” mindset. Ratchet up the tension across the board. Take what should be a healthy exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turn it into a lesson in authoritarianism.
Mind you, those who respond with violence are playing into the government’s hands perfectly.
The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.
They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another.
They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces.
They want us silent, servile and compliant.
They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully.
And they definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
You know how one mayor characterized the tear gassing of protesters by riot police? He called it an “unfortunate event.”
Unfortunate, indeed.
You know what else is unfortunate?
It’s unfortunate that these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.
It’s unfortunate that “we the people” have become the proverbial nails to be hammered into submission by the government and its vast armies.
And it’s particularly unfortunate that government officials—especially police—seem to believe that anyone who wears a government uniform (soldier, police officer, prison guard) must be obeyed without question.
In other words, “we the people” are the servants in the government’s eyes rather than the masters.
The government’s rationale goes like this:
Do exactly what I say, and we’ll get along fine. Do not question me or talk back in any way. You do not have the right to object to anything I may say or ask you to do, or ask for clarification if my demands are unclear or contradictory. You must obey me under all circumstances without hesitation, no matter how arbitrary, unreasonable, discriminatory, or blatantly racist my commands may be. Anything other than immediate perfect servile compliance will be labeled as resisting arrest, and expose you to the possibility of a violent reaction from me. That reaction could cause you severe injury or even death. And I will suffer no consequences. It’s your choice: Comply, or die.
Indeed, as Officer Sunil Dutta of the Los Angeles Police Department advises:
This is not the rhetoric of a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people.
This is not the attitude of someone who understands, let alone respects, free speech.
And this is certainly not what I would call “community policing,” which is supposed to emphasize the importance of the relationship between the police and the community they serve.
Indeed, this is martial law masquerading as law and order.
Any police officer who tells you that he needs tanks, SWAT teams, and pepper spray to do his job shouldn’t be a police officer in a constitutional republic.
All that stuff in the First Amendment (about freedom of speech, religion, press, peaceful assembly and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances) sounds great in theory. However, it amounts to little more than a hill of beans if you have to exercise those freedoms while facing down an army of police equipped with deadly weapons, surveillance devices, and a slew of laws that empower them to arrest and charge citizens with bogus “contempt of cop” charges (otherwise known as asserting your constitutional rights).
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are other, far better models to follow.
For instance, back in 2011, the St. Louis police opted to employ a passive response to Occupy St. Louis activists. First, police gave the protesters nearly 36 hours’ notice to clear the area, as opposed to the 20 to 60 minutes’ notice other cities gave. Then, as journalist Brad Hicks reports, when the police finally showed up:
They didn’t show up in riot gear and helmets, they showed up in shirt sleeves with their faces showing. They not only didn’t show up with SWAT gear, they showed up with no unusual weapons at all, and what weapons they had all securely holstered. They politely woke everybody up. They politely helped everybody who was willing to remove their property from the park to do so. They then asked, out of the 75 to 100 people down there, how many people were volunteering for being-arrested duty? Given 33 hours to think about it, and 10 hours to sweat it over, only 27 volunteered. As the police already knew, those people’s legal advisers had advised them not to even passively resist, so those 27 people lined up to be peacefully arrested, and were escorted away by a handful of cops. The rest were advised to please continue to protest, over there on the sidewalk … and what happened next was the most absolutely brilliant piece of crowd control policing I have heard of in my entire lifetime. All of the cops who weren’t busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in.
As Forbes concluded,
“This is a more humane, less costly, and ultimately more productive way to handle a protest. This is great proof that police can do it the old fashioned way – using their brains and common sense instead of tanks, SWAT teams, and pepper spray – and have better results.”
It can be done.
Police will not voluntarily give up their gadgets and war toys and combat tactics, however. Their training and inclination towards authoritarianism has become too ingrained.
If we are to have any hope of dismantling the police state, change must start locally, community by community. Citizens will have to demand that police de-escalate and de-militarize. And if the police don’t listen, contact your city councils and put the pressure on them.
Remember, they are supposed to work for us. They might not like hearing it—they certainly won’t like being reminded of it—but we pay their salaries with our hard-earned tax dollars.
“We the people” have got to stop accepting the lame excuses trotted out by police as justifications for their inexcusable behavior.
Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.
Either we live in a constitutional republic or a police state.
We have rights.
As Justice William O. Douglas advised in his dissent in Colten v. Kentucky, “we need not stay docile and quiet” in the face of authority.
The Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials.
Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).
This emphasis on nonviolence goes both ways. Somehow, the government keeps overlooking this important element in the equation.
There is nothing safe or secure or free about exercising your rights with a rifle pointed at you.
The police officer who has been trained to shoot first and ask questions later, oftentimes based only on their highly subjective “feeling” of being threatened, is just as much of a danger—if not more—as any violence that might erupt from a protest rally.
Compliance is no guarantee of safety.
Then again, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if we just cower before government agents and meekly obey, we may find ourselves following in the footsteps of those nations that eventually fell to tyranny.
The alternative involves standing up and speaking truth to power. Jesus Christ walked that road. So did Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless other freedom fighters whose actions changed the course of history.
Indeed, had Christ merely complied with the Roman police state, there would have been no crucifixion and no Christian religion. Had Gandhi meekly fallen in line with the British Empire’s dictates, the Indian people would never have won their independence.
Had Martin Luther King Jr. obeyed the laws of his day, there would have been no civil rights movement. And if the founding fathers had marched in lockstep with royal decrees, there would have been no American Revolution.
We must adopt a different mindset and follow a different path if we are to alter the outcome of these interactions with police.
The American dream was built on the idea that no one is above the law, that our rights are inalienable and cannot be taken away, and that our government and its appointed agents exist to serve us.
It may be that things are too far gone to save, but still we must try.
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“Saudi Arabia’s Bitch”. That’s what Democrat candidate Tulsi Gabbard calls President Trump for his slavish reliance on Saudi Arabia to declare Iran responsible for last weekend’s attack on Saudi oil resources.
Gabbard’s comments are in response to Trump’s tweet on Sunday:
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Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!
For the Saudis, there is but one culprit—Iran. The Kingdom and its psychotic boy prince, Mohammed bin Salman, wants nothing more than to take down Iran, preferably to the ground and smoldering. It cannot do this without the help of the US military. The blame will not go to some fictitious terror group hiding out in the Maldives. I exaggerate, of course, but not much.
Tulsi elaborates her position:
Strong statement from Tulsi Gabbard following President Trump’s tweet about Saudi Arabia pic.twitter.com/R1nIBxepoN
Meanwhile, one of the loudest, shrillest, and most Israel-centric talk show hosts in America has denounced her as a “clown” for attempting to end the neocon wars and return sanity and balance to US foreign policy.
…, threatens to destroy the U.S., etc. you’re unfit to lead our country. You’re a dangerous fool.https://t.co/WzRhZZB9uE
Neocons are predisposed to tell lies. There is no evidence Iran had anything to do with the attack, or for that matter Yemen. And there will little if any convincing evidence provided by Mike Pompeo and his neocons. they understand evidence is not required, only lies.
This paucity of evidence has never bothered the neocons—they simply invent and spin events resulting in deadly consequence. For instance, the murder of over a million Iraqis, which it is fair to say Mark Levin supported and will again. Because only Israeli and American lives matter, especially the former.
Zionists are not concerned with the mass murder of Arabs and Muslims. Israel’s history is chock full of massacres, torture, the imprisonment of children, and the targeted assassination of medics, journalists, and activists along the prison wall that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel.
The “dangerous fool” here is Mark Levin, an Israel-first neocon of the first order masquerading as an American constitutionalist. His version of the Constitution doesn’t include Article I, Section 8, Clause 11. It specifies only Congress can declare war, not a president caught in some kind of Zionist voodoo trance.
Levin calls Gabbard a “moron,” when it is Levin who is the moron, or at least comes off as one. There is virtually zero evidence Iran has killed US soldiers (in occupied Iraq) and is building ICBMs for nuclear warheads that do not exist. Levin’s citing Israeli propaganda, not verifiable facts.
Mark Levin, of course, is not a moron. He’s an intelligent, conniving, and hateful neocon, an Israel-first fanatic. He wants to bomb Iran—just like his ideological twin, the dismissed John Bolton—and the prospect of thousands of dead Iranians and the Middle East in flames does not bother him, as it would any human with empathy and a sense of justice.
Levin has no such empathy for average Iranians, Gazans, Lebanese, and Syrians. Like all neocons, his only concern is Israel. He supports Trump simply because Trump is locked in a Zionist voodoo trance and will give the tiny apartheid state just abbot anything it wants, including putting America’s imprimatur on yet another war, this one with far more dire consequences for humanity than the other neocon wars.
Tulsi, as any serious politician, has paid lip service to Israel. She knows that failing to do so will terminate her political career. She went so far as to support the unconstitutional anti-BDS legislation working its way through Congress.
But that’s not enough for Levin and the neocons. Nothing short of enthusiastic support for Israel and its endless wars, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid are acceptable for any US politician, especially those running for president.
Trump declares he’s “locked and loaded” after the attack on Saudi oil facilities. He is waiting for the Saudis to make up their minds on possible perpetrators. But that’s a foregone conclusion. Iran is responsible. Iran will be punished, possibly with bunker busters and the destruction of its infrastructure.
This latest drama has all the earmarks of a false flag operation designed to further ratchet up hostilities and eventually get a war going.
Mark Levin is doing all he can to make it so.
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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The attack on the Saudi Aramco oil facility over the weekend and President Donald Trump’s subsequent tweet that the United States is “locked and loaded” immediately prompted presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to fire back.
Sanders and other progressive lawmakers stressed that Trump does not have the legal authority from Congress to launch an offensive strike against Iran.
“Mr. Trump, the Constitution of the United States is perfectly clear,” Sanders tweeted. “Only Congress — not the President — can declare war. And Congress will not give you the authority to start another disastrous war in the Middle East just because the brutal Saudi dictatorship told you to.”
And in an interview on ABC on Sunday, hours before Trump’s tweet, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana — another 2020 contender — criticized Trump’s maximum pressure strategy against Iran.
“There is more than enough destabilizing the Middle East and the Persian Gulf without fears that a president could destabilize it further with the next tweet,” said Buttigieg. “We need to make sure right now that we create options to prevent things from escalating further.”
Trump noted that he was “waiting to hear from the kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of the attack” before proceeding.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred some 620 miles from the war-torn country. But US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said over the weekend that there was no evidence the attack came from Yemen and the Trump administration maintains that the attacks came directly from Iran.
Saudi Arabia said today that Riyadh has not reached the same conclusion that Iran was the staging ground for the attacks. Still, the Saudis did claim that the drones that struck the oil facility were Iranian and did not originate from Yemen. Iran denies the charges and no side has presented evidence to corroborate their competing claims.
And Trump implied that Iran was telling “a very big lie” in a separate tweet today. The president referenced an incident earlier this year when Tehran shot down a US drone after claiming it was flying over Iranian air space even as Washington placed the drone’s coordinates over international waters.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tweeted that
“no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long-term upside to the US military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest between the Saudis and Iranians,” going on to lambast Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Tehran.
But not all Democrats were as eager to push back against Trump’s tweets.
Murphy’s colleague on the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., struck a more hawkish message in an appearance today on the pro-Trump “Fox and Friends,” where guests frequently go to directly relay messages to the president. Coons argued that
“this may very well be the thing that calls for military action against Iran if that’s what the intelligence supports.”
Sanders’ campaign co-chair, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., pushed back against Coons on Twitter.
“The only body that can call for offensive military action against Iran is Congress,” tweeted Khanna.
The California Democrat used Coons’ remarks to renew calls for lawmakers to pass his legislation barring the Trump administration from using funds in an offensive strike against Iran absent congressional authorization.
Khanna and Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., teamed up to include the legislation as an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill, which the House passed 220-197 in July. But Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., an Iran hawk, forestalled Democrats from adding similar language to the upper chamber’s version of the bill.
The Gaetz-Inhofe split illustrates the national security fissure between the non-interventionist and hawkish wings of the Republican Party as Trump’s allies continue to vie for his ear on national security issues.
“It is now time for the US to put on the table an attack on Iranian oil refineries if they continue their provocations or increase nuclear enrichment,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., another close Trump confidant. “Iran will not stop their misbehavior until the consequences become more real, like attacking their refineries, which will break the regime’s back.”
Yet Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who also enjoys close access to Trump, pushed back against Graham on CNN, opting instead to focus on the Houthis’ claim of credit for the attack.
“Really the answer is trying to have a negotiated cease-fire and peace in Yemen, and bombing Iran won’t do that,” said Paul. “Iran’s military spending is about $17 billion. Saudi Arabia spends about $83 billion.”
It remains unclear whether the Trump administration would seek a congressional authorization to strike Iran — or if such an authorization would be able to pass. But Trump has twice struck Syrian military installations owned by President Bashar al-Assad without congressional authorization. The Trump administration has yet to disclose its legal justification for both strikes.
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Bryant Harris is Al-Monitor’s congressional correspondent. He was previously the White House assistant correspondent for Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English and IPS News. Prior to his stint in DC, he spent two years as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. On Twitter: @brykharris_ALM, Email: [email protected].
September 17th, 2019 by Center For Biological Diversity
More than 650 miles of barriers already exist along the border. These walls, fences and barriers cut through sensitive ecosystems, disrupt animal migration patterns, cause catastrophic flooding, and divide communities and tribal nations.
Congress has already approved more than $3 billion for border walls since Trump took office. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy Trump’s demands. Now, with the declaration of a national “emergency,” Trump is illegally attempting to funnel billions more to border wall construction in some of the country’s most sensitive and spectacular landscapes.
Trump’s wall would harm border communities, perpetuate human suffering, destroy thousands of acres of habitat and halt the cross-border migration of dozens of animal species. In fact, as revealed in the Center’s 2017 report A Wall in the Wild, 93 threatened, endangered and candidate species would potentially be affected by construction of a wall and related infrastructure spanning the entirety of the border.
This is a looming tragedy for the region’s diverse wildlife and people, as well as its rugged and spectacular landscapes. We’re fighting in the courts, in Congress and in our communities to stop Trump’s cynical attack on our beautiful borderlands.
With headquarters near the border in Tucson, Arizona, the Center has worked to preserve and protect the remote beauty and amazing biodiversity of our borderlands for decades. We’ve been fighting against border militarization — including the border wall — since the late 1990s, using litigation to block unlawful border policy, grassroots lobbying to stop legislation that would exacerbate environmental damage, and creative-media and public-education campaigns to get out the truth about the real impacts of the hugely expensive, largely ineffective and environmentally devastating border wall.
We currently have three lawsuits in play on the border wall. In April 2017 the Center partnered with U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva in filing suit seeking a thorough analysis of the environmental impacts of border-security policy, including the border wall, under the National Environmental Policy Act. Another suit challenges the Trump administration’s waiver of more than three dozen environmental, public-health and tribal-sovereignty laws in order to rush border-wall construction. And a third suit seeks to force the administration to release documents regarding its border plans, thus far withheld from the public.
We were the first organization to sue Trump over the border wall and have since filed six suits challenging border wall construction. Our most recent litigation challenges Trump’s emergency declaration and use of military funds to build the border wall. The Center also has sued the administration to challenge border-wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley and near the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in New Mexico. In 2017, we partnered with U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, seeking a thorough analysis of the environmental impacts of border-security policy, including the border wall, under the National Environmental Policy Act. All of these suits are pending.
In May 2017 the Center partnered with the Tohono O’odham tribe in Mexico to file an endangerment petition for El Pinacate and Gran Desierto Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, just south of the border in the state of Sonora. A wall in that area would block cross-border migration of endangered Sonoran pronghorn and restrict access for the Tohono O’odham people, who travel across the border regularly for traditional and ceremonial purposes.
In July 2017 the House of Representatives approved the Trump administration’s $1.6 billion budget request to expand the U.S.-Mexico border wall, ignoring threats to protected wildlife refuges and border communities. Since then, the administration has been slowly moving forward with its plans — and waiving dozens of laws along the way.
No Border Wall Resolution Campaign
The Center has helped launch a campaign to pass resolutions in states, cities and counties across the United States opposing the border wall, with 39 passed so far. Many of these resolutions contain provisions for jurisdictions to divest from companies that agree to design or build the wall. Numerous local governments have enacted No Border Wall Resolutions. If you’re an elected official or representative of a community or organization who’d like to get involved in our campaign to pass No Border Wall resolutions across the country, please contact Laiken Jordahl.
Background on the Borderlands
Joining the United States and Mexico, our borderlands to the south comprise one of the biggest ecosystem complexes in North America, with some of the least populated areas and the most important wildlife habitats remaining on the continent. This border region is host to a diverse array of threatened, endangered and rare species — including the Sonoran pronghorn, lesser long-nosed bat, Quino checkerspot butterfly, cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, and larger predators like jaguars, Mexican gray wolves and ocelots — and it contains millions of acres of public lands, such as Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Big Bend National Park, Coronado National Forest and Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge.
In the mid-1990s the U.S. federal government launched a strategy of militarization in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that continues to this day. First the areas around ports of entry in El Paso, San Diego, and other urban areas along the border were hardened and walls were erected using solid steel panels from Vietnam War–era landing mats. This had the predictable effect of forcing undocumented migrants out into more remote areas to cross the border, where many died in harsh conditions. More than 7,000 people have died crossing the border in the past 20 years. Documents show that migrant deaths were a foreseen consequence of a conscious strategy to increase the difficulty and dangers of crossing the border as a deterrent to migrants.
The strategy of pushing migrant traffic into wild areas did not work to stem the flow of undocumented immigration — but it did vastly increase the amount of environmental damage it was causing, as both the flow of migrants and the resulting border-law-enforcement activities were pushed into formerly untrammeled sites.
Thousands of Border Patrol agents began driving off-road in remote areas, creating thousands of miles of new roads in designated wilderness and critical habitats for endangered species. As detailed in the Center’s A Wall in the Wild report, more than 2 million acres of designated critical habitat exists within 50 miles of the border and is in danger of being degraded and destroyed by the construction of a wall and related enforcement activities along the border.
In 2005 the U.S. Congress passed a clause in the REAL ID Act, which granted the secretary of Homeland Security the authority to waive any and all laws with regard to constructing walls and roads along the border. More than three dozen environmental, public-health and tribal-sovereignty laws have since been waived using this authority, resulting in hundreds of miles of additional border barriers and roads being constructed with little or no environmental review. The Trump administration has already used this authority three times to rush border-wall construction, most recently in May 2019 in Arizona and California.
The results of these waivers have been predictable. Without the thorough analysis of environmental impacts normally required by law, new border infrastructure has been constructed in ill-advised locations with poor engineering — resulting in massive flooding, erosion, and millions of dollars of damage to private property and public lands alike.
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In the aftermath of the third Presidential Democratic National Committee (DNC) debate, it was mind boggling that viewers were forced to suffer through a rehash of the same, worn out regurgitations that had already been harangued previously. There was no stunning moment where a Star stepped forward as in the two earlier debates, nor any momentous policy pronouncements worth pondering.
The ‘top tier’ candidates proved to be a bland assortment, awash in mediocrity and predictably contentious blathering. Missing in action was Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hi) who failed to meet the DNC’s arbitrary polling requirements; thus successful in clearing the stage of a reputable foreign policy voice.
If you were unfortunate enough to tune in, you may have realized that what remains of a once political powerhouse is little more than a bankrupt shell of flatulence and exploitation. What the DNC and most of its candidates have not grasped is that there is an urgency and an underlying anxiety throughout the country with little public patience for frivolous, meaningless chatter that offers no real solutions to correct the decades of war debt, mismanagement and widespread corruption.
It should be apparent to all that the DNC has not learned one iota, not one scintilla about transparency or why they lost the 2016 election. At that time, the DNCblatantly took no pains to hide its own corruption as it ‘stole’ the Dem nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) After the Dem convention that summer, Sanders’s response to the fraud and sleaze was like that of any feudal vassal. He could not do enough to enable the DNC as he campaigned his ass off on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The DNC has not forgiven him since.
In 2016, Gabbard, then a rising star within the DNC and a Vice Chair, resigned her position to endorse Bernie and, as she walked out the door, cited HRC’s ongoing support for interventionist, regime change policies.” Today, Sanders’s ambivalence to speak out on behalf of Tulsi has been noted as the DNC excluded her from the third debate as she so forthrightly spoke out on his behalf in 2016. That one resignation cost the Dem’s votes on top of an already faltering campaign that remained undiagnosed until after the votes were counted. The DNC hierarchy has not forgiven Gabbard.
After devastating losses across the country that year, including the White House, both houses of Congress and a majority of Gubernatorial seats and State legislatures, it might have been strategic for the Dems to regroup and reconsider their future. Misguided by a deeply embedded corruption that denied their own insulated version of reality, the DNC chose to pretend all was well in Camelot.
By election day 2016, the Russiagate fiasco was already in play and rather than consider the damage their own hysterical unsubstantiated allegations would inflict on the country, the Dem game plan was a train wreck waiting to happen. In retrospect, one can only surmise that the DNC and its minions made a dangerously reckless choice to maintain their own power and position rather than exhibit any devotion to the country.
Fast forward to the 2020 primary season with almost two dozen Presidential candidates as the DNC connived to steer the desired outcome by fabricating truly creative debate deceits to screw the democratic process and even some of its own candidates.
It doesn’t take a professional pollster to recognize that at this early stage of the campaign, those candidates with the highest name recognition are understandably leading with the highest polls; not because of any particular sterling qualities or spectacular policy pronouncements but because they are the most familiar, the more known quantity. The bias of the MSM playing favorites with establishment-oriented candidates is also an enormous factor in the race for name recognition.
The reputable McClatchy-Marist poll pulled out of the DNC’s 2016 Presidential debates “out of concern that public polls are being misused to decide who will be in and who will be excluded’ and that “debate criteria assumes too much precision in polls.” What they are saying is that every poll has a statistical margin of error which makes any poll number speculative and/or unreliable – but that’s exactly how the DNC plays the game.
Lee Miringhoff, Polling Director for Marist Institute issued his “Top Ten Reasons Why Polls should not be used to Determine Eligibility for Debates” including a range of inherent glitches since each pollster will use different methodology. For instance, are potential voters ‘likely’ or ‘leaning’ or were they polled via a cell phone, a land line or a push button phone. Most importantly, Miringhoff questioned the use of a national poll to determine a candidate’s eligibility instead of a statewide primary poll and that the early campaign is unduly influenced by those candidates with higher name recognition as well as whether the opinion of generational voters is being considered.
To be sure, the DNC knew exactly what they were doing to require only certain ‘approved’ polling data as mandatory for debate inclusion – thereby excluding a candidate like Gabbard who exceeded the 2% threshold in 26 national and early state polls with only two of them on the DNC’s “certified” list.
As Bernie continues to challenge Biden and Warren, he has missed the stark reality that little has changed since 2016; to wit, even if he goes into the 2020 convention with a significant block of pledged delegates, the smart money says that the DNC will use every trick in the book to block a first ballot Sanders nomination to prevail. Once a second ballot is called, the DNC is home free as their super delegates once again bail out the shady villains of Capitol Hill from a catastrophe of their own making as together, they unhesitatingly ram through the preferred ‘celebrity’ candidate they wanted in the first place.
Clearly, Gabbard who scored big in the June and July debates had become a thorn to the DNC and just as they will find a way to delete Bernie, so will they also pull whatever strings at their disposal to deny Gabbard a legitimate place on stage. But do not count the Aloha Girl out as she has a resilience and a stubbornness to find her way into the fourth debate.
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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31
From the wetlands of California’s Tijuana Slough near San Diego to the lush Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are a haven for hundreds of rare and beautiful bird species. This is a birding mecca.
Huge swaths of the border are so spectacular that they’re protected by state, national, and international laws. Seven national wildlife refuges stretch from one end of the 2,000-mile border to the other, as well as dozens of state parks and wilderness areas, Big Bend National Park in Texas, and Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
More than 90 threatened and endangered species live in these richly biodiverse landscapes, crossing back and forth to feed, breed, and thrive. They include at least 16 species of birds, as well as jaguars, ocelots, and Mexican gray wolves.
Wildlife in peril
Border walls and militarization have taken a toll on animals in the borderlands for years. But President Trump’s obsession to build hundreds of miles of wall before the next election places the region and its wildlife in the crosshairs like never before.
Under previous administrations, most border-wall construction avoided protected landscapes. Waist-high vehicle barriers allowed wildlife to move back and forth across the border.
But under Trump, those vehicle barriers are being replaced with 30-foot-tall steel bollard walls next to barren, brightly lit “enforcement zones.” New wall construction is already under way on protected lands in Arizona and Texas that include some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the continent.
Over the past year, I’ve been documenting new border-wall construction in Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico ― and sharing the devastation on Twitter ― as part of my work with the Center for Biological Diversity. Trump’s wall is no longer just rhetoric; it’s happening now.
HAPPENING NOW: First panels of Trump #Borderwall going up through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
Endangered species, protected wilderness, Native American sacred sites, precious desert groundwater. So much is being destroyed, all for nothing. pic.twitter.com/zzee62P4Uz
A Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo in a bander’s grip. The subspecies is listed as Threatened and stands to lose habitat to the wall. Photo by Mark Dettling/Point Blue Conservation Science
All along the border, Trump is speeding wall construction by waiving dozens of laws that protect clean air, clean water, public lands, and endangered wildlife. This includes critical laws like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that protect birds and their habitat.
The Center and our allies have sued to challenge Trump’s February emergency declaration, an end-run around Congress to swipe billions of dollars in military and other funds for border wall construction. The Center also has sued Trump to challenge border-wall construction in California, New Mexico, and Texas. The Center’s first border-related lawsuit― filed in 2017 in U.S. District Court in Tucson with U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva ― seeks to require the Trump administration to do a detailed analysis of the environmental impacts of its border-enforcement program. Other conservation and human rights groups, and 20 state attorneys general, have sued to stop Trump’s border wall.
These enormous barriers block wildlife migration and destroy and fragment habitat. Some birds will be able to fly over the taller walls, but many can’t or won’t. Wall construction includes the bulldozing of huge swaths of habitat, turning protected land into dead zones where birds, butterflies, and bees have no place to land.
This will prevent them from finding food, breeding and migrating ―all essential to their survival.
Blasted with flood lighting, staked with sensors
Thousands of acres of habitat will be cleared for a 150-foot-wide “enforcement zone” running along each mile of border wall. This barren area will be blasted with 24-hour flood lighting, staked with sensors, and paved with a high-speed patrol road. For each mile of wall, an estimated 20 acres of habitat will be bulldozed for the enforcement zone alone.
In the Arizona desert, wall construction will suck up tens of millions of gallons of precious groundwater, diminishing flow to springs and seeps critical to the survival of birds and other wildlife.
Birds also collide with the wall itself, as well as the surveillance towers and light structures built along the border.
Simply put, Trump’s wall is a disaster for wildlife. The stunning birds that live across the borderlands demand and deserve our protection.
Here’s a look at birds and wildlife habitat at stake in the four border states:
Arizona
Thirty-foot-high walls in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument will block movement of Cactus Ferruginous Pygmy-Owls, cutting off populations in Mexico from those in the United States. Biologists say the border wall will impede the path of the rare, low-flying birds and threaten their recovery in Arizona and Mexico.
Organ Pipe was designated in 1976 as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, an effort to foster conservation and study the world’s most pristine intact Sonoran Desert ecosystem.
Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge is home to endangered Sonoran pronghorns and lesser long-nosed bats, as well as more than 200 species of birds, including roadrunners, Elf Owls, and Vermilion Flycatchers. Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta compose the Sonoran Desert Borderlands Important Bird Area.
More than 30 miles of walls under construction near Yuma will block people and wildlife from accessing the Lower Colorado River and harm habitat for the endangered Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and Yuma Ridgway’s Rail.
Texas
Border walls through the Rio Grande Valley will damage one of the world’s top birding regions, home to more than 400 species of birds and a dwindling number of endangered ocelots.
Huge swaths of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refugewill be destroyed by Trump’s wall. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes the refuge as “one of the most biodiverse regions in North America.”
In a region where 95 percent of native habitat has been lost to development, the natural corridor along the Rio Grande River is the last ribbon of green for wildlife. The wall here will slice this tiny ribbon in two.
Among the rare and beautiful birds at risk are Aplomado Falcon and Piping Plover. The area is also within historic jaguar habitat.
New Mexico
Earlier this year, the Trump administration built 20 miles of new bollard walls through the remote Chihuahuan Desert. Another 46 miles are under construction.
The new wall will sever a known migratory corridor for Mexican gray wolves, among the rarest mammals on the continent. The area west of El Paso is also home to some of the last U.S. breeding grounds for endangered Aplomado Falcon, as well as kit foxes, bighorn sheep, and ringtails.
California
Recent border-wall construction in coastal San Diego County replaced barriers near wetlands, streams, and critical habitat for numerous endangered species, including the Quino checkerspot butterfly and Coastal California Gnatcatcher. The area includes the Tijuana Slough and San Diego National Wildlife Refuges, which host rare birds including Western Snowy Plover, Ridgway’s Rail, Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, and endangered Least Bell’s Vireo.
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Laiken Jordahl works at the Center for Biological Diversity, focused on protecting wildlife, ecosystems and communities throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The Arizona-based Center filed lawsuits challenging border wall waivers in Texas, New Mexico, and California.
Featured image: A border wall in New Mexico with a wide cleared roadway alongside it. Photo by Russ McSpadden (Creative Commons)
September 16th, 2019 by Indigenous Environmental Network
The Gwich’in nation vowed to protect sacred lands today after the Bureau of Land Management released a Final Environmental Impact Statement promoting oil & gas exploitation in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge located in northeastern Alaska, It is the largest national wildlife refuge in the US.
The document is the result of a hasty, flawed, inadequate, and secretive review process that disregarded concerns about sacred land, human rights, traditional knowledge, and the impacts of climate change.
“There is nothing final about this EIS process except that it demonstrates that this administration and the Alaska delegation will disregard our way of life, our food, and our relationship with the land, the caribou, and future generations to pander to industry greed,” said Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. “This document disrespects the Gwich’in Nation and all people in the Arctic and world who suffer the impacts of climate change and nonstop exploitation, while formally scratching the backs of those who seek to desecrate land and dishonor human rights to fill their pockets.”
BLM will need to wait at least 30 days to release a final Record of Decision, at which point it may attempt to hold a lease sale this year.
The Trump administration’s unlawful plan promotes the most aggressive violation of the entire coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. The effort began when legislators furtively hid a drill bill into the 2017 Tax Bill, despite the majority of Americans wanting to protect the Arctic Refuge.
The process has lacked legitimacy ever since, with rushed public comment periods, unreliable economic assumptions, the omission of science, the withholding of public information, and a nonstop barrage of public officials with industry lobby ties that run deep.
“In no case may a people be deprived of their own means of subsistence.” International Covenants on Human Rights.
Throughout the environmental review process, the agency has sidelined the testimony and traditional knowledge of the Gwich’in of Alaska and Canada, who have shown that oil and gas drilling on the coastal plain would disrupt the calving and nursery grounds for the caribou herd.
“This shameful process has been brutal for us and our communities,” said Demientieff, “but we have the strength of our ancestors behind us, and the knowledge and power of elders who have guided us in protecting the Porcupine caribou herd and the sacred coastal plain. The Gwich’in are protectors, and we will not give up.”
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Syrian families held captive by Trump Regime Forces and their ISIS affiliates of Maghaweer Thawra terrorists at al-Rukban Concentration Camp went out of their tents in the high heat of the desert to protest for food the day before yesterday, 11th of September, they were faced with live bullets by the US occupation forces.
Russian Coordination Center called on the US occupation forces in Rukban Concentration Camp to exert pressure on US-sponsored Maghaweer Thawra terrorists to stop their terrorist acts against the displaced Syrians held in the camp, these terrorist acts have exacerbated the already dire humanitarian situation of the families there.
A statement by the head of the Russian Coordination Center Major General Alexei Bakin stated: ‘We urge the US command in Al-Tanf area to exert pressure on the terrorist groups under its influence to secure the safety of the refugees at Rukban, and to distribute evenly the humanitarian aid, and to arrange for the swift evacuation of the displaced who are still in the camp.’
SARC Humanitarian aid delivery
Rukban Concentration Camp – Catastrophic Conditions for Displaced Syrian Families under US Occupation
Rukban Concentration Camp for Syrian Displaced Refugees
Suffering of Displaced Syrians in the Rukban Concentration Camp
The Russian military official pointed out that ‘the Syrian state in cooperation with Russia and the United Nations continue to make every effort to resolve the humanitarian crisis in the camp Rukban, which is witnessing a situation is greatly complicated by the practices of terrorist groups supported by the US occupation forces.’
Major General Bakin added: ‘according to information received from the residents of Rukban camp, these terrorist groups forcibly seized a large part of the humanitarian aid that was delivered to the camp in the previous days by the representatives of the United Nations and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.’
The terrorists have stolen the aid and stored it in one of its headquarters in Al-Tanf area.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) in cooperation with the United Nations on the eighth of this month, managed to deliver a humanitarian convoy to the US-IS styled Rukban Concentration Camp. The camp is located in Al-Tanf area at the farthest southeast of Syria deep in the desert. The aid consisted of 22 trucks loaded with food relief materials including 3,100 food baskets, 3,100 bags of flour of 50 kg each, high-energy of dates biscuits and peanut butter.
Syria has constantly condemned and called on the United Nations to pressure the US occupying forces in Syria to leave the country voluntarily where it is acting as a destabilizing force violating Syria’s sovereignty establishing camps within Syrian territories against international law, against the UN charter which the US should honor and protect being a permanent member of the UNSC not to be the one breaching it. The Syrian state has relentlessly and repeatedly called on the US forces to free the civilians in the concentration camps of Rukban and Al-Houl it runs in southeast and northeast of the country respectively.
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When birds migrate, timing is everything. Fly too late, and they miss the peak season for finding good food, a good mate, or a good nest site. But that’s just what may happen to migrants unlucky enough to eat pesticide-laced seeds, new research shows. Toxicologists studying white-crowned sparrows have shown that these large, grayish sparrows become anorexic after eating neonicotinoid pesticides, causing them to lose weight and delay their southward journeys. The study might apply to other birds as well—and help explain the dramatic songbird decline of recent decades, researchers say.
Neonicotinoids are the world’s most widely used class of pesticide. They protect seeds—and the plants that grow from them—from insects resistant to other pesticides. But scientists have recently found that they can decimate pollinators like honey bees and bumble bees. Such concerns led the European Union to ban three of these compounds in 2018.
Laboratory studies have shown that neonicotinoids sicken and disorient captive birds, but no data existed on how they affect wild birds, who often swoop into fields to nosh on pesticide-laced seeds. Wondering whether pesticide exposure might explain a massive recent decline in farmland bird species, Margaret Eng, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and her colleagues got to work.
The researchers caught dozens of white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) in southern Ontario province in Canada as the birds migrated from the Arctic to the southern United States. They kept the birds in cages with food and water for 6 hours. About a dozen received low doses of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid—equivalent to what they might ingest had they eaten several seeds from a recently planted field. Another dozen got a lower dose of the pesticide, and control birds received the same handling but no pesticide. After 6 hours, Eng put a tiny radio transmitter on each bird’s back and released it into a 100,000-square-kilometer site in Ontario, where 93 regularly spaced radio towers track tagged animals.
Within hours, birds with the highest pesticide dose lost an average of 6% of their body weight and about 17% of their fat stores, which are key to fueling long flights, Eng and colleagues report today in Science. Over the course of those 6 hours, the birds given pesticides stopped eating, taking in about one-third the food that untreated birds ate, they note.
Nor did the birds recover quickly when released. Half of the high-dose birds stuck around Ontario an extra 3.5 days or longer. “It’s just a few days, but we know that just a few days can have significant consequences for survival and reproduction,” Eng explains. She thinks the birds needed that extra time to get the pesticide out of their systems, start to eat again, and regain their lost fat.
The paper provides “a compelling set of observations” that shows how even low doses of neonicotinoids can affect bird survival and reproduction, says Mark Jankowski, a toxicologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul who was not involved with the work. These effects could help explain declines in sparrow populations—and may apply to other birds, says Caspar Hallmann, an ecologist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. But more work would be needed to prove that, Jankowski adds.
Few researchers think the United States or Canada will have the political will to ban neonicotinoids despite the harms, because they are so protective for plants. But there are workarounds, says Nicole Michel, a population biologist with the National Audubon Society’s Conservation Science Division in Portland, Oregon. For example, rather than treat all seeds before they are planted, farmers could save money and reduce birds’ exposure by applying the pesticide to plants only after an insect outbreak occurs. Jankowski says researchers could also explore other methods to reduce birds’ exposure, including coming up with better ways to bury seeds—and remove those that spill—during planting.
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Elizabeth Pennisi is a senior correspondent covering many aspects of biology for Science.
Featured image: White-crowned sparrows stop eating after they ingest small amounts of neonicotinoid pesticides. (MARGARET ENG)
In November 2018, Detroit-based General Motors dealt a staggering blow to 2,700 Canadian workers when it announced plans leading to the closure of a key automotive assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario. In its heyday decades earlier, GM Oshawa had been the largest auto complex in North America and had employed twenty-three thousand workers. But those numbers had been steadily reduced over the years, and now it was to be shut down – along with several GM plants in the United States – as part of the ongoing move by the automaker to relocate ever more of its production to low-wage Mexico.
Unifor, the union representing Canadian auto workers, protested vehemently and focused on trying to negotiate a less draconian deal with GM in order to save at least some of the jobs. Meanwhile, the Trudeau government in Ottawa and the Ford government in Toronto signalled their willingness to accept the closure of the plant without a fight.
One veteran of the auto industry calling for a more robust response from government has been Sam Gindin, who served from 1974 to 2000 as research director of the Canadian Auto Workers (Unifor’s predecessor). Now an adjunct professor at York University, Gindin argues that giving up on Oshawa amounts to a “disheartening failure of [the] imagination.” Instead, he suggests serious consideration be given to expropriating the GM Oshawa plant and turning it into a publicly owned facility that would produce some of the vast array of products that will be needed in the transition to green energy: wind turbines, solar panels, energy-saving lighting, motors, appliances, and electric vehicles.
Transitioning to Green Energy
A fleet of electric utility vehicles seems the most obvious alternative for the Oshawa assembly plant, he notes.
“Public vehicles will inevitably have to be electrified or run on renewable energy resources, and this means a growing market for electric post office vans for mail and package delivery (as suggested by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers), hydro vehicles doing maintenance and repair work, mini-buses to supplement public transit … electrified vehicles in agriculture, mining and construction.”
Gindin points out that much of the needed equipment and skills for such an ambitious “green production” project already exist in the Oshawa complex; additional high-tech expertise could be pulled in from the Waterloo computer corridor, as well as Canada’s experienced engineering, aerospace, and construction firms.
Of course, Gindin’s idea for producing public utility vehicles would require co-operation from the federal and provincial governments, and it is hard to imagine such co-operation from our current political leaders. And business leaders would no doubt dismiss the notion that the public sector could handle something as complicated as vehicle manufacturing.
In fact, as we’ve seen, Canadian public enterprise has an impressive history and has made its mark in fields that are at least as complicated as vehicle manufacturing. The creation of a public hydroelectric power system in Ontario – and later in other provinces – was a stunning achievement that served as a model for US president Franklin D. Roosevelt when he created highly successful public power systems, including the New York Power Authority, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Bonneville Power Administration. There was also Connaught Labs, the publicly owned Canadian drug company, which made remarkable contributions to the development of breakthrough vaccines and treatments for a wide range of deadly diseases. And the publicly owned CNR exhibited innovative business skills in creating a viable national rail network out of five bankrupt railway lines and in establishing, during the pioneering days of radio, a cross-country string of radio stations, which became the basis of the nationwide CBC broadcasting network.
And, as we’ve seen, some of Canada’s most impressive public enterprises were created during the Second World War, when twenty-eight Crown corporations contributed enormously to Canada’s war effort, manufacturing airplanes, weapons, and communications equipment. Crown corporation Victory Aircraft provided the foundation for the postwar Canadian subsidiary that developed the Avro Arrow, a state-of-the-art military fighter plane (discontinued by the Diefenbaker government for political, not technological, reasons). And Crown corporation Research Enterprises, teaming up during the war with Ottawa’s National Research Council, produced highly innovative optical and communications equipment, including radar devices, binoculars, and radio sets – equipment with countless applications that could have been successfully developed for the postwar market if our political leaders hadn’t succumbed to the notion that government shouldn’t be involved in producing such things.
The rationale that the wartime emergency made government ownership acceptable could be resurrected today – with the substitution of the climate emergency. The possibility of producing electric utility vehicles at a nationalized GM Canada plant, or at another location for that matter, would open up truly exciting possibilities if we can get beyond our kneejerk rejection of government entering the marketplace.
As Toronto Star business columnist David Olive observed, Canadians know a lot about building cars; we’ve been manufacturing them in southern Ontario for more than a hundred years. It started in Oshawa in the 1890s when Sam McLaughlin, along with his father and brother, established McLaughlin Carriage Works, which produced horsedrawn sleighs and carriages. By 1908, the McLaughlins were producing car bodies for Buick Motor Company in Flint, Michigan. In 1918, their company was purchased by General Motors and incorporated as General Motors of Canada, with Sam McLaughlin serving as president of GM Canada and vice-president of the US parent company.
GM, along with Ford and Chrysler, built a substantial auto industry in Ontario, particularly after Canada and the United States signed the 1965 Auto Pact, which provided automakers access to the Canadian market on the condition that they locate a specified amount of their production here. Effectively, the pact required that, for every vehicle sold in Canada, one had to be produced here. This “domestic content requirement” worked extremely well for Canada, leading to the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs in Canadian auto production and spinoff industries.
Free Trade
In 1988, Brian Mulroney signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (later adding Mexico in NAFTA), which eliminated most of the force of these domestic content requirements. The Auto Pact continued to formally exist until 2001 (when it was overruled by the World Trade Organization). But as soon as the ink was dry on NAFTA, the auto companies began planning their migration to Mexico. In 2019, GM is expected to produce one million vehicles in Mexico, while GM’s Canadian production, with the closing of the Oshawa plant, is expected to fall to just two hundred thousand vehicles – about half of what it was producing here a decade ago.
Yet, even as GM has drastically cut its Canadian operations, Canadian taxpayers have contributed generously to keeping the company alive. When the 2008 financial crisis pushed the US automaker into bankruptcy, the Canadian and Ontario governments provided financial assistance worth more than ten billion dollars (including a 10 percent ownership stake in the company) as part of the joint US-Canada financial rescue of GM.
Jim Stanford, former economist for Unifor, argues that the ownership stake gave Ottawa some real clout in dealing with GM. He points out that Ottawa could have held on to that stake and used it as leverage to pressure the company in the future to maintain production and jobs in Canada. This has worked elsewhere. France’s 15 percent interest in Renault and a German public ownership stake in Volkswagen have helped ensure that Renault and Volkswagen maintain high employment levels in France and Germany, Stanford says.
But the Harper government, with its strong ideological resistance to public ownership, made clear that it intended to be a purely passive investor in GM and that it would sell its stake as soon as possible. By 2015, the Harper government had sold off the last of Canada’s shares, over the strenuous objections of Unifor.
This was a tremendous missed opportunity. Stanford recalls how much clout Canada had had when the rescue package was negotiated. He was in meetings where “the CEO of GM was basically on his knees begging for help from an assistant deputy minister of industry in Ottawa. That’s not what normally happens.” As part of the rescue package, Canada insisted that GM agree to maintain its Canadian production at the existing level of 16 percent of the company’s overall production. That production requirement – reminiscent of the Auto Pact – was good, Stanford says, except that the Canadian negotiators allowed it to expire by 2017.
So, in 2018, after the expiry of the production requirement and with no remaining Canadian government ownership stake in the company, GM felt free to shut down its major Canadian plant in Oshawa and move those jobs to Mexico, which is exactly what it did. Given the Harper government’s failure to take advantage of the clout we had with GM, we have been left with a dwindling, uncertain presence in a once-booming Canadian industry.
It’s striking to think that we were veterans of the auto manufacturing industry by the 1960s, when Honda was just beginning its transition in Japan from making motorcycles to making cars. While Honda has gone on to produce some of the world’s most popular cars, Canada is facing the end of auto making in Oshawa, amid fears about which of our remaining auto plants will be closed next.
Is it feasible to save the once-vibrant Oshawa complex and transform it into a publicly owned plant producing environmentally essential products, as part of a Green New Deal? Gindin notes that, during the Second World War, GM facilities were converted to produce military vehicles. And he suggests that the Oshawa plant be expropriated today without compensation, since Canadian taxpayers have already provided generous subsidies to GM. While he acknowledges that his plan is a long shot, he adds, “It seems criminal not to at least try.”
Bold, Out-of-the-Box Thinking
What is needed is some bold, out-of-the-box thinking – a willingness to consider innovation that is not just Wall-Street-designed, self-enriching financial innovation, but untapped made-in-Canada innovation aimed at building something the world needs. Given the fact that Canada’s historic auto-making centre is about to be shut down, we should at least give serious consideration to the possibility of creating a publicly owned company that could potentially start a transformative industry here. If that idea is ultimately rejected, the rejection should be based on something more than the notion that such a project is too ambitious for public enterprise and is best left to the private sector.
In truth, the very ambitiousness of the project seems to call out for public enterprise. For most of our history we’ve been mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and operators of branch plants. When we’ve risen above that, it’s usually been because we’ve created public enterprises that served a broader public purpose than what private interests were offering. We became the country we are today in part because, at key moments in our past, some visionary figures had bold, ambitious ideas of what was possible and weren’t deterred by the admonitions of the business elite.
Would Adam Beck have backed off from creating a public power system for Ontario, thinking that he couldn’t possibly match the skill set of those in business? Would Henry Thornton have decided not to transform bankrupt railway lines into the profitable, publicly owned Canadian National Railways on the grounds that railways belong exclusively in the hands of private, profiteering monopolists? Would Dr. John G. FitzGerald have decided not to take great personal risks experimenting in a makeshift lab in a horse barn, considering it better to leave the production of affordable, lifesaving medical treatments to the business world?
There may be a good reason not to turn the Oshawa plant into a green production facility, but let’s not succumb to the ill-informed notion that Canadians aren’t up to the task or that we don’t know how to do public enterprise in this country.
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This article is an excerpt from Linda’s latest book The Sport and Prey of Capitalists.
Over the past year, largely due to changes in how information is distributed online, our finances have been hit hard. We currently run a monthly deficit: we cannot cover our monthly costs. In what effectively amounts to online censorship directed against the Independent media, Global Research has been “penalized” for wanting to “Tell the Truth”.
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Greetings delegates and organizers. My name is Mark Taliano. I am a writer and Research Associate at the Center For Research on Globalization (Global Research).
My book, Voices from Syria, and my website marktaliano.net represent my efforts to take a stand for civilization and the rule of international law against the barbarity that NATO and its allies have been imposing on Syria and its peoples.
I have not stood idly by and I will not stand idly by as Western governments and their agencies indoctrinate the Western collective mindset with criminal war propaganda.
Our resistance demands cohesiveness, a shared, truthful vocabulary that distinguishes us from the lies of the broad-based media. Our words are words of truth and justice, and clarity. Our words are not isolated soundbites, fabricated to deceive. Our words are embedded in historical truths, historical contexts.
The globalizing war that the West is waging is not a War on Terror. It is a War Of Terror. The West and its agencies support the terrorists in Syria. This is the truth.
The pre-planned NATO war of aggression against Syria is not a “civil war”. The term “civil war” connotes a false equivalency between both sides, an internal conflict. It is a war lie.
The Western -supported terrorists are chameleons with many names, and they include al Qaeda and ISIS. The Syrian people overwhelmingly reject them. The West supports ISIS and all the terrorists. It is not going after ISIS. The “Caliphate Project” is a CIA Project.
The elected Syrian government is legitimate. It is not a regime. The terrorists are the brutal dictators. Our governments are the brutal dictators. President Assad and the Syrian government are not.
Similarly, the notion that the war is a “revolution” is a lie. Western-supported terrorists displaced peaceful demonstrations, murdered government security personnel and others. It was an “intelligence” operation. Weapons and terrorists came from Libya and beyond.
It was never an “intervention”. Intervention is a sanitized word that camouflages the anti-humanitarian reality which is that Empire and its proxies mass murder children, women, and men. Empire’s sectarian terrorists mass murder Syrians, Empire’s bombs mass murder Syrians, and Empire’s economic warfare mass murders Syrians. The intent is there. Have we forgotten Madeline Albright and the mass murdering economic warfare imposed on Iraq? “We think the price is worth it,” she said.
The so-called ”sanctions” that the West is imposing on Syria are criminal economic warfare. This warfare murders children, women and men. Again, the intent is there.
Even the term “proxy war” is misleading. There is no equivalency between the warring sides. Syria and its allies are fighting a just war, self-defense, all within the framework of international law. The other side consists of al Qaeda, ISIS, anti-democratic SDF, criminal occupiers. NATO and its allies command and control them all. There is no equivalency.
“Moderate” terrorists never existed. Think about that one. It’s true.
When we use the same truthful nomenclature/word choice, just as mainstream media uses the same lying nomenclature, the people’s resistance becomes a more powerful humanitarian intervention. It is a reality-based “intervention” that supports rather than destroys humanity.
I join with my colleagues here in a unified resistance against imperialism in all its forms, against colonialism, and against Zionism.
Thank you.
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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net.
Featured image is from the author
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
I think we already know the answer. We need to go further and try and understand what this partially veiled, but completely serious, US and UK destruction of a modern journalist means for all of us.
Assange is an advocate for whistleblowers, a promoter of information access and information security for everyone, not just governments and major government-connected corporations. He, with the help of information security specialists, codewriters, truthtellers and witnesses around the world, received and published material that embarrassed and exposed a number of powerful organizations, including the US government and its many cronies and beneficiaries.
Why is he being tortured to death? Why is he still being subjected to new and experimental variants of BZ fresh from Porton Down, and deprived, not only of friends, relatives, and unsupervised access to his legal team, but to food and basic care?
The short answer is that he is being held on behalf of the United States and he is being chemically and physically interrogated in Belmarsh (the British Gitmo) in order to reveal his private cryptographic keys, and the names and cryptographic information relating to others within the Wikileaks information network. The arrest of Ola Bini in April with new charges filed last month, and the re-arrest and incarceration of Chelsea Manning, speak to part of the effort to find the anonymous leakers of information from the NSA vaults, specifically their hacking tools cache leaked in 2016. This is generally indicated but not completely put forth in the US indictment.
It is fascinating that the plea deals of two recent NSA “spies” – government employees who took home and “hoarded” vast quantities of NSA material were remarkably mild, when compared to what Julian Assange is going through, and how Bini and Manning have been and are being treated.
The best practice in the US, in case you are interested in this line of work, is to cop a plea. Otherwise, best you be a flag officer who swore to uphold the Constitution (like Petraeus or Clapper) or an elite politician like Hillary. Barring that, be sure you are tried publicly on weak charges, and perhaps you will avoid chemical interrogation, physical and mental torture, and indefinite detention by the US government and its lackeys. Otherwise, like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, one needs the protection of a powerful non-US government to fend off US death squads. Edward has that from Russia, and Julian had that from Ecuador, but it came with a price – and no price is too high for the US taxpayer when it comes to the security of the USG.
In the case of Assange, while no damage was done to the world or to human life, the US Government experienced significant embarrassment through the release of USG hacking tools by the Shadow Brokers hacking group. Those tiered releases indicate what the NSA and other parts of the US Government (and their Five Eyes allies) were and are capable of doing, and are doing, to all of us. The 2016 retroactive legalization of UK surveillance of its citizens indicates the scope and the concern of existing governments that are engaged in self-preservation in difficult times. The updated USA Freedom Act of the same time frame reveals much the same concerns by the US state.
The Shadow Brokers revelations also suggest that another Snowden caliber leak may exist within the NSA. Thanks to Assange, Snowden and others, the NSA feels almost as technologically transparent and vulnerable as the average American. This must not stand!
Because this must not stand, Assange and those who may have worked with him will be interrogated with the full capability of the state (physical, mental and chemical torture). They will not be tried, represented or defended in a public court, and as noted here for Assange, they will never be released regardless of what is discovered through various interrogations.
Whether or not a mole, or moles, remain inside the vast US Intelligence conglomerate is, at this point, irrelevant. One or more must and will be found, and as part of that search, many people – to be found among traditional or non-traditional 21st century journalists, aggregators, bloggers, communicators, tweeters or researchers and the vast population of government employees and contractors – must be destroyed.
As with the convoluted intelligence bureaucracies of East Germany, the Soviet Union, Iran under the Shah, and a long list throughout human history, once the disease of government secrecy and hidden crime metastasizes, there is no resolution but death, destruction and eventual collapse of the system, and a slow, painful and inconsistent recovery of human society.
On the other hand, there will be no slow painful recovery for Julian Assange. He has been reduced to the mental capacity of a drug-addled rubberhead, and some of these effects will be found to be permanent. Physically he is reported to be underweight (under 100 pounds) with food and water being used as bargaining chips in his continued interrogation. Ironically, even the prisoners at Gitmo, as part of the tender care by the USG, were force-fed when they tried to starve themselves to death. Julian’s government caretakers are using food and water to break him completely.
Is there any good news? NPR’s Terri Gross presented an interesting historical perspective on CIA drug experimentation just last week. Well worth a listen, as all change is but evolution. Interestingly, as with the end of Sidney Gottlieb’s employment, if the sponsor of evil within a government is removed, sometimes their entire cadre is cleared out. More often than not, illustrating Robert Higgs’ “ratcheting effect”, it is simply relocated elsewhere in the government, or even expanded among several agencies.
Modern day government power is fundamentally related to its “believability.” This believability, this trustworthiness, is teetering everywhere – in part to the valiant work of honest people everywhere – and make no mistake, we are indeed everywhere. The hopeless and evil persecution of Julian Assange signals just such a believability crisis. When a building, or an institution, begins to crumble, there are many urgent jobs to do to save lives and ensure a happier future. Find one of them and start doing it.
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Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, farmer and aspiring anarcho-capitalist. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012.
At the start of the 2000s, Suzuki Muneo was one of the most prominent politicians in Japan. Elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in 1983, Suzuki eventually served eight terms. He became a powerful figure in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and was appointed head of the Hokkaidō and Okinawa Development agencies in 1997. He also became deputy chief cabinet secretary in the government of Obuchi Keizō in 1998. However, while these are senior positions, Suzuki’s real power was unofficial. Exercising extraordinary influence over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) that often exceeded that of the foreign minister, Suzuki established himself as a key figure in Japanese foreign policy, especially with regard to Russia.
Above all, in advance of the Irkutsk summit between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mori Yoshirō in March 2001, Suzuki, in close cooperation with certain Japanese diplomats, pioneered what they regarded as a more realistic means of resolving the longstanding dispute over the Russian-held Southern Kuril Islands, which are claimed by Japan as the Northern Territories. Suzuki’s strategy entailed discontinuing Japan’s hitherto insistence on Russia’s simultaneous recognition of Japanese sovereignty over all four of the disputed islands.1 Instead, Suzuki promoted a phased approach that would see the transfer of the two smaller islands of Shikotan and Habomai, followed by continued negotiations over the status of the larger islands of Iturup and Kunashir, which are known as Etorofu and Kunashiri in Japanese. This initiative proved highly controversial since critics, including within MOFA, feared that it effectively meant abandoning Japan’s claim to all four islands. Ultimately, after bitter infighting within Japan’s foreign-policy elite, the policy was rejected in favour of a more conventional four-island approach after Koizumi Jun’ichirō replaced Mori as prime minister in April 2001. Suzuki was therefore left to lament what he saw as a missed opportunity, claiming that “The return of the Northern Territories was before our eyes.” (2012: 197).
Map of the disputed islands (CartoGIS, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University)
Having reached the peak of his power, Suzuki’s fall was precipitous. In February 2002, in a meeting of the Budget Committee of the lower house, Sasaki Kenshō of the Japanese Communist Party accused Suzuki of misusing government funds that had been allocated for the Northern Territories. This marked the start of an escalating series of corruption allegations, which led to Suzuki’s resignation from the LDP in March and his arrest in June. In 2004, after spending 437 days in pretrial detention, Suzuki was found guilty by the Tokyo District Court on two counts of accepting bribes, one count of perjury during testimony before the Budget Committee, and one count of violating the Political Funds Control Law for concealing donations (Carlson and Reed 2018: 71-2). After his appeal was rejected and his conviction upheld by the Supreme Court in 2010, Suzuki was sent to prison for a period of two years, though he was released on parole after 12 months. He was also barred from political office until 2017. Adding to his troubles, Suzuki was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, resulting in the removal of two thirds of his stomach. He was also treated for cancer of the oesophagus in 2010.
Such developments would be expected to terminate any political career, yet Suzuki has proved remarkably resilient and has succeeded in restoring much of his former influence. Most striking is that, since December 2015, Suzuki has met regularly with Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, becoming one of his leading advisors on Japan’s Russia policy (Suzuki 2018: 28-9). In particular, Abe regularly consults with Suzuki ahead of meetings with President Putin. For instance, in advance of Abe’s talks with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Ōsaka on 29 June 2019, Suzuki met Abe twice, on 5 June and 26 June. Not coincidentally, Abe’s Russia policy has come to bear many of the hallmarks of the approach pioneered by Suzuki during the early 2000s. This includes moving away from the demand that Russia recognise Japan’s right to sovereignty over all four of the disputed islands, and the placement of emphasis instead on conducting joint economic projects on the contested territory. In other words, after a gap of almost 20 years, Suzuki’s policy from 2001, which came to be known as the “two-plus-alpha” formula, is back as the focal point of Japan’s Russia policy.
Furthermore, Suzuki presents himself as an unofficial envoy to Russia. He visited Moscow in April 2019, where he met chairman of the Federation Council’s Committee on International Affairs Konstantin Kosachev. During the visit, Suzuki announced (accurately) that the countries’ “2+2” meeting between the defence and foreign ministers would take place before the end of May, something that the foreign ministries had yet to confirm (Nikkei 2019). Additionally, there are signs that Suzuki is again active behind the scenes. For example, when Diet member Maruyama Hodaka disgraced himself during a visa-free visit to the disputed island of Kunashir in May 2019 by drunkenly raising the prospect of Japan seizing the disputed islands by force, the Russian ambassador Mikhail Galuzin phoned Suzuki to ask how Maruyama’s behaviour should be interpreted (Satō 2019).2 In Suzuki’s own words, “My role is to create an atmosphere in which the prime minister can confidently conduct negotiations. Supporting from behind is fine for me.” (Tanewata 2019).
After his initial conviction, Suzuki formed Shintō Daichi and was re-elected to the lower house as the party’s sole representative in the elections of September 2005. However, despite remaining head of his own party, Suzuki has maintained ties with the LDP. This bond was strengthened when Suzuki’s daughter, Takako, joined the LDP in September 2017 and was elected to the lower house in the October election.3 Despite her brief tenure in the party and her relative youth (she was born in 1986), Suzuki Takako was appointed parliamentary vice minister of defence in October 2018. There is little doubt that this promotion owed much to her father’s close ties with Prime Minister Abe. Moreover, despite supposedly representing different parties, Suzuki Muneo and Takako continued to hold joint events that were attended by LDP grandees. For example, on 1 June 2019 they held a joint fundraising event in Sapporo that was attended by Minister for Economic Revitalisation Motegi Toshimitsu, as well as chair of the LDP’s General Council Katō Katsunobu (Hokkaidō Shinbun 2019b). This is further evidence of Suzuki’s closeness to governing circles.
Not everything, however, has been going in Suzuki’s favour. On 20 March 2019, the Tokyo District Court dismissed his application for a retrial to overturn his criminal conviction and thereby clear his name (Sankei Shinbun 2019a). Additionally, his cancer of the oesophagus returned and he underwent surgery on 27 May. Undeterred by these setbacks, Suzuki ran in the upper-house elections on 21 July as a candidate for Nippon Ishin no Kai, a conservative party based in Ōsaka that is ideologically close to the LDP. Participating in the proportional section of the vote, Suzuki was successfully elected, thereby completing his remarkable journey from prison cell to the floor of the House of Councillors.
It is not unusual for Japanese politicians to bounce back from corruption scandals, yet the scale of Suzuki Muneo’s revival is exceptional. Unlike most other politicians who face allegations of illegal activity, Suzuki was actually sent to prison and banned from public office for five years. Furthermore, at the time of his prosecution, he was widely vilified by the Japanese media in what was described as “Suzuki-bashing” (Togo 2011: 139). Yet, despite this destruction of his public image in the early 2000s, Suzuki has managed, not only to return to national politics, but to regain significant leverage over government policy. He also enjoys a degree of access to the prime minister that is extraordinary for a convicted criminal who is neither a member of the ruling party nor (until July 2019) a member of parliament.
The purpose of this article is to analyse how it has been possible for Suzuki Muneo to first establish, and then reestablish, such political influence. It will also examine his impact on Japan-Russia relations. In so doing, the aim is to gain new insight into this remarkable politician, but also to understand what Suzuki’s case says about Japanese politics more broadly.
The emergence of Suzuki Muneo
Japanese politics has a strong hereditary streak and many politicians owe their initial success to famous political forebears. However, this is not the case with Suzuki Muneo. Suzuki was born in January 1948 in Ashoro, eastern Hokkaidō. As he recounts in one of his many books, his family was not especially poor but nor were they ever really comfortable. Both parents worked long hours on their farm and, as a child, Suzuki himself often had to help out with the livestock and in the fields (Suzuki 2012: 6-7). After completing high school, Suzuki was expected to take an administrative job in a coal mine and had to persuade his parents to support his dream of attending university instead. He was eventually accepted at Takushoku University (a private institution in Tokyo) and Suzuki tells the story of how his father had to sell the family’s best horse to afford the tuition (Suzuki 2012: 106). Tragically, one year later, when Suzuki was 19 years old, his father died of a brain haemorrhage. This deepened the family’s woes and Suzuki was only able to continue his studies thanks to the support of his mother and older brother.
This humble, rural upbringing forms a key part of Suzuki’s political identity.4 He claims that he was interested in politics from an early age and wrote in a junior high-school essay that it was his dream to become a politician. His political beliefs were further developed during a visit to Tokyo in the second year of high school. This school trip took place in 1964, just a month before the start of the Tokyo Olympics. Suzuki explains that he was impressed by the scale of the city, as well as by the number of tall buildings and the quality of the infrastructure. Most of all, he was shocked by the gap in living standards between the capital city and the Hokkaidō countryside. He says that this inspired him to enter politics so that he could work to bridge this divide (Suzuki 2012: 7).
Suzuki therefore presents himself as a man of the people, working to create a fairer society that serves the interests of ordinary citizens, especially those in rural areas. He is also a vocal opponent of neoliberalism, which he claims became influential in Japan as a result of the administration of Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō (2001-06). Suzuki fears that, due to the pursuit of privatisation and the freeing of market forces, Japan’s national unity and traditional values have been eroded and it has become a society in which “the weak are meat and the strong do eat” (Suzuki 2012: 9-10). Added to this, he is concerned about the lack of social mobility and warns that, if you are born into a poor family, you cannot get the education you need in order to get a good job (Suzuki 2012: 146). To remedy this, Suzuki argues for more government funding for regional revitalisation, including to maintain and develop road and rail networks in Hokkaidō. He also argues for a return to an “old Japan” in which people did more to support their community instead of only being concerned with themselves. To achieve this, he says it is essential for Japanese politicians to set a good moral example (Suzuki 2012: 135).
Lacking a privileged start in life, Suzuki had to work hard to establish himself in national politics. Indeed, Suzuki boasts of the “Suzuki Muneo style”, which is his strategy of working twice as hard as anyone else and emphasising face-to-face engagement with the voters (Suzuki 2012: 154). This approach was on display during the campaign for the July 2019 upper-house election. During just the first three days, Suzuki visited the most easterly, westerly, and northerly points of Japan, and by the end of the campaign he had travelled 21,171 km (Suzuki 2019d). Suzuki is also active on the internet, writing a personal blog since 2013 and not even missing a day when admitted to hospital for cancer treatment in May 2019. This incessant activity is consistent with Suzuki’s personality, which Tōgō Kazuhiko, a former Japanese diplomat who was closely associated with Suzuki at the start of the 2000s, describes as “ne-aka”, meaning innately cheerful or, literally, with a bright root.5
Suzuki’s first job in politics was as secretary to Nakagawa Ichirō, a politician who he continues to lionise as the “Kennedy of eastern Hokkaidō” (Suzuki 2012: 107). Nakagawa was a senior figure in the LDP and served as minister of agriculture from 1977 to 1978. He also stood for election for the presidency of the LDP in 1982 and would have become prime minister had he not lost to Nakasone Yasuhiro. Suzuki describes Nakagawa as a father figure to whom he devoted 13 years of his life (Suzuki 2012: 108). It was when working for Nakagawa that Suzuki demonstrated his capacity for extraordinary hard work, often returning home at one or two o’clock at night and going to collect Nakagawa again at six o’clock in the morning (Katō 2002: 12). It was also at this time that Suzuki began to show an interest in relations with Russia (or the Soviet Union, as it then was). As a politician from Hokkaidō, Nakagawa naturally wished to improve relations with Japan’s northern neighbour. What is more, Nakagawa’s ministerial portfolio included fisheries, which was a prominent area of bilateral cooperation following the signing of a Soviet-Japan fisheries agreement in 1977. Suzuki therefore came to share Nakagawa’s interest in this relationship and, ultimately, the aim of strengthening ties with Russia became his defining “personal passion”.6
Image on the right: Nakagawa Ichirō and Suzuki Muneo
Even at this early stage in his political career, Suzuki was a divisive figure. In particular, Nakagawa’s wife Sadako is said to have been strongly against Suzuki’s appointment as secretary, believing that there was something untrustworthy in Suzuki’s constant restlessness (Katō 2002: 11). Critics also claim that, during his time in Nakagawa’s office, Suzuki became increasingly imperious. Hiranuma Takeo, who was also a secretary to Nakagawa, is quoted as saying that, if he allowed the phone to ring even once before answering, Suzuki would hit him in the head (Katō 2002: 13). It is also reported that Suzuki even felt bold enough to harangue members of parliament visiting Nakagawa’s office (Katō 2002: 13). Ultimately, Suzuki’s influence was such that, even if Nakagawa authorised something, it would not happen until Suzuki approved it too (Katō 2002: 13).
The source of this power is said to have been Suzuki’s control over Nakagawa’s finances. Katō Akira, who has written an excoriating book about Suzuki, describes him as an extremely effective political fundraiser (Katō 2002: 14). This made Suzuki valuable to Nakagawa. Moreover, Suzuki’s hold on the purse strings enabled him to exercise leverage over his political boss. Drawing upon information from Uekusa Yoshiteru, who was also a secretary to Nakagawa before becoming a member of parliament, Katō alleges that Suzuki threatened to expose a scandal in Nakagawa’s campaign finances if Nakagawa did not support Suzuki’s bid to run in the general election of 1983 (Katō 2002: 16). Katō also claims that Suzuki may have been involved in the disappearance of funds that were left over from Nakagawa’s unsuccessful bid for the LDP leadership in November 1982. When Nakagawa was told by Suzuki on New Year’s Day that none of this money was left, Nakagawa is said to have become enraged and began punching Suzuki in the head (Katō 2002: 18). Just over a week later, Nakagawa was found dead in a hotel room in Sapporo, having seemingly taken his own life.
Nakagawa’s family held Suzuki responsible for driving the politician to his death. In particular, his wife, Sadako, claims that Suzuki not only ruined Nakagawa’s political career but also his private life (Katō 2002: 11). Moreover, she alleges that Nakagawa had shouted, “Suzuki, how dare you stab me like this! You’ve killed me. I’ve no choice but to die.” (quoted in Katō 2002: 18). In response, Suzuki retorts that Nakagawa was depressed after losing the LDP leadership election. He was also terrified that it was going to be revealed that he had received an illegal donation of one million yen from All Nippon Airlines. Added to this, Suzuki claims that Sadako herself added to the pressure on Nakagawa by threatening to divorce him if he did not sack Suzuki (J-Cast 2010).
After Nakagawa Ichirō’s death, Suzuki followed through with his plan to stand for election in December 1983. In so doing, he became a rival to Nakagawa Shōichi, the 30-year-old son of Nakagawa Ichirō, who had stepped into his father’s shoes. Under the system that operated until the reforms of 1994, all members of Japan’s House of Representatives were elected in multi-member constituencies by single non-transferable vote. This meant that members of the same party ran against each other in large constituencies, thereby encouraging factionalism within the dominant LDP. In the case of Suzuki and Nakagawa Shōichi, in the four elections between 1983 and 1993, they were opposing candidates in Hokkaidō’s 5th district, from which five Diet members were elected. On each occasion that the two men ran directly against each other, Nakagawa topped the polls, with Suzuki securing election as the fourth or fifth most popular candidate.
Even after the electoral reform of 1994, which created a mixture of single-member districts and a party list system with proportional representation (PR), Suzuki and Nakagawa remained rivals. This was because the LDP now needed to decide who would be its sole candidate in the new 11th district, where both men had their greatest concentration of support. Ahead of the election in 1996, the LDP leadership opted for Nakagawa. Suzuki also lost out in the 12th district, his second choice, where the LDP’s Takebe Tsutomu was judged the stronger candidate. He was eventually selected to run in the 13th district but lost heavily to the candidate from the New Frontier Party. Despite this, Suzuki was still able to return to parliament as a result of votes for the LDP within the Hokkaidō PR block (Carlson and Reed 2018: 73).
This long-term rivalry between Nakagawa Shōichi and Suzuki Muneo is another factor that makes Prime Minister Abe’s frequent meetings with Suzuki surprising. This is because Abe and Nakagawa Shōichi were very close. Nakagawa was one year older than Abe and they shared a nationalist agenda, with a common desire to promote patriotic education and a less apologetic attitude towards Japan’s wartime history. After Abe became prime minister for the first time in September 2006, he appointed Nakagawa as chair of the LDP’s Policy Research Council. Later, in September 2008, under the leadership of Asō Tarō, Nakagawa was appointed Minister of Finance, but served less than five months. In February 2009, Nakagawa, who was known for his heavy drinking, appeared drunk during a press conference at a G7 finance ministers’ meeting. He claimed that his drowsiness and slurred speech were due to a strong dose of cold medicine, but he was forced to resign within days. Nakagawa lost his seat in the general election of August 2009 and was found dead in his Tokyo apartment a few weeks later, after reportedly taking sleeping pills (Nakamoto 2009).
Suzuki’s accumulation of power
Despite his energetic campaigning and prowess as a fundraiser, Suzuki has never been especially successful electorally. As noted, under the system of multi-member districts, Suzuki consistently lagged behind Nakagawa Shōichi and was only ever the 3rd or 4th most popular LDP candidate within the Hokkaidō 5th constituency. What is more, after the electoral reform of 1994, he never succeeded in winning a single-member district, always being returned to parliament as a result of PR party votes.7 As such, Suzuki’s political power rested, not on his broad appeal with the voters, but on his steady accumulation of influence within the political system and especially over Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The leverage that Suzuki was able to exert over MOFA at the start of the 2000s was a consequence of a peculiarity in the Japanese political system. Although the foreign minister had nominal control over the ministry, in reality, many politicians holding this position owed their promotion simply to the fact that it was the turn of their LDP faction to receive a senior cabinet post. As a consequence, many Japanese foreign ministers had little international expertise and did not serve long enough to significantly shape foreign policy. Real control was exercised by senior MOFA bureaucrats, as well as by certain politicians, like Suzuki, who, no matter what their formal responsibilities, made a point of specialising in foreign affairs. These are known as the “policy tribesmen” (zoku giin) (Carlson and Reed 2018: 94-5).
The relationship that developed between Suzuki and MOFA was a reciprocal one. Specifically, Suzuki made himself valuable to senior diplomats by working within the political system to further the interests of the ministry, such as by arguing for the opening of new overseas missions and by pressing the Ministry of Finance to protect MOFA’s budget. In return, Suzuki expected to be consulted about key decisions and to play a hand in shaping foreign policy.
Suzuki’s influence was exerted covertly and only truly came to light following Prime Minister Koizumi’s appointment of Tanaka Makiko as foreign minister in April 2001. She is the daughter of Tanaka Kakuei, who served as prime minister between 1972 and 1974. Suzuki and Tanaka Makiko became major adversaries, but there are actually several similarities between Suzuki and her father. They both had relatively humble origins and rose to prominence through their mastery of backroom politics. In addition, both men closely associated themselves with the goal of directing public spending towards rural Japan. For this reason, Suzuki claims that he, rather than Tanaka Makiko, is the politician who really inherited Tanaka Kakuei’s spirit (Suzuki 2018: 118). Another thing that the two men have in common is that they were both found guilty of corruption and given prison sentences.
Tanaka Makiko’s appointment as foreign minister came at a time when MOFA was roiled by allegations of corruption. The most spectacular of several scandals was the case of Matsuo Katsutoshi, who was director of the Ministry’s Overseas Visit Support Division. At the beginning of 2001, it was revealed that, between 1993 and 1999, Matsuo had engaged in the widespread theft of funds that were intended for arranging overseas trips by the prime minister and other officials. Ultimately, Matsuo was arrested for having “used 410 million yen ($3.4 million) to purchase a yacht, condominium, golf club memberships, a string of racing horses, and to pay his mistresses and former wife” (Carlson and Reed 2018: 99). Although MOFA initially sought to portray Matsuo’s case as the crime of a single individual, Tanaka Makiko saw it as indicative of an institution that had evaded oversight for too long and had become “a hotbed of corruption” (quoted in Satō 2005: 98).
As Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tanaka immediately set out to reform the Ministry, putting her on a collision course with senior diplomats. The first sign of trouble came in May 2001 when senior MOFA officials made a series of personnel changes without consulting the minister. Determined to stamp her authority, Tanaka responded by freezing all personnel transfers (Carlson and Reed 2018: 99). Senior officials were appalled by this political interference and turned to Suzuki Muneo for assistance in countering her reform efforts. This set the stage for what Satō Masaru describes as “the Battle between Tanaka Makiko and Suzuki Muneo” (Satō 2005: 61).
Image below: Front cover of an issue of Shūkan Asahi (2002) with the title “Makiko’s battle”
Suzuki clearly shared the objective of opposing institutional changes that threatened his steadily accumulated influence over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, Suzuki and his allies were also opposed to Tanaka because of her attempts to alter the course of Japanese foreign policy. MOFA officials and Suzuki regarded themselves as international experts and did not want their carefully developed policies to be disrupted by Tanaka, whom they saw as a foreign policy neophyte.
The clearest example of this is with regard to Russia policy. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, under the administrations of Hashimoto Ryūtarō, Obuchi Keizō, and Mori Yoshirō, Suzuki and supportive MOFA officials developed a new approach to the territorial dispute with Russia. Up until this point, Japanese governments had consistently promoted what might be described as a principled approach to resolving the territorial dispute. This meant that Tokyo would continue to insist upon the immediate return of all four of the islands, or at least the demand that Moscow simultaneously recognise Japan’s right to sovereignty over all four. This position was maintained even though it was apparent that Japan’s refusal to compromise meant that there was no prospect of a breakthrough. The innovation put forward by Suzuki and his associates was to abandon the unrealistic goal of securing the return of all four of the islands in one go. Instead, they promoted a phased approach. In advance of the Irkutsk summit in March 2001, this crystallised as the proposal for a “two-plus-two” formula. This would see talks about a peace treaty and the transfer of the smaller islands of Shikotan and Habomai being conducted separately from negotiations about the future status of the larger islands of Kunashir and Iturup. Suzuki, as well as Tōgō Kazuhiko, who was then Director-General of MOFA’s European and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, and Satō Masaru, who was a leading Russia expert within MOFA, saw this compromise approach as the only means of achieving progress towards resolving the territorial dispute (Brown 2016: 117).
Believing that they were on the verge of a breakthrough, the Suzuki-led group was aghast when, shortly after taking office in April 2001, Tanaka proposed an entirely different strategy. She did this by suggesting a return to the hard-line demand for “the return of four islands as a bunch” that was pursued by her father when he met General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in October 1973 (Satō 2005: 65). Since Suzuki and his allies were convinced that Tanaka’s retrograde approach would badly damage relations between Japan and Russia, taking action to oppose the minister was regarded as a necessary step to protect Japan’s national interests (Satō 2005: 103-5). These concerns were not without foundation since, after Tanaka Kakuei’s visit to Moscow in 1973, there were no further official meetings between the Soviet and Japanese leaders until Gorbachev travelled to Tokyo in April 1991. The Suzuki faction therefore feared that bilateral relations would be returned to the state of stagnation that had characterised the late-Cold War period.
Driven by these motivations, MOFA officials, in collaboration with Suzuki, sought to undermine the foreign minister. In these efforts, they were greatly assisted by Tanaka herself, who committed a series of gaffes. The first of these occurred in early May 2001 when, at the last minute, Tanaka cancelled a meeting with visiting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Her critics leapt upon this incident as an indication of her unprofessionalism; they reported that the reason for the cancellation was because she was busy writing thank you letters to those who had sent flowers in congratulation for her ministerial appointment (Satō 2005: 97). Further leaks followed about other cancelled meetings and she was also attacked for accidentally revealing the location of where U.S. State Department officials were hiding after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 (Satō 2005: 122).
This battle between the foreign minister and her officials was largely played out in public, with Tanaka telling the media, “They are digging holes and placing landmines in front of me, apparently trying to get me out of the way so they can go back to doing things as they wish” (quoted in The Japan Times 2001). There were also bizarre incidents, such as when Tanaka returned to her office from a Diet session to find that one of her rings was missing. Reporters in a neighbouring room were able to record Tanaka accusing her administrative secretary Kozuki Toyohisa (who was appointed Japanese ambassador to Russia in 2015) of stealing the ring and ordering him to go to buy a replacement (The Japan Times 2001).
Another confrontation with bureaucrats related to the transfer of Kodera Jirō from his position as director of the Russian Division to the post of Japanese ambassador to the United Kingdom. Kodera was a supporter of the hardline stance on the territorial issue with Russia that was favoured by Tanaka. Suzuki therefore saw him as an obstacle to his preferred Russia policy and is therefore said to have used his influence to have Kodera transferred. However, as soon as Kodera arrived in London, he was immediately recalled by Tanaka and reappointed to his former position. Absurdly, Kodera spent only 3 hours in the UK before flying back to Japan. In revenge, Suzuki took the opportunity to grill Tanaka for two hours in parliament on Kodera’s recall and her broader Russia policy (Sayle 2002).
Ultimately, Prime Minister Koizumi had to step in to end this state of dysfunction within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The final straw was a conflict over invitations to the Tokyo Conference on Reconstruction Aid for Afghanistan in December 2001. Two Japanese non-governmental organisations (NGOs) — Peace Winds Japan and Platform Japan — were initially invited to the conference. However, when Suzuki learned that Ōnishi Kensuke, a representative of Peace Winds Japan, had criticised the government in a newspaper article, he allegedly instructed his allies within MOFA to exclude the NGO from the conference (Berkofsky 2002). Tanaka was furious about the barring of these NGOs, especially because, as she claimed, Vice Foreign Minister Nogami Yoshiji twice told her that MOFA had been forced to exclude the NGOs on the orders of Suzuki Muneo (Sayle 2002). Nogami denied that he had ever mentioned Suzuki’s name, and both he and Tanaka accused each other of lying. With Tanaka having lost all control of her ministry, Koizumi sacked her at the end of January 2002, while Nogami was demoted (Sayle 2002).
Suzuki’s victory proved short-lived since, less than two months later, he was forced to resign from the LDP. Nonetheless, Suzuki’s role in helping drive Tanaka from office demonstrates the extraordinary level of informal influence that he had amassed within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indeed, this was later tacitly acknowledged by MOFA. After Suzuki’s arrest in 2002 and surprise reelection to the Diet in 2005, MOFA issued staff with a formal manual on how to deal with Suzuki in order to ensure that the controversial politician did not reestablish inappropriate levels of influence over the Ministry (Shūgiin 2009).
Japan’s key man in relations with Russia
Suzuki Muneo being received by Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in April 2000 (Jiji)
Further to his privileged connections within MOFA, Suzuki’s political power was established upon his reputation as a politician who is an expert on relations with Russia and the disputed Northern Territories. It is this expertise that has sustained Suzuki’s political influence over the years, enabling his Lazarus-like return from incarceration to the inner circle of the Japanese leadership. Although Suzuki’s actual achievements with regard to Russia are meagre, the failure of all Japanese governments over the last seven decades to make any progress on this issue makes Suzuki’s alternative approach and optimistic rhetoric seem enticing. Specifically, Prime Minister Abe evidently judged that Suzuki’s assistance was indispensable if he is to succeed in his goal of finally resolving the territorial dispute with Russia and signing a peace treaty.
Principally, Suzuki presents himself as the leading political representative of former Japanese residents of the four disputed islands. Prior to their occupation by Soviet forces at the end of the Second World War, the Japanese population of the four islands was 17,291 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2018). After being forcibly expelled from the territory by the Soviet Union, the majority of these individuals settled in Hokkaidō. By March 2019, only 5,913 of these former islanders remained alive and their average age was 84.1 (Ōno 2019). Despite their dwindling numbers, the plight of these individuals remains an emotive issue within Japan.
As a native of eastern Hokkaidō, where many of the former islanders reside, it was natural for Suzuki to associate himself with their cause. Suzuki was also quick to recognise that, for many of the former residents, what mattered most was not the principle of sovereignty over the islands but the practical matter of access. Suzuki’s promotion of a compromise solution therefore appealed to many. His so-called “two-plus-alpha” formula only promises the return of Shikotan and Habomai plus some form of access rights to Iturup and Kunashir (Takewata 2019).8 Nonetheless, the opportunity to freely visit their former homeland before the end of their lives is more attractive to many than the vague possibility of the return of all four islands, which might not be achieved for decades, if ever.
Added to this, Suzuki has long been a proponent of closer political and economic ties with Russia as a means of preparing the ground for a territorial deal, as well as a way of promoting regional development in Hokkaidō. In this respect too, Prime Minister Abe is heeding his advice. Central to Abe’s “new approach” to relations with Russia, which was announced in May 2016, is an 8-point economic cooperation plan, which prioritises enhanced bilateral ties in the areas of health, urban infrastructure, exchange between small and medium-sized enterprises, energy, industrial diversification and productivity, industrialisation of the Russian Far East, cutting-edge technology, and people-to-people exchange (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2016). Again, this represents a reversal of the approach taken by previous Japanese governments, which often held back economic cooperation until hoped-for progress on the territorial issue was achieved. Encouraged by Suzuki’s advice, Abe’s policy is instead to frontload economic investment in the hope that this will generate the needed momentum to deliver a territorial breakthrough (Brown 2018a: 1-5). To date, the biggest Japanese investment in Russia under the “new approach” is the purchase of a 10% stake in Russia’s Arctic LNG-2 project, which was announced in June 2019. The stake is worth more than $2bn and, while the Japanese consortium includes Mitsui & Co, 75% of the financing is being provided by state-controlled JOGMEC.
As the self-styled representative of the former islanders and with concrete ideas for resolving the dispute, Suzuki presents himself as the one politician who can finally facilitate a deal with Russia. Ahead of the upper-house election in July 2019, he told voters: “No matter what it takes, I want to resolve the Northern Territories problem. To do this, I want to return to parliament once again. Please everyone, once again give Suzuki Muneo the opportunity to work. Suzuki Muneo will not lose. I will win!” (quoted in Takewata 2019)
Central to Suzuki’s claim to be able to deliver a breakthrough are his long-standing connections within the Russian political elite. These were developed with the assistance of Satō Masaru, who has been a key figure in Suzuki’s rise, fall, and rehabilitation. During the 1990s, when Suzuki was extending his influence over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Satō was a junior non-career diplomat specialising in Russian politics.9 The two men initially met during a trip to Moscow by Suzuki in 1990 and reportedly bonded over their shared dislike of career diplomats (Katō 2002: 38). These are the elite officials who dominate senior positions within MOFA and are usually graduates of Japan’s most prestigious universities. From this first encounter there developed an unusually close personal relationship, with Suzuki describing Satō as an “intellectual giant” (Suzuki 2019b) and Satō, in return, praising Suzuki for his “exceptional ‘grounded mind’” (Satō 2005: 49).
Image on the right: Suzuki Muneo and Satō Masaru
Over the course of the next decade, Satō became Suzuki’s “private soldier” within MOFA (Katō 2002: 41). Suzuki used his influence to have Satō appointed to the specially created role of chief analyst within the first division of MOFA’s Intelligence and Analysis Bureau. From this position, Satō worked to further Suzuki’s foreign policy agenda and to provide him with information from within the Ministry. Tanaka, in her battle with Suzuki for control over MOFA, recognised the instrumental role that Satō played in facilitating the influence of her rival. In frustration, she began describing Satō as MOFA’s “Rasputin” and sought to marginalise him by having him transferred (Satō 2005: 126-7).
Satō knows the Russian language well and developed an impressive array of contacts during his time at the Japanese embassy in Moscow. He was therefore able to assist Suzuki in developing connections with the Russian political elite. As a consequence, when Suzuki was at the peak of his political power at the turn of the century, Russian officials visiting Tokyo would meet Suzuki for informal late-night discussions at which Satō, of course, was also present. One regular contact was Viktor Khristenko, who was first deputy prime minister from May 1999 to January 2000 (Satō 2005: 129). Also, when Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov visited Tokyo in February 2002, Suzuki and Satō, along with former Prime Minister Mori, met him for talks at a sushi restaurant in Roppongi the night before his official meeting with Foreign Minister Kawaguchi Yoriko, who had just replaced Tanaka Makiko. When they learned that the press were outside, Suzuki and Satō stayed behind in the restaurant to hide their presence, while the others left. As they were finally departing, they received a phone call from Russian ambassador Aleksandr Panov, who invited Suzuki to visit Ivanov’s hotel room for a frank discussion in preparation for the next day’s formal talks (Satō 2005: 143-4). This is evidence of the behind-the-scenes role that Suzuki was performing at the time.
Suzuki no doubt believes that these covert efforts were important in facilitating the development of Japan-Russia relations. Nonetheless, his activities with regard to the disputed islands and his close contacts with Russian officials have proved a continuing source of controversy.
To begin with, in line with his aim of maximising Japan’s involvement on the disputed territory, Suzuki has long been a proponent of Japanese investment and joint projects with Russia on the islands. This was Suzuki’s key focus during the late 1990s. Moreover, since soliciting Suzuki’s help in December 2015, Abe has also become a strong advocate of joint economic projects on the islands, agreeing with Putin in September 2017 to concentrate on five priority areas: aquaculture, greenhouse agriculture, tourism, wind power, and waste management (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2017).10 However, at least during the 1990s, Suzuki’s enthusiasm for promoting Japanese investment on the disputed islands led him into trouble.
One controversial incident occurred in May 1996 when Suzuki joined a visa-free exchange visit to the island of Kunashir. Suzuki, alongside a group of former Japanese islanders, for whom these visits are primarily intended, proposed to plant a number of Japanese cherry trees that they had brought with them as a symbol of peace and friendship. The local authorities agreed but insisted that the group complete the necessary quarantine procedures before the trees could be planted. Suzuki was willing to comply but a MOFA official, who was accompanying the group, refused, saying that completing the quarantine forms would imply acknowledgement of the Russian government’s jurisdiction over the disputed territory. It was therefore not possible for the cherry trees to be planted. Although the unnamed diplomat was simply following official procedure, Suzuki was furious. As Ignacy Marek Kaminski recounts,
“Suzuki had not only accused Mr. X of undermining his regional peace efforts, but he had also physically attacked Mr. X during the group’s return trip onboard the Japanese vessel. Although the official’s facial and leg injuries required a week to heal, the Foreign Ministry suppressed the incidents caused by Suzuki” (2004: 186).
The other main source of scandal was Japan’s provision of financial assistance to the islands by means of the so-called Cooperation Committee (shien iinkai). This entity was established within MOFA in 1993 as a vehicle for providing assistance to the territories of the former Soviet Union. This sounds uncontroversial. However, since the Cooperation Committee sat outside Japan’s usual structures for providing aid, its funds came to be used in an opaque manner for a range of other purposes.
Specifically, Suzuki is alleged to have used the resources of the Cooperation Committee to fund projects on the disputed islands that generated lucrative contracts for Hokkaidō businesses that were major donors to Suzuki himself. For instance, in June 1995, Suzuki successfully lobbied Foreign Minister Kōno Yōhei to approve construction of a medical facility on Shikotan.11 According to Kaminski, “The building contract was awarded to the contractor from Suzuki’s constituency, which was a regular contributor to Suzuki’s electoral fund.” (2004: 181). Kaminski also notes that, after Suzuki was promoted to the position of deputy chief cabinet secretary in 1998, “the overt economic aid to the Russian-occupied islands jumped from about 0.5 billion yen in 1998 to over 3 billion in 1999.” (2004: 183). The implication is that Suzuki used his enhanced leverage to direct more money from the Cooperation Committee to projects on the islands that would reward his political donors.
The most memorable of these projects is the so-called “Muneo House”, an emergency evacuation facility on Kunashir, which is properly known as the “Japan-Russia Friendship House.” It is alleged that, two months before the 417 million yen construction contract was awarded, “Suzuki conferred with the Foreign Ministry’s officials regarding the bidding requirements and procedures. On Suzuki’s request, the ministry illegally limited the contractors eligible to place the bids to those from Hokkaido’s Nemuro region and with certain business experiences in the past.” (Kaminski 2004: 183). It was subsequently reported that, between 1995 and 2000, the two successful contractors had donated over 9 million yen to Suzuki’s electoral support committee (kōen kai) (Kaminski 2004: 198).
“Muneo House” on Russian-held Kunashir (2012)
Although the alleged chicanery regarding the building of “Muneo House” is the best-known scandal relating to Suzuki, it was not the leading factor in his arrest and imprisonment. Instead, Suzuki was sent to prison for crimes connected to two separate instances of bribery. The first case involved Suzuki’s acceptance in 1998 of 5 million yen from Yamarin, a lumber company, in exchange for Suzuki’s influence as deputy cabinet secretary in assisting the company to avoid punishment for illegal logging in national forests. Suzuki’s prosecution for perjury also relates to this case, since he was found guilty of lying about the Yamarin bribe during sworn testimony in a Diet committee hearing in March 2002.
The second bribery case involved Suzuki’s acceptance of 6 million yen from Shimada Construction between 1997 and 1998. Prosecutors successfully argued that these funds were a bribe that had been given to Suzuki, who was then head of the Hokkaidō Development Agency, in return for his help in winning government contracts (Carlson and Reed 2018: 71-2). Shimada Construction is also reported to have paid John Muwete Muluaka, Suzuki’s former Congolese private secretary, 15 million yen over a period of six years, despite the fact that “Big John”, as he is known, had done no work for the company. As Axel Berkofsky elaborates, “The affair became even more bizarre when it was revealed that Muluaka had been granted permanent residence in Japan in October 2001, even though his diplomatic and normal passports expired in 1994 and 1998 respectively.” (2002).
However, while the misuse of Cooperation Committee funds was not directly connected with Suzuki’s arrest, it was the cause of the downfall of his ally Satō Masaru. Specifically, Satō was arrested, and subsequently found guilty, of illegally procuring 30 million yen from the Cooperation Committee to pay for more than 10 Japanese academics and Foreign Ministry officials to attend a conference at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Since Cooperation Committee rules only permitted the funding of such events in Russia or other Soviet republics, this spending was deemed illegal. He was also accused of inappropriately using 3 million yen from the Cooperation Committee to pay for the visit of an Israeli researcher and his wife to Japan in January 1999 (The Japan Times 2002). Separately, Satō was accused of providing confidential information to a Japanese trading company about a construction contract on the Northern Territories (McCormack 2010: 2).
Tōgō Kazuhiko, who had moved from his position of Director-General of MOFA’s European and Oceanian Affairs Bureau to become Japan’s ambassador to the Netherlands, was also caught up in the scandal. He was forced to resign from the Ministry in April 2002 and then in Europe he was interviewed by prosecutors in relation to the same charges as Satō. However, since Tōgō avoided returning to Japan until 2006 – when he testified on Satō’s behalf – he was never arrested.
As with Suzuki, Satō has subsequently made a remarkable comeback. After being suspended (and later sacked) from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Satō began a phenomenally successful career as an author, writing countless books and articles on a wide range of topics and becoming an influential public intellectual. Satō also retains close ties with Suzuki and has regularly appeared alongside him at public events organised by Shintō Daichi, Suzuki’s political movement. Satō has also made a significant contribution to laundering Suzuki’s reputation. This he achieved by writing Kokka no Wana [The Trap of the State] in 2005. This book, which became a bestseller in Japan, convincingly argues that Satō was harshly treated for what were, at most, administrative misdemeanours and which certainly did not merit pre-trial detention of 512 days. What is more, the book provides a favourable account of Suzuki’s character and intentions in his exercise of influence over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Satō 2005: 62-128).
Aside from the controversy arising from the use of Cooperation Committee funds and promotion of projects on the disputed islands, Suzuki’s ties with Russian officials have also periodically raised concerns. For example, Kaminski mentions rumours of Suzuki’s contacts with Russian intelligence operatives. Specifically, he claims that “Suzuki had private meetings with a certain Smirnov of the Russian embassy in Tokyo. Suzuki was aware that Smirnov was an intelligence officer. But he pressured the head of the National Police Agency (NPA) not to pursue his meetings with Smirnov.” (2004: 191).
Such reports might seem alarming but it is important to emphasise that there is no evidence to suggest that Suzuki ever knowingly served the interests of the Russian state. The intelligence services play a prominent role in Putin’s Russia and Suzuki may simply have judged that meeting intelligence officers is a necessary step in the process of cultivating a network of valuable contacts within the Russian political system. Nonetheless, there remain legitimate concerns about Suzuki’s Russian connections. He has pro-Russian inclinations, a history of criminality, and regular access to Prime Minister Abe. This trinity of factors may have encouraged the Russian intelligence services to view Suzuki as a security vulnerability that can be exploited. Moreover, even if this is not the case, it is certain that Russian officials will seek to use their contacts with Suzuki as a means of projecting influence into the prime minister’s office in an attempt to ensure that the Japanese leader continues to pursue a Russia policy that is deemed favourable to Moscow.
What Suzuki’s return says about Japanese politics more broadly
The magnitude of Suzuki Muneo’s rise, fall, and rise again is unique. Even Suzuki himself talks of three “miracles” (Suzuki 2019e). The first was his initial election to the lower house in 1983; the second was his re-election in 2005, which occurred after his arrest, but prior to his official sentencing; and the third was his election to the upper house in July 2019. Yet, even though there is no politician quite like Suzuki Muneo, there are some broader conclusions about Japanese politics that can be drawn from his extraordinary case.
Firstly, and most obviously, the return of Suzuki suggests a high degree of tolerance for a certain type of corruption within Japan. Although his conviction has been upheld in Japan’s Supreme Court and his demand for a retrial rejected, Suzuki has never accepted responsibility for his crimes, nor has he apologised. Despite this, many Japanese voters, as well as the media and broader political class, appear willing to forgive and forget. This relaxed attitude towards graft also appears to include Prime Minister Abe since he began to invite Suzuki to the Kantei in 2015, when the convicted politician was still banned from political office. Abe’s only nod to propriety has been his refusal (so far) to permit Suzuki to rejoin the LDP.
It is not easy to immediately identify why there should be such acceptance of Suzuki’s behaviour in Japan, whereas similar actions in many liberal democracies would be sufficient to end a political career many times over. One consideration, however, is the fact that the Suzuki scandals do not primarily relate to accusations of personal enrichment. Instead, Suzuki was essentially found guilty of developing a symbiotic relationship with companies in Hokkaidō through which he assisted them to win business and, in return, they provided him with financial resources to keep him in power. This is a perversion of the proper function of the democratic process and can therefore be regarded as corruption (Carlson and Reed 2018: 15-6). Nonetheless, some Japanese voters may simply consider that Suzuki was performing his proper role of serving the interests of his constituency. This is consistent with Miyamoto Masafumi’s broader observation that, in Japan, the “public perceives corruption as a victimless crime and dismisses the affair” (quoted in George Mulgan 2010: 194).
Acceptance of corruption as a normal part of the political game is therefore one structural factor that appears to have facilitated Suzuki’s return to power. However, the other lessons from the Suzuki case relate to qualities embodied in Suzuki himself. There are three of these: the ability to connect oneself to powerful political patrons; the possession of policy expertise; and personal charisma.
First, Suzuki’s success demonstrates the reliable benefits of tying oneself to influential individuals and, when necessary, engaging in outright sycophancy. After Nakagawa Ichirō’s suicide, Suzuki cultivated ties with Kanemaru Shin, an important LDP powerbroker from Yamanashi prefecture. According to Berkofsky, “He [Suzuki] and Koichi Hamada, another independent in the LDP, acted as Kanemaru’s bodyguards and often served as Diet hecklers during Kanemaru’s tenure as LDP Secretary General” (2002). Kanemaru was a central figure in the Sagawa Kyūbin scandal that broke in 1992 in which he was alleged to have received a 500 million yen bribe from the parcel delivery firm, which he then shared with around 60 other LDP politicians. Prosecutors also accused Kanemaru of tax evasion amounting to over one billion yen. When his home and offices were searched, investigators discovered a hoard of cash, bearer bonds, and 220 pounds of gold bars. Although he was arrested, Kanemaru’s trial was suspended due to his poor health and he died in 1996 (Carlson and Reed 2018: 54-6).
Subsequent to Kanemaru’s downfall, Suzuki prioritised relations with Nonaka Hiromu, who served as Chief Cabinet Secretary between 1998 and 1999. He also became close to Mori Yoshirō, who Nonaka helped to make prime minister in April 2000. In developing these connections, Suzuki endeared himself by sharing his financial resources. Specifically, “Over a two-year period from 1997-1999, he contributed a total of 39 million yen to 11 LDP lawmakers, including members of the current Koizumi cabinet, senior vice ministers and parliamentary vice-ministers.” (Berkovsky 2002).
As the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) prepared to take power after the general election in August 2009, Suzuki set aside his long-term connections with the LDP and strengthened ties with the new government of Hatoyama Yukio. This immediately paid dividends when he was appointed chair of the lower house committee on foreign affairs. This was despite the fact that Suzuki was still on trial for bribery. Suzuki again sought to make himself useful with regard to both Russia policy and Okinawa, but in September 2010 his conviction was upheld and he was sent to prison.
After his release on parole in December 2011 and the LDP’s return to power a year later, Suzuki shifted his allegiance to the Abe administration and increasingly sought to align his statements with government policy. This involved reversing his position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he had previously criticised as a neo-liberal policy and harmful to farmers in Hokkaidō. Suzuki has also not been shy about personally praising key figures in the Abe government, saying, for example, that “I greatly appreciate the skill and ability of Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga, who continues to achieve excellent results.” (Suzuki 2019a). Additionally, despite supposedly representing an opposition party, Suzuki acclaims Abe as the only leader who can resolve the territorial dispute with Russia. He also asserts that “I have 1000 percent trust in Prime Minister Abe’s foreign policy towards Russia and I want him to make full use of my personal connections, information, and experience.” (quoted in Sankei Shinbun 2019b).
Such relentless courting of the powerful has been a key element of Suzuki’s success, yet his constant shifting of allegiances would not have been tolerated if he did not have something to offer in return. At times, this has been financial but, above all, Suzuki has used his expertise on Russia as his main currency of exchange. Suzuki’s knowledge of Russia and his web of personal contacts in the country are a rare commodity within Japanese politics and have made him valuable to a succession of Japanese leaders. This certainly applies to Abe, who is unlikely to have given Suzuki the access to the prime minister’s office that he enjoys, if the same expertise were available from a less controversial source.
Indeed, so rewarding has been Suzuki’s association with Russia that it is surprising that more members of the Japanese parliament have not followed him in cultivating a particular bilateral relationship. In the current Diet, the only other politician who stands out for his especially well-developed ties with a specific country is Nikai Toshihiro, the LDP secretary general, who is known for his contacts in China.
Adding to the appeal of Suzuki’s expertise on Russia is that, irrespective of his real motivations, his approach to the territorial dispute is logical. In particular, having studied the dispute, it is hard to disagree with Suzuki’s assertion that the principled approach of demanding Russia’s recognition of Japanese sovereignty over all four of the islands has failed and that the only plausible solution is a compromise that would see, at most, the transfer to Japan of the two smaller islands of Shikotan and Habomai, plus some form of enhanced access to the larger two islands (Sankei Shinbun 2018). This realism regarding the territorial issue is again something that has contributed to Suzuki’s relations with Japanese leaders, especially prime ministers Mori and Abe.
Lastly, in addition to the benefits of associating oneself with powerful figures and accumulating country-specific expertise, Suzuki Muneo’s enduring success demonstrates the value of charisma in Japanese politics. While Suzuki is generally a divisive figure, everyone can at least agree that, unlike many of his colleagues in Japanese politics, he is not boring. In part, this is a consequence of his natural effusiveness, but he is also skilled at self-promotion. One notable factor is the speaking style that he has cultivated, which, according to Murray Sayle, “advertises his provincial roots and an exaggerated humility rising to high-pitched yelling that suggests either a hair-trigger temper or the feigned rage of a samurai warrior as seen in Japanese TV serials.” (2002). He has also increased his visibility by adopting a signature item of clothing – a lime-green necktie – that he is rarely seen without. Additionally, he has made effective use of his friendship with Matsuyama Chihara, a popular singer from Ashoro, Hokkaidō, who campaigned for Suzuki ahead of the 2019 election. More surprising is that, during the same campaign, Suzuki also secured the endorsement of Steven Seagal, a Hollywood actor who starred in martial arts films during the 1980s and 1990s, before becoming a Russian citizen in 2016 (Suzuki 2019).
Image on the left: Steven Seagal and Suzuki Muneo during the 2019 upper-house election campaign (Twitter)
Some of these traits might be regarded as populist, especially Suzuki’s embrace of common language to signal his identity as a champion of the ordinary Japanese people. In any case, in the sometimes dull world of Japanese politics, Suzuki’s distinctive character and active self-promotion have been important in helping him overcome his inauspicious start in politics, whereby he lacked the established network of support that is available to hereditary politicians. It was also this charisma that made the Suzuki-Tanaka battles of the early 2000s so captivating to a Japanese TV audience. In the case of both these politicians, the excitement generated by their theatrical performances appears to have encouraged the Japanese public to take a forgiving attitude towards their obvious failings.
Conclusion
This article has charted the remarkable political career of Suzuki Muneo over the past four decades. This has seen his progression from the humble role of secretary to Nakagawa Ichirō to the heights of being appointed deputy chief cabinet secretary in the administration of Obuchi Keizō. Emphasis was also placed on the extraordinary influence that Suzuki exercised over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on his very public battle with Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko during the early 2000s. A prominent feature of the article has also been the numerous allegation of corruption and misconduct that have been directed at Suzuki over the years, as well as the crimes of bribery, perjury, and violation of political funding laws for which he was eventually sent to prison.
The ability of Suzuki to regain access to the prime minister’s office and to achieve re-election in 2019, despite his criminal record, is unprecedented in modern Japanese political history. Nonetheless, some broader conclusions have been possible. Namely, the Suzuki case suggests a significant degree of tolerance for corruption within Japan, especially when the crimes are judged to be to the benefit of the local constituency and not motivated by the desire for personal enrichment. Additionally, as is perhaps true of all political systems, Suzuki’s enduring success points to the importance of cultivating ties with powerful politicians, of becoming the go-to expert on a valued subject, and of bringing sparkle to the political arena.
Suzuki campaigned for election to the upper house in 2019 under the slogan that this was to be “Suzuki Muneo’s last battle” (Suzuki 2019e). Suzuki turned 71 in January 2019. By the standards of Japanese politics, this is not especially old, but the unfortunate return of his cancer of the oesophagus may have caused him to assess that his days in politics were numbered.
Despite this, it is too early to write the final chapter of Suzuki’s political biography. The reason for this is that Prime Minister Abe has fully adopted the Russia policy that Suzuki has advocated since the late 1990s and is implementing it in close consultation with the veteran politician himself. As noted, this entails expanding political and economic ties with Russia, as well as moving away from the demand for the return of all four islands and instead emphasising the goal of securing the transfer of just two. Abe’s embrace of this agenda was signaled by his agreement in November 2018 to base peace treaty talks with Russia on the countries’ 1956 Joint Declaration. This document promises the transfer of Shikotan and Habomai after the signature of a peace treaty, but makes no mention whatsoever of the larger islands of Iturup and Kunashir. Furthermore, Abe has fully signed up to Suzuki’s long-favoured agenda of promoting joint economic projects on the disputed islands. In December 2016, when Putin visited Abe in his home prefecture of Yamaguchi, the leaders agreed to discuss such projects. Having subsequently narrowed the focus to five priority areas, it was agreed in June 2019 that pilot projects would begin in the areas of waste management and tourism. The first of these trials took place in August 2019 when four Russian officials visited the Nemuro area of Hokkaidō to learn about Japan’s experience of waste management. The second is planned for October 11-16, when 35 Japanese, including officials, will visit Kunashir and Iturup on a trial tourism excursion. Given Suzuki’s influence in convincing Abe to adopt this approach, it is perhaps appropriate that, during their stay on Kunashir, the tourists are likely to stay in the “Muneo House” (Hosokawa 2019).
All of the indications are that Muneo’s agenda will not enable Abe to deliver the legacy-defining resolution to the territorial dispute that he is aching to achieve. This is because the Russian side appears to consider even the prospect of transferring the two smaller islands as excessive. Indeed, since Abe conceded in November 2018 to making the 1956 Joint Declaration the basis for talks, Russia’s position has only hardened. Specifically, the Russian leadership has made it clear that the transfer of two islands as a gesture of goodwill could only occur if Japan were first to accept Russia’s legitimate right to all four of the islands as a result of Soviet victory in World War 2. Added to this, Moscow would require legal assurances that no U.S. military facilities would ever be permitted on the transferred territory (Brown 2018b). As the Russian leadership well knows, no Japanese prime minister could easily accept these conditions. The impression is therefore that Moscow merely intends to accept the fruits of Abe’s engagement, without offering anything concrete in return.
And yet, given Suzuki’s extraordinary return from the political wilderness, as well as Abe’s own remarkable comeback after his failure as prime minister in 2006-07, perhaps we should not entirely rule out the possibility that the pair’s plan will succeed. Suzuki evidently believes that he has defied the political odds on several occasions already and can do so again. If he is right and can mastermind extracting an acceptable territorial deal from the Putin administration, Suzuki will have performed his greatest miracle of all.
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James D.J. Brown is Associate Professor in Political Science at Temple University, Japan Campus. His main areas of expertise are Russian-Japanese relations and international energy politics.
Kaminski, Ignacy Marek, 2004, “Applied anthropology and diplomacy: Renegotiating conflicts in a Eurasian diplomatic gray zone by using cultural symbols,” ch.10 in Langholtz, H.J. and Stout, C.E. (eds.) The Psychology of Diplomacy, (London: Praeger).
McCormack, Gavan, 2010, Ideas, identity and ideology in contemporary Japan: The Sato Masaru phenomenon,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 8, issue 44(1): 1-22.
Togo, Kazuhiko, 2011, “The inside story of the negotiations on the Northern Territories: five lost windows of opportunity,” Japan Forum, 23(1): 123-145.
Notes
1 To be precise, the disputed territory consists of three islands, which are known as Iturup, Kunashir, and Shikotan in Russian, and Etorofu, Kunashiri, and Shikotan in Japanese. There is also a small group of islets known collectively as the Habomais. For simplicity, this latter archipelago is customarily referred to as a single island, making it a “four-island dispute”.
2 Specifically, during the visa-free visit to Kunashir on 11 May 2019, Diet member Maruyama Hodaka is reported to have drunk more than 10 shots of cognac. He then became disorderly and raised the prospect of Japan going to war to seize the disputed islands. It is also alleged that he said that he wanted to “buy” a Russian woman (Hokkaidō Shinbun 2019a).
3 Suzuki Takako first entered parliament in 2013 as a candidate for Shintō Daichi. This followed the resignation of the party’s representative Ishikawa Tomohiro following a political funding scandal. She then joined the Democratic Party (DP) and was returned to the lower house in the election of December 2014. She left the DP again in 2016, making the LDP her third political party by the age of 31.
4 Katō Akira questions the extent of Suzuki’s childhood poverty, suggesting that he has exaggerated his family’s hardship in order to bolster his image as a self-made politician and representative of the common man (Katō 2002: 93-5).
5 Interview conducted with Tōgō Kazuhiko, Tokyo, 27 May 2019.
6 Interview conducted with Tōgō Kazuhiko, Tokyo, 27 May 2019.
7 In the elections of 1996 and 2000, Suzuki was elected to the House of Representatives as a candidate of the LDP in the PR Hokkaidō block. During the election of November 2003, Suzuki was in pre-trial detention (which lasted a total of 437 days) and unable to stand, but he returned to the lower house in 2005 through PR votes for Shintō Daichi, his own political vehicle. He was elected again in the same way in August 2009, but was forced to relinquish his seat when he was sent to prison the next year. Suzuki was banned from political office during the lower house elections of 2012 and 2014, and failed in his bid for election in October 2017. After switching to Nippon Ishin no Kai, he was successfully elected to the upper house through PR party votes in the election of July 2019.
8 The “two-plus-two” and “two-plus-alpha” proposals are similar, and both have been promoted by Suzuki Muneo. “Two-plus-two”, which was emphasised at the time of the Irkutsk summit in 2001, aims for the transfer of two islands to Japan, plus the continuation of talks about the other two. “Two-plus-alpha”, which appears to be Abe’s current goal, implies the transfer of two islands to Japan, plus some form of special access rights and joint economic projects for Japan on the other two islands.
9 In fact, prior to being steered towards Russia by MOFA, the scholarly Satō Masaru’s main area of interest was church-state relations in Czechoslovakia (Satō 2005: 17).
10 The proposed joint economic projects on the disputed islands are entirely distinct from Abe’s 8-point economic cooperation plan, which applies to Russia as a whole.
11 Kōno Yōhei is the father of Kōno Tarō, who was appointed foreign minister in August 2017.
