Global Research

The IMF, has been instrumental in helping destroying the economy of a myriad of countries, notably, and to start with, the new Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Greece, Ukraine and lately Argentina, to mention just a few. Madame Christine Lagarde, as chief of the IMF had a heavy hand in the annihilation of at least the last three mentioned.

She is now taking over the Presidency of the European Central Bank (ECB). There, she expects to complete the job that Mario Draghi had started but was not quite able to finish: Further bleeding the economy of Europe, especially southern Europe into anemia.

Let’s see what we may have in store – to come.

Negative interest, we have it already – it’s the latest banking fraud stealing money from depositors to give to large borrowers. It’s a reverse cross-subsidy, the poor financing the rich. That’s the essence. It’s a new form of moving money from the bottom to the top. Now, a Danish bank has launched the world’s first negative interest rate mortgage. It provides mortgages to home owners for a negative rate of 0.5%. The bank pays borrowers to take some money off their books. Of course, as usual, only relatively well-off people can become home owners and benefit from this reverse cross-subsidy. It is a token gesture, duping the public at large into believing that they are benefitting from the new banking stint. The bulk of such operations serve large corporations.

The borrower pays back less than the full loan amount. Switzerland may soon go into the direction of Denmark. Bank deposits with central banks pay negative interest almost everywhere in the western world, except in the US – yet. It’s only a question of time until the average consumer will have to reimburse the banks for their central bank deposit expenses, meaning, the customers are getting negative interest on their deposits. That’s inflation camouflage. A sheer fraud, but all made legal by a system that runs amok, that does not follow any ethics or legal standards. A totally deregulated western private banking system, compliments of the 1990s Clinton Administration, and, of course, his handlers. As Professor Michael Hudson calls it, financial barbarism. We are haplessly enslaved in this aberrant ever more abusive private – fiat money – banking shenaniganism.

RT’s Max Keiser recently interviewed Karl Denninger of Market-Ticker.org. Denninger told Keiser, “Negative yielding bond is forced inflationary instrument: you buy it, you’re guaranteed inflation in the amount of a negative yield.” He blasted the tool as plain “theft” by any government that issues these bonds, which is done in an effort to nominally expand a country’s GDP. “If the government is issuing more in sovereign debt their GDP is expanding in nominal terms. If you have negative interest rates on those government bonds, you’re creating excess space for the government to run the fiscal deficit […] in excess of GDP expansion. Nobody in any civilized nation should allow this to happen because it is theft, on the scale of that differential, from everybody in the economy,”

—–

To make sure the little saver doesn’t think about depositing his savings under his matrass or in a hole in the ground instead of bringing it to the bank, money will be digitized and cash will disappear. Madame Lagarde has already more than hinted at that, when she gave a pre-departure speech at the IMF – explaining on how she sees the future of monetary banking. The future, according to her, being no more than 15 to 20 years away, is a no-cash society. Just enough time for the elder generations – those that may still feel an instinct of rejection and have some consciousness about personal privacy, those that may resist money digitization – may have died out. The young, up-and-coming age groups may be brainwashed enough to find a cashless society so cool.

Since Madame Lagarde is moving to head the ECB in Frankfurt, it is fair to assume that Europe will be one of the largest test grounds for digitized money, i.e. towards a cashless society. In fact, it is already a test ground – many department stores and other shops in Nordic countries – Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland – do no longer accept cash, only electronic money. In Denmark already up of 80% of all monetary transactions are made digitally.

Imagine, for your chewing gum wrapper, pack of cigarette, or candy bar, you swipe a card in front of an electronic eye – and bingo, you have paid, not touching any money – “that’s mega cool!” – That’s what the young people may think, oblivious to leaving a trail of personal data behind, among them their bank account details, their GPS-geared location, what they are shopping, a pattern of data that is in ten years-time expected to amount to about 70,000 points of information about an individual’s characteristics, emotions, preferences, photos, personal contacts… what Cambridge Analytica in the superb documentary “The Great Hack” revealed as already today on average 5,000 points of data per citizen. The system will know you inside out better than you know yourself. And you will be exposed to algorithms that know exactly how to influence every action, every move of yours. Cool!

That, combined with face recognition which is advancing rapidly around the globe, will be super cool.
—-

A horrendous trial on how an entire country, India, with the world’s second largest population, may react to demonization, was introduced in 2016 by President Modi, bending to the pressure of the western financial system, with support of the IMF and implementation funding by USAID. It amounted in a disastrous and cruel demonetization, invalidating almost over-night the most popular 100 Rupee (Rs) bank note, replacing it with a 200 Rs note – which in most places, especially in rural towns, where banks are scarce, was not available. Never mind that less than half of the Indian population has a bank account, where the bank note exchange transactions had to be carried out.

The sudden disappearance of the most popular bank note – more than 80% of all monetary cash transactions in India took place in 100 Rs notes – was a proxy to digitization of money. Countless people starved to death especially in rural areas, because their 100 Rs were declared worthless and became unacceptable to buy food

(see also http://www.globalresearch.ca/india-death-by-demonetization-financial-genocide-the-crime-of-the-century/5569859).

——

The 340,000 citizens of Iceland have already a fully digitized e-ID, now moving towards a mobile ID, i.e. accessible through your smart phone – uniting every possible data that belongs to you, from medical records to insurance policies, all the way to dog, cat and car registrations – you name it. Most say they trust their government and are not unhappy with their divulging their most intimate data. Many have no or little idea, though, to what extent the private sector is involved in setting up such a hermetic countrywide data bank for the government. – Even if the regulator is within the government and you trust your government, how much can you trust the profit-oriented private sector in protecting your data?

The surveillance state that you, among other clandestine intrusions into your privacy, will allow by willy-nilly accepting digitization of money, and eventually digitization of your entire private data, pales Orwell’s imagination of “1984”. Every citizen is registered in every western “security agency’s” electronic data bank – and of course those of the empire and Middle East affiliate, Israel, CIA, NSA, FBI, Mossad – and so on – no escaping anymore.

It just so happens that you, dear citizen, are oblivious to all of what is going on behind your back, since your attention will be captured by massive marketing and directed towards the nefarious machinations of the corporate elite ruled, globalized world, making you an eternal and ever-more intense consumer. You must spend the last penny of your income on trendy stuff, all those fashion things that will be pumped non-stop day-in-day-out into your brain, what’s left of it, by propaganda on television, radio, electronic cartoon-like billboards, internet – and that at every turn you take. And let’s not forget sports events – they increase every year and are the most direct deviation tactic take-over from the Roman Empire.

The most aberrant trends will be cool, like shredded jeans, for which you pay a premium, body-paintings, called tattoos, footballer hair styles, because they are fashionable and your looks are key to fit into a standardized, globalized society that has seized thinking for itself – no more interest in politics, in what your non-democratically elected representatives decide for you. It’s what Noam Chomsky calls the marginalization of the populace.

You are made believe that you are living in a democracy where you can do what you want, shop what you want, watch what you want, and even when the elections or occasional referenda are offered to request your opinions, you are cheated into believing your choice is free. Of course, it is not. It is all programmed. Algorithms drawing on your profile of 70,000 points of information on emotions, desires and dreams, will clandestinely help the ‘system’ to enslave, cheat and master you – and you won’t even notice.

That’s where we are headed, largely thanks to digitalization of money – but not only, because surveillance will also follow all your steps on internet, on facebook, twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp – and many more of those especially created marketing tools, implanted in societies’ social media, that make life and communication so much easier.

And there is more to digital money. Much more. In 2014, the unelected European Commission (EC) has put on its books of regulations, following a similar decree in the US, the rule that an overextended  bankrupt too-big-to-fail private bank will no longer be rescued by the state, by your tax money – which used to be called a “bail-out”. Instead, there will be “bail-ins”, meaning that the bank will seize your deposits, your savings and sanitize itself with money stolen from you. You have no choice, there will be no ‘run on the banks’ – because there is no cash to withdraw. We have seen signs of this when Greece collapsed after 2010, and cash machines spitting out no more than 20 € per day – if at all. For many of Greek citizens – especially the poorer class living from day to day – this meant often cruel starvation.

Bail-ins are little talked about, but they happen already today and ever more so. In 2014, the Austrian bank Hypo Alpe Adria – the Heta Asset Resolution AG, was given green light by the Austrian Banking Regulator, the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA), to refinance itself by a so-called “haircut” of an average 54%, meaning, stealing 54% of depositors’ money

(see also https://www.mondialisation.ca/austria-just-announced-a-54-haircut-of-senior-creditors-in-first-bail-in-under-new-eu-rules/5520162).

But the first and largest “haircut” test took place in Cyprus, when in 2013 the Bank of Cyprus depositors lost about 47.5% in a “haircut” to bail out their bank. Of course, the big sharks were forewarned, so they could withdraw their money in time and transfer it abroad

(see also https://www.globalresearch.ca/infringing-upon-the-eurozones-sovereignty-on-behalf-of-wall-street-the-ecbs-haircut-measures-undermining-trade-and-investment-with-russia-and-china/5412477

and

https://www.globalresearch.ca/retrenchment-robotization-and-crypto-currencies-the-runaway-train-towards-full-digitization-of-money-and-labor/5624050).

It could get worse. The state, tax authority, an institution, a corporation says you owe them money which you deny, possibly for a good reason – but they have access to your bank account and just seize the amount they pretend is their due. You are powerless against these tyrannical monsters and may have to hire expensive legal service to get your stolen money back – if at all. Because the “system” is run by the “system”. And once that level has been reached, a form of Full Spectrum Dominance, a key target of the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century), there is hardly any escaping. That has all happened already, in front of our publicity-blinded eyes, little spoken about, the trend is growing – and this even without necessarily a digitized world.

Is it that the kind of society you want?
———-

Then there are the rather prominent gurus who bet on gold and bitcoins to replace the faltering dollar, like a last-ditch solution. None of them is any more viable than the fiat dollar. Gold is highly volatile due to its vulnerability for manipulation – as it is largely controlled bit the BIS (Bank for International Settlement, in Basle, Switzerland, also called the central bank of all central banks, and yes, the same bank that helped the FED finance Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union – so you see where this bank is coming from). It is entirely privately owned and largely controlled by the Rothschild clan. And as an associated side note – few people talk about it, there is in excess of 100 times more paper gold in circulation than you could ever cash in, if you needed it. It is another one of those bank-invented ‘derivative’ bubbles that will explode and serve to enrich them when the time is ripe.

Bitcoins, the most prominent of some 3,000 to 4,000 cryptocurrencies flooding the world, is totally unreliable. A year after it was created in 2008 allegedly by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s value in 2009 was US$ 0.08, It gradually rose and eventually jumped in December 2017 briefly above US$ 20,000, but dropped within a year to about US$ 3,500. Today bitcoin is hovering around US$ 9,500 (August / September 2019). Bitcoin – along with other cryptocurrencies – is highly speculative, lends itself to Mafia-type money-laundering and other fraudulent transactions. It is about equivalent to fiat money and certainly inept to be the backing for a monetary system.

And let’s not forget, the latest Facebook initiative – a cryptocurrency, the Libra, to be launched in 2020 out of Geneva, Switzerland – is expected to dominate within a few years 70% to 80% of the international money market. You see, the same clan that has been manipulating and cheating you with the dollar, is now ‘banking’ on you falling for the Facebook currency – as it will be so easy to use your smart phone for any kind of monetary transaction, thus, avoiding traditional predatory banking. Looks like a good thing at the outside – right? – Nope! It’s entirely privately owned and run by an unscrupulous mafia that is being set up to continue milking the masses for the benefits of an ever-smaller elite.

There is however a role for blockchain cryptocurrencies, to circumvent private banking, those that are government controlled and regulated. China and Russia are about to launch their government-controlled cryptocurrencies and others – Iran, Venezuela, India – are following in the same steps. But they all ban privately run cryptocurrencies in their countries – and rightly so. A combination of government-regulated blockchain cryptos and public banking, where no private profits are in the fore, but rather the wellbeing of the citizen and the country’s economy, may be a viable solution into a new monetary scheme, protected from the kleptocracy of western banking.
—–

Desperation about the dollar losing its world hegemony is growing – and growing fast. To salvage the western fiat monetary system, Madame Lagarde and others are also talking about some kind of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) to replace the dollar as a reserve currency, since there is no escaping – the dollar as reserve currency is doomed. The current IMF SDR basket consists of five currencies, the US-dollar (weighing 41.73%), the British Pound (8.02%) the Euro (30.93%), the Japanese Yen (8.33%) and since 2017 the Chinese Yuan, the currency of the world’s largest economy compared by Purchasing Power GDP (10.92%).

At this point thinking of any reshuffling of the SDR basket’s contents is purely speculative. However, it can easily be assumed that the dollar would remain in a very prominent position within the basket, as it should remain the leading hegemon of world economy. Let’s not forget, The US Treasury controls the IMF with an absolute veto, in other words – 100%. It can also be assumed that the Chinese Yuan would either be kicked out altogether or would be given a minor weight in the basket, so to diminish its role. If this was to become the chosen option by the US Treasury, it could and probably might prompt China to withdraw the Yuan from the SDR basket, as the Yuan does no longer need SDR recognition in the world to be considered a primary reserve currency.

Unless this is stealthily done – outside of public sight and in disguise of countries still holding major US-dollar reserves, the world would unlikely accept such an alternative, especially since it is widely known among treasurers of countries around the globe that the Chinese Yuan is rapidly raising to become the key world reserve currency.

As reported by William Engdahl’s analytical essay “Is the Fed Preparing to Topple the US Dollar?” – , the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, delivered at the recent annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a set of ideas that went into a similar direction, towards a shift away from the dominant role of the US dollar as a reserve currency. Similar to Mme. Lagarde’s earlier remarks about an SDR-type reserve currency, he made it understood that though, the Chinese Yuan, the currency of the key trading nation, may have a role in the basket, it would – for now – not be an important one. He also was clear about the current disturbing and destabilizing imbalance – where a faltering dollar still pretends to hold the hegemonic scepter over the world economy.

Keeping the dollar still in a leading role, while the US economy is declining, was no longer a viable option for an increasingly globalized world economy. Carney was hinting at a multipolar monetary and reserve system for a multipolar globalized world. Similar remarks came from former New York Federal Reserve Bank chief, Bill Dudley. However, Dudley, hinted that for the United States to give up her dollar dominance, the backbone for her world hegemony, may not come voluntarily. Might that lead to a major, maybe armed world conflict?

Much of this is speculation from the western perspective. It is however clear, that there is a tremendous and mounting uneasiness about the western, dollar-based fiat monetary system, backed by nothing, not even by the western economy. You compare this with the Chinese Yuan and the Russian Ruble, both backed by gold and – more importantly – by their own economy. It becomes increasingly clear that much of the speculation and efforts by influential central banking figures to save the western monetary Ponzi scheme, maybe just propaganda to calm the minds of western financiers – holding them back from jumping ship.

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 21^st 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.

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

First published by the New Eastern Outlook – NEO

The entities rolling out 5G are tormenting humanity and sucking their humanity from them by taking their minds and their health, while on the other side, you have the zombie apocalypse of all the people with their 4G cell phones, blindly going about destroying the world. 

The 4G zombie apocalypse lot have to wake up.  They need to wake up now before it is too late and time is of the essence. 

***

It is time we asked a crucial question. How did we come to be in this 5G mad zone, poised to self-destruct? How on earth did we get here?

It appears that every expansion of the use of electricity since the 19^th century correlates with drastic rises in all the modern diseases of civilization,[i] but this information has been kept from the public in order not to impede commercial profit, military expansion and universal convenience.[ii]

Since 100+ years of quantum physics has had little to no impact on the way we live our lives or how we perceive reality, we in the West still labour under the illusion that our bodies are made up of lumps of discrete matter that can be conveniently excised by a surgeon’s knife when they go wrong, this having been established in the 19^th century by a grave-robbing spree to collect corpses for surgical experiments.[iii] Since no one seems to have considered the possibility that a living body might differ significantly from a dead one, this crude experimentation formed the foundation for the system that we now call Western medicine.[iv] All traditional and ancient healing wisdom based on a holistic view of a living body was outlawed by enforcing membership of a “professional body”.[v] In an inversion typical of our Western thinking, natural healing methods dating back thousands of years could then be termed not “traditional”, but “alternative” and “backward”.

Taking advantage of this – let us charitably call it an induced misconception – our militaries discovered that microwave weapons could be deployed silently and secretly to “defend us” from alleged enemies or perhaps for some more sinister purpose.[vi] They gleefully amassed compendia of thousands of studies,[vii][viii] many done in the Soviet bloc,[ix] in order to solidify their knowledge of the many and varied types of biological damage that these weapons could inflict on human beings at very little cost or inconvenience to those deploying them.

There was even a symposium organized by the World Health Organization in 1973 to discuss The Biologic Effects and Health Hazards of Microwave Radiation,[x] but the participants must have subsequently decided not to share this information with the public in view of their intelligent propensity to suspect that one day microwave weapons might be turned on them.

Instead of informing the public that their bodies were, in fact, not solid at all but entirely electrical,[xi] these military and industrial entities kept secret all their thousands of studies on the biological effects of microwaves.[xii]

They established regulatory bodies with grand names intended to impress the public, filled them with industry and military stooges,[xiii][xiv]and set electromagnetic radiation (EMR) exposure limits so high that it would be impossible to exceed them,[xv] similar to setting car speed limits at a million miles/kilometres per hour. Russia’s public exposure standards are 100 times more stringent than those in the US.[xvi]

The self-proclaimed international commission on non-ionizing radiation protection (icnirp), which is an NGO with no international or official status that appoints its own members with no oversight or transparency and protects no one from anything, while disclaiming all liability on its website for any of its pronouncements,[xvii] sets non-legally enforceable and astronomically high exposure guidelines that are time-averaged over 6 minutes to avoid taking peak pulsations into account and thereby falsify exposure calculations. What a pity no one told Jackie Kennedy about the 6-minute average when that magic bullet changed her life![xviii] How different history might have been! These implausible guidelines are embraced enthusiastically by the WHO and the International Telecommunication Union, both UN bodies, and most of the world’s governments, with no basis in law.

4G uses 2.45 GHz, which has been shown in more than 100 studies to cause a wide variety of severe damage to the body and nature at levels below the so-called safety guidelines of icnirp.[xix]

.[xx]

They have published pictures of plastic mannequin heads filled with gel that they put probes inside to demonstrate the heating effect. “Look at our wonderful science!”, they seem to say, “The mannequin head has suffered no ill-effects!  Why should you worry?”[xxi]

Of course, there were people who spent a lot of time exposed to EMR through computer screens or other devices, who started to complain of illnesses. This was not good because it could affect the sales of electrical products and impede the military developing ever more sophisticated weapons, so the corrupt WHO just called these people mad:[xxii] on its website, it claimed that the EMR-related symptoms experienced by millions of people worldwide “may be due to pre-existing psychiatric conditions as well as stress reactions as a result of worrying about EMF health effects, rather than the EMF exposure itself”. Any apparent rise in cancer rates is rapidly attributed to improved diagnostic techniques rather than the more obvious true cause of exposure to an environmental toxin.

This was a good solution, for such people could not use machines to communicate to anyone else that they were experiencing health problems, and in fact even more conveniently, they became societal outcasts because many of them became homeless, living in cars in the woods where there was no EMR. And thus it was that almost no one learned that there was any problem.[xxiii]

As you would expect, there were a few scientists who didn’t care for the idea of  getting paid lots of money to tell lies that kill people and they started to try to advertise the truth, but it’s not difficult to arrange for them to lose their jobs or their study funding to silence them.[xxiv] All you need do then is simply buy up the media and pay journalists to dismiss tens of thousands of awkward scientific studies on the basis that they do not provide “solid”, “real”, “proven”, ”credible”, “convincing”, ”conclusive”, “valid” or “established” evidence. And you employ pliable scientists to “war-game” the science by producing studies that show inconclusive results.

As time went on, the military wanted industry to develop better weapons for them, but this was expensive, and frankly it was becoming quite difficult to convince the public that there were that many enemies that they needed to be protected from. A lot of effort was put into creating and funding so-called terrorists, but it didn’t do much good because the public didn’t need to make much effort to realise that they were way less likely to be killed by a terrorist than by a lightning bolt, which is pretty unlikely in the first place.[xxv]

So the military and industry had a brilliant idea.[xxvi] What about commercialising this weapons technology as a communications technology that they could sell to the public, and then the public would pay for all the research and development of new and improved weapons?[xxvi]

Even better, they knew that cell phones would be addictive so everyone would want a phone.[xxvii] And they would be able to control people’s minds and tell them what to think, what to do and what to buy.[xxviii],[xxix] You could have complete physical surveillance inside and outside people’s homes.[xxx] How perfect! You could have a completely orderly society, with no one complaining about how eight people had accumulated wealth equal to that possessed by half the population of the planet.[xxxi] And if one in two children become autistic,[xxxii] they will make really efficient, robotic workers, will always be happy and never make trouble! We see endless articles saying it makes good business sense.[xxxiii]

After the kleptocracy of neoliberal economics,[xxxiv][xxxv] during which everything that could be stolen was stolen, all that is left is to consume the consumer him- or herself.  Companies like Facebook are designed to do just that and Zuckerberg regards consumers as “dumb fucks” for giving away their information for free.[xxxvi]

Already in 1981, icnirp’s predecessor organization, irpa, acknowledged that general population exposure from man-made sources of microwave and radiofrequency (RF) radiation exceeded that from natural sources by many orders of magnitude.[xxxvii] In 1999, Dr. George L. Carlo warned that the occurrence of brain cancer and certain types of tumours among cellular phone users was twice that of non-users so that consumers could make an “informed judgment about how much of this unknown risk they wish to assume in their use of wireless phones”. His evidence was suppressed.[xxxviii]

Work done by Russian and Ukrainian researchers published in a US review in 2001 established that, during the previous 50 years, the round-the-clock power of radio emissions had increased by a factor of more than 50,000.[xxxix] The same paper discussed the development of psychic disturbances under EMR exposure showing effects ranging from changes in mood to nonsensical ideas and aural and visual hallucinations, and disturbances in behaviour all the way to attempts at suicide.

While people’s minds are disturbed by their exposure to EMR, the mainstream media plies them with blanket coverage of Greta Thunberg fear-porning about an unsubstantiated 12 years until doomsday from non-existent anthropogenic climate change in order to persuade them that they need a totalitarian, world government that can guarantee their safety in uncertain times.[xl],[xli][xlii]

Populations have been discombobulated by 25 years of cell phone use, 12 of them under intense “smart” phone attack. Parents are so fascinated by their phones that their children drown in swimming pools right in front of them.[xliii] More and more people walk out into the road when a car is coming or fall over or down something while peering into “smart’ phones.[xliv] We hear of adverse effects on learning, attention, and behaviour.[xlv] Children are being exposed to magnetic fields from cell phones that breach WHO’s recommended 0.3μT safety limit by a factor of 20,000.[xlvi]

Meanwhile, insurance companies, which presumably have to protect their existence by keeping a grip on reality, refuse to insure against EMF injuries or damage.

The deployment of 5G is presented by militaries, governments[xlvii] and commercial entities as a race in which the winner takes all. Why should such a dangerous and completely untested technology have to be rolled out so quickly? Could it be that the Internet is empowering people who are increasingly impoverished to open their eyes about the kleptocrats who plunder the planet? Could it be that the true health effects of 25 years of cell phone use cannot much longer be hidden?[xlviii]

Whatever the reason, Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex has revealed itself in the 5G project, showing its hand clearly in the crossover between the two, including in the regulatory agencies (see image below showing affiliations of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) meeting participants).[xlix] The limited frequencies available have to be shared among commercial and military entities.

Thus 25 years of diminishing mental capacity among populations due to irradiation facilitated by the lie of the thermal hypothesis, combined with the apparent urgency to protect ill-gotten gains and prevent populations awakening to the truth and flexing their muscles to redress the power balance have conspired to produce a mad free-for-all – a licence to irradiate without constraint from every corner of the planet and from above our heads.

Technicians have been given free rein to dream up ways of attacking populations: from under manhole covers; from cabinets on the street; from lamp posts that blast blue light with no more diffusers,[l] as well as 5G EMR in laser-like beams; from adhesive strips of tiny but powerful antennas hidden under carpets; on the street; in trains; in planes; in cars; in buses; blasting through the walls of our homes; from our television sets; from fridges, hairdryers, milk cartons, babies’ diapers, baby monitors, “smart” phones, “smart” meters, and soon from the billions of devices that are planned to be connected to the Internet of Things. This is not to mention the plethora of “wearables” and cell phone apps that purport to help you monitor your health status while seriously undermining it. The plan is to beam 5G down to Earth from satellites in the Earth orbits, from networked civil aircraft, from pseudosatellites in the stratosphere … In other words, from everywhere. The stated plan and the word trumpeted in the 5G literature is to “blanket” every inch of the Earth, with no escape for any of the approximately 100 million people worldwide already made sick by the toxic environment supplied courtesy of the first to fourth generations of WiFi, to which 5G will be additional.

There will also be no escape for the trees,[li] which have to go as they block the 5G signals and risk interrupting the continuous signals essential for self-driving vehicles,[lii] nor for the birds,[liii] the insects[liv] or the food chain.[lv] Any remnants of a sane, balanced, calm and quiet life will be wiped out by 5G, 4G, 3G, or any other G of wireless technology. We are complicit in our own destruction and, worse, in the wanton destruction of all life on this Earth.

Greed, fear, stupidity and hubris have brought us to this point, complemented by inanity, laziness, complacency and unconsciousness.

The 5G Dementors are closing In for the kill. The question is whether the people choosing to play out the 4G Zombie Apocalypse on their “smart” phones can tear themselves away long enough to care.  If they can, or if at least some of them can, they need to understand certain realities:

1. There is no safe limit for artificial EMR. It is alien to our biology.
2. Cell phones were never tested for health or safety and we should not be using them.[lvi] They destroy us, our children,[lvii] our fertility, our minds and our planetary home. Convenient they may be, but they have to go.
3. WiFi was never tested for health or safety and we should not be using it. It destroys us, our children, our fertility, our minds and our planetary home. Convenient it may be, but it has to go.
4. The problem with cell phones and WiFi has nothing to do with power levels. Wireless technology cannot be made safe by reducing the power. There are effects at near-zero power, and for some effects, there is an inverse power relationship, i.e. the lower the power, the worse the harm.
5. Electricity has been killing us slowly since its introduction. We need to constrain its use, not expand it. Fibre-optic cable enables 5G. If you don’t want 5G because it’s dangerous, don’t build the infrastructure that it depends on.
6. Our bodies function on biophotons. Blue light from car headlamps and street lights– both of which for some unexplained reason suddenly are no longer fitted with diffusers[lviii]– is blinding and then killing us and the biosphere. Modulating light for LiFi would kill us faster and possibly even more effectively than 5G.[lix]
7. There is one solution only to the problems of WiFi, cell phones and 5G: STOP USING THEM. All the time you pretend to ask the telcos to stop building this infrastructure while you pay them to do so, you are sending the wrong message.
8. Wake up! Choose life!Choose love!  Choose the Earth! 

• Smash your phone
• Get a landline
• Cable your computer
• OR … you could keep your portable not-smart-at-all computer, just as long as it is never connected to WiFi and not killing life on this planet.

It’s not rocket science. 

It’s just simple common sense.

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Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] Arthur Firstenberg. The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life(summary). Available at https://www.5gexposed.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/English-Summary-of-The-Invisible-Rainbow-A-History-of-Electricity-and-Life-3.pdf.

[ii] Microwave Weapons Expert Barrie Trower: “This is the saddest and most despicable document ever published in history”: “Biologic Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation (Radiowaves and Microwaves – Eurasian Communist countries (U) – DST-1910S-074-76 Date of Publication: March 1976). This is a Department of Defense Intelligence Document prepared by the US Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency and approved by the Directorate for Scientific and Technical Intelligence of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

Page vii:

“If the more advancecl nations of the West are strict in the enforcement of stringent exposure standards, there could be unfavorable effects on industrial output and military functions.” (Translation: Western nations must have lax exposure limits so that military weapons and dangerous commercial products can be developed.) Available at https://www.orsaa.org/uploads/6/7/7/9/67791943/__us_dia_1976_biological_effects_of_electromagnetic_radiation.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2_Y3DCG4i2IH29tA03jS49bj0_9ab6LzYe5ByGT6WCCqZdcR_YhsI-9Lc.. Accessed 11 September 2019.

[iii] Mike Williams. Grave Robbing in Washington: A History of the Morbid Trade. 26 October 2015. Available at https://blogs.weta.org/boundarystones/2015/10/26/grave-robbing-washington-history-morbid-trade. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[iv] Chris Kanthan. World Affairs. How Rockefeller founded modern medicine and killed natural cures. Available at https://worldaffairs.blog/2015/10/20/how-rockefeller-founded-modern-medicine-and-killed-natural-cures/. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[v] Dr. Mercola. Chiropractors and Naturopaths – Are They Dangerous? Available at https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/12/30/rethinking-medical-associations-best-interests.aspx. Accessed 13 Setember 2019. “The medical profession has a long history of opposing alternative healing professions. The rules of engagement have changed; as the AMA is finding new “legal” ways to discredit and limit practitioners of natural medicine. … Other medical associations have joined forces to manipulate the public into believing natural medicine is quackery by spreading propaganda and mistruths.”

[vi] Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. Introduction: “This document represents the doctrine adopted by the Policy Committee of the Bilderburg Group during its first known meeting in 1954. The document, dated May 1979, was found on 7 July 1986 in an IBM copier that had been purchased at a surplus sale.” Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_38tsQ4p0I;

https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&v=s_38tsQ4p0I&redir_token=L7h3DsobfUbnD56o9VTeOLzDQDB8MTU2ODI4ODIwM0AxNTY4MjAxODAz&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stopthecrime.net%2Fdocs%2FSILENT%2520WEAPONS%2520for%2520QUIET%2520WARS.pdf.

[vii] Rome Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, Griffiss Air Force Base, New York. June, 1994. Available at: https://emfrefugee.blogspot.com/2014/09/radiofrequencymicrowave-radiation.html. Accessed 11 September 2019. Conclusion: Exposure to RF/MW radiation is known to have a biological effect on living organisms. … Adherence to the ANSI Standard [9] should provide protection against harmful thermal effects and help to minimize the interaction of EM fields with the biological processes of the human body [9].

Excerpts

• Absorption: It is known that RF/MW radiated energy will be absorbed by the tissue of the human body. The depth of energy penetration into the tissue depends primarily on the wavelength of the incident radiation and the water content of the tissue [3], [6].
• Auditory effects: Individuals exposed to pulsed RF/MW radiation have reported hearing a chirping, clicking or buzzing sound emanating from inside or behind the head.
• Biological effects:
  • Adverse biological effects can occur when the body is subjected to high doses of RF/MW radiation [161.
  • Exposure of living organisms to RF/MW radiation can have a potentially dangerous biological effect. … Union. East Block countries have set more stringent standards than nations in the West [3], (8], (11], [22].
  • Exposure to higher levels of radiation can cause serious biological effects.
  • Investigators in the Soviet Unionand Eastern Europe have placed a great emphasis on the nonthermal effects of biological exposure to RF/MW radiation. They contend that electromagnetic interactions with the bioelectrical and biochemical functions of the body constitute a more serious health risk than effects from thermal heating. Nonthermal disruptions have been observed to occur at power density levels that are much lower than are necessary to induce thermal effects.
• Blood:
  • Blood circulation can be altered in the affected area and other biological functions could be indirectly affected [12].
  • There is evidence that RF/MW radiation can effect the blood and blood forming systems of animals and humans.
• Body:
  • Depth of energy penetration: Biological materials such as skin are dielectrics that consist mostly of water. Hence, these dielectrics are rich in molecular dipoles and are able to quickly absorb millimeter-wave radiation.
  • Body geometry: The orientation of the human body with respect to the incident EM field will determine the amount of RF/MW energy that is absorbed by the tissue.
  • RF/MW radiated energy is nonuniformily deposited over the whole-body surface.
• Burns:
  • Burns can cause increased vascular permeability. This can lead to significant losses of body fluids and electrolytes.
  • Serious burns can suffer fluid losses for a few days.
• Cancer:
  • In 1962, S. Prausnitz and C. Susskind reported experimental results that showed an increase in cancer among test animals exposed to RF/MW radiation.
  • In 1976, A. A. Kapustin, M. I. Rudnev, G. I. Leonskaia, and G.I. Knobecva (reference found in [17]) reported alterations in the chromosomes of bone marrow cells in laboratory animals that were exposed to RW/MW radiation.
  • Nonthermal effects may provide important clues to the understanding of carcinogenic reactions in the human body [8],[32].
  • Pulsed and CW radiation ranging in frequency from 15 to 2950 MHz and power densities from 7 to 200 mW/cm2 have caused abnormalities to occur in chromosomes. … They concluded that irradiation of tissue by pulsed RF/MW sources causes cell membranes to become more permeable to destructive chemical mutagens [8].
• Cardiovascular effects:
  • Researchers examined 100 patients suffering from radiation sickness. It was found that 71 of the patients had some type of cardiovascular problem.
  • Soviet investigators claim that exposure to low levels of RF/MW radiation that are not sufficient to induce hyperthermia can cause aberrations in the cardiovascular system of the body [7].
  • The WHO investigation found evidence linking exposure of RF/MW radiation to cardiovascular disease and cancer.
• Clothing effects: Figure 6 shows the relationship between clothing thickness and coupling efficiency as a function of frequency. The authors note that wet or damp clothing may actually reduce the amount of energy absorbed by the body because of the Debye relaxation of the water molecules [6].
• Congenital abnormalities: They found gross congenital abnormalities in rodent fetuses that were irradiated by a 2450 MHz RF/MW source at an incident power intensity of 107.4 mW/g [8].
• Eyes:
  • However, minimum exposure levels sufficient to cause ocular damage are not certain [301].
  • In 1970, Zaret, Kaplan and Kay (reference found in [30]) reported a large number of cataracts induced in humans as result of occupational exposure.
  • The researchers concluded that exposure to RF/MW radiation had caused the lens of the eye to age faster than normal (30].
• Heating: wavelengths the perception of warmth may occur at a power density level of about 8.7 mW/cm 2.
• Neurological effects: It was observed that rabbits exposed to the 5 and 10 uW/cm2 power density levels suffered alterations in the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex and disturbances to the conditioned reflex response.
• Neurological effects: observations of laboratory animals subjected to low power EM fields showed alterations in the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex and disruptions in the activity of neurons [17].
• Resonance frequency: The ANSI Standard [9] reports that the human body will absorb 7 times more energy fron radiation emitted at the resonance frequency than at a frequency of 2450 MHz [9]. … The free space whole-body resonance frequency is reported to be between 61.8-77 MHz for a Standard Model of Man [91, [22], (25]. … When the human body is in contact with the electrical ground, the whole-body resonance frequency is reduced to about 47 MHz (22]. Figure 3 shows the SAR versus the incident EM field frequency for conditions of free space and grounding [22].
• Skin: IR [Ionizing] radiation will not penetrate the outer body surface as deeply as RF/MW radiation emitted at a frequency of 2.45 GHz.
• Symptoms: The symptoms were listed as: hypotension, slower than normal heart rates, an increase in the histamine content of the blood, an increase in the activity of the thyroid gland, disruption of the endocrine-hormonal process, alterations in the sensitivity to smell, headaches, irritability, and increased fatigue.

[viii] Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons. Department of The Army, United States Army Intelligence and Security Command. Freedom of information/Privacy Office. 17 February 1998. Available at: https://www.petermooring.nl/blog/?p=93. Accessed 11 September 2019. Effects described:

• Microwave heating – Heating the human body to incapacitate a person
• Microwave hearing – Letting a person hear sounds/voices in his head without normal sound
• Neural control – Disrupt normal muscle control, invoke muscle spasms
• Acoustic energy – Pressure sensations, nausea, eye spasms, see the world turning
• Laser induced biological effects:
  • Chemical effect
  • Thermal effects – The primary mechanism for laser induced injury
  • Mechanical or acoutical mechanical effects – Pressure wave can result in explosive tissue injury
• The effects of lasers on eyes:
  • Dazzling or induced glare
  • Flashblinding or loss of night adaptation
  • Permanent or semipermanent blinding.

[ix] Influence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation at non-thermal intensities on the human body (a review of work by Russian and Ukrainian researchers). Published in No Place To Hide – Newsletter of the Cellular Phone Taskforce Inc., February 2001. Available at: https://magdahavas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RFR-Russian-Ukrainian-1.pdf.

Highlights:

• Humanity may have crossed a threshold of recoverability from PEM exposure …
• No safe dose, even at extremely low EMF intensity …
• Russian standards hundreds to thousands times more stringent than Western ones …
• Information flow disturbance in the body among bio-damage mechanisms.

[x] Biologic Effects and Health Hazards of Microwave Radiation. This 350-page document is the result of a symposium (convened by the World Health Organization, among others), held in Warsaw from 15–18 October 1973, with the participation of 60 researchers specializing in the biological effects of microwaves on humans.

The document describes primarily the adverse effects of microwave radiation on neurological, vascular and cardiac systems, as well as on the thyroid and thrombocytes; it also reports that microwaves can cause Type II diabetes, sleep issues, cataracts, opacification of the ocular lens, and behavioural disorders, among others. Available at:

https://www.emfoff.com/symposium/. Accessed 11 September 2019.

[xi] Jerry Tennant, MD: Healing is Voltage — The Physics of Emotions | EU2017

29 September 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Ia6vI4PA. Accessed 11 Septembr 2019.

Most people have heard of the “mind/body connection” and are aware that emotions affect the way people act. However, few can describe how that works. What is relatively new is our understanding that emotions are stored in and around the body as magnetic fields. Not only do these magnetic fields cause the biochemical effects noted above, but they also block the flow of voltage in the associated muscle battery packs that provide the voltage necessary for organs to function and repair themselves. He will discuss the human body’s battery packs, wiring system, and the physics of how our electronic systems are affected by these emotions. In addition, he will discuss how other magnetic fields and scalar energy can be used to erase these emotions, leaving behind only memories that do not disrupt our health and physiology. (cont.)

[xii] Department of the Army, United States Army Intelligence and Security Command. Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons. 17 February 1998 (date of FOIA release 13 December 2006).

www.targetedamerica.com/uploads/1/2/3/9/123991101/bioeffects_of_selected_non-lethal_weapons.pdf.

[xiii] Environmental Health Trust (https://ehtrust.org/policy/outdated-ansi-and-ieee-standards/): In 1985 the United States government adopted an exposure limit from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI-an industry & military organization), ANSI C95.1-1982 Exposure Limit Standard. In 1996 the U.S. government adopted (updated from the ANSI Standard) the IEEE C95.1-1991 Exposure Limit Standard. IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers is substantially an industry and military organization.

[xiv] Video (in French): Être connecté peut nuire gravement à la santé – Reportage suisse remarquable (Being connected can seriously harm your health – remarkable Swiss reporting). 31 May 2017. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnnUbWRGJz8. Excerpt”

(Switch on English subtitles at 15.05)

“… hence the following question. Do the current emission standards effectively protect us from electromagnetic radiation? it should be borne in mind that the standards were drawn up well after the time when all electrical equipment was already in place. These standards are set by the industry in such a way as to have irradiation values that are acceptable and to avoid lawsuits.

“These images from Norwegian television show the power of industry in the establishment of standards.

“The footage was shot at a meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an organization of world telecommunications experts. When their members specialising in electromagnetic safety reveal the names of their employers, here’s what we learn:

“[(C Keito?), Motorola; (Mike Welby?), US Air Force; (?) US Army; Motorola; Alcatel-Lucent; US Air Force; Nokia; France Telecom; Ericsson; US Air Force]

“In fact, they are industry representatives. IEEE has issued recommendations on exposure values related to mobile telephony, which have been adopted without much modification by Europe and Switzerland.

“The standards are defined not for health protection, saying there are no effects, there are no risks. They simply say, “Above these values one is certain that there is a risk of biological effects in the short term”. And actually that message has been distorted a bit by saying that below those values, nothing happens.

“In most countries today, the maximum exposure value for antennas is 61 volts per metre. Switzerland has adopted this standard by adding a precautionary principle limiting exposure to 6 volts per metre in places designated “places of sensitive use”. This includes housing, schools, workstations inside buildings, some playgrounds, but not outdoor public spaces or transit areas such as railway stations.

“The telcos are constantly getting greedier. They want to get rid of the 6-volt per-metre straitjacket that they feel limits their activities. …”

[xv] Amy Worthington. The Radiation Poisoning Of America. Global Research, 9 October 2007; Idaho Observer, 7 October 2007. Excerpt: “Prior to 1996, the wireless age was not coming online fast enough, primarily because communities had the authority to block the siting of cell towers. But the Federal Communications Act of 1996 made it nearly impossible for communities to stop construction of cell towers “even if they pose threats to public health and the environment. Since the decision to enter the age of wireless convenience was politically determined for us, we have forgotten well-documented safety and environmental concerns and, with a devil-may-care zeal that is lethally short-sighted, we have incorporated into our lives every wireless toy that comes on the market. We behave as if we are addicted to radiation. Our addiction to cell phones has led to harder “drugs” like wireless Internet. And now we are bathing in the radiation that our wireless enthusiasm has unleashed. Those who are addicted, uninformed, corporately biased and politically-influenced may dismiss our scientifically-sound concerns about the apocalyptic hazards of wireless radiation. Available at https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/the-radiation-poisoning-of-america/. Accessed 11 September 2019.

[xvi] Ibid. “Myriad symptoms of radiation poisoning can be induced at exposure levels hundreds, even thousands of times lower than current standards permit. Russia’s public exposure standards are 100 times more stringent than ours because Russian scientists have consistently shown that, at U.S. exposure levels, humans develop pathological changes in heart, kidney, liver and brain tissues, plus cancers of all types.”

https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/the-radiation-poisoning-of-america/.

[xvii] Disclaimer on icnirp website: ICNIRP e.V. undertakes all reasonable measures to ensure the reliability of information presented on the website, but does not guarantee the correctness, reliability, or completeness of the information and views published. The content of our website is provided to you for information only. We do not assume any responsibility for any damage, including direct or indirect loss suffered by users or third parties in connection with the use of our website and/or the information it contains, including for the use or the interpretation of any technical data, recommendations, or specifications available on our website. Available at https://www.icnirp.org/en/legal-notice.html. Accessed 11 Septembr 2019.

[xviii] Bill Hicks on the Kennedy Assassination. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aaqN7SqLpU. Accessed 11 Seotember 2019.

[xix] Review: Biological and pathological effects of 2.45 GHz radiation on cells, fertility, brain, and behaviour. 26 June 2019. Available at http://www.emfsa.co.za/research-and-studies/review-biological-and-pathological-effects-of-2-45-ghz-radiation-on-cells-fertility-brain-and-behavior/. Accessed 13 September 2019. Original German: https://www.diagnose-funk.org/publikationen/artikel/detail&newsid=1256. Conclusions: Based on the extensive body of research and the adverse health effects demonstrated in the majority of the studies, it is recommended that steps should be taken to minimize RF radiation exposure in accordance with official recommendations. Wired solutions should be given preference. Current exposure limits and SAR values do not protect from health risks associated with Wi-Fi radiation.

[xx] Dr. Lennart Hardell. ICNIRP draft on new radiofrequency guidelines is flawed. 2 July 2019. Available at http://www.avaate.org/spip.php?article2828. Accessed 13 September 2019. “Most remarkable is that the science on health effects is still based on thermal (heating) effect from RFR just as the evaluations published 1998 and updated in 2009. In the draft only thermal effects are considered for health effects (page 7). Van Rongen states there is ’No evidence that RF-EMF causes such diseases as cancer’ (page 8). These comments are based on the power point presentation. However, there is no evidence that non-thermal effects are considered and thus a large majority of scientific evidence on human health effects, not to mention hazards to the environment. Thus the basis for new guidelines is flawed and the whole presentation should be dismissed as scientifically flawed.”

[xxi] EMF Dosimetry (General methodology and RF region) EMF Dosimetry (General methodology and RF region). Dr. Soichi Watanabe, ICNIRP Member Affiliated with National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan  Available at https://www.icnirp.org/cms/upload/presentations/NIR2012pdf/watanabe.pdf. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[xxii] Olga Sheean. The [World Health Organization] WHO cover-up that is costing us the Earth.

Video available at: https://www.emfoff.com/cover-up/?fbclid=IwAR0x-VNP6A4UTpCgwasElSJOG_GyuswK3vED7piTY4RWDmAFPq-rlDwNckE. The facts about 5G and other sources of wireless radiation have been very skilfully downplayed and covered up by WHO, industry and governments, causing many people to believe it’s not a problem. The truth is that it’s causing havoc all over the planet. Find out what WHO and governments have been hiding from you. Download PDF – The WHO cover-up that is costing us the Earth: Are you ready to say goodbye? The 5G spin, the deeper truth and what you can do: https://www.emfoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/WHO-cover-up.pdf.

[xxiii] Belpomme D, Campagnac C, Irigaray P. Rev Environ Health. 2015;30(4):251-71. doi: 10.1515/reveh-2015-0027. Reliable disease biomarkers characterizing and identifying electrohypersensitivity and multiple chemical sensitivity as two etiopathogenic aspects of a unique pathological disorder.

[xxiv] United Nations. Human Rights Council: 5G is cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under resolution 39/46. 22 February 2019. Available at. https://undocs.org/A/HRC/40/NGO/217/. Henry Lai: Cell Phones and Cancer – TalkingStickTV. 23 June 2011. Available at https://youtu.be/NZl2MSHDKls. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[xxv] Deadly Statistics. The chances of being killed ina terrorist attackare about 1 in 20 million. A person is as likely to bekilled by his or her own furniture, and more likely to die in a car accident, drown in a bathtub, or in a building fire than from a terrorist attack. Available at http://www.lifeinsurancequotes.org/additional-resources/deadly-statistics/. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[xxvi] Barrie Trower. Microwaves in weapons and wireless telecommunication. “Weapons utilize much less power [than telecom radiation].” Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3QeSOU8qC0. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[xxvii] Peter Delos. “The Way to a New Phased Array Radar Architecture.” TechTime: Electronics & Technology News. 15 January 2018. Available at https://techtime.news/2018/01/ 15/analog-devices-phased-array-radar/. Accessed 14 September 2019. “Although there is a lot of discussion of massive MIMO and automotive radar, it should not be forgotten that most of the recent radar development and beamforming R&D has been in the defense industry, and it is now being adapted for commercial applications. While phased array and beamforming moved from R&D efforts to reality in the 2000s, a new wave of defense focused arrays are now expected, enabled by industrial technology offering solutions that were previously cost prohibitive.”

[xxviii] Democracy Now! How Big Wireless War-Gamed the Science on Risks, While Making Customers Addicted to Their Phones. Available at https://youtu.be/un-vXIzIIOo. Accessed 13 September 2019. We continue our conversation with Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation’s environment correspondent and investigative editor, who co-authored a major new exposé: “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe.” He discusses how wireless companies “war-gamed the science” by funding friendly studies and attacking critical ones; the potential dangers of the pending expansion of 5G with the “Internet of Things”; the role of the telecommunications industry officials turned federal regulators; and how companies deliberately addicted customers to this technology through the addition of social media.

[xxix] Ben Piven. Rebelling against attention economy, Humane Tech movement expands: A growing coalition of social groups is pushing back against tech companies that feed digital addiction and overload. 25 July 2019. Available at

https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/rebelling-attention-economy-humane-tech-movement-expands-190724210851788.html. |Tristan Harris is fighting to save you. An ex-Google design ethicist, Harris cofounded the Time Well Spent movement and the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) to combat the ‘existential threat’ of unchecked technological power over humanity, from digital addiction and information overload to Twitter bots and political polarisation. CHT is trying to halt what it calls the ‘downgrading’ of humans by smartphones and social media – within an ‘extractive’ attention economy where Silicon Valley firms profit from “playing tricks” on people’s minds. ‘More than two billion people – a psychological footprint bigger than Christianity – are jacked into social platforms,’ says a pamphlet from CHT. ‘Algorithms recommend increasingly extreme, outrageous topics to keep us glued to tech sites fed by advertising … It’s a race to the bottom of the brainstem.’”

[xxx] Garfield Benjamin. Silicon Valley wants to read your mind – here’s why you should be worried. 16 August 2019. Available at

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/08/silicon-valley-wants-to-read-your-mind-heres-why-you-should-be-worried.html?utm_source=Activist+Post+Subscribers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=61979a3ea3-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_term=0_b0c7fb76bd-61979a3ea3-387959801. Accessed 13 September 2019. “Not content with monitoring almost everything you do online, Facebook now wants to read your mind as well. The social media giant recently announced a breakthrough in its plan to create a device that reads people’s brainwaves to allow them to type just by thinking. And Elon Musk wants to go even further. One of the Tesla boss’s other companies, Neuralink, is developing a brain implant to connect people’s minds directly to a computer. Musk admits that he takes inspiration from science fiction, and that he wants to make sure humans can ‘keep up’ with artificial intelligence. He seems to have missed the part of sci-fi that acts as a warning for the implications of technology. These mind-reading systems could affect our privacy, security, identity, equality and personal safety. Do we really want all that left to companies with philosophies such as that of Facebook’s former mantra, ‘move fast and break things’?”

[xxxi] TWiT Tech Podcast Network. What is surveillance capitalism? [selling behavioural data on human beings]. 11 January 2019. Available at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=pD3Gw8rvcJ8. Accessed 13 September 2019. Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future(https://amzn.to/2H8B207) at the New Frontier of Power. She talks with Leo Laporte about how social media is being used to influence people. Watch the full episode at https://twit.tv/tri/380. Host: Leo Laporte Guest: Shoshana Zuboff

[xxxii] Oxfam. Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world. 16 January 2017. Available at https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world. Accessed 13 September 2019. “Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a new report published by Oxfam today to mark the annual meeting of political and business leaders in Davos. Oxfam’s report, ‘An economy for the 99 percent’, shows that the gap between rich and poor is far greater than had been feared. It details how big business and the super-rich are fuelling the inequality crisis by dodging taxes, driving down wages and using their power to influence politics. It calls for a fundamental change in the way we manage our economies so that they work for all people, and not just a fortunate few.”

[xxxiii] Marco Cáceres. Scientist Says 1 in 2 Children Born in 2025 Will Be Autistic – Something is Clearly Causing this Health Crisis of Historic Proportions. Available at http://humansarefree.com/2019/07/scientist-says-1-in-2-children-born-in.html. Accessed 13 September 2019. “On June 5, 2014, senior research scientist Stephanie Seneff, PhD of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory made the following statement at an event sponsored by the Groton Wellness organization in Groton, Massachusetts: ‘At today’s rate, by 2025, 1 in 2 children will be autistic’.

[xxxiv] Anna Remington. The Conversation. Why employing autistic people makes good business sense. 14 April 2015. Available at https://theconversation.com/why-employing-autistic-people-makes-good-business-sense-39948. Accessed 13 September 2019. “Microsoft has announced its intention to hire more autistic people – not as a charitable enterprise but because, as corporate vice-president Mary Ellen Smith said: ‘People with autism bring strengths that we need at Microsoft.’ Employing autistic people makes good business sense. Microsoft is not the only firm to reach this conclusion. More and more companies are beginning to seek employees from the pool of autistic talent. Specialisterneis a consultancy that recruits only autistic individuals. Originally based in Denmark it now operates in 12 countries worldwide and is currently working with Microsoft.”

[xxxv] Confessions of an Economic Hitman – John Perkins. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWuAct1BxHU. Accessed 13 September 2019. “Economic Hit Man (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

“Perkins charges that the proposed conditions for this debt forgiveness require countries to privatise their health, education, electric, water and other public services. Those countries would also have to discontinue subsidies and trade restrictions that support local business, but accept the continued subsidization of certain G8 businesses by the US and other G8 countries, and the erection of trade barriers on imports that threaten G8 industries.”

[xxxvi] Katie Rooney. TIME. Naomi Klein on ‘Disaster Capitalism’. 27 September 2007. Available at http://tsd.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/time-magazine-disaster-capitalism. “In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein, best known for her 2000 book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, explores how capitalism came to dominate the world, from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Canada, with the help of violent shock tactics in times of natural disaster or tragedy. Released in the U.S. September 18 and throughout Europe and Canada the week before that, the book counters the theory that unfettered capitalism and a successful democracy go hand-in-hand. TIME sat down with Klein to discuss her conclusions, the research process and what kind of impact she’s hoping her new book will have.”

[xxxvii] Computing Forever. Facebook & Google: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=92&v=Ya1eTbTUUvc. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[xxxviii] World Health Organization, United Nations Environment Programme and International Radiation Protection Association (IRPA, predecessor to ICNIRP): Environmental Health Criteria 16: Radiofrequency and Microwaves. 1981. Available at https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/39107/9241540761_eng.pdf. Accessed  13 September 2019. Excerpts: “… General population exposure from man-made sources of microwave and RF radiation now exceeds that from natural sources by many orders of magnitude. … increased levels of environmental electromagnetic radiation may constitute a problem in many countries. … … Problems of pollution range from … to direct risks to the health of individuals. … Lesions have been found in the internal organs of animals exposed for prolonged periods during which there was no significant rise in rectal temperature. Furthermore, such animals did not show any overt signs of distress. Acute exposures may cause injury to the eye.The cornea and crystalline lens are particularly susceptible to injury within the frequency range of 1-300 GHz. The cornea is at greatest risk between 10 and 300 GHz and the crystalline lens from 1 to 10 GHz. … A highly conservative approach would be to keep exposure limits close to natural background levels. However, this is not technically feasible. A reasonable risk-benefit analysis has to be considered. [Author’s translation: In order to protect industry and the military, people must die.]… National and international agreements on exposure limits, ways and means of controlling this type of environmental pollution, and concerted efforts to implement such agreements are needed.” (emphasis added)

[xxxix] George Carlo, Ph.D, M.S., J.D. “Letter To AT&T Chairman C. Michael Armstrong from Wireless Technology Research (WTR) Chairman Dr. George L. Carlo.” Aegis Corporationonline, publisher. http://www.goaegis.com/articles/gcarlo_100799.html. This letter claims the occurrence of brain cancer and certain types of tumors among cellular phone users is twice that of non-users. Dr. Carlo is requesting AT&T’s assistance to distribute this information to consumers so that they can make an “informed judgment about how much of this unknown risk they wish to assume in their use of wireless phones.” A signed copy of this letter was also sent to a panel of experts convened by the British Parliament to evaluate the science and health concerns regarding wireless communications.

Tom Wheeler suppressed the Wireless Technology Research report. He became Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2013 and ushered in 5G with great fanfare in 2016, in full knowledge of its catastrophic consequences. See Peter G. Tocci. Wireless Technology: Ultra Convenient. Endlessly Entertaining. Criminally Instigated. Terminally Pathological. 9 February 2019. Available at https://www.activistpost.com/2019/02/wireless-technology-ultra-convenient-endlessly-entertaining-criminally-instigated-terminally-pathological.html. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[xl] No Place To Hide – Newsletter of the Cellular Phone Taskforce Inc. February 2001. Influence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation at non-thermal intensities on the human body (a review of work by Russian and Ukrainian researchers)

https://magdahavas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RFR-Russian-Ukrainian-1.pdf.

[xli] Igor Ogorodnev. I am terrified of ‘children’s crusader’ Greta Thunberg – and you should be too. 13 March 2019. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/453730-greta-thunberg-environmental-activist-crusader-saint/.

[xlii] Greenpeace pioneer: “Climate change neither dangerous nor man-made.” 13 August 2019. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPQD5iejbnA. According to Moore, climate change is a completely natural phenomenon. The current modern warm period began 300 years ago, when the Little Ice Age came to an end. “Nothing to be afraid of,” stresses Moore. But the climate alarmists have lived off frightening people. Most scientists who speak of a crisis would be earning their living from government contracts. Watch the entre broadcast to find out why Moore is an important voice to listen to in the current climate hysteria.

[xliii] Eli Beer. Jerusalem Post. Children are dying because parents are on their phones. 3 August 2019. https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Children-are-dying-because-parents-are-on-their-phones-597552. Last year, the German Lifeguarding Association published findings that drew a direct link between children dying in the water and parents cellphone usage at the time of death.

[xliv] Tim Henderson. Stateline. Too Many Pedestrians Injured by Looking at Their Phones. 11 December 2014. Available at https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/too-many-pedestrians-injured-by-looking-at-their-phones.html. Accessed 13 September 2019. “They walk in front of cars, and into tree limbs and street signs. They fall off curbs and bridges into wet cement and creek beds. They are distracted walkers who, while calling or texting on mobile phones, have suffered cuts and bruises, sustained serious head injuries or even been killed.”

[xlv] Review: Biological and pathological effects … op. cit.

[xlvi] Ray Broomhall. Cell phone magnetic fields breach WHO’s 0.3μT safety limit at 6,200 μT – dangerous to children. September 2019. Available at https://emrlegaleducation.com/latest-updates/. Download slide show: https://emrlegaleducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Cell-phone-magnetic-fields-breach-WHOs-0.3uT-safety-limit-at-6200uT.pptx.

An important slide show that clearly shows that cell phones are massively dangerous to children.

[xlvii] European Parliament. April 2019. 5G Deployment: State of Play in Europe, USA and Asia. Available at www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2019/631060/IPOL_IDA(2019)631060_EN.pdf. “The notion of a ‘race’ is part of the campaign but it is becoming clear that the technology will take much longer than earlier generations to perfect. China, for instance, sees 5G as at least a ten-year programme to become fully working and completely rolled out nationally. This is because the technologies involved with 5G are much more complex. One aspect, for example, that is not well understood today is the unpredictable propagation patterns that could result in unacceptable levels of human exposure to electromagnetic radiation.”

[xlvii] Blue Cross Blue Shield. The Health of America. The Health of Millennials. 24 April 2019.  Available athttps://www.bcbs.com/the-health-of-america/reports/the-health-of-millennials. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[xlviii] Télévision Suisse Romande. Être connecté peut nuire gravement à la santé – Reportage suisse remarquable (Being connected can seriously harm your health – remarkable Swiss reporting). 31 May 2017. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnnUbWRGJz8. Translation: “These images from Norwegian television show the power of industry in the establishment of standards.

“The footage was shot at a meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an organization of world telecommunications experts. When their members specializing in electromagnetic safety revealthe names of their employers, here’s what we learn:

[Audio: (C Keito?), Motorola; (Mike Welby?), US Air Force; (?) US Army; Motorola; Alcatel-Lucent; US Air Force; Nokia; France Telecom; Ericsson; US Air Force]

“In fact, they are industry representatives. IEEE has issued recommendations on exposure values related to mobile telephony, which have been adopted without much modification by Europe and Switzerland.

“The standards are defined not for health protection, saying there are no effects, there are no risks. They simply say, “Above these values one is certain that there is a risk of biological effects in the short term”. And actually that message has been distorted a bit by saying that below those values, nothing happens.”

[l] Brett Molina. USA Today. Blue light from phones, tablets could accelerate blindness and hurt vision, study finds. 13 August 2018. Available at https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2018/08/13/blue-light-phones-tablets-could-accelerate-blindness-study/974837002/. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[li] Josh Loeb.London councils remove almost 50,000 trees in five years: ‘Our canopy is vanishing’. 2 May 2017. Available at https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/05/our-canopy-is-vanishing-london-councils-remove-almost-50-000-trees-in-five-years/. Accessed 13 September 2019. Sandra Laville. The Guardian. Millions of trees at risk in secretive Network Rail felling programme: Plan to stop leaves and branches falling on lines has already led to thousands of trees being chopped down. 29 April 2018. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/29/millions-of-trees-at-risk-in-secretive-network-rail-felling-programme. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[lii] University of Surrey.5G Whitepaper: Meeting the Challenge of “Universal” Coverage, Reach and Reliability in the Coming 5G Era. Available at https://www.surrey.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-03/white-paper-rural-5G-vision.pdf. Accessed 13 September 2019. “Having adjacent trees and or building at comparable heights to the mast can reduce coverage by as much as 70% in that direction, which is not in the interests of the operator, the local planning authorities and more importantly the mobile phone user. This is the source of many of today’s mobile coverage issues for consumers in many rural locations.”

[liii] Dana Dovey. Newsweek. Radiation From Cellphones, Wi-Fi Is Hurting the Birds and the Bees; 5G May Make It Worse. 19 May 2018. Available at https://www.newsweek.com/migratory-birds-bee-navigation-5g-technology-electromagnetic-radiation-934830. Accessed 13 September 2019.

[liv] ‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss. From the Washington Post, 15 October 2018. Available at https://smombiegate.org/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss/. Accessed 13 September 2019. “Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new reportsuggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest’s insect-eating animals have gone missing, too.

“In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percentdecrease in flying insectsin the past few decades in German nature preserves.

“The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this startling loss of insect abundance extends to the Americas. The study’s authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates….SNIP”

Note from reader: “When I checked on the location of the “pristine national forest” in Puerto Rico, mentioned in the article, I found that it is located approximately 50 miles from Cayey Puerto Rico, the home to the WSR-88 Doppler Radar which is one of the most powerful and advanced weather surveillance doppler radars in the world, transmitting at 750,000 watts. Cayey is a mountain municipality in central Puerto Rico with the radar facility located on the central mountain. Whether or not this has anything to do with the decline in insects of the national forest is an interesting question. Perhaps not so pristine after all…..”

[lv] Arthur Firstenberg. 5G, Birds, Bees, and Humanity. 12 May 2019. Available at . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpdJ_t5XMvw.

[lvi] Professor Emeritus Martin Pall. Letter to California Legislators. 7 August 2017. https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Pall-Letter-to-CalLegis-FINAL-8-7-17.pdf. Accessed 13 September 2019. “None of our wireless communication devices are ever tested biologically for safety – not cell phone towers, not cell phones, not Wi-Fi, not cordless phones, not smart meters and certainly not 5G phones, or radar units in cars – before they are put out to irradiate an unsuspecting public.”

[lvii] Irradiated: A comprehensive compilation and analysis of the literature on radiofrequency fields and the negative biological impacts of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (particularly radiofrequency fields) on biological organisms (416 pages). Available at https://wirelessaction.wordpress.com/irradiated/. Accessed 14 September 2019.  

“Our genetic legacy, our children, should be listed as an endangered species

The most obscene aspect of this ever-present technology is the unrestrained proliferation of Wi-Fi in schools (the use of Wi-Fi is not even necessary; schools can be wired with telecommunication cables, as has been used for decades). If after exposure at school, children go home to another wireless environment, then they are exposed day and night. Children are more harmed by RF than adults; in essence we are destroying the future potential of our collective gene pool.”

[lviii] France. Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire de l’Alimentation, de l’Environnement et du Travail (ANSES) Effets sur la santé humaine et sur l’environnement (faune et flore) des diodes électroluminescentes (LED) (Effects of light emitting diodes on human health and the environment (flora and fauna)). April 2019. Available at https://www.anses.fr/fr/system/files/AP2014SA0253Ra-Anx.pdf. Review of report, at https://www.sante-sur-le-net.com/lumiere-bleue-led-nefaste-sante-environnement/: “A negative impact on health and the environment – Recent studies on LED technology have shown that the blue light emitted is potentially harmful to health at at least two levels:

• Direct retinal toxicity, which may lead to a decrease in visual acuity, even with brief exposure
• Increased risk of AMD (Age-Related Macular Degeneration) with chronic exposure
• A risk of glare especially with LED headlights, which can be sources of accidents especially in the elderly
• An impact on the biological clock and sleep, when people expose themselves to the blue light of LEDs at the end of the day.

Other health effects of LED lights may result from the high variability in light intensity. This variability can lead to headaches or eyestrain, especially in children and adolescents.

But health would not be the only victim of LEDs, which could also impact the environment and biodiversity. Scientific studies show an increase in mortality and a reduction in animal and plant biodiversity in lighted environments at night.

In response to these findings, ANSES issued in its last report several recommendations aimed at limiting the population’s exposure to LED light rich in blue. Its main recommendations are as follows:

• Give as much preference as possible to domestic lighting of the “hot white” typ
• Limit the exposure of the population, and in particular children and adolescents, to the blue light of night and evening screens
• Speed up the regulation of LED technology.

In addition, ANSES warns the general public about the effectiveness of protection against blue light. Treated lenses, goggles or specific screens would have variable effectiveness and their ability to maintain biological rhythm is not proven to date. Performance criteria could be developed to help the public better select these means of protection.

From an environmental point of view, cutting off or reducing public lighting at night is the main measure that can reduce the effect of LED lights on biodiversity. Some French cities have already adopted the measure and others are planning to do so soon.

Presented as a technological advance and a more energy-efficient solution, LED lights seem to present a heavy health and environmental toll! A toll that puts into question the prospects for their continued use …”

[lix] Arthur Firstenberg. LiFi will be Worse than WiFi. Email to author. “The harm is done NOT primarily by the carrier frequency but by the modulation. Not only the modulation frequency but the modulation wave form, the rise and fall time, the pulse duration, the repetition rate, and all of the other informational properties. Changing the carrier wave to a much shorter frequency, i.e. from microwaves to light, does not change the informational characteristics. The major difference is that our bodies reject microwaves because they are foreign to us, but our bodies preferentially absorb light because it is a necessary nutrient. Therefore the harm will be much worse.”

“We Wrestle Not Against Flesh and Blood, but Against Powers, Against the Rulers of the Darkness of this World, Against Spiritual Wickedness in High Places.” (Epistle to the Ephesians 6:12, New Testament)

***

“Hegemony” is a sanitized word “vomited” up by colonial media “news” reports.

The word pretends to describe the myriad ways in which a country or countries criminally destroy prey countries to assert their dominance, their control, and their privileged access over stolen resources.

Imperialists collectively “punish” prey countries with fake captagon-fuelled “revolutions”, economic warfare, terrorism, the destruction of country-sustaining infrastructure, assassinations of leading scientists, the destruction of historical artifacts and myriad other ways.

Consent is fabricated in such a way that domestic populations in the imperial countries themselves are led to believe that they will somehow benefit, but they too are being plundered and looted.

Imperial warfare is also class warfare. The plundered wealth rushes upwards to the oligarch classes that create the wars.

Multitudes globally pay the price in death and disease and starvation and dispossession. There’s nothing humanitarian about any of this.

The interview below with Syrian Scientist and antiwar activist Dr. Ayssar Midani lays bare the converging lies that grease the wheels of imperial wars of aggression.

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Dr. Ayssar Midani is a prominent Syrian scientist and anti-war activist based in France. She is the chairperson of NOSTIA, a network and community of expatriate Syrian Scientists, Technologists and Innovators.

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. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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On September 11, the Senate  heard from Trump’s nominee to be the Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Aurelia Skipwith, a former employee of agrochemical corporation Monsanto. 

“Skipwith has a history of working with big-time special interests like Monsanto. Outside of her days at the agrochemical corporation, her resume is surprisingly scant for someone that would be charged with managing America’s fish and wildlife. But like so many other Trump political appointees, Skipwith has already rubbed elbows with oil and gas interests and is poised to continue to curry favors for special interests at the expense of our public lands, fish and wildlife if she is confirmed,” said Jayson O’Neill, Deputy Director of the Western Values Project. 

While Skipwith was working for Monsanto, the corporation lobbied the department of the Interior, Congress, and other federal agencies on the Endangered Species Act. In 2012, Skipwith even won an award from the agrochemical corporation for her work.

After Skipwith joined FWS as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Fish, Wildlife and Park, FWS decided to rescind a ban on farms within national wildlife refuges using bee-killing pesticides – a decision highly favorable to Monsanto. This wasn’t the only departmental action that would ostensibly benefit agrochemical corporations. Secretary Bernhardt is under investigation by Interior’s Inspector General for his role in suppressing a scientific assessment on the impacts of pesticides on endangered and threatened species.

According to her publically released calendars, Skipwith has been deeply involved in the administration’s rollback of habitat protections for the imperiled sage grouse and spoke at the oil and gas association Independent Petroleum Association of America’s (IPAA) regulators’ forum. The IPAA is a former client of Secretary Bernhardt’s whose political director was caught on tape laughing about the connections and access they have within the Trump administration.

In July 2017, Skipwith sent memos to the National Park Service and FWS requesting they review rules that prevented hunters from killing bears and wolves using extreme techniques, like  “baiting the animals with greasy doughnuts, ambushing mothers with pups in dens and shooting animals from boats while the bears are swimming.”

Skipwith’s qualifications for the nomination have been called into question, given that her resume offers no previous experience working within FWS, aside from her work as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks over the last two years within the Trump administration. She was originally nominated under the tenure of former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke – who ran in the same circles as Skipwith’s then-fiance. Recently, 27 former FWS employees united in opposition to her nomination, critiquing her background and experience.

Her nomination was celebrated by both scandal-ridden Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who resigned in disgrace in late-2018, as well as current conflict-ridden Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. Her original nomination died at the end of the previous Congress, but she was renominated for the same position on July 17, 2019.

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On August 29, the United Arab Emirates carried out a series of airstrikes on forces loyal to the Saudi-backed government of Yemen. The strikes reportedly killed or wounded over 300 people. The UAE said that the targets were some “terrorist militias”. However, the Saudi-backed government claimed that the UAE targeted its troops in Aden and Zinjibar supporting forces of the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council. This incident became the first time when the UAE provided STC units with a direct military support in their clashes with Saudi-backed forces.

An intense fighting between UAE- and Saudi-backed forces were ongoing across southern Yemen, especially in the city of Aden, almost entire August. In the first half of September, the intensity of clashes decreased. Nonetheless, the conflict within the Saudi-UAE-led coalition remains unresolved.

Essentially, the UAE and forces it backs are shifting focus from fighting against the Houthis, to fighting against the Saudi-backed government, further widening the rift. Taking into account that STC units are the most military capable part of coalition-backed troops, this undermines the already low chances of the coalition to achieve a military victory over the Houthis.

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Watch the video here.

Interests and vision of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East have been in conflict for a long time. Nonetheless, this tendency became especially obvious in 2019. The decline of influence of the House of Saud in the region and inside Saudi Arabia itself led to logical attempts of other regional players to gain a leading position in the Arabian Peninsula. The main challenger is the UAE and the House of Maktoum.

Contradictions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE turned into an open military confrontation between their proxies in Yemen. Since August 29, Saudi Arabia has provided no symmetric answer to the UAE military action against its proxies. It seems that the Saudi leadership has no will or distinct political vision of how it should react in this situation. Additionally, the Saudi military is bogged in a bloody conflict in Yemen and struggles to defend its own borders from Houthi attacks.

The UAE already gained an upper hand in the standoff with Saudi Arabia in the economic field. This motivates it for further actions to expand its influence in the region.

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Iran has trumped Trump by routing its oil tanker along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, pausing at ports in Greece and Turkey, then anchoring off Syria’s Tartus. The current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump, persuaded London to detain the tanker, originally named Grace 1, as it sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar, a British overseas territory. On July 4, armed royal marines were dispatched to apprehend the ship, upsetting the crew with this unnecessary show of force. Britain argued it had seized the ship because it intended to violate EU sanctions, barring Iranian oil deliveries to sanctions-ridden Syria. Commentators argued that Iran is not a member of the EU and cannot be expected to abide by bloc sanctions against itself.

Although Trump urged Britain to hold the vessel indefinitely, it was released by Gibraltar’s high court on August 15. Britain said Iran had agreed to the condition that it would not dock at any country under EU sanctions. The ship was renamed Adrian Darya 1 and began its slow journey eastwards, monitored by US and British ships and satellites. The Trump administration issued a warrant for the tanker’s arrest and threatened to impose sanctions on any country offering assistance or any potential buyer of the cargo. Last week, a desperate US official offered the Indian captain of the ship millions of dollars to sail to a port where the US could detain it. The captain switched off the transponders that identify the ship’s location and satellite photos subsequently showed it be off the coast of Syria.

Once safely in Tartus, where the Russians have a naval facility, Iran trumped Trump a second time by announcing its cargo of 2.1 million barrels of crude had been sold and delivered to an unidentified customer, presumably in heavily sanctioned Syria. Iran can be charged with “showboating” at Trump’s expense.

Israel retaliated on behalf of Trump by bombing and killing 18 pro-Iranian Iraqi militiamen fighting Daesh in southeastern Syria. This was a strike that was in no one’s interest.

The Trump administration’s response was given by Treasury official Sigal Mandelker, who said: “We will continue to put pressure on Iran and as [Trump] has said, there will be no waivers of any kind for Iran’s oil.” She also accused Iran of engaging in a “game of deception”. Her reaction was hardly surprising. She has pledged to defend “our great partner Israel” by imposing sanctions on Iran, journalist Max Blumenthan revealed in an article published online. She is the architect of the extreme sanctions regime.

There would have been no need for sanctions or Iranian deception if Trump had honoured the 2015 agreement, under which Iran dismantled 90 per cent of its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. He withdrew for several reasons. He is determined to destroy all the achievements of President Barack Obama, the Iran deal being his major foreign success. During his election campaign, Trump promised his conservative “base” of supporters that he would “tear up the deal” although most members of this constituency probably have no idea where Iran is and are not interested in the nuclear deal. He also sought to please his great friend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by not only wrecking the deal by pulling out, but also by imposing ever tougher sanctions which Mandelker has used to punish anyone who has anything to do with Iran, even US academics who attend conferences in Iran.

Although France, Germany and Britain have tried to establish a mechanism which would allow Iran to sell enough oil to purchase medicine and humanitarian supplies, this has not yet come into force due to US pressure and interference. Iranian officials argue the country needs to export between 750,000 and 1.5 million barrels of crude a day in order to save the agreement from collapse. Tehran has given Europe two months to find a way to circumvent Trump’s sanctions. Europe, which continues to support the agreement, is trapped by Trump and his exactions. Last week, France proposed a financial bailout, allowing Iran to receive $15 billion in hard currency, about half its normal revenue from a year’s oil exports. Trump has to give assent before it can be implemented.

Having scrupulously complied with the agreement until May this year, Iran has since then taken small steps to pull back from the agreement. It has increased output of enriched uranium beyond limits set by the deal, slightly raised the approved level of enrichment and is upgrading its centrifuges. Iran argues its actions are within the scope of the agreement, while the US is in violation by withdrawing from it and ramping up sanctions.

Trump has blacklisted Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and  branded the country’s army, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, a “terrorist” organisation. Through the wide use of sanctions, the Trump administration has reduced by 80 per cent Iran’s oil exports, its main source of external revenue.

After the six-nation nuclear agreement was implemented in January 2016, Iran was able to export oil, metal, gold and other items and its economy surged. Since Trump reinstated sanctions, Iran’s economy has returned to negative growth. International human rights laws should prohibit the use of sanctions that negatively impact populations of targeted countries since such sanctions constitute collective punishment, which is deemed illegal in international law.

Iran cannot be expected to submit to such punishment and will retaliate somehow whenever it can. Afraid to cross Trump and his minions, Europe promises Iran relief but fails to deliver. It is hardly surprising that Iran responded to the British detention of Grace 1, by taking charge of a British-flagged tanker, the Stena Impero, in the Strait of Hormuz. Now that its tanker is moored in Tartus, the Stena Impero is expected to be released.

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During UK–EU Brexit negotiations, Theresa May pursued a determined path of concealment and non-disclosure. Envisaged as a way to protect herself against political opposition, enhancing her bargaining power vis-à-vis the EU and deliver policy promises, the strategy failed and contributed to the end of her premiership. Ben Worthy and Marlen Heide detail how her case illustrates the powers of increasing transparency expectations and the risks of concealment over longer times or around contentious issues. It provides a useful lesson for her successor.

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Contemporary leaders are caught between expectations and obligations of transparency and the pressure to achieve tangible outcomes in complex and hostile political environments. Being open is a moral commitment and a way of building trust and legitimacy. Yet leaders still have powerful incentives and temptations to choose a strategy of concealment to protect their power, policy plans or reputation. As such, secrecy still features as part of leaders’ strategic repertoire. How does such an approach play out in an age of transparency?

Pursuing a strategy of secrecy can be a powerful instrument protecting leaders’ room for manoeuvre or power. It can be vital for protecting early or delicate discussions, especially around contentious policy issues. Frequently, secrecy also serves to minimise blame or conceal personal or political mistakes.

Secrecy can, in certain contexts, be a necessary, if not fruitful, way of leading. Concealment, however, comes with risks and downsides, undermining the benefits it is supposed to bring. Secrecy provokes suspicion and speculation, and can raise demands for transparency or provoke leaks. Cover-ups of political mistakes can cause greater damage on a leader’s reputation in the long-term, creating stronger opposition and undermining trust. The can even prove terminal to a career, as the resignations of Eden and Nixon show. Finally, secrecy needs constant maintenance and can consume valuable time and political energy.

Table 1: Incentives for secrecy and related risks

The case of Theresa May’s premiership shows what happens when a leader chooses a strategy of concealment in an age of transparency. It illustrates that context is key, and secrecy is more difficult for high-profile controversial issues, such as Brexit, and particularly damaging if exposed when it is tied to the reputation of the leader themselves, as was the case for May.

Theresa May: Prime Minister of secrets

Theresa May had a long-standing reputation for strict information control and a secretive working style. As Home Secretary between 2010 and 2016, she had a ‘preference for working with a close team of advisers [nicknamed the Chiefs], often not bothering to share information with Number 10 or other ministers’. She avoided publicity and scrutiny when problems threatened, causing David Cameron to call her ‘the submarine’. May ‘survived as home secretary for six years partly because she held a tight grip over information flows’ and twice (in 2011 and 2016), blame avoidance and information control saved her career.

As a Prime Minister, May tied her reputation to her ability to successfully negotiate Brexit and, in turn, Brexit to secrecy. She made it clear that her approach was based on strict confidentiality by saying there will be no ‘running commentary’ on the negotiations. May was warned in late 2016 that ‘silence is not a strategy’. In her case, concealment was doubly risky, since there was no substantive policy to protect.

In the short-term, May’s approach temporarily preserved her room for manoeuvre, and her power over a divided party. Many of her big decisions – triggering article 50 or calling a snap election – were taken in small, secret groups. Her avoidance of the press for anything other than set-piece interviews or speeches helped protected her reputation for competence for some time, at least until the election campaign of 2017 shined a dazzling, brutal, light on her abilities.

May’s secretive approach came under pressure domestically. For over two years, Parliament used all the tools at its disposal to force greater openness around Brexit. MPs and committees sought to open up Brexit. Between 2016 and 2018 select committees launched more than 108 inquiries into various aspects of Brexit, as well as creating a new, unusually large, DEXEU committee to scrutinise the negotiations. The ‘publicity spotlight’ at committee hearings revealed ministerial contradictions or confusion. In one day in November 2017, for example, six committees simultaneously questioned six different officials and ministers about Brexit.

One key symbolic battle concerned several government-produced studies on the impact of Brexit. Their existence first became known in the summer of 2017, triggering several requests for documentary access. After FOIs were refused, in November 2017 Labour used an obscure piece of parliamentary procedure, a Humble Address to Her Majesty, to force the government to release them. Other key pieces of information that the government clearly wished to keep secret, from other assessments to legal advice, were forced out of them or informally disclosed. Alongside the more spectacular battles was a daily drip of disclosure. Parliamentary pressure through questions, statements and government scrutiny meant, as the Chair of the Exiting the EU committee put it, ‘we learn something new about the potential impact of Brexit every day’.

At the same time, May’s divided government leaked continually. The leaks began straight away, and this BBC headline sums it up quite how bad things became: ‘Leak inquiry into leaking of letter warning about leaks’. This got worse after 2017 as May’s authority waned and Cabinet ministers openly undermined and contradicted policy. Behind the scenes, pressure from Conservative backbench MPs forced May to be more open and publish the first Brexit White paper in 2017 and another in 2018. By 2019 May appeared to have lost control of the policy, the narrative and with it her own reputation.

Boris Johnson: hiding in plain sight?

Interestingly, May’s successor, Boris Johnson, has followed the same path, with hidden plans for Brexit, made with a closed networks of advisers. He too has said he will deliver Brexit, but what the real plans are – or if there is plan – remains a mystery, with bluff, secrecy and lies swirling like a smokescreen.

In his leadership bid there were limited chances for questions from the press and few interviews. Once in power, Johnson appointed Dominic Cummings, who hadbeen held in contempt of Parliament over his refusal to give evidence. There were early warnings that leaking would mean instant dismissal (though that was, of course, leaked). Most controversially there has been the lengthy prorogation of parliament, which means that Johnson has had a mere five days of scrutiny and avoided the now regular liaison committee appearance, which was scheduled for today, 11 September. Rumours abound of Johnson’s government not only avoiding scrutiny itself, but seeking to scrutinise and gather data on us.

The counter-pressure for forced openness has been even swifter for Johnson than May. Again, like May, Johnson now faces pressure to publish government assessments, this time around ‘Operation Yellowhammer’, its analysis of the impact of a no-deal Brexit (already leaks have undermined Johnson’s own claims).In the final moments before Parliament was prorogued, a humble address again struck, seeking messages, including texts as WhatsApp messages, around prorogation, sending a signal of the determination of opponents to break open the government’s plans. The motion covered:

All correspondence and other communications (whether formal or informal, in both written and electronic form, including but not limited to messaging services including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Facebook messenger, private email accounts both encrypted and unencrypted, text messaging and iMessage and the use of both official and personal mobile phones.

The all-embracing nature was due to fears – based on leaks from anonymous public officials to Dominic Grieve MP – that decisions were being made outside of formal records and decision-making process (something Michael Gove has previous for). Even if the motion fails to turn up much information – and the government seems unwilling to provide any – it will create pressure for leaks and scrutiny from elsewhere. At the same time, the case in the Scottish courts may prove a crucial first step in undermining his power. It first revealed Downing Street documents showing Johnson’s planning back in August, including his insult that Cameron was a ‘girly swot’ (initially redacted, see image), and today the Court of Session has concluded the main purpose of prorogation was to hinder scrutiny, and so unlawful.

We’ll see when the UK Supreme Court considers the matter next week the full extent of the damage to Johnson’s reputation, and the extent to which such secrecy helps or hinders his power, his policy and his reputation. Hiding anything over a long period of time in a high polarised and partisan environment is almost impossible. May’s attempts to keep the Brexit negotiations secret amid such strong transparency pressure, and with a divided, leak-prone government, always appeared highly unlikely, if not futile. Secrecy triggered a negative spiral against a greater counter-pressure for transparency, exposing May’s policy. Using secrecy to protect a reputation means that any exposure has consequences for a leader’s credibility: May’s premiership came under even greater scrutiny, eventually crashing her reputation. For May, in the end, secrecy failed to deliver power, protection or tangible results. Will it for Boris Johnson?

This post has been updated to include a reference to the ruling of the Scottish Court of Session on prorogation on 11 September.

This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit. It draws on their article, ‘Secrecy and Leadership: The Case of Theresa May’s Brexit Negotiations’, recently published in Public Integrity, 1-13.

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Ben Worthy is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Freedom of Information: How and why governments pass laws that threaten their power.

Marlen Heide is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Communication Sciences, Università della Svizzera italiana at Lugano.

Featured image by 726056 from Pixabay

War in Syria rages in parts of the country. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov claims it’s over, saying:

“The war in Syria has really come to an end. The country is gradually returning to a normal, peaceful life,” adding: 

“Some hotspots of tensions remain in the territories that are not controlled by the Syrian government, such as Idlib and the eastern bank of the Euphrates.”

Northern and southern Syria are US occupied territory. Numerous Pentagon bases control about 30% of the country — used as platforms for endless war in its ninth year, resolution unattainable because dark forces running things in Washington reject the idea.

Permanent war is official US policy, raging in multiple theaters — military Keynsianism on steroids.

Ruinous military spending and endless wars rage while vital homeland needs go begging — overwhelmingly supported by both hard-right wings of the US war party, rejecting world peace and stability.

The US came to all its war theaters to stay, permanent occupation planned directly and/or through installed puppet regimes.

Turkish forces occupy northern parts of Syria, part of President Erdogan’s aim to annex the territory, especially oil-rich areas of the country.

On Thursday, Putin and Netanyahu met in Sochi, Russia’s president saying the following:

“We stressed, emphasized, the need – and here the Israelis fully agree with us (sic) – to ensure real, in practice, not only in words, respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic,” adding:

“And in this sense, we (sic) on our part highlighted the issues of assisting the Syrian authorities and the Syrians on the whole in their returning to peaceful life.”

Netanyahu told Putin he’ll act freely against what he called an Iranian threat in Syria — that doesn’t exist.

He said

“there has been a serious increase in attempts by Iran to hit Israel from Syria and to place there precision missiles to use against us” — the remark part of his pre-election fear-mongering campaign.

Haaretz slammed what it called a “nasty, racist campaign that will go down in Israel’s history” — the nation “mired deep in a political and constitutional nightmare.”

Netanyahu threatened war on Gaza, saying:

“There will be an operation, but I will not embark on it a moment before we are ready…(T)here apparently will be no choice but to topple Hamas.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry slammed Netanyahu’s campaign pledge to annex the Jordan Valley if reelected, saying:

His vow “provoked a sharply negative reaction in the Arab world…We share the concern about such plans…whose implementation could lead to a sharp escalation of tension in the region and undermine hopes for a long-awaited peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.”

Is Lavrov right about war in Syria ending? Current headlines dispute him, some examples:

Press TV: “Joint US-Turkish patrols in flagrant violation of Syria’s sovereignty: Damascus”

Press TV: Israel claims drone attack near Syria’s border with Iraq”

Fars News: “Thousands of Terrorists Deployed to Borders with Turkey at Al-Jolani’s Order for Battle with Syrian Army”

Fars News: “Syria in Last 24 Hours: Tahrir Al-Sham (Al Nusra) Starts Forced Recruitment of Soldiers for Battle with Syrian Army”

AMN News: “ISIS carries out new attack in northern Syria”

AMN News: “Turkey sends large military convoy to reinforce Idlib”

AMN News: “Heavy clashes breakout between Turkish-backed militants in northern Aleppo”

AMN News: “Syrian Army readies forces for upcoming Latakia offensive.”

AMN News: “Russian Air Force unleashes heavy strikes over western Idlib”

South Front: “Russian, Syrian Warplanes Rain Hell on Militant Positions in Southern Idlib”

South Front: Russian Warplanes Target Militant Positions on Syrian-Turkish Border”

South Front: “US Proxies in Al-Tanf Claim They Repelled Syrian Army Attack”

Pentagon and CIA operatives continue arming, funding, and training jihadists at US bases in Syria, deploying them to parts of the country to attack government forces and civilians.

Al-Qaeda-connected White Helmets operate with them, masquerading as civil defense workers.

On Wednesday, Russian General Alexey Bakin said jihadists “opened fire with small arms at a market in (the) Rukban (refugee camp in southeastern Syria) to disperse (starving) civilians demanding food.”

Last week, pro-Western UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet falsely accused Russian and Syrian forces for hundreds of civilian deaths in Idlib and Hama provinces from late April to late August.

Giving short shrift to US-supported terrorists, she said: “Non-State armed groups (sic) also carried out attacks on populated government-controlled territories, and are reportedly responsible for…58 civilian deaths.”

She ignored Pentagon-led terror-bombing, responsible for mass slaughter and destruction since 2014.

Syria is Washington’s war, launched by the Obama regime, escalated by Trump hardliners.

It continues raging in parts of the country, resolution nowhere in sight.

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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.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Israel aggressively spies on allies and adversaries alike.

Former CIA counterintelligence specialist/military intelligence officer Philip Giraldi earlier accused Israel of stealing everything it can get its hands on — notably military and industrial secrets. 

He called evidence of Israeli spying on the US “indisputable.” An earlier FBI report said the following:

“Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States,” adding:

“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.”

Washington’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) once said Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.”

The Pentagon earlier accused Israel of “actively engag(ing) in military and industrial espionage in the United States.”

In 2014, an NSA document  leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden accused Israel of spying on the US, saying:

“The Israelis are extraordinarily good partners for us, but on the other (hand), they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems.”

Despite knowledge of extensive Israeli spying in the US, the Justice Department, US intelligence community, Congress, and the executive branch maintain normal relations with the Jewish state — considered both ally and counterintelligence threat.

The Wall Street Journal earlier said Israel spied on Iran nuclear talks while ongoing — to “build a case against the emerging terms of the deal,” citing unnamed current and former US officials.

According to an unnamed senior US official, “(i)t is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other.”

“It is another thing for Israel to steal (its) secrets and play them back to (congressional) legislators to undermine US diplomacy.”

Yet nothing is done about it, Israel considered a valued US ally despite its unacceptable actions.

On Thursday, Politico said “mysterious (Israeli cellphone) spy devices (were found) near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington,” citing unnamed former senior US officials, adding:

So-called “ ‘StingRays’ mimic regular cell towers to fool cellphones into giving them their locations and identity information.”

“(T)hey also can capture the contents of calls and data use…FBI and other agencies working on the case felt confident that Israeli agents had placed the devices, according to the former officials, several of whom served in top intelligence and national security posts.”

One official said it’s “pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible.”

In denial, Trump said “I don’t think the Israelis are spying on us. I really would find that hard to believe.”

Responding to the disclosure, Netanyahu falsely said “Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period,” a bald-faced Big Lie.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz repeated Netanyahu’s false statement, adding:

“The US and Israel share a lot of intelligence information and work together to prevent threats and strengthen the security of both countries.”

Former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin called Politico’s report “fake news spiced with anti-Semitism (sic).”

On Thursday, Politico reporter Daniel Lippman stood by his account, stressing its accuracy, dismissing Israeli denials.

US Naval Intelligence Support Center (NISC)/Navy human intelligence (HUMINT) intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was the most high-profile Israeli spy caught red-handed in the US.

Arrested in 1985, he pled guilty in 1986, then sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for supplying Israel with top-secret classified information.

Senior US officials claimed his espionage was far more serious and wide-ranging than publicly reported at the time.

It reportedly included a detailed NSA manual on how the agency collects signal intelligence, countless names of individuals who cooperated with US intelligence, and much more before caught.

Granted parole in July 2015, he was released in November that year.

Nations routinely spy on each other, some more aggressively than others, notably the US and Israel.

Snowden earlier called NSA spying a “total awareness” obsession. The agency wants privacy eliminated, he said.

Its ultimate aim is the ability to monitor everyone everywhere at all times — for US political, economic, technological, and military advantage.

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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.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from American Free Press

Presidential candidate Joe Biden is now claiming about the 2003 Iraq invasion: “Yes, I did oppose the war before it began.”

Biden has been claiming:

“From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress.”

That claim was made by Biden in the second DNC debate and received virtually no scrutiny except for the piece by Mideast scholar Stephen Zunes, “Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies.”

Biden repeated the claim recently on NPR and did receive some scrutiny. The Biden camp claimed he “misspoke” — but then reiterated the central claim, that Biden “was immediately clear in his opposition to how we got into the conflict” — an explanation the Washington Post accepted.

Now, independent journalist Michael Tracey, who interviewed Biden in New Hampshire recently, reports that Biden is now claiming that he opposed the invasion of Iraq even before it started; see his piece and video, which contains audio of Biden’s most recent remarks.

Of course, Biden voted for the war authorization bill in October 2002 and, as  Zunes has amply documented, stood by that vote after the invasion started.

Tracey also writes:

“When I reminded Biden that if he opposed the war all along, he could have joined 23 of his Senate colleagues in voting against authorizing it, he replied: ‘No, no, because they argued against authorizing the ability to get the United Nations to go back in with inspectors. We needed the Security Council to get a vote to put inspectors in to determine whether or not there was any nuclear activity going on.’”

This statement is wrong on several levels. Perhaps most obviously, in mid-September, before the congressional vote, Iraq had agreed to allow weapons inspectors back in. On Sept 16, 2002, the New York Times reported: “U.N. Inspectors Can Return Unconditionally, Iraq Says.” (This was immediately after a delegation organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy had gone to Iraq.)

Biden did initially back a bill along with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar which would have somewhat constrained Bush’s capacity to launch an invasion at his whim. But the Bush administration opposed the measure — and Biden voted for the legislation giving Bush the leeway he wanted. See Biden’s speech.

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Sam Husseini, sam at accuracy.org, @samhusseini is senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy and has written extensively on U.S. policy on Iraq. See his recent piece: “Film Official Secrets Is Tip of Mammoth Iceberg.”

There was something richly amusing in the move: three judges, sitting in Scotland’s highest court of appeal, had little time for the notion that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspension, or proroguing, of parliament till October 14, had been lawful.  Some 78 parliamentarians had taken issue with the Conservative leader’s limitation on Parliamentary activity, designed to prevent any hiccups prior to October 31, the day Britain is slated to leave the European Union.

It did take two efforts.  The initial action in Edinburgh’s Outer House of the Court of Session was unsuccessful for the petitioners.  Conventional wisdom then was that such issues were, as a matter of high policy, political and therefore non-justiciable.  Legal standards, in other words, could not be applied to the decision.  (British judges tend to be rather reserved when it comes to treading on matters that might be seen as the staple of political judgment.)

All three First Division judges thought otherwise, taking the high road that this was exceptional.  Lord Carloway, the Lord President, accepted in principle that advice by the Prime Minister to the Queen would not normally be reviewable by courts.  Such a realm was customarily one above and beyond the judicial wigs.  That said, as a summary of the judgement records, “it would nevertheless be unlawful if its purpose was to stymie parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, which was a central pillar of the good governance principle enshrined in the constitution”.  That principle was drawn, by implication, from the “principles of democracy and the rule of law.”  Feeling emboldened, Lord Carloway, on examining the documents supplied by Johnson and his team, felt that improper reasons could be discerned.

Lord Brodie similarly noted the singular nature of the circumstances. Under normal circumstances prorogation advice would not be reviewable, but if it constituted a tactic designed to frustrate Parliament, it could well be deemed unlawful.  In this case, Johnson’s move was “an egregious case of a clear failure to comply with generally accepted standards of behaviour of public authorities.”  It could be inferred on the evidence 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 inference.”  Bold stuff, indeed, and hard to fault.

The third judge, Lord Drummond Young, was bolder still.  No need to be nimble footed here: the entire scope of such powers, relevant to prorogation or otherwise, could be legally tested.  The onus was on the UK government to show a valid reason for the prorogation “having regard to the fundamental constitutional importance of parliamentary scrutiny or executive action.”  The clues of evident impropriety in Johnson’s action lay in the length of the suspension and the general circumstances suggesting a prevention of scrutiny.  There could be no other inference that the move showed a wish “to restrict Parliament.”

The full bench, accordingly, made an order “declaring that the prime minister’s advice to HM the Queen and the prorogation which followed thereon was unlawful and thus null and of no effect.”  Few more damning statements have ever issued against a prime minister of the realm. 

In an effort to remove some egg on the faces of government officials, a spokesman for Number 10 claimed to be disappointed by the decision, insisting that Johnson needed “to bring forward a strong domestic legislative agenda.  Proroguing Parliament is the legal and necessary way of delivering this.”  This was a somewhat milder version from those offered by other sources close to the Prime Minister, claiming political bias on the Scottish bench.  “We note that last week the High Court in London did not rule that prorogation was unlawful.  The legal activists choose the Scottish courts for a reason.”  The cheek of it all. 

As for certain conservative outlets, accepting the judgment of the Court of Session was, well, unacceptable.  The Supreme Court, it was hoped by the likes of Richard Ekins, would clean up the mess made by their northern brethren with clear heads.  The Scottish decision had been “a startling – and misconceived – judgment.”

 Which brings us to the second front opened up by petitioners in England itself.  A High Court challenge, with an appeal now expected to be heard in the Supreme Court next week, initially failed to yield any movement.  But Johnson had little reason, or time, to gloat.  The government is now reverting to a stalling game, refusing to act on the Scottish decision till the English equivalent is handed down.  Not all business, however, will be suspended: the work of select committees, for instance, will continue.  The government also finds itself in the trenches, facing a Parliament intent on extending the Brexit date in order to achieve a deal.   

The publication of the full, previously leaked doomsday document, the Yellowhammer contingency plan, anticipating measures if a no deal Brexit takes place, has also done its bit to pockmark Johnson’s efforts to maintain a steady ship.  The prime minister, said Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accusingly, “is prepared to punish those who can least afford it.”

 The government’s hope is that the Supreme Court case will move at its usual snail’s pace, thereby making any point ventured by Johnson’s detractors a moot point.  Richard Dickman of Pinsent Masons has observed that such appeals “take months sometimes years, but the court can move quickly in urgent cases like this one.”  The occasion promises to be quite a judicial party: 11 of the 12 law lords will be sitting. 

Testing the judicial weather, Dickman suggested that there might “be a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision from the court with a more detailed judgment to follow.”  Another chapter in the annals of British law and parliamentary farce is being written.  In the meantime, the sentiment of the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, reverberates through Europe. “We do not have reasons to be optimistic.”

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

The 5G danger can’t be overstated.

5G (5th Generation) is now being actively rolled out in many cities around the world. Simultaneously, as awareness over its horrific health and privacy impacts is rising, many places are issuing moratoriums on it or banning it, such as the entire nation of Belgium, the city of Vaud (Switzerland) and San Francisco (USA).

Radiofrequency radiation (RF or RFR) and electromagnetic fields (EMF) are being increasingly recognized as new types of pollution – environmental pollution. Here are 13 reasons exposing the 5G danger, which could turn into an unmitigated health and privacy catastrophe if enough people don’t rise up to stop it.

Read the complete article here.

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The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has released a report, Designating Hate: New Policy Responses to Stop Hate Crime, which recommends radical initiatives to tackle “hate” groups, even if they have not committed any kind of violent activity.

The problem, as the think-tank defines it, is “the dangerous nature of hateful groups, including on the far right like Britain First and Generation Identity. But current laws are unable to stop groups that spread hate and division, but do not advocate violence”. The think-tank defines what it sees as one of the main problems with hate crime the following way:

“A steady growth in hate crime has been driven by surges around major events. Often this begins online. Around the 2017 terror attacks in the UK, hate incidents online increased by almost 1,000 per cent, from 4,000 to over 37,500 daily. In the 48-hour period after an event, hate begins to flow offline”.

Specifically, the report mentioned as problematic the rise online in “hate incidents” after three Islamic terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017 — the Westminster car-ramming and stabbing attack in March by Khalid Masood, who murdered pedestrians and a police officer; the Manchester arena bombing in May, at the end of an Ariana Grande concert, in which Salman Abedi murdered 22 people — the youngest only 8 years old — and injured more than 200 people; and the London Bridge ramming attack in June, in which Rachid Redouane, Khuram Butt and Youssef Zaghba drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge and then proceeded to stab people in nearby Borough Market. Eight people were murdered in that attack.

Disturbingly, the main concern of Blair’s think-tank appears to be the online verbal “hatred” displayed by citizens in response to terrorist attacks – not the actual physical expression of hatred shown in the mass murders of innocent people by terrorists. Terrorist attacks, it would appear, are now supposedly normal, unavoidable incidents that have become part and parcel of UK life.

The report claims:

“Divisive groups – especially increasingly mainstreamed far-right groups – spread hatred with relative impunity because responses to nonviolent extremism remain uncoordinated; hate incidents spike around major events, leaving communities exposed; and perpetrators of religious hate are rarely prosecuted due to gaps in legislation”.

The problem, according to the report, is that “current laws are unable to stop groups that spread hate and division, but do not advocate violence”.

One of the think-tank’s suggested solutions to this problem is to:

“Create a new law to designate ‘hate groups’. This new tier of hate group designation would be the first of its kind in Europe and would help tackle nonviolent extremist groups that demonise specific groups on the basis of their race, religious, gender, nationality or sexuality … Powers to designate would, like proscription powers, fall under the Home Office’s remit and require ministerial sign off”.

The report defines a hate group as:

“Spreading intolerance and antipathy towards people of a different race, religion, gender or nationality, specifically because of these characteristics; Aligning with extremist ideologies… though not inciting violence; Committing hate crimes or inspiring others to do so via hate speech; Disproportionately blaming specific groups (based on religion, race, gender or nationality) for broader societal issues”.

It would be up to the government to define what is understood by “spreading intolerance”, or “blaming specific groups for broader societal issues”.

Being designated a “hate group”, it is underlined in the report, “would sit alongside proscription but not be linked to violence or terrorism, while related offences would be civil not criminal”.

Unlike proscribed groups that are banned for criminal actions, such as violence or terrorism, the designation of “hate group” would mainly be prosecuting thought-crimes.

The groups that Blair’s think-tank mentions as main examples of those to be designated hate groups are Britain First and Generation Identity. Both are political; Britain First is also an aspiring political party with parliamentary ambitions. If the report’s suggestions were to be adopted into law, these movements, if designated as “hate groups” would not be allowed “to use media outlets or speak at universities”. They would also not be allowed “to engage, work with or for public institutions”.

However, the report tries to assure us, “hate designation would be time-limited and automatically reviewed, conditioned on visible reform of the group”.

Although the report would still allow designated “hate groups” to “meet, support or campaign”, such a law would mean that the political speech of designated groups would be rendered null and void. The European Convention on Human Rights and the jurisprudence on the convention from the European Court of Human Rights puts a special premium on political speech, which enjoys particular protection: it is so fundamental to the basic workings of a democratic society. In its case law, the European Court of Human Rights has stated[1] that the convention

“…protects not only the information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive but also those that offend, shock or disturb; such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness without which there is no democratic society. Opinions expressed in strong or exaggerated language are also protected”.

Even more important is that, according to the European Court of Human Rights’ case law,

“…the extent of protection depends on the context and the aim of the criticism. In matters of public controversy or public interest, during political debate, in electoral campaigns… strong words and harsh criticism may be expected and will be tolerated to a greater degree by the Court”. [emphasis added]

The European Court of Human Rights may therefore find aspects of the proposed law problematic precisely because of concerns with free speech and basic democratic values.

Democratic values, however, appear to be the think-tank’s least concern. The proposed law would make the British government the arbiter of accepted speech, especially political speech. Such an extraordinary and radically authoritarian move would render freedom of speech an illusion in the UK. The Home Office would be able to accuse any group it found politically inconvenient of “spreading intolerance” or “aligning with extremist ideologies” — and designate it a “hate group”.

It would make the old Soviets proud.

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Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Note

[1] Monica Macovei: A guide to the implementation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, p 16, (Human rights handbooks, No. 2, 2004).

Featured image is from iStock

On Wednesday evening, Boris Johnson’s government was forced to release its forecast for a no-deal Brexit, codenamed “Operation Yellowhammer.” The six-page document affirms the social and economic catastrophe threatened by a no-deal Brexit and underscores the danger of authoritarian rule in the UK.

While the government insists that the scenarios outlined in Yellowhammer represent “reasonable worst case assumptions,” a widely shared version of the document from the same day uses the phrase “base scenario.”

The release of the document disproves the government’s claims, made last summer when the Times first leaked details of Yellowhammer, that the forecast was an outdated hangover from Theresa May’s time as Conservative prime minister. The document is dated 10 days after Johnson became prime minister, confirming that Yellowhammer presents the expected outcome of a no-deal Brexit.

The initial problem identified is the hold-up of freight transport at the Channel Tunnel and Britain’s ports. The flow rate of HGVs could drop to 40-60 percent of its current levels for three months following Brexit, with lorries stuck for up to two-and-a-half days, before “improving” to 50-70 percent.

Some level of continued disruption is expected to last “significantly longer.” The breakdown of supply chains will “have an impact on the supply of medicines and medical supplies,” which, due to their short shelf life, are “particularly vulnerable.” The reduced supply of veterinary medicines will “reduce our ability to prevent and control [animal] disease outbreaks, with potentially detrimental impacts for… the environment, and wider food safety/availabilities and zoonotic diseases which can directly impact human health.”

The British Medical Association has described these points as “alarming,” saying they confirm its warnings about the threat of medical supply shortages in the case of a no-deal break with the EU.

As for food supplies, a no-deal Brexit will “reduce availability and choice of products and will increase price.” The document adds, “There is a risk that panic buying will cause or exacerbate” these problems.

Helen Dickinson of the British Retail Consortium commented,

“Fresh food availability will decrease, consumer choice will decrease, and prices will rise.”

A no-deal Brexit threatens to “disrupt fuel supply in London and the South East” and “customer behaviour could lead to local shortages in other parts of the country.” In addition, “Significant electricity price increases” are expected, “with associated wider economic and political impacts.” An “increase in inflation following EU exit would significantly impact adult social care providers … and may lead to provider failure.”

In one of the most telling passages, the document concludes that these effects will hit “vulnerable,” “low income” groups hardest, leading to a “rise in public disorder and community tensions.”

All of this is to say nothing of the impact of the government’s own economic plans for post-Brexit Britain. These include substantial tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations, the removal of many labour protections, deeper social spending cuts, and the setting up of “free ports” to enable the hyper exploitation of large sections of the workforce. These measures add up to the wholesale destruction of living standards for a large majority of the population.

A no-deal scenario is also expected to immediately create flashpoints for international tensions. Confusion and conflict over fishing rights between UK and EU fishermen are thought “likely” to produce “violent disputes or blockading of ports.”

The document describes the government’s promise not to establish a hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland as “unsustainable due to significant economic, legal and biosecurity risks and no effective unilateral mitigations to address this will be available.”

A legal case is ongoing against the government, challenging the legality of a no-deal Brexit on the grounds that it would violate the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 promises to protect. The argument was rejected by the Belfast High Court on Thursday, with the judge saying that the main aspects of the case “were inherently and unmistakably political,” but will be appealed. Raymond McCord, a campaigner for victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles who brought the case, says he plans to take it to the Supreme Court.

The situation outlined in Operation Yellowhammer is one in which democratic forms of rule cannot be maintained. While the media has noted the document’s reference to the “significant amounts of police resources” required to deal with protests, next to nothing has been said about the wider plans for repression known to be in motion.

It is understood that 50,000 regular and reserve troops will be made ready “in case of civil unrest, to assist at Britain’s airports and to ensure fuel and medical supplies.” They will be backed up by 10,000 riot police, ready to be deployed in 24 hours, and 1,000 extra police from Britain sent to reinforce the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Discussions have been held amongst senior civil servants about the use of powers normally reserved “to deal with national emergencies such as acts of war and terrorism,” including the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, introduced by the Labour government of Tony Blair. These powers include, according to the Sunday Times, “Curfews, bans on travel, confiscation of property and, most drastic, the deployment of the armed forces to quell rioting.” Ministers “can also amend any act of parliament, except the Human Rights Act, for a maximum of 21 days.”

One paragraph in the document, numbered 15, has been redacted. Only members of the Privy Council—who swear an oath to keep matters discussed in the Council secret—will be allowed to read the text.

The government claims to have censored the paragraph “on the grounds of commercial sensitivity.” The Times leak in August revealed that this paragraph dealt with threats to the UK fuel industry and the political ramifications. It read: “Facing EU tariffs makes petrol exports to the EU uncompetitive. Industry had plans to mitigate the impact on refinery margins and profitability but UK Government policy to set petrol import tariffs at 0 percent inadvertently undermines these plans. This leads to significant financial losses and announcement of two refinery closures (and transition to import terminals) and direct job losses (about 2,000).

“Resulting strike action at refineries would lead to disruptions to fuel availability for 1-2 weeks in the regions directly supplied by the refineries.”

Given that this information is already in the public sphere, it is very likely that the government is trying to hide an updated, far worse, assessment. Significantly, the censored paragraph is the only point in the document to reference the threat of strikes.

The government has admitted the likelihood of “protests and counter-protests,” presumably relating to Leave and Remain supporters, and even “protests and direct action with road blockages” in Northern Ireland over border issues and their economic consequences. But it cannot acknowledge the prospect of industrial action, which would involve far more than 2,000 refinery workers.

For the last three years, the ruling class has been able to exclude the working class from intervening independently in the Brexit crisis thanks to the role played by the trade unions and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The number of workers involved in disputes in 2018 (39,000) was the second lowest since 1893. The lowest number since 1893 was in 2017, which saw just 33,000 workers involved in industrial action.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party and union bureaucrats have sought to tie the workers to one or the other of the equally reactionary factions—pro-EU or pro-Brexit—of the ruling elite.

The development of major strikes in the course or aftermath of Brexit threatens to bring the working class back into the political equation, where it can begin to assert its own interests. It is against this potential movement that the immense forces of repression built up through Operation Yellowhammer will be deployed.

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To read the full report. Open access paper: Risks to Health and Well-Being From Radio-Frequency Radiation Emitted by Cell Phones and Other Wireless Devices

On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump finally fired his third national security advisor, John Bolton after eighteen long and grueling months. John happens to be the thirty-fifth member of Trump’s revolving door administration to get fired or resign, since he took office in 2016. Bolton gives a different version of events but regardless of whether he was fired or resigned, Bolton is not in a powerful position anymore (and hopefully nevermore), and the world is a better place for it.

Now some might think is an overly optimistic way to look at things and that his replacement might be just as bad or maybe even worse, but can we think of anyone who could possibly be worse? I think that would be a stretch for even the staunchest neo-conservatives. John was unapologetic about advocating for more war, he hungered with an insatiable appetite to bomb and nuke nations that he didn’t like, he made enemies out of our adversaries and although it’s possible, it would be a difficult task to find someone that matches his outspoken and hard-lined hostile views.

Non-interventionists and anti-war advocates rightfully celebrated what might possibly be the end of the Israel-First, war hawk’s political career. While progressives rejoiced, Democrats and even some Republicans expressed disappointment and sadness about his dismissal.

After having served under three previous presidents; Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and George W. Bush many questioned the reasoning behind Trump hiring Bolton in the first place. A staunch advocate for intervention and increased war, Bolton’s foreign policy views differed greatly from those Trump advocated for during his presidential campaign, which helped him win the presidency. Wanting to end our involvement in wars, and not get the United states into any additional regime change wars and advocating for diplomacy and negotiations when possible just wasn’t on par with how Bolton preferred to handle foreign affairs.

Bolton vocally opposed diplomacy and dialogue attempts by Trump. Whenever attempts were made to bridge gaps between the United States and its adversaries Bolton found ways to hinder or sabotage progress.

Some have stated that on Monday the two men reached a breaking point over Afghanistan and Iran. Bolton adamantly opposed the idea of Trump meeting with the Taliban in Camp David or Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani later this month in New York.

On Wednesday, Trump, said that they had disagreed on other matters including Venezuela, saying that Bolton “was way out of line”, and had tried to sabotage denuclearization talks with North Korea by mentioning the “Libya model.” That among other reasons might be why Kim Jong Un had a strong distaste for Bolton and didn’t want him involved in any negotiations.

Regardless of what the reasons were (and there are many to choose from including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela etc.) behind why Trump fired Bolton after eighteen months, he finally pulled the plug and not a day too soon after having disagreed on many issues.

Bolton’s overnight ouster has left many wondering who will replace him, and whether that person will be Bolton 2.0 or someone more closely aligned with Trump’s foreign policy views. Regarding this, Trump told reports in the White House on Wednesday that there are five people (originally the number being heard around town was nine) who want the position “very much” and the chosen person will be announced next week.

Some have said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (who is favored by Trump) might even straddle both positions as the nation’s chief foreign diplomat and the president’s top national security liaison much like Henry Kissinger did under former President Richard Nixon in 1973. Some are warning that this is a bad idea.

There’s a good chance that Pompeo not only supported but advocated for the ouster of Bolton. Some have said that Pompeo purposely left Bolton out of important meetings in recent weeks.

Many people inside and outside of Trump’s administration believe that Bolton’s dismissal will help ease diplomatic efforts such as peace talks with Iran and North Korea. The idea here isn’t that whoever takes on this role will have that much of an impact or real power but rather will they be able to carry out or execute the policies that Trump decides to put in place? For instance, when Trump announced last December that he wanted to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, Bolton did not agree with that, and worked with others to sway Trump to back down on his decision.

According to an article published by Foreign Policy on Wednesday, some of the names being tossed around are Douglas MacGregor a retired Army Colonel and defense analyst, who told Tucker Carlson on Tuesday that he’d execute Trumps policies unlike Bolton who had prevented him from implementing them. Another is Stephen Biegun, a veteran Republican foreign-policy expert and Trump’s envoy to North Korea. Keith Kellogg, Vice President Mike Pence’s national security advisor who is reportedly very much liked by Trump and a retired lieutenant general.

Some other names making the rounds are Iranian-crisis envoy Brian Hook who recently sent letters to Iranian ship captains filled with bribes and threats and U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell who is known for placing strategic interests ahead of ideological principles.

Just a day after letting Bolton go, Trump is supposedly considering a French plan to extend Iran a $15 billion-dollar credit line if they agree to return to complying with the JCPOA nuclear deal, something Bolton would have surely objected to.

We wish the impressively mustached Bolton good luck (more like good riddance) in his future endeavors (and hopefully less influential roles) and hope that he will someday realize that peace is a better option than war.

If he runs out of career options in the US, Israel might be an alternative, seeing how he won the “Defender of Israel” award in 2018 at the Zionist Organization of America’s annual Brandeis Award dinner in New York.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and political commentator. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research. For media inquiries please email [email protected].

Featured image is from Gage Skidmore

In delivering his first major policy-speech since being sworn in as US Defense Secretary in July, Mark Esper said in London on September 6th that the United States’ European allies needed to be wary of developing closer ties with China.

“The more dependent a country becomes on Chinese investment and trade, the more susceptible they are to coercion and retribution when they act outside of Beijing’s wishes,” he said.

Defense Secretary Esper also criticized what he called Russia’s “annexation” of Crimea, alleged Russian violations of arms-control agreements, and said that Russian missiles deployed within range of Western Europe were “probably nuclear-tipped.” He argued that the western alliance needed to do more to counteract what he saw as Russian and Chinese attempts to “disrupt the international order,” and also said that the Trump administration was determined to maintain economic “maximum pressure” on Iran.

Speaking in Paris the following day, Esper said that it would be great if the west could get Russia “to behave like a more normal country.”

One of the reasons why it has become standard practice for US government officials to put their rapid-fire word-salad together so loaded with vapid ideological signifiers is that they are perfectly well aware of Brandolini’s law, and milk it shamelessly.

However, aside from demonstrating their absurdity, we can still analyze Defense Secretary Esper’s remarks on two distinct levels – the first level purely tactical and political, and the second level more abstractly ideological.

What precisely is the point of the US Defense Secretary reiterating the same shopping-list of US foreign-policy and security-policy objectives using the same vapid rhetoric? Or, to ask that question in another way, who precisely were the intended addressees of his remarks?

His audiences in London and Paris had heard it all before ad nauseam. So who precisely was he actually attempting to persuade?

Firstly, quite obviously, he was addressing the grey cardinals who are his de facto superiors. One of the core purposes of the first major policy-speech given by any new US Defense Secretary is to demonstrate that he’s “a team-player.” So it’s best to just double-down on the same old exhausted, vapid rhetoric as un-ironically as you possibly can. Let’s call it the “Emperor’s New Clothes” political imperative.

Secondly, Esper’s speeches in both London and Paris are deliberately worded to appeal to the most naïve segments of the population. In the Occident, pre-pubescent children are now the primary addressees of political speeches. This point partially overlaps with my previous point about Brandolini’s law. In any case, if I attempt to persuade an adult of anything, then I will likely have to construct arguments, which will in turn evoke counter-arguments. The beauty of vapid buzz-words like “normal” is that, by virtue of their pre-discursive mystical quality, they pre-empt this entire process of argumentation. The Occident’s political elites seem to have simply assumed, without any empirical evidence whatsoever, that neuro-linguistic programming is effective on pre-pubescent children. For this reason, NLP has become the standard modus of the infantilization of political discourse in the Occident.

In most religious households, parents do not teach their children theology. Theology is an activity which intellectually curious people engage in on their own initiative later, during adult life. For children, the concept of “God” has a charismatic power only if we keep it very, very simple. Attempting to assign characteristics to “God” would destroy the charismatic power of this word for the very young. For quite analogous reasons, secular liberal parents do not teach their children what “normalcy” is. The mythology must be easily graspable. The predicates must be left unsaid. In liberal anti-metaphysics, “normalcy” has become one of many conceptual substitutes for “God.”

Living in the Czech Republic for 9 years, I used to scratch my head and wonder why both Czech teenagers and young adults, both utterly indoctrinated in liberal ideology, used both the English adjective “normal” and the Czech adjective “normální” with such bewildering regularity. They had never experienced, or even cursorily thought about, any alternative way of doing anything to how it was done in their own immediate social environment. They simply had no historical or experiential basis for comparison, so they described almost EVERYTHING as “normální.”

Then again, in a country which is 77% atheist, it’s hardly surprising.

Christians, Muslims and Jews sometimes say that “God is everywhere.”

For post-communist Czech liberals, “normálnost” is everywhere.

It’s a pantheistic faith.

Like the Christian and Islamic conceptions of God, this crypto-deity named “normalcy” is implicitly postulated as transcendental, as existing outside of the process of human history, and therefore independent of historical conditions in the human world.

Didn’t the Euromaidan protestors in 2013/2014 also say that they just wanted to live in “a normal country?”

The irony which hardly requires explanation is that this vapid invocation of “normalcy” has become increasingly incessant at the very moment in history when the hegemonic geo-political power-relations which underpinned this liberal bourgeois sense of “normalcy” have disintegrated. That irony, in itself, is utterly predictable. The lady doth protest too much. Insofar as Mark Esper is a Trump administration loyalist, one point which his remarks demonstrate quite clearly is that the cultural and ideological war which is taking place within the United States today is a phony war. Both sides are simply advocating different interpretations of anti-historicist liberalism.

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Padraig McGrath is a political analyst.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces another obstacle in the way of his path to a No Deal Brexit as it was ruled on Wednesday that his five week long suspension of parliament, condoned by the Queen herself, was ‘unlawful’. The case was brought to the Court of Session in Edinburgh by seventy MPs led by the Scottish National Party’s Joanna Cherry, who argued that the Prime Minister was attempting to prevent parliament from holding the government to account over Brexit.

The three judges unanimously agreed with this statement, ruling that Boris Johnson was motivated by the “improper purpose of stymieing Parliament”, and furthermore, that he had effectively misled the Queen by advising her to suspend Parliament. They added:

‘The Court will accordingly make an Order declaring that the prime minister’s advice to HM the Queen and the prorogation which followed thereon was unlawful and is thus null and of no effect.”

There were unprecedented scenes on Monday night as parliament was officially prorogued until the 14th October, much to the vehemence of opposition politicians, who sat well into the night protesting the action. Labour politicians sang socialist anthem ‘The Red Flag’ as Scottish Nationalists blared out ‘Flower of Scotland’ in defiance of the ruling to shut down parliament for several weeks, at such a critical time in the Brexit negotiations. Several MPs, brandishing placards which read ‘SILENCED’ also tried to stop Speaker of the House, John Bercow, who has announced his plan to step down from his role on 31st October, from leaving the Commons.

The Scottish judges’ decision casts huge doubt on the legitimacy of the prorogation, with MP Joanna Cherry now calling for politicians to return to Westminster.  However the government stands by its decision, claiming that there is nothing unusual in requesting such a suspension, and suggesting that the real motivation was in order to hold a Queen’s speech, whereby the Johnson cabinet could outline its domestic agenda for the year ahead. Subsequently the government plans to challenge the outcome of the Scottish court in the highest court in the UK – the Supreme Court in London – next week.

The ruling also now raises questions for the Queen and how well she was advised when requested by Johnson to give permission to suspend parliament. It is now being asked whether the Palace should have pushed Downing Street further as to why such a prorogation was necessary, especially given the contentious nature of Brexit. It also puts her role as monarch under scrutiny, as if she herself has no discretion regarding such decisions, then what is her real purpose? If the Supreme Court does indeed rule in favour of the Scottish Court’s decision then it will only drag the Queen further into the Brexit discussion as she will likely be forced to rethink her position.

Calls are now being made for Boris Johnson’s resignation, by none other than former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, on the basis of Wednesday’s verdict. For a UK Prime Minister to have been accused by a court of misleading the Queen herself really is unprecedented. But then Boris Johnson it seems, is no ordinary politician. And he heads a gang of hard-core Brexiteers who in the opinion of many opposition politicians, believe they are above the law and will stop at nothing to see Britain leave the EU on October 31st. As Johnson heads towards crashing out of Europe, like a bull in a china shop, he is leaving nothing but destruction and mayhem in his path. And yet, he presses on regardless. It’s not clear whether, even given a Supreme Court decision that parliament was prorogued unlawfully, that he would pay heed to this verdict.

The Prime Minister’s honesty was questioned again on Wednesday evening as documents were released confirming the chaos which awaits the UK given a No Deal Brexit. This was in response to a law rushed through parliament by opposition MPs on Monday evening, before it was shut down. Previously having played down the consequences of a No Deal scenario, government ministers will now be forced to admit that their previous statements regarding the leaked Operation Yellowhammer documents being out of date, were not true. The outlook for No Deal Britain is bleak, with the report indicating that there would be severe disruption to food and medical supplies, delays at ports and public disorder. To put it in context, any of these issues in normal circumstances would be considered a national emergency; therefore to downplay them in order to push through Brexit is being seen by many as wholly irresponsible.

The European Parliament for its part said on Thursday it is open to a Brexit extension if asked. It seems the lack of progress on this matter is wholly down to inertia on the UK side, and all the evidence suggests this is because Johnson knows a No Deal Brexit is the most likely scenario. It seems this government is simply not prepared to risk another deal being rejected by parliament, leading to further delays. But this hard-headed approach comes with its own risks. Johnson is playing with fire; having already been accused of misleading the Queen and illegally proroguing parliament. The accusations could not be more serious. The best option he has now, if he is to save what is left of his withering reputation,  is to indeed get some kind of deal with the EU that can be presented to the British people. But whether the PM will have the sense to do that is another question…

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Johanna Ross is a journalist.

President Trump is considering backing a French plan to extend a $15 billion line of credit to Iran. 

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Trump says he hates the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran. But he’s toying with a French proposal to get the Iranians to comply with it: a $15 billion line of credit to Tehran. https://t.co/VBWtg05MJL

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) September 12, 2019

Needless to say, this is a 180 degree turn away from his previous stance. Last July, he tweeted a threat specifically aimed at Iranian President Rouhani. 

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

More recently, reality managed to sink in. 

If Trump follows the advice of Bolton and the neocons, it would be a sure bet he’d lose the 2020 election. A disastrous war against Iran would also crash a world economy that runs on oil and is already teetering on the edge. Americans suffering under the consequences would find somebody to blame, and that somebody would be Trump. 

No way in hell will Trump’s ego allow this to happen. 

The president showed arch-neocon, John Bolton, the door this week, but despite this welcome and positive move his administration remains chock full of neocons. Most disturbingly, his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is a dedicated anti-Iran and pro-Zionist fanatic. 

Following word of the plan, neocons went bonkers. 

Treasury secretary Mnuchin wants to do what?  https://t.co/FqAHR9zsYa

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 12, 2019

Meanwhile, the Israelis were told, contrary to Trump’s wish to dial-down the hostilities, that the sanctions would remain in place and not to worry. 

#BREAKING Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said a visiting senior US treasury official told him that sanctions against Iran would remain in full force pic.twitter.com/ACgUXZTuPz

— AFP news agency (@AFP) September 12, 2019

Unfortunately, President Trump’s apparent willingness to step back from the neocon plan to set the Middle East on fire for the sake of tiny Israel is not set in stone. 

He’s not known as the King of Flip-flop for nothing. 

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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.

Featured image is from Gage Skidmore

On September 11, the US-backed Revolutionary Commando Army claimed that it had repelled a Syrian Arab Army (SAA) attack in the 55km zone surrounding the US military garrison in al-Tanf. The militant group said that SAA units advanced using a Red Cross visit to civilians in the area.

A Syrian military source, stationed around the 55km zone, denied these claims. The source told SouthFront that no clashes happened in the area. There are about 300 Revolutionary Commando Army militants stationed in al-Tanf. They receive training, weapons and supplies from the US-led coalition despite multiple scandals surrounding this cooperation. Earlier in 2019, the group’s spokesperson, Mohamad Mostafa al-Jarrah, was caught raping a 10-year old girl from the nearby refugee camp.

A prominent Hayat Tahrir al-Sham commander, Abu Abd al-Ashda, left the militant group accusing its current leadership of massive corruption, and failing to defend militants’ territories in northern Hama during the recent SAA advance. According to him, millions of dollars that HTS had for rearmament simply disappeared.

Watch the video here.

Meanwhile, another key Hayat Tahrir al-Sham commander, Abu Abdul Mohsen al-Jazrawi, was assassinated in southeastern Idlib. The incident happened near the town of Saraqib on September 10. Al-Jazrawi, a Saudi citizen, was reportedly a close aide of the terrorist group leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani.

In the last few months, several prominent foreign terrorists were assassinated in Greater Idlib. The perpetrators of most of these attacks remain unknown.

On September 11, Syrian and Russian warplanes bombed positions of terrorists near the towns of Kafar Takharim and Darkush. The airstrikes were likely a response to the recently increased number of violations by militants in southern Idlib.

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Russian media reported that the “multilateral strategic stability” proposal by some of the country’s leading experts to actively prevent a military confrontation between nuclear powers runs counter to Moscow’s current foreign policy, though its possible promulgation would represent a victory by the “Progressive” faction of its “deep state” over the “Traditionalists” and potentially return Russia to its originally envisioned “balancing” role in South Asian affairs.

The “Multilateral Strategic Stability” Model

“Deep State” Drama

By all indications, it appears as though the “Progressive” faction of the Russian permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) is lobbying hard to counteract the revived influence of their “Traditionalist” rivals after the latter succeeded in returning their country’s foreign policy back to its historic roots last week following through the informal alliance that was sealed with India during Modi’s participation in the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok as President Putin’s guest of honor. The author wrote two years ago about how “Russia’s Foreign Policy Progressives Have Trumped The Traditionalists” after Moscow began to actively pursue its 21st-century grand strategic vision of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia, which later led to “Russia’s ‘Deep State’ Divisions Over South Asia Spilling Over Into The Public” in the aftermath of Russia “Returning To South Asia” through its proposal to host Indo-Pak peace talks earlier this year. Those plans were nearly scuttled after India’s “Israeli”-like unilateral moves in Kashmir last month compelled Russia to extend its full support to New Delhi and seemed to spell the endof the “Progressive’s” brief reign.

The “deep state” struggle for influence isn’t over, though, at least if the latest MSS proposal is anything to go by. Its possible promulgation would represent a marked departure from Russia’s “Traditionalist” position of staying out of bilateral disputes between nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan and instead encourage a more active effort to mediate or “balance” between them in pursuit of peace and the avoidance a military confrontation that could spark “a global nuclear war”. That’s not at all what India would want to see happen after it invested billions of dollars in military-technical and energy deals with Russia in the hopes of “buying off” Moscow and preventing the “Progressives’” return to power there. Nevertheless, the MSS proposal is extremely pragmatic and will likely be received very well by Russian diplomats, even if their positive reaction to it isn’t made public given how sensitive of a foreign policy shift it would be, especially regarding Russian-Indian relations if ever enters into practice. One possible indication that this could be the case comes from former Ambassador and current Vice President of the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs Gleb Ivashentsev.

Mr. Ivashentsev told Nezavisimaya Gazeta earlier in the week (as reported by TASS in the context of their daily press review) that “Russia cannot act as an intermediary (in Kashmir)…however, we must promote a rapprochement between the two countries”, which was an extremely bold statement to make given his country’s official position on the matter. That strongly hints that there’s serious interest in the Russian “deep state” to “recalibrate” their recent foreign policy “adjustment” in full-fledged partisan favor of India in order to make it more “balanced”, which would by default work out to the “Progressives’” advantage. Such a change wouldn’t be just for the strategic sake of it either, but could possibly be driven by Iran’s reported plans to build a CPEC-parallel pipeline (E-CPEC+) to China, a game-changing megaproject that Russia could participate in if it allows its offshore reserves in Iran to be transported through this pipeline and/or uses its world-class technical expertise to construct it. Any move in that direction could help Russia retain “balance” in its new relations with India but also just as importantly promote peace in South Asia too.

The MSS speaks about the need to actively “prevent any military confrontation between [nuclear powers] – both deliberate and unintended – since any standoff could spark ‘a global nuclear war’”, and while Russia isn’t able to mediate between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, it could “balance” out its regional investments in the former through its prospective leading participation in the latter’s E-CPEC+. The more economically connected that Russia becomes with the global pivot state of Pakistan (including through the RuPak rail proposal via Central Asia & Afghanistan that could become the main component of N-CPEC+), the less likely it is that India will seriously consider behaving aggressively against Islamabad out of concern that its informal ally’s investments might be impacted as “collateral damage”. The greater the tangible stake that Russia has in Pakistan, the more involved it would naturally become in promoting peace between this nuclear power and India in accordance with the strategic precept guiding the MSS proposal. Without any “skin in the game” in Pakistan, Russia’s efforts to prevent a military clash in the region would be unconvincing and ultimately futile.

Overcoming The Kashmiri Obstacle

India is powerless to prevent Russia from investing in a purely apolitical project such as E-CPEC+ if its partner is sincerely interested in doing so and desires the resultant aforementioned strategic gains that this would entail, but it might try to wage a low-intensity infowar out of desperation to pressure it against doing so, though going too far with this could risk undermining the hard-fought trust recently built between the two by amounting to blatant interference in its affairs. The most likely narrative approach that could be relied upon in this scenario is to emphasize how the Russian Ambassador to India explicitly said that his country recognizes India’s recent moves in Kashmir to be an “internal matter” and that “our views are exactly the same as India’s”, which implies full endorsement of New Delhi’s maximalist claims towards the Kashmir Conflict. That said, such an interpretation is merely an assumption, since Russia has the narrative leeway to assert that it set a “balanced” precedent and also therefore regards Gilgit-Baltistan (through which E-CPEC+ would traverse) as Pakistani territory, thus settling any Indian concerns over the legality of this move.

So long as Russia has the political will to defy Indian pressure (however direct or indirect it may be), it can return to its original plans of “balancing” South Asian affairs instead of privileging India over the rest of the region. The odds of this happening would become even more likely if the “Progressives” succeed with their plan to get the Foreign Ministry to promulgate the MSS proposal as its official policy, as this would then become the structural framework through which their active “balancing” efforts as practiced by the “energy diplomacy” of participating in E-CPEC+ would become institutionally justified. It might still take a while for the “Progressives’” vision, which may have actually been “ahead of its time” when it first began being practiced a few years ago, to catch on with the rest of Russia’s “deep state” and convince them of the useful flexibility of their MSS model as compared to the extant rigid one being defended by the “Traditionalists”, but the very fact that it’s being so prominently reported on by Russia’s publicly financed international media strongly suggests that there’s some degree of behind-the-scenes support for at least floating the idea in the public domain at this time.

Concluding Thoughts

The author previously wrote about how Russia is in the midst of two systemic transitions in the political (Post-Putin 2024, PP24) and economic (“Great Society”/”National Development Projects”) spheres, but now one can say that it’s also experiencing a similar systemic transition in the diplomatic one as well seeing as how the MSS is the natural evolution of Russian foreign policy in the emerging Multipolar World Order, especially if it intends to indefinitely remain the leader of the fledgling new Non-Aligned Movement (Neo-NAM) that it wants to lead throughout this century (whether by itself or jointly with India). Although the diplomatic transition was recently suspended in the South Asian sense out of financial considerations stemming from the planned multibillion-dollar deals that Russia later clinched with India in exchange for its partisan support of New Delhi’s actions in Kashmir, most of those agreements have been finalized after last week’s Eastern Economic Forum so India can no longer use them as “blackmail” leverage for pressuring Russia not to invest in E-CPEC+. Simply put, India already moved so close to Russia that it can’t disengage, thus leaving it no choice but to accept Moscow’s will.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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.

“War and militarism are class issues.”

Black Alliance for Peace national organizer and Black Agenda Report editor Ajamu Baraka delivered the following remarks to the International Trade Union Forum in Solidarity with Workers and People to Break the Economic Sanctions and in Rejection of Imperialist Intervention, held on September 7 through 9, in Damascus, Syria.

***

Thank you, and I bring you greetings from the struggling working-class peoples of the United States, but particularly from the anti-imperialist and revolutionary Black working class and our still imprisoned comrades from the Black Liberation Movement, many of whom have been imprisoned for over 40 years representing the longest held political prisoners on the planet!

We say “All power to the people, All power to the people! When we say all power to the people, we recognize this not as an abstract slogan but a call to action, a statement of values and an organizing principle.

My Name is Ajamu Baraka, and I am here in my capacities as a member of the leadership bodies of the U.S. Peace Council, The United National Anti-war Coalition and especially the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), a multi-tendency, Black Internationalist, anti-imperialist, working class oriented formation that is an integral part of the historic struggle for Black and working class liberation in the United States.

As a Black working-class oriented alliance residing in the center of empire and committed to peace and abolishing war, repression and imperialism, we are quite clear about how we see the world and our responsibilities.

We say that there can be no working-class justice, no working-class rights in a world where powerful elite social forces are prepared and are using extreme violencein the form of political and economic destabilization and war.

We are clear that war is a class issue.That it is always the rural and urban working classes that are required to fight the wars against other working classes and oppressed peoples and nations.

That is why we in BAP say clearly and without equivocation “Not one drop of blood from the poor and working-class to defend the capitalist dictatorship in the U.S. and oppressor classes and peoples’ world-wide.”

“There can be no working-class justice, no working-class rights in a world where powerful elite social forces are prepared and are using extreme violence.”

Let me share very briefly how the interests of the rulers’ clash with that of the working class in the U.S.

In the U.S.  Neoliberalism, state austerity and theft of public resources has had a devastating impact on workers.

It has been estimated that the U.S. state has spent 6 trillion dollars on U.S. wars over the last 18 years. The military budget for next two years will amount to over 730 billion a year!  The state has already committed 1.7 trillion over next ten years to upgrade U.S. nuclear arsenal.

What impact has that had on workers in the U.S. who make up majority of the population?

The UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights points out that : the US is one of the world’s wealthiest countries. It spends more on national defense than China, Russia, The United Kingdom, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India combined.

But the report documents the social, economic consequences for workers related to the choice made by U.S. authorities to shift public expenditures away from the human rights of the vast majority of the population – workers — to the military. The report documents that:

• US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.
• Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the “health gap” between the US and its peer countries continues to grow.
• US inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries.
• In terms of access to water and sanitation, the US ranks 36th in the world.
• The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.

The theft of public resources for the military and militarism domestically and abroad represent a one-sided class war waged on the working class in the U.S. The 6 trillion dollars spent on U.S. wars since 2003 are resources that could have been directed to address the increasing desperate plight of workers and poor people in the U.S.

“The U.S. spends more on national defense than China, Russia, The United Kingdom, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India combined.”

Today, as a result of the neoliberal policies supported by both parties over last forty years and the diversion of the people’s resources into war and militarism:

• The average worker in the U.S. is making, adjusted for inflation, less than in 1973, i.e., some 46 years ago.
• 140 million are either poor or have low-income with 80% living paycheck to paycheck
• 34 million workers are still without health insurance (Austerity and militarism both kill, AB).
• 40 million live in “official poverty;” and more in unofficial poverty as measured by alternative supplemental poverty (SPM).
• More than half of those over 55 years-old have no retirement funds other than Social Security, which means that these seniors retire straight into poverty.

War and militarism are class issuesthat impact workers in various ways depending on the national context. In Syria workers and the people have suffered enormously as result of the criminal aggressions by a collection of rogue states with no regard for human life, human rights or established morality.

It is clear:

For workers and the people of Syria, women workers in aBangladesh garmentfactory, for African workers extracting precious materials for the world market in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, teacher unions in the U.S., sanitation workers in China, and for the thousands of workers and campesinos in Central America displaced by U.S. and European capital and repressive governments, there can be no workers’ rights without peace and social justice.

This requires a recognition that reciprocal solidarity, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, gender equality and opposition to patriarchy, and respect and support for the sovereignty of nations and peoples’ must be guiding principles of worker- centered internationalism.

BAP stands in fraternal solidarity with the people and working class of Syria and the world in the desire for a world in which the people can experience peace, people(s)-centered human rights and a sustainable future. We are confident that this gathering will move us closer toward realizing this common vision.

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This article was originally published on Black Agenda Report.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded theSerena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.  

Global Research Editor’s Note

The 9/11 Commission’s Report Chapter 2 provides an almost visual description of the Arab hijackers. It depicts in minute detail events occurring inside the cabin of the four hijacked planes.

In the absence of surviving passengers, this “corroborating evidence”, was based on passengers’ cell and air phone conversations with their loved ones.

Focusing on the personal drama of the passengers, the Commission had built much of its narrative around the phone conversations. The Arabs are portrayed with their knives and box cutters, scheming in the name of Allah, to bring down the planes and turn them “into large guided missiles” (Report, Chapter 2).

The 9/11 Report conveys the impression that cell phone ground-to-air communication from high altitude was of reasonably good quality, and that there was no major impediment or obstruction in wireless transmission.

This carefully researched documentary confirms unequivocally that Chapter 2 of the 9/11 Commission’s Report was fabricated.

The official 9/11 Narrative is a Big Lie. Given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell phone call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8000 feet.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 13, 2019

VIDEO

We sent the War to Syria’s shores.

We sent the terrorists, the mass destruction, the mass lies.

We sent the evil, the death, the barbarism.

And we are still doing it.

In the following interview with Syrian Scientist Dr. Ayshar Midani, we learn that criminal “sanctions” are Weapons of Mass Destruction.

We learn of the pre-planned, willful destruction of Syria’s water infrastructure, education infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, financial infrastructure, everything that makes a country function.

We learn how our governments and their terrorist proxies destroy children from the inside out, indoctrinating them in the takfiri ideology.

We know that Syria will win this war for democracy, for nation-state sovereignty, for religious pluralism, for civilisation, and that every inch of Syrian territory will be liberated.

The invisible wounds will take longer to heal. Syria will be forever changed in this battle against Evil that the West has imposed on Syria and Syrians. The battle will continue even when the guns are silent.

But Syria will win, and when she does, we all will win.

Dr. Midani is a Syrian anti-war activist based in France. She is the chairperson of NOSTIA, a network and community of expatriate Syrian Scientists, Technologists and Innovators.

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Dr. Midani is a Syrian scientist and anti-war activist based in France. She is the chairperson of NOSTIA, a network and community of expatriate Syrian Scientists, Technologists and Innovators.

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. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

Click to order

First published on September 11, 2008

***

Note: Although the points are stated briefly, I give in each case the pages in my most recent book—“The New Pearl Harbor Revisited”—where the issue is documented and discussed more extensively.

(1) Although the official account of 9/11 claims that Osama bin Laden ordered the attacks, the FBI does not list 9/11 as one of the terrorist acts for which he is wanted and has admitted that it “has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11” (NPHR 206-11).

(2) Although the official story holds that the four airliners were hijacked by devout Muslims ready to die as martyrs to earn a heavenly reward, Mohamed Atta and the other alleged hijackers regularly drank heavily, went to strip clubs, and paid for sex (NPHR 153-55).

(3) Many people reported having received cell phone calls from loved ones or flight attendants on the airliners, during which they were told that Middle Eastern hijackers had taken over the planes. One recipient, Deena Burnett, was certain that her husband had called her several times on his cell phone because she had recognized his number on her Caller ID. But the calls to Burnett and most of the other reported calls were made when the planes were above 30,000 feet, and evidence presented by the 9/11 truth movement showed that, given the technology of the time, cell phone calls from high-altitude airliners had been impossible. By the time the FBI presented a report on phone calls from the planes at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006, it had changed its story, saying that there were only two cell phone calls from the flights, both from United 93 after it had descended to 5,000 feet (NPHR 111-17).

(4) US Solicitor General Ted Olson’s claim that his wife, Barbara Olson, phoned him twice from AA 77, reporting that hijackers had taken it over, was also contradicted by this FBI report, which says that the only call attempted by her was “unconnected” and hence lasted “0 seconds” (NPRH 60-62).

(5) Although decisive evidence that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks was reportedly found in Mohamed Atta’s luggage—which allegedly failed to get loaded onto Flight 11 from a commuter flight that Atta took to Boston from Portland, Maine, that morning—this story was made up after the FBI’s previous story had collapsed. According to that story, the evidence had been found in a Mitsubishi that Atta had left in the Logan Airport parking lot and the trip to Portland was taken by Adnan and Ameer Bukhari. After the FBI learned that neither of the Bukharis had died on September 11, it simply declared that the trip to Portland was made by Atta and another al-Qaeda operative (NPHR 155-62).

(6) The other types of reputed evidence for Muslim hijackers—such as videos of al-Qaeda operatives at airports, passports discovered at the crash sites, and a headband discovered at the crash site of United 93—also show clear signs of having been fabricated (NPHR 170-73).

(7) In addition to the absence of evidence for hijackers on the planes, there is also evidence of their absence: If hijackers had broken into the cockpits, the pilots would have “squawked” the universal hijack code, an act that takes only a couple of seconds. But not one of the eight pilots on the four airliners did this (NPHR 175-79).

(8) Given standard operating procedures between the FAA and the military, according to which planes showing signs of an in-flight emergency are normally intercepted within about 10 minutes, the military’s failure to intercept any of the flights implies that something, such as a stand-down order, prevented standard procedures from being carried out (NPHR 1-10, 81-84).

(9) Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta reported an episode in which Vice President Cheney, while in the bunker under the White House, apparently confirmed a stand-down order at about 9:25 AM, which was prior to the strike on the Pentagon. Another man has reported hearing members of LAX Security learn that a stand-down order had come from the “highest level of the White House” (NPHR 94-96).

(10) The 9/11 Commission did not mention Mineta’s report, removed it from the Commission’s video record of its hearings, and claimed that Cheney did not enter the shelter conference room until almost 10:00, which was at least 40 minutes later than he was really there, according to Mineta and several other witnesses, including Cheney’s photographer (NPHR 91-94).

(11) The 9/11 Commission’s timeline for Cheney that morning even contradicted what Cheney himself had told Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” September 16, just five days after 9/11 (NPHR 93).

(12) Hani Hanjour, known as a terrible pilot who could not safely fly even a single-engine airplane, could not possibly have executed the amazing trajectory reportedly taken by American Flight 77 in order to hit Wedge 1 of the Pentagon (NPHR 78-80).

(13) Wedge 1 would have been the least likely part of the Pentagon to be targeted by foreign terrorists, for several reasons: It was as far as possible from the offices of Rumsfeld and the top brass, whom Muslim terrorists presumably would have wanted to kill; it was the only part of the Pentagon that had been reinforced; the reconstruction was not finished, so there were relatively few people there; and it was the only part of the Pentagon that would have presented obstacles to a plane’s flight path (NPHR 76-78).

(14) Contrary to the claim of Pentagon officials that they did not have the Pentagon evacuated because they had no way of knowing that an aircraft was approaching, a military E-4B—the Air Force’s most advanced communications, command, and control airplane—was flying over the White House at the time. Also, although there can be no doubt about the identity of the plane, which was captured on video by CNN and others, the military has denied that it belonged to them (NPHR 96-98).

(15) The Secret Service, after learning that a second World Trade Center building had been attacked—which would have meant that terrorists were going after high-value targets—and that still other planes had apparently been hijacked, allowed President Bush to remain at the school in Sarasota, Florida, for another 30 minutes. It thereby revealed its foreknowledge that Bush would not be a target: If these had really been surprise attacks, the agents, fearing that a hijacked airliner was bearing down on the school, would have hustled Bush away. On the first anniversary of 9/11, the White House started telling a new story, according to which Bush, rather than remaining in the classroom several minutes after Andrew Card whispered in his ear that a second WTC building had been hit, immediately got up and left the room. This lie was told in major newspapers and on MSNBC and ABC television (NPHR 129-31).

(16) Given the fact that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 had steel columns running from their basements to their roofs, they simply could not have come down as they did—straight down at virtually free-fall speed—unless these columns had been sliced by means of explosives. Therefore, the official theory, according to which the buildings came down because of fire plus (in the case of the Twin Towers) the impact of the planes, is scientifically impossible (NPHR 12-25).

(17) The destruction of the Twin Towers had many other features—such as the horizontal ejections of steel beams, the melting of steel, and the sulfidation and thinning of steel—that can be explained only in terms of powerful explosives. For example, the fires could not have come within 1000 degrees Fahrenheit of the temperature needed to melt steel (30-36).

(18) Members of the FDNY (Fire Department of New York) provided oral histories shortly after 9/11 in which one fourth of them testified to having witnessed explosions in the Twin Towers. Explosions in the WTC 7 as well as the towers were also reported by city officials, WTC employees, and journalists (NPHR 27-30, 45-48, 51).

(19) Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Peter Jennings of ABC News that day: “we set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street . . . , and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse. And it [the South Tower] did collapse before we could actually get out of the building.” However, there was no objective basis for expecting the towers to collapse; even the 9/11 Commission admitted that none of the fire chiefs expected them to come down. The FDNY oral histories show that the information that they were going to collapse came from the Office of Emergency Management—Giuliani’s own office. How could Giuliani’s people have known that the towers were going to come down, unless they knew that the buildings had been laced with explosives? (NPH 40)

(20) NIST, which produced the official reports on the Twin Towers and (recently) WTC 7, has been “fully hijacked from the scientific to the political realm,” so that its scientists are little more than “hired guns,” a former employee has reported, and the 9/11 Commission was no more independent, being run by Philip Zelikow, who was essentially a member of the Bush White House (NPHR 11, 238-51).

(21) The official story about 9/11 is now rejected by constantly growing numbers of physicists, chemists, architects, engineers, pilots, former military officers, and former intelligence officials (NPHR xi).

David Ray Griffin. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé. Olive Branch Press, September, 2008, ISBN-10: 1566567297

Established on August 22, 2011, around six months after US launched aggression on the country, the so-called “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (COI)” is mandated to investigate war-related human rights abuses.

Instead, it produced over 20 propaganda reports and periodic updates, largely blaming Syria and its allies for crimes of war and against humanity committed against the nation and its people by the US, its imperial partners, and jihadist foot soldiers.

Blaming victims is longstanding US, NATO, Israeli policy, the Big Lie supported by establishment media, most people none the wiser about the deception.

Syria’s UN envoy Bashar al-Jaafari earlier slammed the COI, saying the following:

It’s “deliberately blowing things out of proportion when displaying its findings, also fully disregarding or downplaying core issues,” adding:

“There are blood-curdling scenes that flagrantly contravene the Syrians’ dignity and human rights regarding the crimes of the armed terrorist groups…”

They “rang(e) from eating human flesh, cutting throats, mutilating bodies, beheadings on sectarian and confessional grounds, throwing bodies from rooftops to committing hundreds of suicide bombings using car bombs in populated areas, recruiting children, abducting and slaughtering clergymen, assassinating scholars in mosques, issuing instigative fatwas on ‘sexual jihad,’ killing children on the charges of infidelity, robbing factories and transporting them to Turkey.”

For over eight years, COI reports gave these atrocities scant coverage, focusing attention on vilifying Assad, wrongfully blaming his forces and allies for high crimes and other human rights abuses committed by the US, its imperial allies, and terrorist proxies.

COI reports are based on interviews with anti-Assad sources in neighboring countries, “photographs, video recordings, satellite imagery, forensic and medical reports” from nations and NGO’s hostile to Damascus, along with so-called “academic analyses” and other UN misinformation.

On Wednesday, the COI issued its latest report on Syria. Covering the first six months of 2019, it followed the pattern of earlier ones, largely blaming Syria and allied forces for US-led imperial crimes on the country and its people.

While acknowledging al-Nusra attacks on government forces and civilians in northern Syria, the COI failed to explain that its fighters are armed, funded and directed by the Pentagon, the CIA, and US imperial allies, including Israel.

“(P)ro-government forces” were falsely accused of “destroying infrastructure essential to the survival of the civilian population, including hospitals, markets, educational facilities and agricultural resources, and forcing almost half a million civilians to flee” from Idlib province and surrounding areas.

At the same time, the COI admitted that “large-scale operations by the US-led international coalition and (Pentagon supported) Syrian Democratic Forces caus(ed) widespread destruction of towns and villages in” Deir Ezzor province and elsewhere.

Around 70,000 Syrian refugees are located in the Al Hol camp, enduring “deplorable and inhumane conditions,” said the COI, omitting what Russian National Defense Management Center General Mikhail Mizintsev explained earlier, saying:

“All fundamental norms of international law are violated in (camps) controlled by the US. The situation at…Rukban and Al-Hol (is) critical.”

“By artificially creating inhuman conditions at the refugee camps on the illegally occupied territories in Syria, the US is creating a basis for the return of terror organizations with the goal of maintaining instability in the country and the region.”

Head of Russia’s reconciliation center in Syria General Viktor Kupchishin added the following;

Conditions in refugee camps controlled by the US are responsible for “10 (to) 20 people dy(ing) each day” because of lack of food, medical care, and overall inhumane conditions.

The COI report falsely said

“(i)n areas controlled by the government, civilians, including recent returnees, were arbitrarily arrested by the state or abducted by pro-government militias” — a tactic used by US-supported jihadists, not Damascus.

At the same time, it admitted that “the US-led international coalition…left essential infrastructure obliterated, civilians killed, maimed, and uprooted, and communities in ‘near complete destruction,’ ” — a rare acknowledgment of devastation by the Pentagon and allied forces.

Citing an incident in Hajin, Syria, part of the al-Jazeera Storm campaign in Deir Ezzor province, the COI said attacks by coalition forces may have “amount(ed) to a war crime in cases in which such attacks are conducted recklessly.”

There’s no ambiguity about US-led high crimes of war and against humanity throughout years of naked aggression in Syria.

Examples are endless, including CW incidents staged by US-supported jihadists, falsely blamed on government forces, destruction of vital infrastructure by Pentagon-led terror-bombing, and notably the rape and destruction of Raqqa in 2017.

Most of the city was turned to rubble, countless thousands of civilians massacred, a thriving metropolis transformed into a wasteland — on the phony pretext of combatting ISIS the US created and supports.

None of the above was included in COI reports — nor did they explain that there’s nothing civil about endless US aggression in Syria.

Wherever the US shows up, mass slaughter, vast destruction, and human misery follow.

WikiLeaks earlier released an email from Hillary Clinton when serving as Obama regime secretary of state, saying the following:

“The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability (sic) is to help the people of Syria overthrow…Bashar Assad,” adding:

“Negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program will not solve Israel’s security dilemma (sic). Nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program (sic).”

No such program exists, not then, earlier, or now. Israel’s only security threats are invented. No real ones exist, the same true for the US and its other imperial allies.

Hillary’s mail added that Israel fears loss of its regional “nuclear monopoly,” admitting its open secret.

She failed to explain that Iran and Syria threaten no other nations. The US, NATO, and Israel threaten humanity.

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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.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

On September 1, the Argentine government led by President Mauricio Macri imposed capital controls in a bid to stem the fall in the foreign exchange reserves and the peso currency. This unexpected move was initiated soon after the authorities spent nearly $3 billion of forex reserves to repay short-term debt and to protect the value of the peso.

The announcement followed the Macri government’s unilateral decision taken on August 28 to delay repayment of short-term debt instruments (denominated in both US dollar and peso) to maintain liquidity in the financial system and to protect dwindling forex reserves. The government also unraveled its plans to seek a “voluntary reprofiling” of $50 billion of longer-term debt held by foreigners besides requesting the International Monetary Fund to restructure its debt repayment of $44 billion received under the Fund-supported bailout program.

The Policy U-turn

Hardly anyone anticipated that the Macri government would make a U-turn and embrace capital controls. Such was his commitment to market-friendly and pro-investor policies that Mr. Macri dismantled all capital controls introduced by the previous government in one go within hours of his inauguration in December 2015.

Just a few weeks back, he ruled out the imposition of capital controls when the opposition parties called for these measures to halt a slump in the forex reserves and the peso. Leave aside critics; even his supporters were not expecting a sudden policy reversal from President Macri – a firm believer of free markets and a vocal critic of capital controls and other interventionist policies of his predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Now the Macri government has undertaken a course correction, but will the gambit pay off? It is too early to make any reasonable assessment of the efficacy of capital controls introduced in Argentina just two days ago, but initial reports[1] suggest that these measures did help in arresting the free fall of the peso.

The Political Shock

Since April 2018, Argentina has been facing severe macroeconomic instability, but the recent slump in the peso and financial markets started with the August 11 primary elections when Mr. Macri suffered a resounding defeat by the left-leaning opposition candidate Alberto Fernández, thereby further dimming the chances of his re-election. The presidential election will take place on October 27, 2019.

The primary election results were viewed by many as a referendum on the Macri government’s deeply unpopular austerity policies. The election results sent a shockwave in the domestic financial markets as investors feared a break with the market-friendly policies pursued by the Macri government. That led to a massive sell-off in the financial markets and triggered a fresh wave of capital flight out of the country. On August 17, Argentina’s finance minister, Nicolás Dujovne, resigned while admitting that “undoubtedly we have made mistakes”[2] in his resignation letter to President Macri.

Amid financial fragility and political uncertainty, the peso plunged to record new lows against the US dollar as investors dumped Argentina’s sovereign bonds and stocks en masse. The country’s 100-year bond that was four times oversubscribed just over two years lost more than 50 percent of its value after the August 11 primary vote.  The chaos in the currency markets got further exacerbated when nervous Argentine depositors withdrew their savings from the dollar-denominated saving accounts.

In August alone, the peso dropped by more than 30 percent against the US dollar. The Macri government was left with no option but to impose capital controls to stem the peso’s slide and to protect forex reserves. According to data compiled by Capital Economics, Argentina’s foreign exchange reserves are currently at $58 bn, down by 25 percent from a peak of $77 bn in mid-April 2019.[3]

What is even more worrying is the low net forex reserves (now estimated at $19 bn) that cover only 25 percent of the country’s total external financing need. Such low net reserves not only increase external vulnerabilities but also preempt the possibility of undertaking large intervention in the forex markets to stabilize the peso.

The Controls

What are capital controls? In simple terms, capital controls are regulations that restrict or prohibit the movement of capital into or out of a country.

The controls imposed by the Macri government are only aimed at restricting capital outflows. No controls have been introduced to restrict capital inflows. The authorities have enforced controls for a short duration (120 days) and will remain in effect until December 31, 2019. Some of these measures are summarized below:

• Residents are restricted to buy foreign exchange of no more than $10,000 a month. While no restrictions are imposed on residents to withdraw foreign exchange in cash from their bank accounts.
• Non-residents can only buy foreign exchange of $1000 a month, and they are not allowed to make bank transfers abroad.
• New deadlines have been imposed for exporters to repatriate foreign currency earned from sales abroad. Exporters will have to repatriate foreign exchange within five working days of payment or 180 days after the loading permit.
• Companies, banks, and financial institutions will need prior authorization from the central bank to purchase foreign exchange or to distribute dividends abroad.

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

From a broader policy perspective, it was a wrong move by President Macri to remove all capital controls in one go when he took office in December 2015. To a greater degree, capital controls would have provided his government breathing space to reduce inflation and address longer-term structural problems facing the economy. The removal of capital controls made the Argentine economy extremely vulnerable to sudden stops in capital flows.

Ideally, the government should have introduced capital controls in April 2018 when sudden capital flight out of peso-denominated assets began following the rise in U.S. interest rates and a surge in the US dollar. At that time, the rapid depreciation of the peso increased Argentina’s external vulnerabilities due to its heavy reliance on borrowings in foreign currency. That forced the Macri government to seek financial support from the IMF.

The Social and Economic Costs

Since early 2018, the rapid depreciation of the peso and rising public debt (nearly 75 percent is denominated in foreign currencies) have added to the country’s financial vulnerabilities. The market confidence and domestic demand are on the decline. At 60 percent (the highest in the world), benchmark interest rates have crippled domestic investment.

The Argentine economy is now suffering from a deep recession that is worsening social conditions. The recession has negatively impacted tax revenues, which implies that adhering to the program’s ambitious fiscal targets would necessitate more spending cuts. The inflation rate is currently at more than 50 percent and has drastically reduced private consumption, especially of poor households. Unemployment and poverty rates have risen considerably since mid-2018. According to a report by the Catholic University of Argentina’s Social Debt Observatory, almost a third of Argentines were living below the poverty line at the end of 2018.[4] Facing an imminent electoral defeat in October, Mr. Macri announced ad hoc relief measures including a three-month freeze on fuel prices and income tax cuts on August 14.

Is a Quick Recovery Possible?

Given the precarious state of the Argentine economy, it will be far-fetched to expect a quick economic recovery ahead of the presidential election in late October with the help of capital controls.

Sorry, Mr. Macri, capital controls are not a magic wand to turnaround a messed up economy in less than 60 days.

There is no denying that capital controls are useful policy tools, but these measures alone cannot restore financial stability. To be more effective, capital controls need to be complemented by other policy and regulatory measures such as counter-cyclical fiscal and monetary policies, tightening of financial regulations, and keeping public debt under control. Many of these measures may not be compatible with the policy recommendations of the ongoing IMF-supported program in Argentina.

Also, one needs to keep in mind that capital controls will be enforced in Argentina only for a limited period of 120 days which may not be sufficient for restoring macroeconomic stability.

What about the IMF?

At the time of writing, there is no official word from the IMF on the capital controls introduced by the government. No one can dispute that the IMF enthusiastically supported the Macri government’s pro-market reforms ‒ including the dismantling of capital controls and a floating exchange rate regime. When the country faced financial fragility last year, the IMF quickly approved a loan package of $57 bn – the biggest loan package in the IMF’s history – with the strong backing of the United States.

The IMF’s engagement with Argentina raises a critical question about the rationale of significantly frontloading disbursements under the program. Out of total $57 bn, $44 bn has been already disbursed to Argentina, and the next tranche of $5.4 bn is due in late September. As per the agreement, close to 90 percent of the total financial support is to be disbursed to Argentina before the 2019 presidential election. Isn’t a case of IMF supporting Macri’s re-election?

At present, the Argentine economy is in a much deeper recession than it was before the implementation of the IMF-supported program. It not only indicates that frontloading disbursements was a severe mistake but also suggests that the support program designed to restore market confidence and sustained economic expansion is not delivering positive results. It begs the question: What is the accountability of the IMF Executive Board, Managing Director, and senior staff members who designed and approved the support program?

Rather than acknowledging the likelihood of policy failure, Mr. David Lipton, the IMF’s Acting Managing Director and Chair, strongly backed the IMF-supported program just a few weeks back. On July 12, he stated:

“These policy efforts are starting to bear fruit. Financial markets have stabilized, the fiscal and external positions are improving, and the economy is beginning a gradual recovery from last year’s recession.”[5]

One can only hope that the new Managing Director of the IMF will undertake a complete review of its lending programs as well as its broader policy framework. In particular, the IMF should revisit its 2012 Institutional View[6] that endorses capital controls as a last resort, imposed selectively on capital inflows, and on a temporary basis. As several other emerging market economies are also experiencing sudden reversals in capital flows, the IMF should adopt a more flexible approach towards capital controls and support member-countries with all the policy options needed to safeguard financial stability.

It is yet unclear what kind of renegotiations with the IMF would take place if Mr. Fernández becomes Argentina’s next president. Most Argentines blame the IMF policies for exacerbating the financial crisis of 2001, which deepened the recession and triggered social unrest and political instability.

The Importance of Capital Controls

There are valuable lessons to be learned from the current financial crisis in Argentina. First, the policymaking in a complex, uncertain, and the financially integrated world should not be driven by financial orthodoxy endorsed by the IMF, G7, financial markets, and credit rating agencies. Instead, the policymakers should adopt a pragmatic and flexible approach towards managing cross-border capital flows and, therefore, they should not hesitate to use capital controls (along with macroprudential measures) for maintaining financial and macroeconomic stability. Needless to say, financial stability is a public good that every modern economy needs.

As I discussed elsewhere[7], capital controls should be viewed as a legitimate tool of macroeconomic policy to manage the risks associated with volatile capital flows. In recent years, several countries have deployed controls on outflows as part of crisis management tools with positive outcomes. This long list of countries includes Malaysia in 1998, Iceland in 2008, Cyprus in 2013, and China in 2016.

It is high time that the stigma attached to capital controls is removed. Apart from academia and civil society groups, the IMF, World Bank, OECD, UN, and other international organizations should play an important role in removing the stigma. In a more interconnected and integrated global financial system, national measures alone may not be sufficient to address the systemic risks posed by cross-border volatile capital flows to financial stability. Hence, there is a need for regional and international cooperation for maintaining global financial stability.

Lessons for India Too

Argentina’s current crisis has highlighted the issue of currency risks associated with a large share of foreign currency-denominated public debt. As nearly 75 percent of Argentina’s public debt is denominated in foreign currency, it has risen over 30 percentage points due to depreciation of the peso over the past year.

The Argentine crisis offers important lessons for New Delhi as the Ministry of Finance is planning to raise as much as $10 billion this fiscal year via sovereign bonds denominated in foreign currencies. In her budget speech on July 5, finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, stated: “India’s sovereign external debt to GDP is among the lowest globally at less than 5%. The government would start raising a part of its gross borrowing programme in external markets in external currencies. This will also have a beneficial impact on demand situation for the government securities in the domestic market.”[8]

Till now, India has never issued a foreign currency-denominated sovereign bond due to the inherent risks posed by currency volatility. In the international markets, India has issued sovereign bonds (such as masala bonds) but only in Indian rupees so that the bond investors bear the exchange rate risks.

The finance minister is sticking to the issuance of sovereign bonds in foreign currency despite the widespread criticism of this proposed move and serious apprehensions expressed by some former RBI governors about the potential risks involved in issuing such bonds.

Of course, India’s external debt situation is vastly different from Argentina but as pointed out recently by Duvvuri Subbarao, former RBI governor, “Governments start off believing that they will remain prudent, open their doors wider, and soon become so addicted to foreign money they wouldn’t stop until a crisis hits them. To believe that markets can discipline governments is a stretch. The stories of Argentina and Turkey are telling examples.”[9]

One of the main reasons why India has so far avoided financial crises like those experienced by other emerging markets in Asia and Latin America is because of not borrowing funds from international markets in foreign currencies. Much of India’s external debt is in the form of long-term borrowings from official sources (multilateral and bilateral) and that too on concessional terms.

If nominal currency depreciation and hedging costs are taken into account, foreign currency-denominated sovereign bonds may not turn out to be a cheaper option. Nor is a compelling need to raise funds from international markets in foreign currencies at this moment.

Let’s hope better sense prevails in New Delhi too.

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This article was first published on Madhyan

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Notes

[1] Benedict Mander, “Argentine Peso Strengthens after Capital Control Measures,” Financial Times, September 3, 2019; Reuters, “Argentine Peso, Bonds Whiplashed After Capital Controls Imposed,” September 2, 2019.

[2] The text of the resignation letter in Spanish is available at https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/sin-dudas-hemos-cometido-errores-escribio-nicolas-nid2278599.

[3] Edward Glossop, A Closer Look at Argentina’s FX Reserves, Capital Economics, August 28, 2019.

[4] 31.3% of population living below poverty line, says UCA report, Buenos Aires Times, March 25, 2019.

[5] Quoted in “IMF Executive Board Completes Fourth Review Under Argentina’s Stand-By Arrangement, Approves US$5.4 Billion Disbursement,” Press Release No. 19/268, IMF, July 12, 2019.

[6] IMF, The Liberalization and Management of Capital Flows – An Institutional View, November 14, 2012.

[7] Kavaljit Singh, What Are Capital Controls?, Policy Brief # 1, Madhyam, January 2, 2019; Kavaljit Singh, Recent Experiences with Capital Controls, Policy Brief # 4, Madhyam, May 2, 2019.

[8] The full text of the budget speech is available at https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/doc/Budget_Speech.pdf.

[9] Duvvuri Subbarao, “The name is Dollar Bond,” Indian Express, August 3, 2019.

Featured image is from 123rf.com

In a new peer-reviewed paper, the GMO Panel of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) stands accused of giving “low-quality scientific advice” in its favourable opinion on the cultivation in the European Union of Monsanto/Bayer’s GM Bt insecticidal maize variety MON810.

The maize is the only GMO approved for cultivation in the EU. Based on EFSA’s opinion, the European Commission has decided to renew the authorisation for cultivation, in spite of the fact that 19 Member States have banned it from their territories and the European Parliament has demanded that the Commission withdraw its decision.

EFSA issued an opinion in 2009 stating that MON810 was as safe as non-GM maize regarding potential effects on human and animal health and posed a “very low” risk of adverse effects on non-target organisms and the environment.

But those conclusions are challenged in the new paper, published in Environmental Sciences Europe by the scientist Veronika Chvátalová of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.

Chvátalová looked at EFSA’s risk assessment of MON810, focusing on two non-target organisms, honeybees and earthworms.

Chvátalová found that

“EFSA omits relevant available studies, selectively cites information, misquotes studies, fails to acknowledge uncertainties, fails to call for further research where needed, and fails to critically interpret studies and their findings”.

GMWatch observes that while such failures could hypothetically be the result of simple incompetence, in the case of EFSA’s opinion on MON810, they all tend in one direction: to claim, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that MON810 is safe. This suggests that EFSA’s performance is not driven just by incompetence but by an intent to mislead the public and take industry’s side on the safety of this GMO.

In one example from EFSA’s honeybees risk assessment, Chvátalová found that the authority selectively used scientific information in a biased way. It only mentioned parameters that were not affected by exposure to the GM insecticidal protein in MON810, while it omitted one that was negatively affected.

In the risk assessment for earthworms, Chvátalová found that EFSA used double standards, only applying criticism to a study that reported an adverse effect and not to other studies that reported no adverse effects. EFSA also adopted the opinion of a review in which the study’s method was criticised, even though the critique was irrelevant. This use of double standards, according to Chvátalová, “does not inspire confidence in the scientific rigour of the EFSA”.

Chvátalová found that contrary to EFSA’s reassuring conclusion on MON810,

“the body of referenced evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions on risk” and that the authority’s environmental risk assessment was “incomplete”. She concluded, “Overall, the findings indicate that the reliability of scientific information and particularly its use by the EFSA GMO Panel produces low-quality scientific advice, which is inconsistent with the Authority Mission Statement.”

Chvátalová also took aim at EFSA’s record on conflicts of interest:

“The GMO Panel that was responsible for issuing the favourable report on GM maize MON810 has been criticised for more than half of its members having a conflict of interests.”

Double standards

Chvátalová is not the first scientist to accuse EFSA of operating unscientific double standards in the context of studies on GMOs. In 2012 Dr Angelika Hilbeck and Dr Hartmut Meyer accused EFSA of double standards when it rejected the study led by Prof GE Séralini, which found adverse effects in rats fed a GM maize and very low levels of Roundup herbicide, while uncritically accepting at face value Monsanto’s own studies on the same maize, which concluded that it was safe.

Yet when EFSA’s own criteria for judging Séralini’s study were applied equally to Monsanto’s studies, all the studies were found to satisfy or fail to satisfy EFSA’s criteria to a comparable extent. Drs Hilbeck and Meyer concluded,

“The rejection of only one of the papers is, thus, not scientifically justified.”

MON810: A history

MON810 maize was first permitted to be grown in the EU in 1998 for a 10-year period. In 2007 Monsanto applied for renewal of the cultivation authorisation, but a qualified majority of Member States could not agree to grant the renewal. The row dragged on until 2016, when the European Commission unilaterally issued a decision renewing the authorisation of the cultivation of MON810 maize.

However, later the same year, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling on the Commission to withdraw its decision. A group of NGOs agreed.

Chvátalová states in her paper that her research led her to support the Parliament’s and NGOs’ demand:

“These results would support the call on the EC [Commission] to withdraw its draft implementing decision to renew the authorisation of MON810 cultivation voiced by the European Parliament and NGOs.”

Nineteen EU Member States have made use of the EU’s “opt-out” rule to pre-emptively ban the cultivation of MON810 maize on their territories. Spain is the only country that continues to grow it on any significant scale, with a small area in Portugal.

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A critical evaluation of EFSA’s environmental risk assessment of genetically modified maize MON810 for honeybees and earthworms
by Veronika Chvátalová
Environmental Sciences Europevolume 31, Article number: 52 (2019)
(open access)

Abstract

Background

In the European Union (EU), genetically modified (GM) crops are permitted for cultivation only after a thorough risk assessment and a decision by the European Commission (EC). The central scientific body assessing food-related risks is the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). It aims to provide high-quality scientific advice for EU decision-makers. However, both the way EFSA performs risk assessment and the independence of its panel members have been subjected to consistent criticism. In this paper, I examine part of the environmental risk assessment in the Scientific Opinion issued by the EFSA GMO Panel, specifically, the impacts of GM maize MON810 on honeybees and earthworms. The evaluated EFSA document forms the scientific basis of the pending EC Draft implementing decision to renew the authorisation for the lawful cultivation of MON810. I assess the reliability of scientific information cited in the Opinion, the use of this information by EFSA, and the safety conclusions drawn in a form of an extended peer review.

Results

My research indicates that the scientific studies cited in the EFSA Opinion in the sections concerning the possible impacts of GM maize on honeybees and earthworms stem predominantly from reliable sources in terms of authorship, financial support, and status of the study. However, the reliability of the studies varies significantly concerning the ecological relevance of the experiments. Moreover, the body of referenced evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions on risk. Relevantly, several types of shortcomings in the use of scientific information in the risk assessment were identified as prevalent, namely: EFSA omits relevant available studies, selectively cites information, misquotes studies, fails to acknowledge uncertainties, fails to call for further research where needed, and fails to critically interpret studies and their findings.

Conclusions

Overall, the findings indicate that the reliability of scientific information and particularly its use by the EFSA GMO Panel produces low-quality scientific advice, which is inconsistent with the Authority Mission Statement. My research would support the call by the European Parliament and NGOs on the EC to withdraw its Draft implementing decision intended to renew the authorisation of MON810 cultivation.

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After years of improvements in drilling techniques and impressive “efficiency gains,” there is now evidence that the U.S. shale industry is reaching the end of the road on well productivity.

A report earlier this month from Raymond James & Associates finds that the U.S. shale industry may struggling to achieve further productivity gains. If these improvements begin to fizzle out, it could result in “an inflection point in future global oil supply/demand balances,” the investment bank said.

Well productivity is “tracking WAY below our model,” analysts Marshall Adkins and John Freeman wrote in the report. They note that U.S. oil production is up less than 100,000 bpd over the first seven months of 2019, compared to the 600,000-bpd increase over the same period in 2018.

The analysts note that over the past eight years, Raymond James has been one of the most aggressive forecasters for U.S. shale growth, and even then, actual output tended to exceed their forecasts. But this year U.S. shale growth is significantly below their prediction.

The reason is that productivity improvements have suddenly come to an end. Since 2010, initial production rates for the first 30 days of production (IP-30) improved by 30 percent annually on average, according to Raymond James. That was largely the result of the “bigger hammer” approach, the bank said. In other words, drillers threw more of everything at the problem – more money, longer laterals, more sand, and more frac stages. Earlier this decade, IP-30 rates were growing by roughly 40 percent per year. But that slowed to 11 percent in 2017 and 15 percent last year.

However, in the first seven months of 2019, IP-30 rates are up only 2 percent, compared to the 10 percent prediction from Raymond James. Part of the reason is that there is simply a limit to “more, longer and bigger,” the analysts said.

“We believe that this represents clear evidence that U.S. well productivity gains are beginning to reach maximum limits and may even roll over in the coming years as the industry struggles to offset well interference issues and rock quality deterioration.”

Even 2018 figures may have been a “one-off” increase as the oil majors – Chevron and ExxonMobil – escalated activity.

But perhaps the first 30 days is too short of a timeframe to analyze well productivity. So, the investment bank looked at 90 days of production (IP-90). On that metric, the industry is faring even worse, showing an outright decline of 2 percent in the first half of the year compared to the first six months of 2018.

“Recent Permian IP-90 well productivity trends are especially dire,” the analysts wrote. “While U.S. IP-90s declined 2%, Permian IP-90s declined 10% relative to 2018.”

Because the Permian is the largest source of shale production and the most important source of growth, whatever happens there will determinate the trajectory for U.S. production figures on the whole.

Raymond James said that a slight uptick in productivity on an IP-30 basis but a decline on an IP-90 basis suggests that well interference is taking a toll. In other words, shale well performance is suffering as time goes on because wells have been spaced too close together. “Put another way, the average decline curve is becoming steeper than we thought because the wells are starting to cannibalize each other,” the analysts wrote.

Problems with “parent-child” well interference have become more of a concern over the past year or so, which refers to the first well drilled within a given block (the parent well), and subsequent wells drilled (the child wells). As Raymond James notes, not only do they cannibalize each other, but the longer the parent is online, the more the block sees a drop in pressure.

But here’s the thing – a lot of companies have drilled parent wells on various tracts, incentivized to do so because their leases can expire if they don’t demonstrate activity. They held off on the child wells, focusing on drilling parents. Then, at a later point, they go back and drill child wells to squeeze more oil from their acreage. The problem is that so much of the output growth over the last few years came from parent wells. Going forward, the growth will need to increasingly come from the less productive child wells.

But as Raymond James notes, the longer they wait, the less productive the child wells become, because the area loses more and more pressure over time.

In specific terms, the average child well is 30 percent less productive than the parent. But a child well drilled six months after the parent may only see a 10 percent degradation in productivity, while a two-year delay might result in more substantial 40 percent reduction in productivity.

On the other hand, the “cube development” approach, which entails intense development all at the same time, also has problems. Cube development consists of multiple wells, often rising to more than a dozen, are drilled pretty much simultaneously to avoid well interference and pressure decline. Also, in theory, costs are lower because it takes less time, while shared infrastructure reduces costs as well.

But well interference still occurs, and a growing number of companies have reported disappointing results, suggesting that there are limits to density. In a high-profile admission just a few weeks ago, Concho Resources said its 23-well “Dominator” project proved disappointing. The company said it would space out its projects more. Raymond James says there is some middle ground on well-density that companies still need to figure out, but because the industry has boasted about ever-increasing well-density, the pullback is translating into stagnating productivity.

Ultimately, the investment bank says that because of weaker-than-expected productivity, U.S. oil production may only grow by around 350,000 bpd in 2020, versus the market consensus of around 1.5 million barrels per day. In a scenario in which productivity actually falls to zero, production would remain flat for the next few years.

Because “the single most important driver of the oil market over the next decade will be trends in U.S. well productivities,” Raymond James analysts wrote, this is “VERY bullish for oil prices next year.”

“Given that the oil market seems to be pricing in virtually unlimited U.S. oil supply growth at $50/bbl over the next five years, the implications…are very, very important to upside oil price surprises over the coming years.”

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Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist, covering oil and gas, energy and environmental policy, and international politics. He is based in Portland, Oregon. 

Featured image is from OilPrice.com

On a very warm September morning in Kabul, several dozen men, women, and children sit on the carpeted floor of a room at the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ Borderfree Center. The women cluster together. All wear burqas, but because of the heat they push the steel blue veils back, revealing their faces. Most of the men wear traditional tunics and pakol hats.

Parents and children alike listen intently to Masoma, a young Afghan woman who coordinates the Center’s “Street Kids School.” She explains the importance of steady attendance, and parents nod in agreement. Most of the 100 students come on time for their Friday classes, but a handful had recently skipped, showing up only on the day when the center distributes monthly food rations for the Street Kids families.

The previous Friday, those who had missed more than two classes prior to the food distribution day walked away empty-handed—a hard lesson, but the volunteer teachers felt they must abide by the short list of rules governing the center. Anyone who misses classes two or more times in a month won’t receive the ration.

Then Masoma’s colleague, Dr. Hakim, stands and poses two blunt requests. “Please raise your hand,” he says, “if you and your family have at least enough resources to meet your basic needs.”

About six hands are raised. Next he asks people to raise a hand if they couldn’t make ends meet. Seven hands go up. Hakim says his organization wants to help families become self-reliant so that after their children leave the Street Kids School, they will have another way to acquire essentials like beans, rice, and cooking oil.

Hakim now asks people to raise their hands if they could send one family member, like an older brother, to a three-month course on how to repair mobile phones. The idea is well-received. Notebook papers are circulated to gather parents’ names, and, if possible, mobile phone numbers. Several women seek Masoma’s help to write their names. She assures them she will stay in touch.

A tall young man, Habib, carrying a large tray of bananas and apples, politely offers fruit to each guest. Six years ago, Afghan Peace Volunteers members had befriended Habib when they met him in a busy market-place. His father had been killed when a bomb exploded in Kabul. I remember watching him work on a dusty, crowded street during a chilly afternoon shortly after he and his family had taken up residence in a miserable shack in Kabul. His little brother walked alongside him, holding his hand, while Habib carried a scale and asked people to weigh themselves on it. Habib looked forlorn and worried. The shy, anxious youngster had been regularly beaten by an uncle who tried to force him to join a militia; he now recognizes that Habib was wise to run away from the militia.

Today, Habib towers over me. Yesterday, he spoke eagerly at a small group meeting he had helped plan about ways to build caring relationships. Over the past three years, he has learned to read and write and has been at the top of his classes at a government school. He has also developed some construction skills. When I remark that several walls at the center were repaired and newly painted, Masoma smiled happily. “Habib!” she says. “He was a big help.”

A few adults linger alongside the center’s shady garden, filled with fruit trees, grapevines, herbs, and flowers. Some of the Afghan Peace Volunteers used permaculture methods to design and cultivate the space. Others recently dedicated themselves to a “renewable energy team.” Last year, the team helped forty-four families acquire solar energy. This year they hope to expand the effort.

Over the past week, young volunteers have gathered to plan for an upcoming “On the Road to Peace” conference. This will be the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ third annual gathering of participants from each of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. The conference offers four days of intensive learning and discovery about cross-cultural understanding, nonviolence, and ways to abolish war.

Yesterday, Dr. Hakim and I asked for complete quiet inside the center’s “office”—a large room lined with bookcases, file cabinets, mats, and sturdy pillows. In the center of the room, a jumble of cords and power strips are connected to a solar power battery, a fan, a router, and a collection of  cell phones and laptops.

Earlier, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! had invited Dr. Hakim and me to participate in interviews regarding President Trump’s sudden decision to call off a secret meeting he claimed to have arranged between himself, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani, and representatives of the Taliban who have been meeting with United States envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Sitting on the floor, we huddled over Dr. Hakim’s well-worn laptop waiting for Democracy Now! engineers to contact us by Skype.

Hakim and I suggested that neither Trump nor any of the negotiators in Doha were participating in a genuine peace process. Rather, it was a cruel charade, with each side seeking greater leverage by demonstrating their willingness to kill innocent people.

Many people living in Afghanistan greatly fear increased Taliban power over their cities, villages, roadways, and crumbling infrastructure. Taliban war crimes are frequently covered in global media. Less obvious to people in the U.S., but horribly real for people in Afghanistan, are acts of aerial terrorism regularly waged by the United States military.

Writing for The Daily Beast earlier this year, Andrew Quilty described how one Afghan family in the Helmand province suffered a vicious attack on their home last November. Two Taliban fighters had come to their home, insisting that Obaidullah, the householder, let them in. He pleaded with them to leave, but instead the Taliban fighters fired on a joint United States and Afghan military convoy. Shortly thereafter, a United States A-10 Warthog plane strafed Obaidullah’s home.

“Hundreds of rounds of ammunition—bullets the size of large carrots—fired by a weapon designed to disable armoured tanks, poured out of the plane’s Gatling gun,” Quilty wrote. “The two Taliban fighters had fled. Instead, Obaidullah and his fifteen-year-old son Esmatullah were killed; thirteen others suffered broken bones and shrapnel injuries from head to toe. One boy, fourteen-year-old Ehsanullah, lost both his eyes.”

In a report on civilian casualties, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan attributed a rise in civilian deaths in 2019 to an escalation of the U.S. air war in the country. In addition, countless night raids carried out by joint U.S./Afghan forces have struck terror in families whose loved ones were killed in front of them. Ordinary Afghans whom I have met with in the past week are acutely aware of the night raids and link the gruesome pattern of killing civilians to United States trainers and the CIA.

Before Donald Trump pulled back U.S. participation, there had been nine rounds of talks, and the United States special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was supposedly edging closer to a “peace” deal with the Taliban.

A genuine peace process would hold all warring parties accountable for crimes against humanity and would call for an immediate end to U.S. and NATO militarism in Afghanistan. It would urge the United States to humbly acknowledge the recklessness of its invasion and occupation. Reliable non-governmental parties would be asked to develop ways for Afghans to receive reparations from all countries who’ve participated in the past eighteen years of war. Those responsible for pursuing a genuine peace process would need mentors and advisors. I recommend the Afghan Peace Volunteers.

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Featured image is from Dr. Hakim via  Voices for Creative Nonviolence

There is a phenomenon being reported by numerous people worldwide. A growing number of citizens are becoming aware of being stalked, surveilled and manipulated possibly by their own government, other organizations or even individuals. The resulting symptoms include, but are not limited to, sleep disturbance, anxiety, hostility, aggression, depression, anger, hallucinations, delusions, paranoia and cognitive problems. Many are being labelled as delusional. I’m not questioning the presence of psychotic people in the world, but there are too many people complaining of stalking, surveillance and harassment for it to be psychosis in every case. So, what’s happening?

There are existing technologies and agendas available that affect a person’s well-being and behavior such as electronic surveillance, stalking, microwave hearing, silent subliminal messages and behavior modification.

Electronic surveillance is rampant in our country.

“A May 2003 report by Toffler Associates (a global forecasting and consulting company) mentioned 24/7 ‘global persistent surveillance’ accomplished using all sources. According to the report, surveillance technology is to be used to make the targeted individual aware that they’re being watched in order to alter their behavior.”^[1] 

Following the attacks on 9/11, President Bush had authorized illegal wiretaps^[2] by passing the Patriot Act on October 26, 2001 (see Department of Justice, The USA Patriot Act) that vastly expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens in numerous ways.

In January 2008, the US Department of Justice publicized its survey “Stalking Victimization in the United States.” According to the survey an estimated 3.4 million people were victims of stalking while another 2.4 were victims of harassment.^[3]

From a KION Central (West) Coast News report:

“The news report included an interview with Santa Cruz, California Police Lieutenant Larry Richard, who explicitly admits organized stalking is a real phenomenon that has been occurring for a long time.”^[4]

Stalking by the government has occurred. Former FBI supervisor Ted L. Gunderson in a sworn affidavit in a legal action case against the FBI and DOJ said,

“I firmly believe that most individuals working in the FBI, other intelligence agencies, and the government overall are honest, law abiding public servants. However, a sophisticated network of rogue operatives has secretly infiltrated the FBI, other intelligence agencies including the CIA, and other key government positions. This rogue element seeks personal power and wealth and considers themselves above the law and the Constitution.”

Gunderson continued,

“In addition to high-ranking members of the FBI, other intelligence services, and the government overall, wealthy, powerful members of criminal syndicates, multi-millionaires and the corporate elite are using the government gang stalking program to harass enemies. . . . “The victims are targeted for a variety of reasons including government and corporate whistleblowers, parties to financial and employment disputes, parties to marital disputes (usually divorced women), and jilted paramours.”

Unfortunately, persons of convenience are also selected.

He stated that

“Journalists covering controversial issues, and even attorneys and private investigators representing unpopular clients or interests, have been targeted by this program.”^[5]

“Psychological Operations (PsyOp), are a planned process of conveying messages to a target audience (TA) to promote certain attitudes, emotions and behavior. PsyOp is basically the use of communication to influence behavior.” ^[6] 

Direct energy, biological and chemical weapons and computer network operations are all used in PsyOps.

One of the hallmark symptoms that distinguish between the mentally normal and mentally ill is the presence of voices in the head or auditory hallucinations. However, there are weapons that can direct sound onto a person. “Microwave hearing” refers to the production of audible artificial hearing or audible artificial hallucination.

A microwave voice transmission non-lethal weapon is referenced in the thesaurus of the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which is a military instruction website. It also lists analogous devices using silent sound.

A 1980 NASA document (NASA abstract report number AD-A090426, June 1, 1980) stated that

“one can remotely create the perception of noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves. By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.”

The US Army in its “Bioeffects of Selected Non-lethal Weapons” document states that the use of this technology could be psychologically devastating.

Silent subliminal messages are powerful subliminal messages that can be transmitted by infrasound (just below human hearing) directly to the subconscious mind to influence thought and emotions with no conscious filtering. Subliminal mind-control is considered a non-lethal weapon.

Lt. Colonel John B. Alexander of the US Army, one of the prime movers behind the advanced development of non-lethal weapons, states in an article “The New Mental Battlefield: ‘Beam me up Spock’” in the US Army Military Review, Dec. 1980 EPI 6022,

“Mind-altering techniques designed to impactopponents are well advanced. The procedures employed include manipulation of human behavior through the use of psychological weapons affecting sight, sound, smells, temperature, electromagnetic energy or sensory deprivation.” ^[7]

In the June/July 1987 issue of Peace Magazine, former Congressman James Scheur (R-NY) is quoted as saying,

 “We are developing devices and products capable of controlling violent individuals and entire mobs without injury. We can tranquilize, impede, immobilize, harass, shock, upset, chill, temporarily blind, deafen, or just plain scare the wits out of anyone the police have a proper need to control and restrain.”

Between 2016 and 2018 there are news reports of U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba and China experiencing a strange perception of high frequency noises and neuro-behavioral symptoms such as headaches, dizziness and vertigo. There are reports from others around the world suffering with similar symptoms.

Some think we are being experimented on with these weapons. Citizens don’t want to believe that our government would allow this to occur, but unfortunately my research has shown that this is indeed a possibility. In 2007, NBC News quoted the Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne:

“Non-lethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd control situations before they are used on the battlefield.”^[8]

Non-consensual experimentation is not just current. Past experiments include radiation tests and mustard gas experiments in the 1940s, testicle implants from 1910 to the 1950s, the use of STDs in Guatemala in the 1940s, and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments that ran from 1932 to 1972.

Jim Guest, former Representative (R-MO) and retired aerospace engineer, wrote the members of the Missouri Legislature asking for help for the many “who are being affected unjustly by electronic weapons torture and covert harassment groups.”^[9]

Why haven’t we known about this? In an article called “The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflict Short of War” Stephen Metz, PhD, director of Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, and James Kievit, a research analyst at the Strategic Studies Institute, state,

“The use of new technology may also run counter to basic American values. The advantage of directed-energy weapons over conventional ones is deniability. Deniability must be aimed at the American people…”^[10]

There are some schools of thought that claim when an individual is too close to revealing these programs, they are considered a threat in one way or another and neutralized through a concept known as targeting, which includes the use of weapons and including death. Some who have died under “suspicious circumstances” include Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), bioweapons expert Dr. Frank Olson, Dr. Fred Bell (a radio host and whistleblower on non-lethal weapons) and Dr. Rauni Kilde, former medical doctor for Finland and whistleblower on mind control technology.

Committing and discrediting individuals is another way of silencing victims. Of course, not discussing cases is used to deny anything. Censoring and classifying are common.

Do you think this all sounds like science fiction? You bet. There’s a quote by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuham: “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”

It is now clear these programs do exist and are capable of inducing mental illness symptoms, which could be labeled by psychiatrists as psychotic. In the modern world, if you could evoke these symptoms, it could be used to silence people by mimicking mental illness. Once a person is designated abnormal, all his/her behavior and characteristics are covered by that label . . . forever. Who will then listen to them?

If you know someone who insists this is happening to them, don’t automatically discount them as delusional. Consider they may be a victim of one or more of these programs.

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Notes

1. Mark M. Rich. New World War: Revolutionary Methods for Political Control, pg. 89 (see also Toward a Revolution in Intelligence Affairs, Rand Corporation, 2005.)
2. David Sanger. “Bush Admits He Ordered Domestic Spying Program,” The New York Times, reprinted Anchorage Daily News, 18 December 2005. (See also: “The Fisa Amendments Act Authorizes Warrantless Spying on Americans,” by Jennifer Granick, The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Blog, 5 November 2012). Sourced fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/politics/bush-says-he-ordered-domestic-spying.html
3. US Department of Justice Survey, “Stalking Victimization in the United States,” January 2009. Sourced from https://victimsofcrime.org/docs/src/baum-k-catalano-s-rand-m-rose-k-2009.pdf?sfvrsn=0

4. “Gang Stalking, Bullying on Steroids,” 29 January 2011. KION Central (West) Coast News. Sourced from https://medium.com/@thomas.mcfarlan/the-numerous-reports-of-organized-stalking-bycalifornia-tv-news-outlets-24d806873606

5. Ted L. Gunderson, sworn affidavit 26 April 2011, Los Angeles, California. Mr. Keith Labella action against FBI and DOJ. Sourced from https://www.oregonstatehospital.net/d/otherfiles/gunderson.pdf
6. Mark M. Rich. New World War, pg. 103.

8. “Military Review,” the US Air Force Institute for National Security Studies. Sourced from https://www.wanttoknow.info/mk/alexander-new-battlefield.pdf
9. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14806772/ns/us_news-security/t/nonlethal-weapons-touted-use-citizens/). See also:https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/cnn_claims_af_secretary_wants_to_test_weapons_on_protestors/
10. Representative Jim Guest. 10 October 2007 excerpt from Jim Guest’s letter to members of the Legislature. Sourced from https://targetedindividualscanada.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/letter2.jpg
11. Steven Metz, James Kievit. “The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflict Short of War.” US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA. 17013-5050. Sourced from https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1994/ssi_kievit-metz.pdf

Chinese-Indian relations are worsening after reckless statements by the latter’s media and officials, proving that ties between the two Asian Great Powers are much shakier than either side publicly acknowledges and thus raising the risk that President Xi’s unconfirmed visit to the South Asian state next month might not happen at all if this worrying trend isn’t reversed.

Although the Russian Far East has huge investment potential in the fields of raw materials, mineral resources, fisheries, forestry’s and tourism, it still remains a sparely populated area of only around 7 million people. With China, India, Japan, Indonesia and Russia projected to be some of the world’s biggest economies by 2030 according to many experts, the 21st Century has been dubbed as the “Asian Century,” and it is for this reason that Russian President Vladimir Putin has prioritized the rapid development of the Russian Far East.

The region is not only resource rich, but is also conveniently located in northeast Asia, bordering Mongolia, China and North Korea, while sharing a maritime border with Japan. It is so strategic and rich that only weeks ago French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his belief that Europe stretches from Lisbon on the Atlantic Coast to the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok. Vladivostok has hosted the Eastern Economic Forum annually ever since its establishment 2015, in part to attract foreign investors to diversify from only Chinese investments in the Russian Far East. China has invested tens of billions into the region, making it easily the biggest foreign investor in the region.

However, with Indian Prime Minister Modi on the eve of Vladivostok’s 5th Eastern Economic Forum proposing a trilateral cooperation between India, Russia and Japan by jointly developing the Russian Far East, it appears that China’s economic influence in the region will be challenged. Although China emphasizes peaceful relations through mutual economic development and prosperity, it still has frosty relations with Japan and India. It is therefore unsurprising that India and Japan have opted to invest in the Russian Far East to challenge China’s economic might in a region that also shares a vast border with China.

India, Japan and Sri Lanka signed an agreement to build a new container terminal in the port of Colombo, demonstrating that New Delhi and Tokyo have experience in cooperating in a trilateral format. With India opting to be the only South Asian country not involved in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), India continues to show coldness to China as the latter continues to rapidly develop neighboring countries, especially with Nepal and rival Pakistan. With the BRI developing Sri Lanka, it appears India and Japan are creating a new economic duo to match China’s economic strength, and are now prepared to take this to a new front away from Sri Lanka and to the Russian Far East.

Japan’s investments in the Russian Far East’s economy already exceeds $15 billion and will continue to develop, according to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. And with India also expressing its interest, the Russian Far East has become a promising place for all prospectors. With Russian President Vladimir Putin offering free land handouts in the Far East to Russians and naturalized citizens in May 2016, it demonstrates that Russia has identified that if it wants to benefit from Asia’s rapid development and economic dominance in the 21st century, it needs to develop its regions in Asia.

With the development of the region naturally meaning increased trade and cultural exchanges with China, tens of thousands of Chinese citizens have now migrated to the region in search of opportunities and establish themselves as merchants and entrepreneurs. Whether we begin seeing Indian and Japanese merchants in the Russian Far East remains to be seen.

With India and China competing in Nepal and border issues on the Indian-Chinese frontier remaining unresolved in New Delhi’s eyes, it appears that India is now wanting to compete against China in a region that has had connections with China for millennia. Russia has been encouraging more and diversified investments in the Far East and Japan and India will take every opportunity to do this.

Russia and China remain strategic partners and are also pragmatic international players that continue to pursue a policy of non-interference. Therefore, although China has frosty relations with Japan and India, it can respect Russia’s ties with both countries. This pragmatism has now allowed India and Japan to engage in a friendly competition for economic influence over Russia’s resource rich region. Although both Japan and China invest in raw material and energy projects in the Far East, India will be a new player to this sector with Indian Oil and Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan expressing his long-term interest in the Russian coal and steel sector during his visit to Russia last week.

With India becoming increasingly energy hungry because of its enormous and growing population, alongside its economic development, it is easily seen why the resource rich Russian region is of critical importance to it. For Japan, the region presents unmatched economic opportunities. Most interestingly to observe is whether India and Japan will continue to work in trilateral formats to continue expanding their economic interests and challenge the BRI in other regions. It appears now that after their cooperation in Sri Lanka, their second step is to challenge the expansion of the BRI in Russia’s Far East by competing for lucrative contracts and opportunities that the region can offer.

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Paul Antonopoulos is Director of the Multipolar research centre.

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The Globalization of War is undoubtedly one of the most important books on the contemporary global situation produced in recent years. 

In his latest masterpiece, Professor Michel Chossudovsky shows how the various conflicts we are witnessing today in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and Palestine are in fact inter-linked and inter-locked through a single-minded agenda in pursuit of global hegemony helmed by the United States and buttressed by its allies in the West and in other regions of the world.   Dr Chandra Muzaffar, President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

$15.00, Save 40% on list price

 The following text is the Preface of  Michel Chossudovsky’s New Book entitled: The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity

The Book can be ordered directly from Global Research Publishers.  

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PREFACE

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

Under a global military agenda, the actions undertaken by the Western military alliance (U.S.-NATO-Israel) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Ukraine, Syria and Iraq are coordinated at the highest levels of the military hierarchy. We are not dealing with piecemeal military and intelligence operations. The July-August 2014 attack on Gaza by Israeli forces was undertaken in close consultation with the United States and NATO. The actions in Ukraine and their timing coincided with the onslaught of the attack on Gaza.

In turn, military undertakings are closely coordinated with a process of economic warfare which consists not only in imposing sanctions on sovereign countries but also in deliberate acts of destabilization of financial and currencies markets, with a view to undermining the enemies’ national economies.

The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. As we go to press, U.S. and NATO forces have been deployed in Eastern Europe including Ukraine. U.S. military intervention under a humanitarian mandate is proceeding in sub-Saharan Africa. The U.S. and its allies are threatening China under President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”.

In turn, military maneuvers are being conducted at Russia’s doorstep which could potentially lead to escalation.

The U.S. airstrikes initiated in September 2014 directed against Iraq and Syria under the pretext of going after the Islamic State are part of a scenario of military escalation extending from North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to Central and South Asia.

The Western military alliance is in an advanced state of readiness. And so is Russia.

Russia is heralded as the “Aggressor”. U.S.-NATO military confrontation with Russia is contemplated.

Enabling legislation in the U.S. Senate under “The Russian Aggression Prevention Act” (RAPA) has “set the U.S. on a path towards direct military conflict with Russia in Ukraine.”

Any U.S.-Russian war is likely to quickly escalate into a nuclear war, since neither the U.S. nor Russia would be willing to admit defeat, both have many thousands of nuclear weapons ready for instant use, and both rely upon Counterforce military doctrine that tasks their military, in the event of war, to pre-emptively destroy the nuclear forces of the enemy.1

The Russian Aggression Prevention Act (RAPA) is the culmination of more than twenty years of U.S.-NATO war preparations, which consist in the military encirclement of both Russia and China:

From the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States has relentlessly pursued a strategy of encircling Russia, just as it has with other perceived enemies like China and Iran. It has brought 12 countries in central Europe, all of them formerly allied with Moscow, into the NATO alliance. U.S. military power is now directly on Russia’s borders.2

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Worldwide Militarization

 From the outset of the post World War II period to the present, America’s s global military design has been one of world conquest. War and globalization are intricately related. Militarization supports powerful economic interests. America’s “Long War” is geared towards worldwide corporate expansion and the conquest of new economic frontiers.

The concept of the “Long War” is an integral part of U.S. military doctrine. Its ideological underpinnings are intended to camouflage the hegemonic project of World conquest. Its implementation relies on a global alliance of 28 NATO member states. In turn, the U.S. as well as NATO have established beyond the “Atlantic Region” a network of bilateral military alliances with “partner” countries directed against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. What we are dealing with is a formidable military force, deployed in all major regions of the World.

The “Long War” is based on the concept of “Self-Defense”. The United States and the Western World are threatened. “The Long War” constitutes “an epic struggle against adversaries bent on forming a unified Islamic world to supplant western dominance”. Underlying the “Long War”, according to a study by the Rand Corporation, the Western World must address “three potential threats”:

• those related to the ideologies espoused by key adversaries in the conflict,
• those related to the use of terrorism • those related to governance (i.e., its absence or presence, its quality, and the predisposition of specific governing bodies to the United States and its interests). … in order to ensure that this long war follows a favorable course, the United States will need to make a concerted effort across all three domains.3

Our objective in this book is to focus on various dimensions of America’s hegemonic wars, by providing both a historical overview as well as an understanding of America’s contemporary wars all of which, from a strategic viewpoint, are integrated.

Our analysis will focus on the dangers of nuclear war and the evolution of military doctrine in the post-9/11 era.

The central role of media propaganda as well as the failures of the anti-war movement will also be addressed. While the first chapter provides an overview, the subsequent chapters provide an insight into different dimensions of America’s long war.

Chapter I, Imperial Conquest: America’s “Long War” against Humanity provides a post World War II historical overview of America’s wars from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. There is a continuum in U.S. Foreign Policy from the Truman Doctrine of the late 1940s to the neocons and neoliberals of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

Part II focuses on the dangers of nuclear war and global nuclear radiation.

Chapter II, The Dangers of Nuclear War Conversations with Fidel Castro consists of Conversations with Fidel Castro and the author pertaining to the future of humanity and the post-Cold War process of militarization. This exchange took place in Havana in October 2010.

Chapter III focuses on the doctrine of Pre-emptive Nuclear and the Role of Israel in triggering a first strike use of nuclear weapons against Iran.

Chapter IV, The Threat of Nuclear War, North Korea or the United States? focuses on the persistent U.S. threat (since 1953) of using nuclear weapons against North Korea while labeling North Korea a threat to global security.

Chapter V, Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War. The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation examines the dangers of nuclear energy and its unspoken relationship to nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy is not a civilian economic activity. It is an appendage of the nuclear weapons industry which is controlled by the so-called defense contractors. The powerful corporate interests behind nuclear energy and nuclear weapons overlap.

Part III illustrates at a country level, the modus operandi of U.S. military and intelligence interventions, including regime change and the covert support of terrorist organizations. The country case studies (Yugoslavia, Haiti, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Ukraine) illustrate how individual nation states are destabilized as a result of U.S.-NATO covert operations and “humanitarian wars.” While the nature and circumstances of these countries are by no means similar, there is a common thread. The purpose is to provide a comparative understanding of country-level impacts of America’s long war against humanity. In all the countries analyzed, the intent has been to destroy, destabilize and impoverish sovereign countries.

Chapter VI, NATO’s War on Yugoslavia: Kosovo “Freedom Fighters” Financed by Organized Crime examines the role of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as an instrument of political destabilization. In Yugoslavia, the endgame of NATO’s intervention was to carve up a prosperous and successful “socialist market economy” into seven proxy states. The political and economic breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s served as a “role model” for subsequent “humanitarian military endeavors.”

Chapter VII, The U.S. led Coup d’Etat in Haiti against the government of Jean Bertrand Aristide was carried out in February 2004 with the support of Canada and France. In a bitter irony, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti James Foley, had previously played a central role as U.S. special envoy to Yugoslavia, channeling covert support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In Haiti, his responsibilities included U.S. aid to the Front pour la Libération et la reconstruction nationale (FLRN) (National Liberation and Reconstruction Front) largely integrated by former Tonton Macoute death squads. Closely coordinated with the process of regime change and military intervention, the IMF-World Bank macroeconomic reforms played a crucial role in destroying the national and impoverishing the Haitian population.

Chapter VIII, “Operation Libya” and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa reveals the hidden agenda behind NATO’s 2011 humanitarian war on Libya, which consisted in acquiring control and ownership of Libya’s extensive oil reserves, that is, almost twice those of the United States of America. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) played a key role in the war on Libya in coordination with NATO.

Libya is the gateway to the Sahel and Central Africa. More generally, what is at stake is the redrawing of the map of Africa at the expense of France’s historical spheres of influence in West and Central Africa, namely a process of neocolonial re-division.

Chapter IX, The War on Iraq and Syria. Terrorism with a “Human Face”: The History of America’s Death Squads examines U.S.-NATO’s covert war on Syria, which consists in creating Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist entities. The U.S.-led covert war consists in recruiting, training and financing Islamist death squads which are used as the foot-soldiers of the Western military alliance. The ultimate military objective is the destruction of both Iraq and Syria.

Chapter X, War and Natural Gas. The Israel Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields focuses on Israel’s attack directed against Gaza with a view to confiscating Gaza’s offshore gas reserves.

In Chapter XI, The U.S. has Installed a Neo-Nazi Government in Ukraine, the structure of the U.S.-EU sponsored proxy regime in Kiev is examined. Key positions in government and the Armed Forces are in the hands of the two neo-Nazi parties. The Ukraine National Guard financed and trained by the West is largely integrated by Neo-Nazis Brown Shirts.

Part IV is entitled Breaking the American Inquisition. Reversing the Tide of War focuses on some of the contradictions of the antiwar movement.

Chapter XII, The “American Inquisition” and the “Global War on Terrorism” analyzes the central role of America’s “war on terrorism” doctrine in harnessing public support for a global war of conquest. The “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) is a fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the multi-billion dollar U.S. intelligence community.

Today’s “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) is a modern form of inquisition. It has all the essential ingredients of the French and Spanish Inquisitions. Going after “Islamic terrorists”, carrying out a worldwide pre-emptive war to “protect the Homeland” are used to justify a military agenda.

In turn, “The Global War on Terrorism” is presented as a “Clash of Civilizations”, a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives.

Chapter XII, “Manufactured Dissent”, Colored Revolutions and the Antiwar Movement in Crisis examines the role of corporate foundations in funding dissent and the inability of “progressive” civil society organizations and antiwar collectives to effectively confront the tide of media disinformation and war propaganda.

COMMENDATIONS

The Globalization of War is an extraordinarily important book. It tags the origin of a long series of wars and conflicts, from the end of World War II to the present, as being direct products of U.S. Foreign Policy. Nothing happens by accident. U.S. provocateurs, usually agents of the CIA, incite one conflict after another in what Michael Chossudovsky labels America’s “Long War” against Humanity.

It comprises a war on two fronts. Those countries that can either be “bought,” or destabilized by a corrupt international financial system, are easy targets for effective conquest. In other cases insurrection, riots and wars are used to solicit American military intervention to fill the pockets of the military-industrial complex that General Eisenhower warned us about. The “End Game” is a New World Order embracing a dual economic and military dictatorship prepared to use atomic weapons and risk the future of the entire human species to achieve its ends.

Michel Chossudovsky is one of the few individuals I know who has analyzed the anatomy of the New World Order and recognized the threat to the entire human species that it is. The Globalization of War is a must read for anyone who prefers peace and hope to perpetual war, death, dislocation and despair. Hon. Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of National Defence

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the most realistic of all foreign policy commentators. He does not lie for money and position, and he does not sell his soul for influence. His book provides an honest appraisal of the extreme danger that hegemonic and demonic American neoconservatism poses to life on earth. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary, U.S. Treasury, former Wall Street Journal editor,  former Wm. E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. 

At these moments when  the threat  of humanity’s  extinction  by the forces  unleashed by the  empire  and its vassals,  it is imperative that we  grasp  the nature of the beast  that threatens us with  its endless wars perpetrated in the name of the  highest levels of freedom.

This  vital work by an outstanding teacher  will remain an enduring testimony  of the author’s  all-embracing  humanism and scholarship that has always been inseparable  from his political activism  that spans  several decades.    It should be mandatory reading  for those seeking to understand , and thus  to contain and repel,   the  compulsive  onslaughts   of the hegemon’s  endless wars with its boundless bestialities and crimes against humanity..Dr Frederic F. Clairmonte, award winning author and political economist, distinguished (former) economic analyst at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The Globalization of War is undoubtedly one of the most important books on the contemporary global situation produced in recent years. It comes from the pen of one of the most insightful and incisive writers on global politics and the global economy alive today.

In his latest masterpiece, Professor Michel Chossudovsky shows how the various conflicts we are witnessing today in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and Palestine are in fact inter-linked and inter-locked through a single-minded agenda in pursuit of global hegemony helmed by the United States and buttressed by its allies in the West and in other regions of the world. This Machiavellian, indeed, diabolical agenda not only centres around wars of conquest and subjugation but also seeks to dismember and destroy sovereign states. Russia, China and Iran are the primary targets of this drive for dominance and control. The underlying economic motives behind this drive are camouflaged in the guise of a civilized West fighting “barbaric Islamic terrorism” which as Chossudovsky exposes is sometimes sponsored and sustained by intelligent networks in the West.

Chossudovsky has aptly described this US helmed agenda for hegemony as a “long war against humanity.” It is an assertion that is backed by solid facts and detailed analysis in a brilliant work that should be read by all those who are concerned about the prevailing human condition. And that should include each and every citizen of planet earth. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) and former Professor of Global Studies at the Science University of Malaysia.

The media, political leaders, academics and the public at large often forget to put into historical perspective the spiral of daily news: we tend to concentrate on the latest events and crisis.

This may explain why the latest report of the US Senate on CIA’s rendition flights, detention places in black wholes and use of torture following 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq has been received as a surprise and shocking news. Such practices have been well known by the international community and depicted, among others, in a number of United Nations documents as well as in Dick Marty’s reports to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

This CIA’s behavior has a long history including assassination plots of political leaders, coups d’Etat, terrorist attacks and other subversive actions that merge into a recurrent pattern.

The Pax Americana like the Pax Romana has been built through wars and domination. General Smedley D. Butler, a hero and the most decorated soldier of the United States had already denounced the US policy in his book “War is a racket”, written over 70 years ago.

Michel Chossudovsky’s book “The Globalization of Warfare” has the great merit of putting into historical perspective the hegemonic project that has been carried out by the United States through various centuries for the control and exploitation of natural resources. Jose L. Gomez del Prado, UN Independent Human Rights Expert, Former Member UN Group on the use of mercenaries

Michel Chossudovsky leads the world in communicating critical information that few or none know. He is a perfect guide for the East European to Russia war now in the making. John McMurty, professor emeritus, Guelph University, Fellow of the Royal Society of  Canada

Michel Chossudovsky ranks as the world’s leading expert on globalization – a hegemonic weapon that empowers financial elites and enslaves 99 percent of the world’s population. The Globalization of War exposes covert operations waging economic warfare designed to destabilize national economies deemed to be inimical to the USA and her NATO allies. The military dimension of western hegemonic strategies threatens to trigger a permanent global war. Chossudovsky’s book is diplomatic dynamite – and the fuse is burning rapidly. Michael Carmichael, President of the Planetary Movement 

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

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Entrapping students into longterm or permanent debt bondage is part of a government/corporate scheme to enrich private lenders.

Because of the high cost of higher education, millions of students need large loans to pay tuition, fees, and other expenses.

Some face burdens up to $100,000 or higher. If unpaid after 30 years, it can be multiples this amount because of debt service costs. If default or declare bankruptcy, it’s unforgiven. Bondage is permanent.

Exceptions are only granted in extreme hardship cases likely to continue for the term of indebtedness, along with having shown good faith efforts to repay.

In the vast majority of cases, loans must be repaid as long as they’re outstanding. Federal laws mandate it – perhaps to get worse. More on this below.

The longer unpaid student loan balances remain outstanding, the more profitable it is for lenders, including from defaults.

Wages can be garnished. So can portions of Social Security and other retirement benefits. A conspiratorial alliance of lenders, guarantors, servicers, and collection companies derive income from debt service and inflated collection fees.

Principle, accrued interest, late payments and collection agency penalties create enormous burdens to repay. Once entrapped, escape is impossible. Unless repaid, future lives and careers are impaired.

According to CollegeDebt.com, current student loan debt exceeds $1.7 trillion, second only to mortgage debt, over $800 billion more than credit card debt, nearly $1 trillion above auto loan debt.

The total for FinAid.org is slightly lower at under $1.7 trillion, the amount increasing exponentially, expected to reach $2 trillion by 2022 – permanent debt bondage for millions of Americans.

The above figures exclude compounded interest charges, making the overall burden exponentially higher for countless numbers of debt entrapped individuals.

About 45 million students and graduates have outstanding student loan indebtedness.

It’s hard to repay because of protracted main street Depression conditions. Real unemployment exceeds 20% based on how the Labor Department calculated it in the 1980s – before numbers were manipulated lower to create the illusion greater jobs creation, low unemployment, and prosperity than exist.

The 3.7% number is pure deception. Most jobs available are rotten low-pay/poor-or-no-benefit part-time or temp ones – millions of industrial and high-paying better jobs offshored to low-wage countries.

For individuals entrapped in high student loan debt, serving and repaying it is especially burdensome, forcing millions into default but not free from their obligation.

According to theFreeThoughtProject.com, citing government data, “11.5% of student loans are 90 days or more delinquent or are in default” – a nearly $200 billion unrepayed debt obligation, increasing because of mounting debt service costs.

GOP Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chairman Lamar Alexander proposed legislation to automatically deduct monthly student loan indebtedness for worker paychecks.

If enacted into law, the change could affect around 40 million individuals. Federal student loans can now be repaid 14 different ways.

Alexander proposed cutting it to two. By one route, monthly debt service would be capped at 10% of discretionary income – the residual amount after taxes and what’s needed for necessities, including food, shelter, clothing, and medical expenses.

A second option is repaying student loan debt over a 10-year period. Either way, employers would make automatic payroll deductions. A sub-option would be for borrowers to set up their own automatic debt service arrangement with their lenders directly.

The  National Consumer Law Center slammed Alexander’s proposal, saying “(f)or borrowers with tight budgets that need to be navigated on a monthly basis, forced automatic payroll withholding may mean diverting money away from rent, heat or food in order to pay their student loans.”

The problem with them is once entrapped, escape is nearly impossible. Except for court ruled hardship cases, as explained above, student loan indebtedness remains for life as long as it’s outstanding.

It’s part of a colossal scheme to transfer the nation’s wealth from ordinary Americans to the nation’s super-rich. It’s been going on for decades, accelerated under Obama, more so under Trump.

For most students in need of financial help to pay tuition, fees and other expenses, loans are relatively easy to get, tough to service, almost never forgiven.

A vicious circle entraps students, graduates and workers, even retirees if entrapped with unrepayed debt.

Student loans take years or decades to repay. Much can happen over an extended period, including unemployment for short or longer periods.

At best, most all debt entrapped individuals can only delay repayment, not get out from under it.

The longer debt remains unrepayed, the greater the service costs, why repayment most often takes many years.

Millions of Americans are entrapped in longterm or permanent debt bondage. America’s ownership society favors capital at the expense of popular rights and well-being – ordinary people exploited to benefit the privileged few.

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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.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Joshua Wong has recently been doing some flyin’ around and hobnobbing with the rich, famous and powerful. He went to Berlin and met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other ‘pro-democracy’ figures like Mayor of Kiev Vitaly Klitschko, who was for awhile himself a Western favorite when the US was actively involved in the color revolution in Ukraine. While there, Wong met with Raed Al Saleh, the head of the White Helmets. For those who don’t know, the White Helmets are a Western propaganda construct with close links to terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Jahbat Al Nusra  (now known as Tahrir Al Sham). What would a supposedly organic grassroots movement leader in China have in common with a Syrian war organization? On the surface, nothing; under the surface, everything; they are both propaganda and destabilization tools of Western (US-UK) foreign meddling and interference.

A Brief Background: The White Helmets-Al Qaeda-Al Nusra Connection

The White Helmets paraded around like heroes pretending to be the saviors of the Syrian people during the earlier years of the Syrian War (which is still ongoing). Appropriately, they were the stars of a TV documentary which won Oscars. Oscars are awarded for acting – and that’s all it really was, acting. The White Helmets were founded in 2013 by James Le Mesurier, a British ex-mercenary and intelligence agent. True independent journalists such as Vanessa Beeley exposed how the White Helmets were a front for various groups of US-UK-Israeli funded rebel terrorists, who were fighting the legitimately elected president of Syria, Bashar Al Assad. In videos like this and this, Beeley walks through an abandoned White Helmets center in Sakhour, East Aleppo … right next door (20 meters) from the Al Nusra Front Aleppo headquarters. In fact, both centers had various entrances to each other and the only thing dividing them is a playground wall. Beeley noted:

“On the 30th April 2017 we visited the abandoned White Helmet centre in Sakhour, East Aleppo. This was the biggest, and most publicized White Helmet centre in East Aleppo. Paperwork left behind proves that various US, UK, EU countries were supplying the group … The White Helmets, as we know, are exclusively embedded in Nusra Front, ISIS & other extremist controlled areas … that contain maximum 20% of the Syrian population, many of whom are living under enforced starvation, deprivation, lack of medical care, imprisonment, torture, execution, rape … at the hands of the extremist factions that the White Helmets support and assist.”

Hong Kong Protest Leader Joshua Wong Also Met with Neocon Coup-Plotter Marco Rubio

If Joshua Wong is trying to paint himself as a leader of a grassroots movement, he’s doing the worst job possible. The evidence is overwhelming that he’s just another pawn of US foreign policy and regime change efforts, led by notorious NGOs like the NED (National Endowment for Democracy). This is the case even if a large segment of the Hong Kong protestors are grassroots activists and ordinary people. As mentioned in articles like Taunting the Dragon: Background to US-China Trade War & Hong Kong Protests, Wong was caught meeting with senior US official Julie Eadah from the USA’s Hong Kong consulate.

Not surprisingly, if you’re following the thread by now, he even met with devoted war hawk, neocon and Venezuelan coup-plotter Marco Rubio. I highlighted Rubio’s role in the US coup against Venezuela earlier this year in 2019. I also mentioned in the above-linked Taunting the Dragon article that Rubio had been drafting legislation to forge a split in China between Beijing and the Uyghur minority group. Why on Earth would Wong be associating with Rubio, unless it was precisely because he was getting tuition and instructions on how to split Hong Kong away from China, thus causing Beijing the maximum amount of difficulty as possible?

Hong Kong Protests: Begging for US Intervention and ‘Liberation’?

As “brutal and authoritarian” as the Chinese Government might be in relation to its own people, one has to wonder what the Hong Kong protestors are thinking when they are holding up signs asking President Trump to “liberate them”? Talk about jumping out of the fire and into the frying pan. What do they want – the US to attack China and annex Hong Kong? Do they somehow think that Beijing will fold under pressure from the US-China Trade War and just let the US intervene in Hong Kong without consequences? According to RT, here’s what happened at recent protest rally on September 8th 2019:

“Hong Kong protesters rallied in their thousands and clashed with police in fresh unrest. They even called on Washington to “liberate” them from Chinese rule, suggesting some may now view the US as their patron. Thousands of demonstrators marched to the US Consulate in Hong Kong on Sunday, in what they said was an appeal to President Donald Trump to intervene in the weeks-long political turmoil. Videos of the rally show protesters waving American flags as they sing the US national anthem and play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ through the speakers on their phones.”

US interference has reached the point of such blatancy that the color revolution protestors are actually waving US flags and playing the Star Spangled Banner! Holy cow! Guess it moved on from a weeks ago when they holding up the union jack, the flag of their former colonial rulers, the UK. RT also reported on Hong Kong Protest leader Jimmy Lai and on another Hong Kong Protest leader Martin Lee, more supposedly grassroots’ leaders who just happen to be meeting with Zionist neocon, ex-CIA head and current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo:

“One of the men at the center of the protest movement is a Hong Kong tycoon, Jimmy Lai, whose company owns one of the most-read local papers, a tabloid called the Apple Daily. Another one is politician and barrister, Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the local Democratic Party. Both men visited Washington at the height of the protests to meet with some high-ranking US officials including State Secretary Mike Pompeo.

And as a former senior adviser in the Trump and Bush administrations Christian Whiton, who met both Lai and Lee in Hong Kong this summer, put it “causing this crisis for the Chinese government … is good in the national interests of the US.””

Final Thoughts

The Hong Kong protests are now in their 15th week and show no sings of slowing down. With the US gradually moving its focus away from Russia as enemy #1 and onto China as the new enemy #1, you can expect to see more Sinophobia (and less Russophobia). You can expect to see more foreign meddling and interference, more deals with and ‘aid’ to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, the Uyghurs, the Dalai Lama (Tibetans) and any other minority group which could cause friction with the ruling Chinese Communist Party. This is the 21st century, and all of these economic and meddling shenanigans are part of the 21st century new hybrid warfare.

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This article was originally published on The Freedom Articles.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and FB.

Sources

https://williambowles.info/2019/09/11/color-revolutionaries-of-the-world-unite-hong-kong-protest-leader-pictured-with-white-helmets-boss/

https://www.mintpressnews.com/james-le-mesurier-british-ex-military-mercenary-founded-white-helmets/230320/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4JFcB-sHv8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7omLaKwRT4

https://thefreedomarticles.com/ngos-choice-tool-subversion-nwo/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/soros-hack-top-10-machinations/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/taunting-dragon-us-china-trade-war-hong-kong-protests/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/4th-generation-warfare-us-attacks-venezuela/

https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/666795258747953152

https://twitter.com/camilateleSUR/status/1171171454349729792/photo/1

https://www.rt.com/news/468361-us-hong-kong-protesters-meddling/

https://www.rt.com/news/468301-hong-kong-protest-leaders-ties-us/

Featured image: Hong Kong protest leader Joshua Wong meets with neocon coup-plotter Marco Rubio on September 8th 2019. Image credit: CamilaSUR

Over the course of the past decade the United States, following decades of relative stagnation in oil production, has surprised many to become the largest oil producer in the world, exceeding Russia as well as Saudi Arabia.

Latest daily production is just above 12.1 million barrels a day. In November 2018 for the first time in decades the US became a net oil exporter.

The geopolitical implications to this energy boom in a world where oil determines the growth of entire economies, would appear to be great. Almost all the increase owes to the exploitation of what is called shale oil, unconventional oil found in shale rock formations. The US Department of Energy projects a rise to 8.8 million barrels daily from US shale oil alone, a new record. Now though, we are seeing the first clear signs that the “shale boom” could implode even faster than it rose. The implications for American foreign policy and global geopolitics and economics are significant.

The ‘Fracking’ Revolution

The idea of extracting oil or natural gas embedded in shale rocks has been known for years. However shale oil, or tight oil as it is known, first became economical with introduction of new horizontal drilling techniques combined with oil prices of $100 a barrel or more. This was about two decades ago.

In hydraulic fracturing or fracking, oil embedded in shale rock thousands of feet down is injected with a high pressure mix of water, lots of it, mixed with chemicals and sand. The de facto sand blasting creates fissures where oil can flow into the oil pipeline. The actual drilling of a shale well is only about 30-40% of the total cost. Up to 55-70% are from completion which includes actual fracking. The independent oil consultancy, Wood Mackenzie, recently estimated that the USA held an impressive 60% of all world shale reserves that are economically viable at oil prices of $60 per barrel or less.

Now it begins to get interesting. The current price for the West Texas Intermediate marker grade of oil is around $58 a barrel, where it has been for months. The price has not shot up as many expected despite the disruptions in Venezuela, in Iran and around the Persian Gulf. This puts shale well production, much of which today is in the Permian basin in West Texas or Bakken in North Dakota, at a delicate point.

When Saudi Arabia and the Arab OPEC producers decided to flood the market in 2014 with cheap oil in order to force the US shale producers into bankruptcy, the results were disastrous for the OPEC countries financially, but new technology advances allowed the major part of US shale oil production to survive at far lower prices. That, combined with a Federal Reserve Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP), made borrowing to produce oil attractive for shale companies. Now, with two years of gradual Fed rate increase policies, shale companies are beginning to show signs of major stress.

Economic Troubles

Little known is the fact that despite all technological advances and economies of scale, the USA shale oil industry as a whole has yet to turn a net profit. At a juncture when world GDP growth begins to look very bleak, whether in China or in the EU or Emerging Markets like Brazil or Argentina or Turkey, US shale companies face a critical juncture.

The year 2018, according to projections of the International Energy Agency was supposed to be the year that the shale industry finally turned a profit. The IEA wrote in early 2018 that “higher prices and operational improvements are putting the US shale sector on track to achieve positive free cash flow in 2018 for the first time ever.” Since it began, until the Saudi price crash, that is from 2000-2014, US shale companies as a whole according to IEA estimates, already generated a cumulative negative free cash flow of more than $200 billion. With glowing predictions for a “new Saudi Arabia, and banks willing to lend to after the 2008 financial crisis, money poured into shale. Companies claimed once infrastructure was in place the profits would soon flow. It didn’t. Despite over two years of rising world oil prices, some 33 US publicly traded shale companies had a combined negative cash flow of $3.9 billion in the first half of 2018.

But with possible war with Iran and the unrest in Venezuela combined with projections of a growing US economy, the US shale industry told their bankers that 2019 would be the year finally of net profit. The reality has been the opposite. Shale company combined capital expenditures for the first Quarter of 2019 alone have exceeded operating cash flow by a whopping $5 billion. And now with oil prices stuck seemingly at $58 and the prospects for economic slowdown, not only abroad but more recently in the USA itself, many bank lenders to the US shale oil bonanza are having second thoughts.

Unconventional means more cost

Unconventional means by definition more costly to produce. Shale, unlike conventional oil reservoirs, deplete far faster than normal oil wells. In many cases a shale well loses 70% of recoverable oil the first year. The Permian Basin has been measured at 22% a year. To justify taking on debt via junk bonds and other lending to continue producing, shale companies went to the best, so-called “sweet spots” and projected the optimistic numbers into the future.

Explaining second quarter 2019 profits, the CEO of one of the most successful companies, Scott Sheffield of Pioneer Natural Resources warned in early August that most of the oil from so-called “sweet spots,” or “tier 1 acreage,” has already been extracted. “Tier 1 acreage is being exhausted at a very quick rate,” Sheffield stated.

To counter faster depletion rates of shale wells, companies have resorted to technical changes in terms of sand, closeness of drilling and other means. As the drilling is forced to go to less ideal areas, one oil industry source likened it to walking up the down escalator, drilling more just to stay even. That costs more per barrel.

Now an alarming new industry report suggests that the shale oil producers, at least in the rich Permian Basin, have been faking their numbers or under-reporting the shale wells completed to make the numbers look better. A detailed report by energy analysts at Kayrros indicates that oil companies in the Permian Basin greatly under-reported the number of shale oil wells completed in 2018. Kayrros estimates that more than 1,100 wells were completed in the Permian Basin but not reported as required by law. That would mean a significant 21% greater number of completed wells to produce the same volume as had been reported. That means the average well is far more expensive per barrel and far less efficient. Kayrros advisory chairman and CEO of Schlumberger, Andrew Gould remarked,

“With far more wells contributing to Permian and US oil production than accounted for, current shale oil production is substantially more water- and sand-intensive than is commonly believed.”

Kayrros estimates that in 2018 in the Permian Basin alone that actual demand for special grade sand was under-estimated by 9.2 billion pounds and water under-estimated by 12.5 billion gallons. That’s a lot of sand and a lot of water. At some point the companies will be importing sand from the deserts of Arabia at that rate. The environmental costs of shale oil fracking in terms of water, contamination, earthquakes are enormous and need a separate treatment.

To worsen the energy outlook, the spectacular oil production growth rates in the US appear to be stagnating, a worrisome sign given the fact that shale wells deplete annually at anywhere between 20-40% per year or more compared with around 4% for conventional wells. Earlier estimates suggested that the largest US shale region, Permian Basin, would reach its economic peak around 2025 or after.

A recent study of shale production by J. D. Hughes, an oil geologist who has followed the industry closely, suggests that with productivity per well peaking or even in some regions like North Dakota actually declining, oil companies are being forced to pour more money in, drill more just to replace lost output. In 2018, the industry spent $70 billion on drilling 9,975 wells, according to Hughes, with $54 billion going specifically to oil.

“Of the $54 billion spent on tight oil plays in 2018, 70% served to offset field declines and 30% to increase production,” Hughes wrote.

He added,

“production will fall as costs rise. Assuming shale production can grow forever based on ever-improving technology is a mistake—geology will ultimately dictate the costs and quantity of resources that can be recovered.”

Add to this all the huge debts of the shale oil companies are a growing problem. According to the Wall Street Journal some $9 billion worth of debt is set to mature over the second half of 2019 and banks are becoming reluctant to continue financing in a weaker economy. Then a staggering $137 billion in debt matures between 2020 and 2022, debt that was taken on to survive the 2014-15 oil market meltdown. Many producers will likely go down, though giants like ExxonMobil will survive.

If major oil shale regions are already beginning to shows signs of limits at present prices, and if decline rates are about to significantly accelerate over the coming 2-3 years, it will have major implications for US foreign policy as well as the economy. A major factor in the recent actions of Washington in the Middle East and even Venezuela has clearly been driven by a sense that America no longer depends on foreign oil and can take greater geopolitical risks. Oil and the remarkable shale boom were largely behind this impression.

The Trump Administration began in 2017 as one of the most oil-friendly in recent history. Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, was named Secretary of State. Texas oil-friendly Governor Rick Perry headed Energy Department. Others were named who favored expansion of shale oil as a national priority. If this domestic shale oil support suddenly begins to vanish, it will send major new shock waves around the globe at a time when shock waves are coming from every direction. It’s not the end of the Oil Age, but it could soon be the end of the USA shale oil boom, one fueled on mountains of debt, horrendous environmental destruction and wishful thinking. In turn that could trigger a global oil price shock that will turn the economy dramatically down.

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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.

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.

Hold the cheers!

The US has been hostile toward Iran since its 1979 revolution. It’s hostile toward all nations it doesn’t control.

Its imperial project calls for transforming them into US client states, pro-Western puppet rule replacing their sovereign independence, gaining control over their resources and populations.

The US has been waging war on Iran by other means for 40 years, including by Obama straightaway after the JCPOA was consummated.

In November 1979, the US seized $12 billion in Iranian government bank deposits, securities, gold, and other properties. They included $5.6 billion held by overseas branches of US banks.

A full trade embargo followed. In January 1981, it was lifted under provisions of the Algiers Accords. Most Iranian assets were unblocked. Iranian Assets Control Regulations remained in place.

US war on Iran by other means rages more intensively since Trump took office, co-orchestrated by now departed Bolton and Pompeo, far-right hardliners representing two sides of the same coin.

In the 1980s, Tehran was falsely accused of supporting international terrorism and attacking Persian Gulf shipping.

Reagan’s 1987 Executive Order (EO) 12613 embargoed Iranian goods and services.

In March 1995, Clinton’s EO 12957 prohibited US involvement with Iranian oil development.

His 1995 EO 12959 imposed new illegal sanctions. His 1997 EO 13059 prohibited virtually all trade and investments with Iran.

In 1996, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) became law. In 2006, it was renamed the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA).

It prohibits US and foreign oil development investments. Violators face stiff penalties. They include denial of Export-Import Bank of the United States help, rejection of export licenses, and/or sanctions.

In 2008, banks and other US depository institutions were prohibited from processing transfers between Iranian and non-Iranian banks.

In 2010, the US Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA) became law.

It extended sanctions imposed by the 1996 Iran Sanctions Act,  punishing entities doing business with Tehran’s oil sector.

Section 103 prohibited importing certain Iranian foodstuffs and carpets. Other provisions banned various Iranian imports, directly or through third countries.

Exporting goods, technology, or services to Iran are prohibited, including from offshore locations.

US individuals and companies are prohibited from engaging in purchases, sales, transportation, swaps, financing, or brokering transactions related to goods or services of Iranian private or government origin.

In July 2017, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) imposed tough new sanctions on Iran.

They target its legitimate ballistic missile program, its nonexistent WMD development, banning the sale or transfer of military or so-called dual use sales to Iran, and financial help, along with directing the president to sanction violators of CAATSA provisions.

Trump’s unlawful May 2018 JCPOA pullout was followed by imposing multiple rounds of tough US sanctions on Iran, including on its energy sector, petroleum related products, other economic sectors, and central bank transactions.

Aiming to reduce Iranian oil exports to zero, Trump regime hardliners want its economy crushed, its people immiserated.

Iranophobe Bolton is gone. Militantly hostile to Iran Pompeo and his hardline henchmen remain.

Is any change in Trump regime policy toward Iran likely? Will 40 years of US hostility toward the country be softened — with arguably the most hardline executive branch and congressional policymakers in US history running things?

Will Trump and Iranian President Rouhani meet on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly session later this month?

On Wednesday, Rouhani said “as long as there are sanctions in place, there is no point in negotiating with the US.”

On the same day, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani commented on Bolton’s sacking, saying:

“Superficial changes in the American governing body do not alter Iran’s perception of the nature of US actions and policies,” adding:

“Obama and Trump both pursued a policy of sanctions against the Iranian nation. (Its) criterion for assessment is the actual policy and performance of the United States, especially its adherence to international obligations and removal of sanctions against the Iranian people.”

US war by other means rages against Iran, Venezuela, and other nations, along with its endless hot wars in multiple theaters.

On Wednesday, did Trump suggest he’d consider softening White House policies on Iran? Virtually nothing he says is credible, time and again saying one thing, then going another way.

At the same time, he said “(w)e cannot let Iran have nuclear weapons” he knows or should know they don’t seek and never did.

He also claimed sanctions on the country are working. So why lift them.

In two summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Trump refused to ease sanctions on the country even modestly as a good will gesture.

He demanded full denuclearization and elimination of DPRK ballistic missile capabilities — in return for empty promises, how the US always negotiates, why it can never be trusted.

Will Iran be treated differently, a nation on the US target list for regime change for 40 years? Trump’s suggestion otherwise fooled no one in Tehran.

According to the Daily Beast, Trump “is actively considering a French plan to extend a $15 billion credit line to the Iranians if Tehran comes back into compliance with the” JCPOA, “not…impede (Persian Gulf) maritime navigation, (and) commit to Middle East talks”  — citing unnamed sources.

Fact: Iran threatens no one. At peace with its neighbors, it never attacked another nation.

Fact: Its nuclear program has no military component, repeatedly affirmed by IAEA inspectors.

Fact: It wants Persian Gulf maritime traffic operating freely unimpeded. With its coastline extending hundreds of miles, Tehran considers itself the protector of navigation through its waters.

Fact: In good faith, Iran spent years engaged in nuclear talks, agreeing to the JCPOA in 2015, sacrificing more than got back when the deal was consummated — then was betrayed by the Trump regime’s pullout and Europe’s failure to fulfill its mandated obligations.

President Rouhani and other Iranian officials said they’re willing to meet with Trump and other White House officials if he rejoins the JCPOA he illegally abandoned and lifts unlawfully imposed sanctions.

Without a US show of good faith, talks with Trump regime officials will accomplish nothing — the North Korea betrayal scenario to repeat.

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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.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

18 years after NATO’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the 9/11 and Al Qaeda lies that were used to justify the war have disappeared.

Now the truth about oil and gas, mineral wealth, opium and naked imperial ambition are all that remain.

The decision to wage war on Afghanistan was taken on September 12, 2001 on the grounds that Afghanistan had attacked America on September 11, 2001. It was presented to the public as a war of “self defense”. 

This GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV was first published in 2016. 

On the eve of the 18-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the illegal U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the United States and the Taliban completed nine rounds of peace talks with no deal.

Although they had reportedly reached an agreement in principle, Donald Trump insisted on a secret meeting at Camp David with the Taliban and the puppet Afghan government so he could take credit as dealmaker-in-chief. The idea of finalizing the negotiations at Camp David was “a prospect that appealed to the president’s penchant for dramatic spectacle,” The New York Times reported.

Trump, however, abruptly canceled the meeting, slated to occur last weekend, citing a Taliban car bombing that killed an American.

There are “questions about the accuracy of [Trump’s] assertion that the Taliban had accepted his invitation to Camp David on Sunday, and that he was the one calling off the meeting,” according to The New York Times.

“Taliban negotiators said Sunday that they had agreed to come to the United States only after a deal was announced and only to meet with the American side, suggesting that Mr. Trump may have canceled a meeting that the key participants were not planning to attend.”

Trump’s excuse for calling off the Camp David meeting is also belied by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claim that the United States was responsible for “over a thousand Taliban killed in just the last 10 days alone.”

Two days after cancelling the meeting, Trump told reporters the peace talks with the Taliban are “dead as far as I’m concerned.”

The Tentative Peace Deal Would Leave Thousands of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

There are currently 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Under the Trump administration’s tentative agreement with the Taliban, the U.S. would pull 5,400 troops out of Afghanistan within 135 days of signing, reducing the number to 8,600. This would still leave more U.S. troops in Afghanistan than the 8,400 who were there when Barack Obama left office. The remaining troops would be withdrawn gradually over a 16-month period.

In return, the Taliban would agree to not support international terrorist groups and would prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan to mount attacks. The Taliban would also conduct political negotiations with the Afghan government (although it’s unclear how these would fare, given that a senior Taliban leader told The New York Times, “we do not recognize the [U.S.’s] stooge government” in Kabul.)

However, even if a firm deal were negotiated, Trump stated, “we’re going to always have a presence” in Afghanistan. U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad reportedly said the United States would reserve the right to help Afghan government forces in the event they are attacked by the Taliban. And senior White House advisers favor secretly increasing the CIA’s presence in Afghanistan as U.S. forces withdraw.

The Taliban, however, see little difference between U.S. military forces and CIA agents, and have repeatedly maintained that they will not agree to a ceasefire until all U.S. troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, although many politicians are criticizing Trump for arranging the Camp David meeting with the Taliban, few are questioning the legality of the United States invading Afghanistan in the first place.

The U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan Was Illegal

The U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan violated the United Nations Charter, which mandates that countries settle their disputes peacefully. The Charter forbids the use of military force except in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. The invasion was not lawful self-defense, as it did not respond to an armed attack by Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks were not carried out by the Afghan government. And although the Council passed Resolutions 1368 and 1373 in response to the 9/11 attacks, neither resolution authorized the United States to use military force against Afghanistan. Instead, the resolutions condemned the 9/11 attacks; ordered the freezing of assets and criminalization of terrorist activity; urged steps to prevent terrorist activity, including sharing of information; and advocated ratification and enforcement of international conventions against terrorism.

Since 9/11, under the guise of George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” the United States has illegally attacked, invaded and bombed several countries and tortured untold numbers of people, with no legal accountability.

At the end of 2018, The New York Times reported that regional Afghan forces led by the CIA “operated unconstrained by battlefield rules designed to protect civilians, conducting night raids, torture and killings with near impunity.”

The 18-year U.S. war in Afghanistan has claimed the lives of 139,000 Afghan civilians and combatants, and more than 6,300 U.S. soldiers and mercenaries.

And the carnage in Afghanistan is only getting worse. July 2019 was the deadliest month of the past two years, with 1,500 civilians killed or wounded. During the first half of 2019, nearly 4,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, and it was primarily the United States that caused most of the civilian deaths in that time period.

Furthermore, the United States has spent over $1 trillion on the war in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

“Washington was politically defeated in Afghanistan long ago, and no shift in US tactics will change that — whether it is a troop surge, the renewed training of local soldiers, or a focus on counterterrorism,” Reese Erlich writes at Common Dreams. The U.S. lost because most Afghans see the U.S.A. as an occupying power,” he added.

Thus, the only acceptable course of action is a total end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan and reparations for its people.

The United States must withdraw all of its troops, CIA agents and mercenaries and close its military bases in Afghanistan. Moreover, the U.S. government should redirect a significant amount of money toward small international aid groups that can help rebuild the country, as suggested by Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Kelly told Erlich, “Reparations should be paid to the Afghan people, not the government.”

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Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

Featured image: U.S. soldiers fortify an Afghan highway police checkpoint with razor wire in Robat, Afghanistan, on March 19, 2010. (Source: TECH. SGT. FRANCISCO V. GOVEA II / U.S. AIR FORCE)

The Hong Kong protests represent a major challenge not only to the authorities of Hong Kong itself, but also to Beijing, due to both their protracted nature and a high level of organization resembling the Kiev Maidan of 2013/14.

The Hong Kong rioters have gone so far as to produce and disseminate a veritable urban warfare manual describing in detail the division of labor between the close-combat fighters, ranged-weapon fighters, as well as various support roles. Their “Plan A” appears to be, as cynical as this may sound, to provoke bloodshed by inducing local law enforcement to use firearms against the rioters.

Thus far this has not come to pass. On the one hand, Hong Kong police has displayed considerable self-restraint, and their rules of engagement seem to favor withdrawal and disengagement when faced with superior numbers of rioters. On the other hand, irrespective of the will of the riot planners, the actual rioters have, again thus far, displayed healthy self-preservation instincts. In the few cases where firearms were brandished by Hong Kong police, usually in cases of police officers finding themselves surrounded by the raging mob, the sight of weapons proved enough to compel the rioters to withdraw. That by itself, however, will not solve the problem of riots because there also seems to be a “Plan B.” Whereas, for example, the Kiev Maidan was largely confined to the Maidan Square itself, the geography of Hong Kong riots is much more extensive and unpredictable. Hong Kong rioters have not shrunk from attacking strategic infrastructure, including the now-infamous occupation of the Hong-Kong International Airport that caused massive air traffic disruptions.

Likewise the violent riots in popular malls and tourist destinations all over the Hong Kong area have had the effect of depressing tourism and even prompting fears of a capital flight. While so far there are no indications of a lasting effect on the enclave’s economy, this is due to the still-lingering perception the unrest is a temporary phenomenon. Should it continue with present intensity, or, worse, escalate in terms of numbers of participants and methods used, there will be severe negative effects. For these reasons, China’s authorities cannot hope to win through a war of attrition, or expect that an escalation of violence will somehow cure this problem. There are genuine underlying problems in Hong Kong which have made themselves visible through these demonstrations.

Watch the video here.

What ails Hong Kong?

As with other “color revolutions”, the Hong Kong protests have tapped into a deep vein of discontent within the population. In this instance, rather than poverty or corruption or even the institutional design of Hong Kong’s government, the banal problem facing the average Hong Kong resident is the extremely high cost of living combined with the highly visible class divisions. Since this “special administrative region” of People’s Republic of China represents a major concentration of financial industries, it is also home to massive wealth which, alas, does not appear to be trickling down. While there is also considerable wealth inequality in China proper which is expanding its list of billionaires at a steady pace, the less well-off Chinese urban-dwellers have the option of migrating from city to city in search of better opportunities. But that option is not one the average inhabitant of Hong-Kong is likely to adopt. Moving to China proper would run counter to the strong local Hong Kong identity, and moreover represent a move to a considerably less wealthy part of the world. Thus while the average Chinese citizen is unlikely to exhibit much sympathy for the plight of the protesters from the special administrative area, Hong Kong residents do not evaluate their well-being in comparison with mainland China. For them, the only relevant reference is Hong Kong itself.

One should also note that the violent component of Hong Kong protests is disproportionately composed of young men in their late teens and twenties suggesting the influence of a generation gap and the breakdown in the intergenerational social contract. While Hong Kong, if it were a sovereign state, would have one of the world’s highest life expectancies, its population is rapidly aging due to the low birth rates of the past several decades. A large age cohort is nearing the retirement age, placing a significant financial burden on the considerably smaller younger generation.

Pining for Tiananmen

Further complicating matters for Beijing is Western powers’, and principally the US, interest in using Hong Kong as an instrument in the gradually escalating confrontation between East and West. The rioters’ awareness of their foreign audience was made plain by the displays of US flags as well as the flags associated with Hong Kong’s British colonial past. From the US perspective, crippling Hong Kong economically would inflict serious damage to China’s economy and also badly dent its political image.  Entirely unsurprisingly, Western governments and media wholeheartedly endorsed the protests while turning a blind eye on the increasing violence perpetrated by Hong Kong’s urban warriors who make no bones their aim is to provoke security forces to spill demonstrators’ blood. It is not difficult to predict what kind of Western reaction would follow: sanctions on Hong Kong officials, financial institutions, perhaps even on top Chinese leadership.

The media outcry would be so large that countries thus far unwilling to jump on the anti-Huawei bandwagon would find it difficult to maintain that position. It is evident the Trump administration is raring for a pretext to break as many ties between United States and China as possible, and also to force third countries, most notably the states of the European Union, to choose continued economic integration with United States or with China—but not both.  Furthermore, Hong Kong’s financial institutions have played an important role in furthering China’s economic objectives in the last several decades. In addition to playing a role of a major supplier of financial investments, they also  are China’s “invisible hand of the market”. While today China’s economy is far less dependent on Hong Kong, thanks to several “special economic zones” such as Shenzhen located only a short distance from Hong Kong itself, a major crisis in Hong Kong would reverberate throughout China.

Fortunately, there appears to exist a key difference between the Kiev Maidan and the Hong Kong protests, namely the absence of a wealthy oligarch or oligarchs pursuing a reactionary political agenda. None of the Hong Kong business elite have given any indications of supporting the rioters’ more radical agenda, nor is there evidence of their contacts with Western diplomats or intelligence services. It is doubtful such contacts would escape the attention of China’s counter-intelligence services, and China’s political leadership is unlikely to show the sort of timidity Ukraine’s President Yanukovych did in a similar situation, to his own chagrin.

One Country, One System?

The current “one country, two systems” paradigm unfortunately lies at the core of Hong Kong’s current troubles. The establishment of an economic enclave, with little labor mobility across this veritable intra-Chinese border, turned Hong Kong into a political pressure cooker. Its political autonomy in turn meant policies that favored the economic elite, causing the growth of wealth inequality which contributes to the high level of the local government’s unpopularity, to the point it has become a liability for Beijing itself. In the short term, Beijing will likely be forced to funnel considerable financial resources into Hong Kong to relieve the social pressures. In the longer term, however, a lasting solution will require not only a more close oversight of Hong Kong’s social policies, but also promotion of two-way migration between China proper and Hong Kong.

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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has called out the US for delivering more than 30,000 weapon-laden trucks to Syria to support the PKK-linked People’s Protection Units (YPG) terrorist group, reported Press Tv.

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#BREAKING Turkey not to remain silent to over 30,000 weapon-laden trucks sent by US to N.Syria as Turkey only country in region to fight, says Erdogan

— ANADOLU AGENCY (ENG) (@anadoluagency) September 7, 2019

Speaking at the Justice and Development Party’s meeting in Eskişehir, a city in northwestern Turkey, Erdogan said he wouldn’t sit back in the shadows anymore about a superhighway of weapons supplied by the US, amounting to more than 30,000 truckloads of weapons, equipment, and ammunition to northern Syria to support YPG terrorists.

Erdogan further criticized the Trump administration for its “lack of commitment” to construct a safe zone in Syria along the Turkish border. He added that he would “sort out” the issue with President Trump at a meeting later this month.

“We must resolve this … There are differences between what is said and what has been done,” Erdogan said.

Washington and Ankara have been at odds with one another of who should control northeast Syria, where YPG terrorist and other Kurdish militias have had the luxury of receiving American weapons.

Ankara has viewed the YPG as an extension of its own Kurdish militancy, insisting the US needs to cut ties with the terrorist organization.

Erdogan also criticized the European Union for the lack of support regarding the millions of Syrian refugees.

He said Ankara has already spent $40 billion hosting four million Syrian refugees, adding that a new project could be announced momentarily to resettle one million refugees in northern Syria.

“Our goal is to settle at least one million Syrian brothers and sisters in our country in this safe zone,” said Erdogan. “If needed, with support from our friends, we can build new cities there and make it habitable for our Syrian siblings.”

The European Union has given Turkey $7 billion since 2015 to restrict the flow of migrants. But with Turkey granting millions of refugees asylum status, the migrant problem is worsening through 2019.

“If there is no safe zone we can’t overcome this,” Erdogan said.

Syrians have already begun traveling to Europe again. Turkish and international refugee officials warned about new waves of migrants headed towards the continent. Over 500 refugees landed by vessel in the Greek island of Lesbos earlier this month.

Erdogan also touched on falling interest rates and said they would also lead to lower inflation rates.

“Inflation is falling, so are interests and they will fall even further. The capital market board will convene on Thursday, and I believe interests will fall afterward,” Erdogan said.

Erdogan has just given the world a dose of reality of where some of the weapons used by terrorists in Syria are coming from.

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Will there be a snap-election or not – that is the big question right now. The earliest date is now mid-November. Whatever happens, money needs to be raised for campaigning. Theresa May’s snap election cost over £18million and she lost – so she grabbed a few billion of taxpayers hard-earned cash to pay for a bunch of terrorist sympathisers to get on board and support her failed bid to achieve anything at all. One can assume Boris Johnson is going to need at least £20 million to have some sort of fighting chance, especially given the support from the DUP is falling away fast.

According to political betting and the polls, Johnson has to retain all the seats he currently has and add at least 35 for the majority he needs. He has to do some apologising in an attempt to encourage a few of those he unceremoniously sacked. Six have already declared they will not stand again.

It doesn’t bode well though for a Tory party who was funded by bankers and hedge funds that Jeremy Corbyn, widely regarded by the financial industry as a banker-baiting, old-school Marxist with big plans for nationalization and tax hikes has the likes of Citibank and Deutsche Bank behind him. “Is Corbyn as bad as no-deal? Perhaps no longer,” said Citi’s Christian Schulz.  Deutsche’s Oliver Harvey said –

“A fiscally profligate no-deal Conservative government is no longer as enticing. We see the magnitude of economic damage caused by a no-deal Brexit as much higher than the policies proposed in the last Labour manifesto.”

Do the Tories have the right people in place to raise the money for a successful snap election that this time will be more akin to trench warfare than the usual nonsense we have become accustomed to? Well, they do have Dominic Cummings – the sociopath who dragged the Vote Leave campaign into financial crimes territory to get a Brexit result.

However, things are looking up, now that the Tories have got Ehud “Udi” Sheleg, the Conservatives’ largest current donor and now the party’s sole treasurer holding the purse-strings.

Sheleg is an ‘art dealer’ and he’s just given the Conservatives another £1m in the second quarter of this year, making him their most generous current benefactor by some margin. Arguably more important, however, is his recent appointment as sole Tory party treasurer.

Until July, Sheleg had been co-treasurer with party chief executive Sir Mick Davis. But with Davis’s resignation, his elevation has given him a senior role that includes no less than being – “responsible for all operational matters including fundraising, membership and candidates”.

First, you should know some background about Sheleg. His brother (and business partner) was involved in a company promoting an online investment industry that was later associated with serious fraud. An investigation by Finance Uncovered, Private Eye and The Times of Israel found that for three years, Ehud’s brother Ran was part of a company that marketed binary options – an industry largely run out of Israel. Binary options were promoted as a form of financial product to thousands of investors around the world, but their sale was halted by European and Israeli regulators last year when it was found that the industry was rife with fraud. It was a high-tech variant of boiler room scams.

Binary options cost UK investors (who reported their losses) some £60million but overall, losses to scamsters is considered to be much larger. When questioned – Ehud Sheleg said he had been completely unaware of the company in which his brother had been involved.

Ehud has ‘establishment’ connections too. His Mayfair-headquartered Halcyon Gallery, an exclusive art dealership boasts of close ties to the Royal Family and the Conservative Party. That company is located in a tax haven (of course). Finance Uncovered also reported that both the Halcyon Gallery and the binary options business were exposed in the huge Panama Papers scandal that exposed tax fraud on a global scale. In the meantime, the gallery sponsors events at Buckingham Palace and has co-hosted a party with Princess Eugenie. It also sponsors an annual charity polo match, where Princes William and Harry have played for the Halcyon Gallery team.

Private Eye also reports that:

Sheleg’s promotion doesn’t say much for the importance Boris Johnson as party leader and James Cleverly MP as co-chairman attach to financial probity in fundraising matters. Our special report earlier this year revealed not just Sheleg’s close relations with Moscow, hosting Russia’s ambassador at the height of post-Crimea-invasion sanctions in 2015, but also his major deal with organised-crime-connected figures in establishing a Cyprus outlet of Halcyon the same year. At a minimum, due diligence appears not to be Sheleg’s strong suit. The Eye’s report also showed how Sheleg’s Halcyon company had filed erroneous accounts (not great for a party treasurer), and how in 2009 it had liquidated one of its subsidiary companies (high street art chain Castle Galleries), walking away from £4m of debts and simply carrying on the business under a new company.

Private Eye also unearthed in an earlier edition, Sheleg’s previous track record of “unfiled accounts, unpaid suppliers, investigations and VAT penalties from HM Customs and Excise, along with millions of pounds in dodged tax”. So serious had his habit of dissolving companies and avoiding liabilities been, said Private Eye, that one businessman from the early 2000s said he’d acquired the nickname “Alka Seltzer”. Given a political party’s onerous accounting and reporting requirements, Sheleg is certainly an interesting choice to hold the finance brief in the Tory boardroom.

However, given the very shady nature of Tory party donations and supporters, it appears this choice of Treasurer is ideal.

Dodgy donors, illegal cash

The Tory party are now little more than anarchists. They have systematically gone about the destruction of political and economic stability in their quest for a new form of power.

During all the scandals that emanated from the EU referendum, a powerless Electoral Commission and a toothless (or frightened) National Crime Agency did nothing after discovering Conservative party donors had invested in the very company that spawned the election consultancy at the centre of a storm about the illegal use of data. Worse, we now know that these new technologies at this same organisation were in fact, designed for the British and American military as a propaganda tool, then used on the civilian population of Britain to achieve their goals. The scandals and lawbreaking were breathtaking in scale given the attack on Britain’s democratic traditions.

Theresa May faced questions in the House of Commons over Tory links to the company.

“As far as I’m aware the government has no current contracts with Cambridge Analytica or with the SCL Group,” the prime minister said.

Either her eyes and ears were looking the other way – or she lied.

Filings for SCL Group, which is at the top of a web of companies linked to Cambridge Analytica, show that since its conception in 2005 its shareholders and officers have included senior Tory MP’s (former and current), Tory insiders, Lords, military men and even a business minister under David Cameron.

The Guardian reported at the time –

“From its outset as a UK-registered company, SCL Group had investors from the upper echelons of British life. Lord Marland, a successful businessman who became a minister in 2010, held shares personally. Sir Geoffrey Pattie, a former Conservative defence and industry minister, took a key role in the company for its first three years. Other big investors (of SCL) went on to make huge donations to the Tory party. For instance, Roger Gabb, introduced the Volvic water brand to the UK and property tycoon Vincent Tchenguiz donated large sums as well – both investors in SCL Group.”

Then there’s Nigel Oakes, an old Etonian from a military family – his father is Major John Waddington Oakes – and a former boyfriend of Lady Helen Windsor. Oakes had previously set up a company called Behavioural Dynamics which made many similar claims to SCL about its ability to influence voters. He was involved with Alexander Nix – the fellow old Etonian at the heart of the SCL/Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal.

Brexit is one of Britain’s biggest crime scenes ever. Immersed in mass population data theft, unlawful invasions of privacy, illegal cash from obscure offshore entities, foreign actors, dodgy donors and a myriad of other scandals that would in normal times bring down any British government – the country is being driven over a political, economic and constitutional cliff for an ideology created by the rich and powerful.

Tory donors came out the woodwork again when Theresa May and her disastrous attempt to strike a deal with the EU sank and Boris Johnson ascended to the party throne. Up popped more ‘dodgy donors‘ such as Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Russian oligarch Vladimir, who famously wrote a large cheque to play tennis with Johnson in 2014. Her donations had declined under Theresa May but suddenly became positively lavish after BJ arrives and a few thousand quid turns into a £200,000 handout. That amount is now believed to be £626,000 from another investigation. 

Subject to yet another lawsuit – The Times reported how “MI5 launched an investigation into a Russian lobbying campaign to infiltrate British politics that received advice and support from a senior Conservative MP.” Alexander Shchukin, a Russian oligarch who is under house arrest in Siberia over a string of corruption charges is involved. (Times article link). Have a look yourself, it’s not good reading when considering who is running the country.

Only six months ago, the Conservative Party was under fire after it was revealed that the party illegally accepted over £1 million in funds from individuals who are actually based in tax havens in the run-up to the last election. They ignored the investigation and illegality of those donations.

Twelve months ago, the Tories refused to assist a French investigation into suspected money laundering and tax fraud by the UK telecoms giant Lycamobile – citing the fact that the company is the “biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party” and gives money to a trust founded by Prince Charles.

Eighteen months ago, the Tory party refused to hand back over £800,000 in donations from Russian oligarchs and their associates.

When these people hand over such large sums of money – what exactly do they expect in return?

And just to provide an answer to that question, one Tory party donor Mohammed Shahid Khan, 55, of Wimbledon, gave a £20,000 donation to the Tory party. He also got a multimillion-pound “golden visa” to ensure he and his family could stay in the country. He has since been arrested for funding and equipping terrorist organisations, for illegal arms dealing, fraud and money-laundering in Bangladesh and was using Britain and the Conservative party as cover. In the raid in his home country, the police found detonators, weapons, radical literature linked to Al Qaeda and counterfeit money along with 54 bank accounts. Why was Khan not vetted? Where were MI5 and MI6?

In the background, the list of the rich and powerful usurping democracy in favour of reshaping Britain into an offshore tax-free plaything also goes on.

Tax advisers to the super-rich also stand to gain much from Brexit-era Britain becoming a happy tax-planning hunting ground. When they hand over donations of £50,000 they want results. There are many others too and they all want something in return.

In the meantime, dark money is pouring into Boris Johnson’s snap election campaign machine. Cash from think tanks linked to some of the hardest of hard right-wing free-market jihadists on the planet is filling Dominic Cummings war-chest. Matthew Elliot is there at the centre of this continuing attack against democracy. Both were at the heart of the crime scene that was the Vote Leave/SCL/Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. Their tactics will be the same. Stolen data, voter manipulation, engagement and disengagement tactics, AB testing, micro-ad targeting. In other words – the illegal gaming of an electoral system unable to defend itself.

The Tories are already at it again – targeting millions with micro-ads. They say there’s nothing wrong with it – and there wouldn’t be if the data wasn’t stolen or gained without consent. It wouldn’t be if the technical delivery systems weren’t built around military structures to win ‘hearts and minds’ on the battlefield and it wouldn’t be if the tactics used weren’t just unethical or immoral but downright sinister. But they are.

This dark money – what is it? It’s illegal cash stuffed into third-party organisations to beat antiquated electoral laws in Britain and keep private the donors. For example, one trail of dodgy cash leads from American so-called think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the all-powerful Atlas Network – the same organisations who surround Donald Trump. Another involved in the UK is the Taxpayers Alliance and Insitute of Economic Affairs. The former was caught stuffing its bank account with hundreds of thousands of US dollars in money from undeclared American donors, the latter caught on videooffering American donors access to Tory MP’s inside the Brexit negotiations. Of course, none of this seems to be illegal or even immoral nowadays. Somehow, none of these organisations have been properly reprimanded as the pitiful fines dished out are minuscule to their budgets.

Going back to the Tory party treasurer, what do you now see?

It’s a party immersed in dirty money, much of it laundered through the City of London. Its origins come mainly from billionaires, many are foreign, but also from opaque think tanks and front charities. Charlatans, crooks and con-artists whose money comes comes from tax evasion, financial crime and more – are represented by the establishment, just as much as they are at the very heart of the British government.

And those extreme Brexit fanboys, the far-right thugs on Britain’s streets, such as the followers of Tommy Robinson, (himself funded by American far-right organisations), the loudmouths with big shiny boots and green bomber jackets don’t realise whose side they are fighting for. Do they really think that the likes of old Etonians, billionaires, bankers and oligarch’s are somehow going to reward them for being fellow travellers of an ideology designed to benefit the rich?

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Featured image is from TP

Certainly, there are many things that President Donald Trump can rightly be criticized for, but it is interesting to note how the media and chattering classes continue to be in the grip of the highly emotional but ultimately irrational “Trump derangement syndrome (TDS).” TDS means that even the most ridiculous claims about Trump behavior can be regurgitated by prominent journalists without anyone in the media even daring to observe that they are both professional dissemblers of truth who lie regularly to enhance their professional resumes.

There are two persistent bogus narratives about Donald Trump that are, in fact, related. The first is that his campaign and transition teams collaborated with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton. Even Robert Mueller, he of the famous fact-finding commission, had to admit that that was not demonstrable. The only government that succeeded in collaborating with the incoming Trumpsters was that of Israel, but Mueller forgot to mention that or even look into it.

Nevertheless, Russia as a major contributing element in the Trump victory continues to be cited in the mainstream media, seemingly whenever Trump is mentioned, as if it were demonstrated fact. The fact is that whatever Russia did was miniscule and did not in any way alter the outcome of the election. Similarly, allegations that the Kremlin will again be at it in 2020 are essentially baseless fearmongering and are a reflection of the TDS desire to see the president constantly diminished in any way possible.

The other narrative that will not die is the suggestion that Donald Trump is either a Russian spy or is in some other, possibly psychological fashion, controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin. That spy story was first floated by several former senior CIA officers who were closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently because they believed they would benefit materially if she were elected.

Former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell was the most aggressive promoter of Trump as Russian spy narrative. In August 2016, he wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton.” Morell’s story began with the flat assertion that

“Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief. I trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president – keeping our nation safe… Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”

In his op-ed, Morell ran through the litany of then GOP candidate Trump’s observed personality and character failings while also citing his lack of experience, but he delivered what he thought to be his most crushing blow when he introduced Vladimir Putin into the discussion. Putin, it seems, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, is “trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities… In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

How can one be both unwitting and a recruited agent? Some might roll their eyes at that bit of hyperbole, but Morell, who was a top analyst at the Agency but never acquired or ran an actual spy in his entire career, goes on to explain how Moscow is some kind of eternal enemy. For Morell that meant that Trump’s often stated willingness to work with Putin and the nuclear armed state he headed was somehow the act of a Manchurian Candidate, seen by Morell as a Russian interest, not an American one. So much for the presumed insider knowledge that came from the man who “ran the CIA.”

The most recent “former intelligence agents’” blast against Trump appeared in the Business Insider last month in an article entitled “US spies say Trump’s G7 performance suggests he’s either a ‘Russian asset’ or a ‘useful idiot’ for Putin.” The article cites a number of former government officials, including several from the CIA and FBI, who claimed that Trump’s participation at the recent G7 summit in Biarritz France was marked by pandering to Putin and the Kremlin’s interests, including a push to re-include Russia in the G-7, from which it was expelled after the annexation of Crimea.

One current anonymous FBI source cited in the article described the Trump performance as a “new low,” while a former senior Justice Department official, labeled Trump’s behavior as “directly out of the Putin playbook. We have a Russian asset sitting in the Oval Office.” An ex-CIA officer speculated that the president’s “intent and odd personal fascination with President Putin is worth serious scrutiny,” concluding that the evidence is “overwhelming” that Trump is a Russian asset, while other CIA and NSA veterans suggested that Trump might be flattering Putin in exchange for future business concessions in Moscow.

Another recently retired FBI special agent opined that Trump was little more than “useful idiot” for the Russians, though he added that it would not surprise him if there were also Russian spies in Trump’s inner circle.

The comments in the article are almost incoherent. They come from carefully selected current and former government employees who suffer from an excess of TDS, or possibly pathological paranoia, and hate the president for various reasons. What they are suggesting is little more than speculation and not one of them was able to cite any actual evidence to support their contentions. And, on the contrary, there is considerable evidence that points the other way. The US-Russia relationship is at its lowest point ever according to some observers and that has all been due to policies promoted by the Trump Administration to include the continuing threats over Crimea, sanctions against numerous Russian officials, abrogation of existing arms treaties, and the expansion of aggressive NATO activity right up to the borders with Russia.

Just this past week, the United States warned Russia against continuing its aerial support for the Syrian Army advance to eliminate the last major terrorist pocket in Idlib province. Once against, Washington is operating on the side of terrorists in Syria and against Russia, a conflict that the United States entered into illegally in the first place. Either Donald Trump acting as “the Russian agent” actually thinks threatening a Moscow that is pursuing its legitimate interests is a good idea or the labeling of the president as a “Putin puppet” or “useful idiot” is seriously misguided.

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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 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 is from Wikimedia Commons

While the world watches in horror as fires rage on in the Amazon, activists are shining a light on the big businesses destroying what’s popularly known as the “lungs of the Earth.” On September 5, people around the globe stood in solidarity with the rainforest’s indigenous communities by partaking in the Global Day of Action for the Amazon, staging protests and singling out the bad actors profiting off deforestation. 

In Washington, D.C. protesters chanted “Put out the flames, we name your names — politicians, corporate vultures, you’re the ones we blame,” as they marched from the White House to the Brazilian Consulate. Activists around the world have been protesting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has steadily rolled back indigenous land rights and environmental protections from his very first hours in office. A coalition — which includes Amazon Watch and Friends of the Earth, among others — is also putting pressure on the multinational corporations turning a profit off the destruction of the Amazon.

Amazon Watch, a California-based organization that works in concert with indigenous and environmental groups, issued a report earlier this year documenting the dozens of companies that stand to make money as Bolsonaro strips regulations in Brazil. The report, titled Complicity in Destruction, highlights the main drivers of deforestation — from soy and beef commodity traders like Cargill and JBS, to their financiers in North America and Europe, like BlackRock, Santander, and JP Morgan Chase. And research from Mighty Earth has documented the retailers most associated with those traders, like Costco, Walmart, and Ahold Delhaize — which owns Stop & Shop, Giant, and Food Lion.

Protesters in D.C. took aim at the U.S.-based companies highlighted in the campaign to defund deforestation.

“There are many, many large corporations in the United States — including Cargill, ADM and BlackRock — who all have a hand in the destruction of the Amazon and we encourage all Americans to use their economic power to put pressure on these companies to do the right thing,” Todd Larsen, the Executive Co-Director for Consumer & Corporate Engagement at Green America told Inequality.org.

Green America is encouraging Americans to use their investments to put economic pressure on the companies profiting off deforestation.

“The only reason these companies are able to keep burning down the forest year over year is because their customers keep paying them to do so,”  Bárbara Amaral of Brazilians for Democracy and Social Justice told the crowd in D.C. “It’s time for supermarket giants like Costco, Walmart, Ahold, to immediately suspend contacts with Cargill and JBS, and for the public to show up at the front doors of Cargill headquarters and yell that it’s time to protect the Amazon.”

Protecting the environment must include structural changes to the economy that keep companies from making a quick buck off climate disaster, protesters said.

“I came out today because I am in support of changing the climate debate into a debate that is critical about the current economic system that exists in the world that is perpetuating climate change,” Gabby Rosazza, a campaigner with the International Labor Rights Forum told Inequality.org. “In particular, I’m tired of hearing about how individual actions can address climate change such as buying metal straws versus plastic straws. I’m more interested in learning about who is profiting from climate change.”

One of the companies profiting the most? BlackRock — the largest asset manager in the world. A report released last month by Amazon Watch and Friends of the Earth found BlackRock to be among the top three shareholders in 25 of the largest publicly-traded deforestation-risk companies. And the asset manager’s deforestation presence grew by more than $500 million between 2014 and 2018. Activists in London, Stockholm, San Francisco, Boston and Hong Kong targeted BlackRock during Thursday’s Global Day of Action, holding protests and die-ins outside the asset manager’s offices.

The recent report and protests are the latest addition to a pressure campaign mounting on BlackRock for continuously profiting off climate destruction, from the Amazon to the Alberta tar sands to Arctic oil reserves. Indigenous and environmental activists held protests at BlackRock’s annual general meeting earlier this year. Luiz Eloy Terena, legal counsel for the National Indigenous Organization of Brazil (also known as APIB) and a member of Brazil’s indigenous Terena community, expressed her criticism to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink directly during the meeting and demanded an audit of BlackRock investees operating on Brazilian indigenous territories.

 “Brazilian indigenous peoples and lands are under immense threat from the beef and soy industries working hand in glove with the Bolsonaro regime to undermine protections that keep our forests standing and our climate stable,” Terena said in a statement released after his conversation with Fink.

“When BlackRock funnels investments to these bad actors in Brazil, it is complicit in the destruction of tropical forests and violation of human rights. BlackRock must use its significant influence over these companies to signal that it will not tolerate policies that violate indigenous rights and damage the climate.”

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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.

Negin Owliaei co-edits Inequality.org.

Kelsey Hawkins-Johnson is a Landau Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Featured image is from Greenpeace

Viet Nam – Epiphany for the USA

There was a moment in Viet Nam when I questioned whether everything I had been taught about “America” was one big fabricated lie – a huge pretend. It was April 1969, and I had just experienced witnessing the aftermath of a series of bombings of supposed military targets. They were in fact inhabited, undefended villages where virtually everyone in those villages perished from low flying bombings, that included napalming. The majority of dead – murdered – were young burned children. On several occasions I observed those bodies up close, sickened by the sight, now burdened by the criminal nature of the US war. The policy of accumulating massive numbers of body counts was an inkling of the Grand Lie. Reading the entrance sign to my squadron in-country headquarters, “Welcome to Indian Country,” was a first clue.

My duty station was the “home” of the fighter-bombers and pilots who followed orders to destroy those “enemy targets”, i.e., villages. I was the USAF night security commander following orders to protect those soldiers and planes from mortar and sapper attacks.

A few days later I was reading an article in Stars and Stripes, an official, independent newspaper for soldiers, reporting on a recent Supreme Court decision (Street v. New York, 1969) that upheld the right of desecrating our “sacred” symbol – the US flag. During a period of increased burnings of the US American flag in protests of the US wars against African-Americans at home, and Asians abroad, an African-American veteran recipient of a Bronze Star, Sidney Street, publicly burned his personal flag on a New York City street corner for which he was arrested and convicted.

Depressed, I pondered how it is that one could be arrested for burning a piece of cloth – even a national symbol – that represented an official policy of criminally burning innocent human beings, including large numbers of young children, while the pilot-perpetrators were commended, and whom, in my duties I was protecting? Initially suicidal, I had difficulty wrapping my head around this dystopian nightmare. I was in psychic shock from extreme cognitive dissonance.

Our behavior against the Vietnamese, a nation of peasants with one-sixth the population of the USA, one-thirtieth its size, certainly must rank as one of the worst of a number of barbarisms in the 20^th Century. The US left 26 million bomb craters, sprayed 21 million gallons of DNA-altering chemical warfare on the landscape and people, murdered some 6 million Southeast Asians, destroyed by bombing over 13,000 of Viet Nam’s 21,000 villages, 950 churches and pagodas, 350 clearly marked hospitals, 3,000 high schools and universities, 15,000 bridges, etc.

Why all this overwhelming firepower and destruction? Incredulously, to prevent the Vietnamese from enjoying their self-determination, absurdly touted as necessary to stop “communism.” Does there in fact exist a kind of psychopathy in our cultural DNA? Though I hadn’t fired a bullet myself, or dropped a bomb, I had been a compliant participant in a mindless murder machine. Viet Nam was not an aberration, but consistent with a long history of arrogant interventions revealing something very dark about who we are. Was I part of a savage culture of unthinking sadists, I wondered?

Clockwise, from top left: U.S. combat operations in Ia Đrăng, ARVN Rangers defending Saigon during the 1968 Tết Offensive, two A-4C Skyhawks after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, ARVN recapture Quảng Trị during the 1972 Easter Offensive, civilians fleeing the 1972 Battle of Quảng Trị, and burial of 300 victims of the 1968 Huế Massacre. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Learning Real People’s Versus Fake, Kool Aid US History

I have spent countless hours studying a more comprehensive people’s version of world and US history. Study of US history of course is part of the Eurocentric globalization/colonization over the past 500 years. The 20 percent Eurocentric “developed-world” is a product of self-proclaimed “superiors” violently and deceitfully stealing resources and labor from the other 80 percent, all cloaked in the conceited rhetoric of spreading “civilization.” This patriarchal policy is totally unsustainable from a social, political, ecological, psychological, and moral perspective.

It is instructive to learn that the “Founding Fathers” chose, not democracy, but oligarchy/plutocracy “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” was a vision to expand private property for large landowners. Our Constitution is more a document to preserve freedom of “property” and commercial transactions, than it is to preserve human liberty, of which free speech is the most fundamental. Historian Staughton Lynd summarized it thus: inherited land replaced inherited government. Recently the highest court of the land ruled the legal fiction that property (money) is a person with free speech rights, as preposterous as the earlier legal fiction that a person (slave) is property.

A fear-laden gun culture originating in violent settler-colonialism and white nationalism-supremacy serve as a basis for the founding ideology and military strategy of the United States. Slave patrols and Indian fighters were our first “special operations,” establishing the essential White character of our militarized culture. As the systematic dispossession project continued, the US government signed over 400 treaties with Indigenous nations, violating every oneof them, establishing deceit and outright lying as part of our cultural DNA.

The politics of violence based on classism and racism has been incessant throughout our history. Examining the US criminal injustice system housing a quarter of all the world’s prisoners reveals brutal truth when comparing extreme disparities in punishments by race, and class. Justice?

I studied the history of the city of my birth – Geneva, New York, which in the 1700s was Kanadesaga, capitol of the Seneca nation. On September 8, 1779, Major General John Sullivan and his forty-five hundred soldiers eradicated these “merciless Indian Savages” in the largest Revolutionary War battle of 1779 – a terrorist, scorched-earth campaign massacring civilians while destroying all forty of the well-established Seneca towns, including Kanadesaga. By 1788, the European settlers renamed it Geneva, as if nothing had happened, a deserved reward for superiors.

All those arrowheads I enjoyed collecting as a child possessed a profound dark secret about the nature and character of my ancestors. However, I would only discover their secret after deep reflections from my Viet Nam awakening.

Official US military interventionism began with the US Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1798 during the undeclared naval war with France. However, hundreds of settler paramilitary units had been killing Indians since the 1620s. But imperialism has been explicit policy since the late 1890s to assure domestic prosperity. In 1907, Woodrow Wilson while president of Princeton University (six years before being elected US president) lectured:

“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down.….Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”

President McKinley, and various Senators continued to advocate “a foreign market for our surplus products.” US meddling, both “soft,” and hard, has never stopped.

Traveling to a number of nations in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East have exposed me to details of hundreds of US overt interventions, and thousands of covert destabilization actions. These policies have caused the murders of millions, 20 to 30 million alone since WWII during the so-called “Cold War”. Only five of these nearly 600 military interventions have been declared wars as required by the Constitution, clearly indicating our sacred document is not taken seriously. This also tells us the system has no interest in being accountable to its own Constitution, or international law. Speaking with peasants in these victim-countries invariably reveals the horrendous cruelty of US interveners and their surrogates. Does the US possess any intentions to be law-abiding? Does the US possess any feelings for others, or only selfish imperial ambitions? And does anyone care?

Violence against even White citizens has matched violence we have carried out in foreign policy. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1917-18 were enacted to suppress anti-war dissent against US entrance into World War I. Thousands of US Americans were deported and imprisoned following World War I for “radical” anti-war expressions, including labor leaders and socialists. Some were tortured in US prisons. Ironically, free speech dissent is most critical when a government decides to go to war. The original Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 stifled free speech of US citizens, including elected officials, who objected to the undeclared war against France. Free speech?  Huh?

While the US was locking up and deporting citizens for opposing World War I, the FBI was ignoring extremely violent KKK supremacist groups whose six million members – nearly 25 percent of the white male population at the time – were lynching with impunity an average of six African-Americans a month. Equal protection?

The first known use of air power against civilians was committed by US Marines in Haiti in 1919. But, the second known use of US air power against civilians occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 31-June 1, 1921, when hundreds of economically successful Black residents living in a 36-square block community were murdered, including from low flying white-piloted planes dropping incendiaries, destroying nearly 1,300 buildings. How many US Americans know about this abomination?

Walter White, a longtime leader in the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), concluded that southerners fear of Negro progress offends the intangible feeling of racial superiority, explaining the intensity of White savagery. The sense of established White superiority (or anyone possessing those feelings) often leads to an insecure character from lack of practicing accountability with others in a world of varied, challenging relationships. Those feelings easily morph into paranoia of others, and delusions of self grandeur – one of the most difficult psychological orders to treat, as the persistent pathology of racism (and classism) so attests.

The third known use of US bombing civilians occurred at Blair Mountain, West Virginia, August-September 1921. As many as 15,000 striking coal miners attempting to unionize were attacked by 2,000 armed sheriff’s deputies, coal company paramilitaries, US troops, and US Army Martin MB-1 bombers, killing as many as 100 miners, with many more wounded. Before the battles had ended, more than a million ammunition rounds had been fired. Nearly 1,000 miners were ironically indicted for murder of the nearly 30 deaths among the miner’s attackers. Over 700 union organizers have been murdered in our history. Is this known by many?

We continue to be obsessed with personal and government guns (police and military) as a guarantor of our security. Those who question easy access to guns, even assault weapons, or the ridiculously wasteful military spending, are thought of as nearly traitorous. US citizens personally own nearly 400 million firearms, or 40 percent of all private guns in the world. On average, three US citizens are killed every day by police, disproportionately African-Americans. So far in 2019, the US has experienced more than one mass shooting (4 or more shot) everyday. Our gun death rate is ten times above that of other high income countries. Using violence as a default position historically ends in disaster, as it has been proven over and over that violence spirals out of control into more violence, while distracting from serious discourse. Why the incredible record of violence? Insecurity?

Under its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance, the US government routinely dispatches military ships to every sea space, military planes to every airspace, hundreds of satellites into outer space, while ordering Special Forces units to operate clandestinely in nearly three-fourths of the world’s countries. Additionally, of the 1.4 million US soldiers in the world, nearly 200,000 are positioned in as many as 150 countries, most stationed at 800 major military bases in 80 nations. The US also possesses a large percentage of the world’s weapons of mass destruction, and recently has dispensed with any genuine effort at containing the spread of nuclear weapons. The annual military budget, including hidden costs, amounts to an exorbitant $1.25 trillion a year, more money than the next seven countries combined spend on their militaries. If you want to be guaranteed health care and a modest house, join the Army. Otherwise these human rights are “unaffordable.” If you want gun control, start at the top.

How to explain the extent and breadth of our violent militarism and global imperialism? Paranoia? It seems that our sense of superiority justifies hurtful dispossession from others to acquire and preserve undeserved privilege.

After exiting the military in 1970, my opinions about the US war against the Vietnamese were affirmed with the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers revealing the more than 20 years of criminal intentions, and deceit, to thwart Vietnamese aspirations for self-determination. Earlier in 1971, January 31-February 2, Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted the “Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes” when nearly 120 veterans testified about the war crimes and atrocities they committed or witnessed in Viet Nam. I was aghast when learning about Nixon’s intended Huston plan to criminally interrupt antiwar activities, the FBI’s sixteen-year COINTELPRO of more than 2,000 illegal actions against innocent US citizens, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS keeping tabs on 300,000 citizens opposed to the Viet Nam war, and the National Security Agency’s Operation SHAMROCK watch lists of those communicating with people overseas. Respect for the law? Huh? Further research revealed that as early as 1934 President Roosevelt instituted a long-standing joint FBI-military program to conduct domestic intelligence with broad investigative scope. The “American” Kool Aid indeed has sedated us.

Today our freedoms are further curtailed, for example, as the National Security Agency (NSA) spies on everyUS American, the Authorization of Military Force Act (AUFA) allows warrantless electronic surveillance of anyone suspected of aiding terrorism, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) enables indefinite detention of US citizens, even arrest by the military. Where is the Constitution when we need it? Or was it ever really there for us?

One of the most revealing chapters in our history is the incredible sympathy the US possessed for authoritarian Nazi Germany. Even though the Soviet military was most critical in defeating the Nazis in World War II, deep fear of the Bolsheviks (the emergence of an alternative social-economic system to capitalism) motivated US America’s wealthy class, with complicity of the US government, to support the rise of Nazi Germany from the mid-1930s into the war years themselves. The US capitalists supported the Nazi capitalists to defeat the “threat” of socialism. Elite power brokers included leaders of Wall Street and wealthy “barons” such as the Rockefellers and Andrew Mellon, and businesses such as Ford Motor, IBM (tabulating daily location of Jews in the Holocaust), General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, International Harvester, Chase Manhattan Bank, the House of Morgan banking dynasty, DuPont, United Aircraft, etc., who enjoyed huge profits from the war. And following the war, the US’s “Operation Gladio” systematically defeated popular anti-Nazi groups throughout Europe, while “Operation Paperclip” secretly brought Nazi scientists and other professionals to the US.Our affinity for fascism has been established.

Psychologically, it is important to note that our national identity has consistently been markedly defined by demonizing others – “merciless savages”, “uppity ni**ers”, “anarchists”, “radicals”, “communists”, “Russians”, “alien filth”, “narco-traffickers”, “terrorists”, “shithole countries”, “vermin”, etc., echoing psychologist Carl Jung’s principle of “shadow projection.” Jung described a cowardly trick we play on ourselves: avoid looking in the mirror so as not to take responsibility for seeing our own demons. We “see” the evil in others, perpetuating a nation addicted to war against them, obscenely profiting as we self-righteously deny our own severe pathologies. If we had looked in the mirror we would have learned what Pogo told us, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Eco-psychologist Chellis Glendinning suggests that modern humans suffer from deep insecurity that emerged from collective traumas hundreds of generations ago. A serious disconnect from intimacy with the earth occurred when our ancient ancestors began controlling nature through agriculture and animal domestication. Evolutionary philosopher Gregory Bateson concludes that addictive behavior is consistent with the Western approach to life that pits mind against body, while behaving as if the natural world is a commodity. We seek various distractions to numb our pain from this feeling of aloofness. Technology, not Nature, has become our God.

Recognizing the Lie

Could it be that virtually everything I was taught by my parents, community, school, church, and political leaders in terms of factual history, morality, ethics, and rational thinking about “America” was the opposite of what had been represented? How could that be?

Yes, I have been conditioned by an incredibly comfortable fairy tale, a massive cultural system denying or distorting historic realities, founded on shameful genocides. I had been betrayed. We are told we are the greatest, even as we (s)elect imperial Presidents and Congresspeople in an orgy of fantastic fiction about “democracy.” The US Senate is a millionaire’s club, with many members of the US House also in that class. Indian author Arundhati Roy describes “democracy” and “pro-democracy” as the “Free World’s whores”, hollow words satisfying a whole range of tastes, available to be used and abused at will where facts don’t matter.

US America loves its myth of being committed to justice for all, but in fact it is a society ruled and funded by a wealthy elite. This is not a government of, by and for the people! It is a ruthless oligarchy sanctioned by a majority of the people believing their vote counts. Money has always mattered, severely rigging the game in many ways toward an upper class (obscenely bribing candidates, corporate personhood power, gerrymandering, proprietary election software, hacking capacity to effect results, Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, etc.). The oligarchy approves “acceptable” candidates, while contrived rhetoric, propaganda, and our education system keep us faithful to our political system comprised of one party with two right wings, the winner ruling by tyranny of its majority. But the bottom line is that (s)elected representatives obey their large donors who thrive on war-making against vulnerable others.

Nonetheless, these facts do not preclude existence of individual conscientious politicians. However, the political economic system itself is fixed, it is not broken, a dilemma every honest politician must face. This delicious Kool Aid has in fact concealed a delusional madness, a Kafkaesque, Orwellian nightmare. Our political leaders have consistently and collectively acted outside the Constitution, while selectively applying laws that preserve the cabal in power. It has always been this way, though the social revolution of the 1960s threatened to overturn the oligopoly. This revolution was unfortunately unsuccessful but the fearful system’s repressive reaction is now in its fifth decade. In the end, we are in fact a nation of men, not laws.

So, in effect, our mythological story made me functionally stupid, a “good kid” who became complicit in mindless, mass murder. And I am suggesting that it has created a society comprised of millions of functionally stupid people. This is different from intelligence. This is not idiocy. This is serious non-thinking of intellectually capable people who, in effect, have suspended their autonomous critical thinking, basking in an intoxicated spell of our sense of national invincibility. It has enhanced the Friedman era of neoliberal privatization, worshipping greed, while millions are without health care and homeless. This is mass psychopathy, a dangerous cultural mental illness.

German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while a prisoner in one of Hitler’s jails, wrote about the role of stupidity in the German people that substantially contributed to the rise of Nazism and worship of savior Hitler. He argued that it is very separate from intellectual capacity but occurs when a cult-like belief system dangerously suspends critical thinking, bringing collective relief to an emotionally anxious population. It is a form of voluntary servitude more dangerous than malice, an entrenched belief system that makes genuine dialogue and education almost impossible. (Bonhoeffer was hung in April 1945).

As US Americans we possess no visceral memory of the two unspeakable genocides our ancestors shamefully committed, forcefully dispossessing Indigenous Africans of their labor, and genuine Americans of their land, murdering millions with impunity. Even though we are superficially taught about slavery and conquering the Indigenous, their egregious suffering has been outsourced outside our feeling fields for 25 generations. Thus, was established our cultural “DNA” of achieving expansion benefitting a few (mostly White males and those who think like them) through any means while escaping any accountability whatsoever. Now nearly 600 overt, and thousands of covert interventions later, US Americans still know little or nothing about our unspeakable imperialism. Why not? Isn’t it critically important that we seriously grapple with our diabolical history?

In 2019, the President, US military, CIA, and other “regime change” entities like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and their funders in Congress, continue to intervene almost everywhere, destabilizing with crippling sanctions, sadistically causing suffering, causing chaos, creating kill lists, murdering, bombing, etc. Does any of this criminal insanity even happen? Has it ever? Does it matter to most people? I believe there is a deep shame that burdens us. It is understandable to avoid looking at shame, but the cost is perpetual war for perpetual peace until we are all dead. The era of privilege is over, as we enter the terrifying era of consequences, bringing fear, insecurity and anxiety to many heretofore privileged folks. Denial becomes a lethal seduction.

Our amnesia has precluded emotional intelligence, a depth of character, so necessary for mature development, with little understanding of historical context. We are effectively emotionally retarded, blocking the universal embedded human feeling of empathy, and the collective solidarity that emerges therefrom. Thus, “America” is very insecure having been conveniently wrapped in a fake, pretend narrative, convincing us of our “exceptional” nature, ignoring both our systemic pattern of domestic violence, and global imperialism. The corporate media, and corporate-owned social media platforms, serve as stenographers for our oligarchic policies and values. They create an agenda-driven narrative that inoculates our minds with constant group think untruths of neo-liberal capitalism.

We now live in a post-truth world, where narcissistic life is experienced as virtual, not real. Do we feel the pain of the Afghani, Yemeni, the Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Libyan, Somali, the Russian, the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Palestinian in Gaza, or our neighbor down the street whose cancer left her homeless due to foreclosure? How much do we care? Answering these questions can tell us a lot about our own survival, including yours and mine.

Serious discussion and debate of a broad range and depth of ideas is virtually nonexistent. Mention of “socialism” is considered traitorous to the religion of neoliberal corporatism. In reality, we promote individualism over community, competition over cooperation, and acquisitiveness over inquisitiveness. These capitalist characteristics condition human development in a way that is diametrically opposed to our inherent, genetic nature as a social species requiring for survival cooperation in all our relations.

The economy and political system is now virtually dependent upon what Eisenhower proclaimed as the military/security industrial complex, and that complex thrives on creation of endless “enemies” which produce obscene war profits for a very few. Community and family units have disintegrated, and citizenship is less engaged as life is increasingly defined in terms of commodities. Everything and everybody is for sale to the highest bidder. This leads to anomie, violence and madness. And yet, we continue to enjoy shopping as the government conducts its daily bombing. How can this be? How can we pay taxes and go about our business as usual when so many people in the world are being impoverished or eliminated by US policies facilitating the wealthy getting richer?

The Deep Divide – 1959 – 2019

Having graduated from a rural upstate New York high school in 1959 at the height of post-WWII Cold War euphoria, in the midst of the short historic blip of aspiring consumerism, the “American” Kool Aid I and my 28 fellow graduates drank at that time was delicious. I was raised in a lower middle class home by conservative, religious parents, not dissimilar to the upbringings of many of my classmates. Life seemed great, and simple. However, my Viet Nam experience rudely exposed the poisonous nature of this delicious drink and its true ingredients.

Discovering information about my former classmates finds several still living in the same area we grew up, possessing similar views to that which we believed in 1959 – religiously and politically conservative, but now supporters of MAGA, Trump and Israel. One classmate who had been a basketball cheerleader, still married to her high school sweetheart after 60 years, read my Facebook postings from Nicaragua, then declared me “a fool” admonishing me to “stay there.” This same cheerleader chanted for each starter before games, such as “Brian, Brian, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, nobody can.”

Being raised in and conditioned by US America instills a desire to preserve a fantasy of post-WWII euphoria for many, at least until President Reagan. But experiential reality painfully destroys make-believe. I argue that the USA has never been great, but suspect many of my 1959 classmates would vehemently disagree.

Trump Exposes the Pretend Society

The phenomenon of the Presidency of Donald John Trump disturbingly “offers” our culture, and the world, an overdue undisguised photo of our real culture and its politics. Some say Trump brings out the worst in people – hatred, self-centeredness, cruelty, insensitivity, crassness, racism, insulting language, poisonous divisiveness, adolescent delinquency, etc. But is it possible that his language and demeanor are validating expressions of historically suppressed feelings and values which have never been sufficiently addressed or openly acknowledged in our Eurocentric, capitalist, money-oriented, nature-defying, often mean-spirited culture? These censored feelings once unleashed, no matter how adolescent they seem, are capable of manifesting in a vicious authoritarian and neo-fascist state, as they did in Germany nearly 100 years ago. It seems we are at that point again.

The “developed” world, now led by the United States of America, has historically been built on egregious exploitation and violence hidden under fanciful rhetoric. Inevitably, the chickens will come home to roost. As Eurocentrics we have been lying to ourselves and the world with our highly touted economic system and “democracy,” fooling ourselves by myths and lies we have long believed about our “superiority” built on the suffering of others. As stated above, we have (s)elected leaders who are to varying degrees corrupted by money who use politically “correct” language and a finessed demeanor to gain approval. In fact, they have consistently been imperial and oligarchic, selfishly stealing to assure an insatiably consumptive lifestyle for under 5 percent of the world’s population (but only benefitting a minority of its own people), while gobbling up anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the globe’s resources (depending on the resource and era examined). We ad nauseum excuse our interventions using “national security” or “humanitarian justice.” We have followed in the footsteps of our imperial teachers in the United Kingdom. Fair? Sustainable? Ever thought about the structural unfairness and gross arrogance that has enabled 500 years of colonization? Trump’s Presidency reveals a lot about us that we have not wanted to recognize. Scary? Our historical chronic complicity in this horror story cannot be ignored.

Trump serves as an avatar, or caricature, of a collective, creepy, violent, disgusting, mean-spirited, immature culture, at least as experienced by large numbers of people both in the US and the world. Trump’s appeal can largely be attributed to the fact that he has taken the clothes off of Pretend. His childish nature of lying, tweeting and exaggerating, ironically reveals an ugly “truth” about our modern selves that has been drowned under incredible “public relations” – education, the media, Hollywood, sports, the State Department, etc. His extreme personal narcissism matches well our extreme collective exceptionalism. Is it clearer now just how big the LIE has been, protected by our comfortable 500-year myths? Welcome to dystopia, Kafka, and Orwell.

Conclusion

The 400-year history of Western dualistic Cartesian thinking (named after French philosopher Rene Descartes’ view of reductionist mind-body dualism) divorcing human beings from study of observable nature, has produced a terribly flawed epistemology. The opposite basis for knowledge is holism, a framework that enables comprehension of multiple interconnections and historical context. Dispensing with any serious concern for consequences, the insatiably consumer-driven materialistic Western Way of Life has ironically and blissfully been destroying life itself by its addiction to burning finite fossil fuels. The harsh truth is that a capitalist system is on a direct collision course with sustainable societies that require conserving healthy interconnected relationships with each other and the earth’s eco-system. We have become accustomed to wishful thinking that resources are infinite, and that they belong to us. This theft can only happen, of course, by force or its threat, and deceit, while living in the toxic illusion we are better than others. Does this suggest a kind of arrogant collective stupidity?

Nature bats last, something our cortex apparently chose to fatally ignore. We now face the greatest existential crisis as Nature bats last humbling modern humans into extinction, or near so. We somehow forgot the most critical truth of all – that we all part of the One. If we can now recognize our various levels of “stupidity”, we have an adrenaline opportunity to leap out of our heretofore seductive comfortable fantasy, choosing instead to access our buried human characteristic of interconnection with everything and everybody, i.e., mutual respect and accountability. This leap now must be of a revolutionary nature, rocketing us out of our historic arrogant pleasureableness. Our survival foundation: embracing the evolutionary feeling of empathy. Saving ourselves is pretty damn important, and that means saving life for all. Let’s do it! We are not worth more; they are not worth less.

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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.

Brian Willson, Viet Nam veteran and trained lawyer, has been a lifelong critic of US domestic and foreign policy. His essays and biography are found at his website: brianwillson.com. His recent book, “Don’t Thank Me for My Service: My Viet Nam Awakening to the Long History of US Lies” is published by Clarity Press (2018). His psycho-historical memoir, “Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson” was published by PM Press (2011). A documentary, “Paying the Price for Peace: The Story of S. Brian Willson” was produced in 2016 by Bo Boudart Productions.

Syria is being reborn, and its religious pluralism is being resurrected, sometimes literally from the ashes.

The ancient town of Maaloula, where Aramaic, the language of Christ, is still spoken, where St. Takla miraculously cured the sick, where NATO’s takfiri terrorists committed massacres, and destroyed shrines, churches, and mosques, is yet again an example of the religious pluralism typical of the Levant.

Yet again it is attracting people from Syria, Lebanon, and beyond to its sacred sites, ensconced, in the “land of the prophets.”

The twisted ideology and barbarity of the West’s terrorist proxies is gone now.

The Syrian Arab Army defeated Western imperialism here, and the Syrian government promises to continue its righteous fight until every inch of Syria has been liberated.

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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.

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. 

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It was too good to be true. For a moment, I actually thought Trump had come to his senses and decided to scour the neocons from his administration.

I was overly optimistic. I should have known better.

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White House taps Charles Kupperman to serve as acting national security adviser https://t.co/5xDOmxij7e pic.twitter.com/aPnrojiAul

— New York Post (@nypost) September 10, 2019

Back in 2016, I wrote a small ebook about the neocons giving Trump advice during his presidential campaign. I focused on the influence of Frank Gaffney, founder of the Islamophobic Center for Security Policy (CSP).

Trump’s interim national security adviser, Charles Kupperman, was John Bolton’s sidekick. He is associated with CSP and its pro-Israel, anti-Iran, Islamophobic agenda. 

New acting National Security Advisor is Jewish Reagan Administration alum, Charles M. Kupperman! https://t.co/vmC7b2Czoq

— RJC (@RJC) September 11, 2019

Kupperman is neck-deep in the military-industrial complex. He held senior positions at Lockheed Martin and Boeing. I’m sure Trump approves, having acted as a salesman for the death merchants. He used the ineffectual and illegal missile strike on Syria as a PR event. 

For now, Kupperman is interim national security adviser. Trump is looking at equally unqualified warmongers to eventually fill the slot. For instance, Brian Hook, Trump’s Special Representative for Iran and Senior Policy Advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

Special Representative for #Iran Brian Hook announced that the U.S. is offering rewards of up to $15 million for anyone who can help disrupt the financial operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Submit a tip by visiting https://t.co/mpTeFmrsJg. pic.twitter.com/H5JM4PiYau

— Department of State (@StateDept) September 5, 2019

Hook co-founded the John Hay Initiative—named after President Theodore Roosevelt’s chief diplomat—a concerted effort to brainwash politicians and their staffs in the neocon way of doing things. Advisers include the high-level neocon Robert Kagan, former Dick Cheney adviser Eric Edelman, “the most influential neocon in academe,” Eliot Cohen, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, former NSA director Michael Hayden, and a host of others.

The list of insiders and neocons considered to replace Bolton is lengthy. The list of potentials includes Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and the president and CEO of CSP. He served as chief of staff to Undersecretaries of State for Arms Control John Bolton during the Bush regime. 

Proud to help @realDonaldTrump keep America safe! @securefreedom pic.twitter.com/larKM4bMd3

— Fred Fleitz (@FredFleitz) September 10, 2019

Trump is clueless. At first glance, it appeared the president may have tried to dampen the influence of the neocons on his disastrous foreign policy, but this assessment is far too optimistic. He fired Bolton—who said he resigned—because the mustachioed neocon disagreed and argued with Trump over hosting the Taliban at Camp David. Bolton and the neocons are not interested in peace, they’re masters of forever war. 

It was personal for Trump, as always. 

The neocons will continue to leverage their influence within the administration and Trump will continue to fire those who argue too vociferously. 

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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.

Featured image is from the author

Many people have said that this Report “reads like a novel.” It is indeed surprisingly good when judged in terms of criteria appropriate to works of fiction. But the 9/11 Commission was supposed to conduct a serious investigation into the question of who was responsible for the attacks of 9/11. Instead, it simply presupposed the official conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks were planned and carried out solely by al-Qaeda. The Commission entirely ignored all evidence for the alternative conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks succeeded only because of complicity by members of the US government.

Having written a book that summarizes much of the evidence supportive of this alternative theory (“The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11”), I read “The 9/11 Commission Report” to see how it handled this evidence. I found that it simply omitted most of it and distorted the rest.

For example, the Report simply repeats the official story about the 19 Arab hijackers, failing to mention that at least six of the named men have shown up alive. It even suggests that Waleed al-Shehri, who visited the US embassy in Morocco after 9/11, stabbed a flight attendant on AA 11 before it hit the North Tower (page 5). This sloppy scholarship proves to be no aberration.

With regard to why jet fighters failed to intercept any of the flights, the Report provides a radically revisionist account of 9/11. Claiming–in contradiction to the timeline provided by NORAD on September 18, 2001–that the FAA never notified the military about Flights 175, 77, and 93 until after they crashed, the Report fails to explain why NORAD had earlier said otherwise. This new timeline also changes the starting times of all the teleconferences, in order to claim that they could not have been the means for the military to have learned about the hijackings from the FAA. Also, to bolster the claim that the shootdown order was not given until after Flight 93 had crashed, the Report also contradicts by 45 minutes all prior testimony–including Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s eyewitness testimony to the Commission itself–as to when Vice President Cheney descended to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

With regard to the World Trade Center, the Report fails to mention that fire had never caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse. It also, by way of suggesting why the Twin Towers could have collapsed so easily, says that the core of each building consisted of “a hollow steel shaft” (541n1), whereas in reality the core of each consisted of 47 massive steel columns. While mentioning that the South Tower collapsed in 10 seconds (305), the Report otherwise fails to mention the fact that the collapses manifested 10 standard features of controlled demolitions. The Report handles the collapse of Building 7, which even FEMA admitted it could not explain, by simply failing to mention it.

With regard to the Pentagon, the Report fails to mention that the West Wing would have been the least likely target for terrorists, that its facade did not collapse until 30 minutes after the strike, and other facts in tension with the idea that the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77. And while claiming that al-Qaeda operatives did not strike a nuclear plant for fear that their plane would be shot down (245), the Report fails to point out that the Pentagon is even better protected, so that any aircraft without a military transponder would have been automatically shot down.

With regard to the FBI, the Report fails to mention many stories that are damaging to the official account of 9/11. These omitted stories include attorney David Schippers’ report that several FBI agents told him of their advance knowledge of the New York attacks, the complaint by Coleen Rowley (Time magazine person of the year) that FBI headquarters sabotaged the Moussaoui investigation, and the damning allegations made by FBI translator Sibel Edmonds in her 3.5-hour testimony to the Commission.

What about the allegation by Craig Unger (popularized in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”) that the White House authorized a private flight carrying Saudis on September 13, before private flights were otherwise allowed? The Report “refutes” this allegation by simply saying that US airspace had been reopened at 11 AM that day (329, 556n25), thereby ignoring the crucial distinction between commercial flights, which were then allowed, and private flights, which were not.

The Report also provides radically ahistorical accounts of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, ignoring all the evidence that these attacks were motivated by desires to establish military bases and to take over the oil (rather than by desires to protect human rights and promote democracy). In this and other ways, the Report omits all evidence that the Bush administration had plans of the sort that could have provided motives for allowing or even engineering the attacks of 9/11.

I have documented these and dozens of other problems in my book The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions . These problems are so great that the Report, instead of being nominated for a National Book Award, should be designated a National Disgrace.

David R. Griffin is author of The New Pearl Harbor – Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions — A Critique of the Kean-Zelikow Report

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For background, read this and this.

Excerpt:

An Iranian parliamentary faction has come up with the idea of establishing a club of sanctioned countries for concerted action against the US economic terrorism.

The chairman of the Parliament’s faction on countering sanctions, Poormokhtar, gave a report on the formation of the faction and its activities, as well as the ongoing efforts to establish the club of sanctioned countries. Iran’s FM, Zaraf, said this would be enhancing the already existing alliance of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela against US economic terrorism.

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PressTV: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela are among the nations that have come out against the United States’ use of sanctions to enforce its foreign policy around the world. In what ways can they fight these US sanctions as a group?

Peter Koenig: Brilliant idea. Solidarity makes stronger and eventually will attract other countries who are sick and tired of the US sanction regime, and since they have the backing of Russia and China – that’s a very strong alliance, especially an economic alliance. The sanction regime can only be broken through economics, meaning decoupling from the western monetary system. I said this before and say it again, at the risk of repeating myself.

After all, China is the world’s largest and strongest economy in Purchasing Power GDP measures – which is the only comparison that really counts. I believe this solidarity alliance against US sanctions is certainly worth a trial.

And personally, I think it will be a successful trial, as more countries will join, possibly even non-sanctioned ones, out of solidarity against a common tyrant.

The countries in solidarity against sanctions, in addition to ignoring them – and the more they ignore them, the more other countries will follow-suit, that’s logical as fear disappears and solidarity grows.

For example, Iran and Venezuela, oil exporting countries, could accompany their tankers by war ships. Yes, it’s an extra cost, but think of it as temporary and as a long-term gain. Would “Grace I” have been accompanied by an Iranian war ship – the Brits would not have dared confiscating it. That’s for sure.

PressTV: Many of the US sanctions have led to death of civilians in those particular countries. At the same time, sanctions have also led to the improvement of these countries to the point where domestic production in various fields advanced. Don’t sanctions become country-productive to US aims?’

PK: Of course, the sanctions are counter-productive. They have helped Russia to become food-self-sufficient, for example. That was not Washington’s intention and less so the intention of the EU, who followed Washington’s dictate like puppets.

Sanctions are like a last effort before the fall of the empire, to cause as much human damage as possible, to pull other nations down with the dying beast. It has always been like that – starting with the Romans through the Ottoman’s. They realize their time has come – but can’t see a world living in peace. So, they must plant as much unrest and misery as possible before they disappear.

That’s precisely what’s happening with the US.

Intimidation, building more and more military bases, all with fake money, as we know the dollar is worth nothing – FIATmoney – that the world still accepts – but less and less so, therefore military bases, deadly sanctions – and trade wars –
Trump knows that a trade war against China is a lost cause. Still, he can intimidate other countries by insisting on a trade war with China – or that’s what he thinks.

PressTV: The more countries US sanctions, illegally, more people turn against the US: doesn’t that defeat the US so-called fight against terrorism and violence?

PK: Well, US sanction and the entire scheme of US aggression has nothing to do with fighting terrorism, as you know. It’s nothing but expanding US hegemony over the world, and if needed, and more often than not, the US finances terrorism to fight proxy wars against their so-called enemies, meaning anybody not conforming to their wishes and not wanting to submit to their orders and not letting them exploit – or rather steal – their natural resources.

Syria is a case in point. ISIL is funded and armed by the Pentagon, who buys Serbian produced weapon to channel them through the Mid-East allies to Syrian terrorists, the ISIL or similar kinds with different names -just to confuse.

Venezuela too – the opposition consist basically of US trained, financed and armed opposition “leaders” – who do not want to participate in totally democratic elections – order of the US – boycott them. But as we have seen as of this day, the various coup attempts by the US against their legitimate and democratically elected President, Nicolás Maduro, have failed bitterly – and this despite the most severe sanctions regime South American has known, except for Cuba, against whom the US crime has been perpetuated for 60 years.

So, nobody should have the illusion that Washington’s wars are against terrorism. Washington is THE terrorist regime that fights for world hegemony.

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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 21^st Century; 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.

Featured image: Trump reinstate sanctions against Iran (White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

The Iranian Ambassador to India shocked his host nation by announcing that his country was considering building a CPEC-parallel LNG pipeline to China in response to New Delhi’s submission to the US’ unilateral sanctions regime, which could completely ruin India’s regional vision if this ambitious plan comes to pass and especially if Russia decides to actively participate in it.

Exciting News About E-CPEC+

India’s zero-sum plans of using its reinvigorated strategic partnership with Russia to “balance” China in the region of “Greater South Asia” are at risk of being ruined if Iran goes through with its recently announced interest in building a CPEC-parallel LNG pipeline to China (E-CPEC+, with the “E” standing for “energy”) and receives Moscow’s world-class support in constructing this game-changing piece of integrational infrastructure. The Iranian Ambassador to India shocked his host nation by declaring that “Iran is now discussing an LNG pipeline to China along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), as India is not expected to retain its prior interest in LNG imports from Iran”, according to The Hindu’s report about his comments made to members of the Indian Association of Foreign Affairs Correspondents on Monday. His words are especially significant for the fact that they represent his country’s first public recognition that India submitted to the US’ sanctions regime and also signify a bold endorsement of the Belt & Road Initiative’s (BRI) flagship project of CPEC that India is adamantly against because of its maximalist claims in the Kashmir Conflict.

The Meek Shall Rise 

India already humiliatingly made a fool out of Iran on the world stage by complying with the US’ sanctions demands, victimizing its partner through blowback from the Hybrid War on CPEC, and entering into informal military alliances with its hated American and “Israeli” enemies, but the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and got Iran to stop behaving as India’s “junior partner” and finally become serious about changing its approach to it was likely the brutal use of force that was inflicted earlier this week upon the Kashmiris who were commemorating the matrydom of Imam Hussein. Publicly funded Iranian international media outlet Press TV extensively covered the wanton human rights abuses committed by the occupying Indian forces during this time and specifically pointed out to anyone who was unaware that Imam Hussein was also the third Shia Imam as well as the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, which is exceptionally important because the Islamic Republic of Iran is first and foremost an ideologically driven state constitutionally beholden per Article 154 to “support the struggles of the oppressed for their rights against the oppressors anywhere in the world.”

It is therefore absolutely unacceptable for Iran to not at the very least respond in an asymmetrical way while its co-confessionals are being visibly oppressed by occupying forces while attempting to commemorate the martyrdom of such an important Islamic figure, which explains why Tehran decided to cross the Rubicon and have its Ambassador to India publicly talk about its plans to construct E-CPEC+ despite knowing that his words would indelibly alter the dynamics of the Iranian-Indian Strategic Partnership. The Ambassador wisely referenced India’s decision to discontinue purchasing his country’s resources as the reason for his government exploring such a game-changing move, thereby ensuring that it can’t be interpreted as anything “hostile” or “anti-Indian” and indirectly laying the blame for any repercussions it could have on the regional balance of power solely at the feet of India’s political leadership. This is crucial to mention because the outcome could very realistically ruin India’s regional plans if the pipeline is ever constructed.

“Energy Diplomacy”

Not only would it naturally strengthen China and Pakistan’s joint regional position, but it might also do the same for Russia’s as well if Moscow decides to get involved in this promising project by bidding to construct it and then pairing its offshore gas reserves in Iran with the rest of the Islamic Republic’s available reserves in order to ensure that the pipeline is truly transformational in the geopolitical sense. Russia already signed a $10 billion memorandum of understanding with Pakistan last October to build an undersea pipeline connecting Iran and India via that nation’s territorial waters, but with New Delhi no longer buying Tehran’s resources, it makes sense for Moscow to modify the proposed project to end in the People’s Republic instead. While India might have thought that it bought Russia’s eternal geopolitical allegiance through the multibillion-dollar deals that were struck in exchange for its full support on Kashmir during Modi’s visit as the guest of honor at the recent Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, it could very well soon find out that there are limits to its influence.

Russia and India are indeed on the same page as regards their grand strategic interest in jointly leading a new Non-Aligned Movement (Neo-NAM), which was elaborated upon by the author in his latest piece about Moscow’s “New Detente” with the West and importantly given an indirect endorsement by the Valdai Club in its latest publication about “The Eurasian Chord and the Oceanic Ring: Russia and India as the Third Force in a New World Order“, in which Moscow’s top think tank toyed with rebranding this concept as the “Peaceful Development Movement”. That said, Russia is sincere in its desire to become the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia and isn’t hiding behind euphemisms to disguise any zero-sum ambitions like India is, so it’s entirely feasible that Moscow might seriously consider resuming the original “balancing” intentions of its “Return to South Asia” (prior to them having been offset by its partisan support of India on Kashmir).

Back To “Balancing”?

By doing so, not only would Russia prove its neutrality in the New Cold War, but it would also be advancing the “Golden Ring” geopolitical concept of strengthening ties between itself, Iran, Pakistan, and China, as well as preempting the possibility of becoming too strategically dependent on India (seeing as how its “Pivot to India” in Vladivostok was due in part to similar concerns vis-a-vis China). These interconnected outcomes would reassure Russia’s partners that its joint leadership of the Neo-NAM isn’t against any of them but is instead intended simply to maintain “balance” in the hemisphere. The resultant goodwill that Russia would receive from them, and especially the global pivot state of Pakistan, might even give it the edge over India in this nascent “balancing” structure that it’s jointly building with it and therefore enable Moscow to keep New Delhi’s pro-Western leanings towards the US’ so-called “Indo-Pacific” strategy of “containing” China in check.

Concluding Thoughts

The balance of power in the transregional space between West, Central, and South Asia was on the brink of being redefined had Trump not unexpectedly called off his country’s peace talks with the Taliban, but while the scenario predicted by the author in his recent analysis on the topic could still unfold if a deal is ultimately struck sometime in the future, it might have to be greatly modified to account for Iran’s abrupt change of approach towards India after its Ambassador there just announced his country’s interest in exploring the possibility of building E-CPEC+. The unforeseen timing of this development could change the grand strategic calculus at play by providing Russia with the much-needed opportunity to show the rest of Eurasia that it wasn’t “bought off” as India’s “junior partner” for “balancing” China through the jointly pursued Neo-NAM after the outcome of last week’s Eastern Economic Forum. Russia can put to rest any suspicions about its long-term intentions by actively participating in the construction of E-CPEC+ and strengthening its ties with each of the three other involved countries as a result, which could also enable it to keep India’s pro-Western leanings in check too.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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.

Afghanistan was bombed and invaded because of 9/11. I was there from the start, even before 9/11. On August 20, 2001, I interviewed commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of the Panjshir,” who told me about an “unholy alliance” of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the ISI (Pakistani intel).

Back in Peshawar, I learned that something really big was coming: my article was published by Asia Times on August 30. Commander Massoud was killed on September 9: I received a terse email from a Panjshir source, only stating, “the commander has been shot.” Two days later, 9/11 happened.

And yet, the day before, none other than Osama bin Laden, in person, was in a Pakistani hospital in Rawalpindi, receiving treatment, as CBS reported. Bin Laden was proclaimed the perpetrator already at 11am on 9/11 – with no investigation whatsoever. It should have been not exactly hard to locate him in Pakistan and “bring him to justice.”

In December 2001 I was in Tora Bora tracking bin Laden – under B-52 bombers and side by side with Pashtun mujahideen. Later, in 2011, I would revisit the day bin Laden vanished forever.

One year after 9/11, I was back in Afghanistan for an in-depth investigation of the killing of Massoud. By then it was possible to establish a Saudi connection: the letter of introduction for Massoud’s killers, who posed as journalists, was facilitated by commander Sayyaf, a Saudi asset.

For three years my life revolved around the Global War on Terror; most of the time I lived literally on the road, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Brussels. At the start of ‘Shock and Awe’ on Iraq, in March 2003, Asia Times published my in-depth investigation of which neo-cons concocted the war on Iraq.

In 2004, roving across the US, I re-traced the Taliban’s trip to Texas, and how a top priority, since the Clinton years all the way to the neo-cons, was about what I had baptized as “Pipelineistan” – in this case how to build the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, bypassing Iran and Russia, and extending US control of Central and South Asia.

Later on, I delved into the hard questions the 9/11 Commission never asked, and how Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign was totally conditioned by and dependent on 9/11.

Michael Ruppert, a CIA whistleblower, who may – or may not – have committed suicide in 2014, was a top 9/11 analyst. We exchanged a lot of information, and always emphasized the same points: Afghanistan was all about (existent) heroin and (non-existent) pipelines.

In 2011, the late, great Bob Parry would debunk more Afghanistan lies. And in 2017, I would detail a top reason why the US will never leave Afghanistan: the heroin rat line.

US troops at an opium field in Afghanistan

Now, President Trump may have identified a possible Afghan deal – which the Taliban, who control two-thirds of the country, are bound to refuse, as it allows withdrawal of only 5,000 out of 13,000 US troops. Moreover, the US ‘Deep State’ is absolutely against any deal, as well as India and the rickety government in Kabul.

But Pakistan and China are in favor, especially because Beijing plans to incorporate Kabul into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and have Afghanistan admitted as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, thus attaching the Hindu Kush and the Khyber Pass to the ongoing Eurasia integration process.

Praying for a Pearl

Eighteen years after the game-changing fact, we all remain hostages of 9/11. US neocons, gathered at the Project for the New American Century, had been praying for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams.

Already in The Grand Chessboard, also published in 1997, former National Security Adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, nominally not a neocon, had pointed out that the American public “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”

So, Brzezinski added,

America “may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” HREEEEE

As an attack on the homeland, 9/11 generated the Global War on Terror, launched at 11pm on the same day, initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, later sanitized as Overseas Contingency Operations by the Obama administration. This cost trillions of dollars, killed over half a million people and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim nations – all justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community.”

Year after year, 9/11 is essentially a You Have The Right to Accept Only The Official Version ritual ceremony, even as widespread evidence suggests the US government knew 9/11 would happen and did not stop it.

Three days after 9/11, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that in June 2001, German intelligence warned the CIA that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”

In August 2001, President Putin ordered Russian intel to tell the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings, MSNBC revealed in an interview with Putin that was broadcast on September 15 that year.

No US government agency has released any information on who used foreknowledge of 9/11 in the financial markets. The US Congress did not even raise the issue. In Germany, investigative financial journalist Lars Schall has been working for years on a massive study detailing to a great extent insider trading before 9/11.

While NORAD sleeps

Discrediting the official, immutable 9/11 narrative remains the ultimate taboo. Hundreds of architects and engineers engaged in meticulous technical debunking of all aspects of 9/11’s official story are summarily dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”

In contrast, skepticism rooted in Greek and Latin tradition came up with arguably the best documentary on 9/11: Zero, an Italian production. Just as arguably the most stimulating book on 9/11 is also Italian: The Myth of September 11, by Roberto Quaglia, which offers a delicately nuanced narrative of 9/11 as a myth structured as a movie. The book became a huge hit in Eastern Europe.

Serious questions suggest quite plausible suspects to be investigated regarding 9/11, far more than 19 Arabs with box cutters. Ten years ago, in Asia Times, I asked 50 questions, some of them extremely detailed, about 9/11. After reader demand and suggestions, I added 20 more. None of these questions were convincingly addressed – not to mention answered – by the official narrative.

World public opinion is directed to believe that on the morning of 9/11 four airliners, presumably hijacked by 19 Arabs with box cutters, traveled undisturbed – for two hours – across the most controlled airspace on the planet, which is supervised by the most devastating military apparatus ever.

American Airlines Flight 11 deviated from its path at 8.13am and crashed into the first World Trade Center tower at 8.57am. Only at 8.46am did NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defense Command – order that two intercepting F-15s take off from Otis military base.

By a curious coincidence a Pentagon war game was in effect on the morning of 9/11 – so air-controllers’ radars may have registered only ‘ghost signals’ of nonexistent aircraft simulating an air attack. Well, it was much more complicated than that, as demonstrated by professional pilots.

‘Angel was next’

World public opinion is also directed to believe that a Boeing 757 – with a wingspan of 38 meters – managed to penetrate the Pentagon through a six-meter-wide hole and at the height of the first floor. A Boeing 757 with landing gear is 13 meters high. Airliners electronically refuse to crash – so it’s quite a feat to convince one to fly five to 10 meters above the ground, landing gear on, at a lightning speed of 800 kilometers an hour.

According to the official narrative, the Boeing 757 literally pulverized itself. Yet even after pulverization, it managed to perforate six walls of three rings of the Pentagon, leaving a two-meter wide hole in the last wall but only slightly damaging the second and third rings. The official narrative is that the hole was caused by the plane’s nose – still quite hard even after pulverization. Yet the rest of the plane – a mass of 100 tons traveling at 800 kilometers an hour – miraculously stopped at the first ring.

All that happened under the stewardship of one Hani Hanjour, who three weeks before had been judged by his flight instructors to be incapable of piloting a Cessna. Hanjour, nonetheless, managed to accomplish an ultra-fast spiral descent at 270 degrees, aligning at a maximum 10 meters above ground, minutely calibrating the trajectory, and keeping a cruise speed of roughly 800 kilometers an hour.

At 9.37am, Hanjour hit precisely the Pentagon’s budget analysts’ office, where everyone was busy working on the mysterious disappearance of no less than $2.3 trillion that Defense Secretary Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld, in a press conference the day before, said could not be tracked. So, it’s not only Boeings that get pulverized inside the Pentagon.

World public opinion is also directed to believe that Newtonian physics was suspended as a special bonus for WTC 1 and 2 on 9/11 (not to mention WTC 7, which was not even hit by any plane). The slower WTC tower took 10 seconds to fall 411 meters, starting from immobility. So it fell at 148 kilometers an hour. Considering the initial acceleration time, it was a free fall, not the least impeded by 47 massive, vertical steel beams that composed the tower’s structural heart.

World public opinion is also directed to believe that United Airlines Flight 93 – 150 tons of aircraft with 45 people, 200 seats, luggage, a wingspan of 38 meters – crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and also literally pulverized itself, totally disappearing inside a hole six meters by three meters wide and only two meters deep.

Suddenly, Air Force One was “the only plane in the sky.” Colonel Mark Tillman, who was on board, recalled:

“We get this report that there’s a call saying ‘Angel’ was next. No one really knows now where the comment came from – it got mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio operators. ‘Angel’ was our code name. The fact that they knew about ‘Angel,’ well, you had to be in the inner circle.”

This means that 19 Arabs with box cutters, and most of all their handlers, surely must have been “in the inner circle.” Inevitably, this was never fully investigated.

Already in 1997, Brzezinski had warned,

“it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”

In the end, much to the despair of US neocons, all the combined sound and fury of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror/Overseas Contingency Operations, in less than two decades, ended up metastasized into not only a challenger but a Russia-China strategic partnership. This is the real “enemy” – not al-Qaeda, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination, rehabilitated and sanitized as “moderate rebels” in Syria.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Aaron Brown, news anchor during most of CNN’s coverage on September 11, 2001, was interviewed on the 15th anniversary of the event. He said in that interview that he had felt “profoundly stupid” when he was reporting the destruction of the first Tower (the South Tower) on that morning.

I…I will tell you…that a million things had been running through my mind about what might happen. About the effect of a jet plane hitting people above where the impact was, what might be going on in those buildings. And it just never occurred to me that they’d come down. And I thought…it’s the only time I thought, maybe you just don’t have what it takes to do a story like this. Because it just had never occurred to me.” (CNN, Sept. 11, 2016, interviewer Brian Stelter)

Is it not remarkable that Brown was made to feel stupid, and to feel inadequate as a news anchor, during the precise moments of his coverage of that day when his senses and his mind were fully engaged and on the right track?

Shortly after 9:59 a.m. Brown had been standing on a roof in New York City about 30 blocks from the World Trade Center. He was looking directly at the South Tower as it was destroyed. He was not just a journalist and not just a news anchor: he was an eyewitness.

He immediately interrupted a journalist who was reporting live about the Pentagon:

Wow! Jamie. Jamie, I need you to stop for a second. There has just been a huge explosion…we can see a billowing smoke rising…and I can’t…I’ll tell you that I can’t see that second Tower. But there was a cascade of sparks and fire and now this…it looks almost like a mushroom cloud, explosion, this huge, billowing smoke in the second Tower…” (9:59:07 a.m.)

Having reported honestly what he saw with his own eyes, Brown next did exactly what he should have done as a responsible news anchor. He let his audience know that while he did not know what had happened it was clear that there were two hypotheses in play, the explosion hypothesis and the structural failure hypothesis. And then he went to his reporters on the scene, as well as to authorities, to try and sort out which hypothesis was correct.

Here are examples of his setting forth—after the first building was destroyed and again after the second was destroyed—the rival hypotheses:

and then just in the last several minutes there has been a second explosion or, at least, perhaps not an explosion, perhaps part of the building simply collapsed. And that’s what we saw and that’s what we’re looking at.” (10:03:47)
…
This is just a few minutes ago…we don’t know if…something happened, another explosion, or if the building was so weakened…it just collapsed.” (10:04:36 a.m.)
…
we believe now that we can say that both, that portions of both Towers of the World Trade Centre, have collapsed. Whether there were second explosions, that is to say, explosions other than the planes hitting them, that caused this to happen we cannot tell you.” (10:29:21 a.m.)
…
Our reporters in the area say they heard loud noises when that happened. It is unclear to them and to us whether those were explosions going on in the building or if that was simply the sound of the collapse of the buildings as they collapsed, making these huge noises as they came down.” (11:17:45 a.m.)

Brown’s honest reporting of his perceptions was balanced repeatedly by his caution. Here is an example:

it almost looks…it almost looks like one of those implosions of buildings that you see except there is nothing controlled about this…this is devastation.” (10:53:10 a.m.)

His next move, having set forth the two hypotheses, was to ask his reporters on the scene, who were choking on pulverized debris and witnessing gruesome scenes, what they perceived.

Reporter Brian Palmer said honestly that he was not in a position to resolve the issue.

Two others were more definite about what they perceived.

As can be seen, the explosion hypothesis was flourishing. Even the news caption at the bottom of the screen shortly after the destruction of the South Tower (10:03:12 a.m.) is striking to read today:

“THIRD EXPLOSION SHATTERS WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK”

After checking with his reporters, Brown continued to explore his hypotheses, this time by consulting authorities. This was where he was led astray. “Authorities” are less securely tied to evidence than witnesses and may, in fact, be implicated in high level deception.

First Brown consulted a political authority. He got the Mayor of New York City on the line.

Later in the afternoon Giuliani got his script right and was more definite in ruling out explosions. But, of course, Giuliani had no right to pronounce on the science of building destruction. Brown should have persisted in his questioning.

Finally, Brown brought in an engineer, Jim DeStefano–associated, we were told, with the National Council of Structural Engineers. DeStefano’s brief comments put an end to Brown’s explosion hypothesis and rendered CNN’s news coverage safe for public consumption.

I am not in a position to call DeStefano a fake or to claim he was reading from a script given to him by others, but I am prepared to say he was extremely irresponsible. He did not say “here is one hypothesis.” He said, in effect, “this is what happened.” He was in no position to make this claim. There had been no photographic or video analysis of the building destruction, no analysis of the remains of the WTC, no cataloguing of eyewitnesses, nor any of the other methods of evidence gathering. He was shooting in the dark. He was silencing a journalist who was sincerely trying to discover the truth. As we have known for years now, DeStefano not only could have been wrong: he was wrong.[1]

And let us remember that the entire War on Terror, with its suffering and oppression, has depended on this false structural failure hypothesis. No structural failure hypothesis, no guilty Muslim fanatics. No guilty Muslim fanatics, no War on Terror.

Some readers will feel I am too generous with Brown and with CNN. But I am not interested in portraying them as broadly “dissident” or as on the political Left. I am simply interested in calling things as I see them and giving credit where credit is due. Anyone who wants a contrast to Brown’s performance is free to watch the work of Fox News anchor, Jon Scott, on September 11, 2001. The same confidence that allowed him to name Bin Laden as a suspect 42 seconds after the impact of the second plane allowed him to proclaim the structural failure hypothesis directly after the destruction of the South Tower. He persisted even when his reporters in the field clearly spoke of explosions.

David Lee Miller reported:

we heard a very loud blast, an explosion. We looked up, and the building literally began to collapse before us…” (10:01:17 a.m.)

Rick Leventhal said:

The FBI is here, as you can see. They had roped this area off. They were taking photographs and securing this area just prior to that huge explosion that we all heard and felt.” (10:06:39 a.m.)

News anchor Scott was troubled by none of this. He overrode, silenced and patronized Fox reporters. At no point did he even acknowledge the existence of a second reasonable hypothesis for the Trade Center destruction.

Of course, it is true that by the end of the day of September 11, 2001 CNN and Fox were singing from the same hymnbook. But I believe we ought to acknowledge Brown’s brief, shining moment and consider what might happen if journalists found their courage and trusted their senses and their minds.

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This article was originally published on OffGuardian.

Graeme MacQueen is the former director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University. He is a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and an organizer of the 2011 Toronto Hearings, the results of which have been published in book form as The 9/11 Toronto Report. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

Same-day coverage by CNN and Fox for September 11, 2001 has been sporadically available on the Internet. My notes are from my own previously downloaded files. Times should be accurate to within two seconds.

Notes

[1] Many works have appeared over the years refuting the account of the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But special note should be taken of two sources:

Ted Walter, Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, 2015.

https://www.ae911truth.org/images/BeyondMisinfo/Beyond-Misinformation-2015.pdf

Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, First Amended Grand Jury Petition, filed July 30, 2018 at the office of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, N.Y.

https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/lc-doj-first-amended-grand-jury-petition/

In addition, a recent academic report on the related destruction of World Trade Center 7 destroys whatever confidence we might have in NIST’s accounts:

J. L. Hulsey, et al, A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7 (draft), University of Alaska Fairbanks, Sept. 2019.

https://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50694/signup_page/uaf-wtc7-draft-report?killorg=True&loggedOut=True

Featured image is from OffGuardian

Many who oppose the aggressive foreign policy of the United States under President Donald Trump, which has resulted in record numbers of bombs dropped, regime change operations against Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran and Hong Kong, the abusive use of unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) and record military budgets, cheered when uber-hawk, John Bolton was removed as the National Security Advisor.

Bolton undermined Trump numerous times such as when Trump wanted to get out of Syria and sought negotiations with North Korea and Iran. Bolton led Trump into regime-change operations in Nicaragua and Venezuela, both of which backfired.

The firing of Bolton is an opportunity for Trump to make a major course correction on foreign policy as the 2020 election heats up. The escalation of military aggression and regime-change actions that have occurred in the Trump era have been inconsistent with his previous campaign statements, which indicated he opposed never-ending wars, nation-building, and interventions abroad and wanted to focus on fixing problems at home in the United States.

Trump has long expressed skepticism about US foreign intervention in activities that he has labeled as “nation-building.” During the presidential election campaign, Trump criticized the war in Iraq, claiming he opposed George W. Bush’s Iraq War at the time and accused Bush of lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction. In October 2015, he criticized US interventions saying,

“We’re nation-building. We can’t do it. We have to build our own nation. We’re nation-building, trying to tell people who have [had] dictators or worse for centuries how to run their own countries.”

In December 2016, before his inauguration, Trump said that the policy of “intervention and chaos” must come to an end. He pledged to “build up our military not as an act of aggression, but as an act of prevention. In short, we seek peace through strength.”

Trump has opportunities to take another course, one that is more consistent with his rhetoric. Chairman Kim of North Korea said he was open to another meeting with President Trump on September 10, the next day, Bolton was fired. Shortly after the firing of Bolton, Secretary of State Pompeo gave the green light for Trump to meet with the President of Iran without preconditions at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in a few weeks. The firing of Bolton may not be enough, Iranian officials have refused any meeting until sanctions are lifted. After Bolton’s firing, President Hassan Rouhani said Trump “should distance itself from ‘warmongers’” after the dismissal of Bolton.

When it comes to Latin America, Trump has been silent, especially about his failed coup in Venezuela. Trump’s previous National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster, strongly recommended to President Trump not to pursue a military option in Venezuela when Trump suggested it in 2017. He explained that Latin American governments were against foreign intervention in the region. John Bolton gave contrary advice when he dubbed Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba the “Troika of Tyranny” and gave Trump bad advice by urging a strategy of escalating intervention in Venezuela, recognition of a failed coup government and military threats.

When Bolton was fired, the New York Times reported:

 “Mr. Trump also grew disenchanted with Mr. Bolton over the failed effort to push out President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Rather than the easy victory he was led to anticipate, the president has found himself bogged down in a conflict over which he has less influence than he had assumed. The political opposition backed by the White House could not turn Venezuela’s military against Mr. Maduro and has been stuck in a stalemate for months.”

President Maduro has consistently expressed his willingness to meet with President Trump, despite the brutal economic war, military threats and recognition of the fraudulent Juan Guaido. Trump knows that Maduro is solidly in place as the president of Venezuela. US efforts to undermine his re-election in May of 2018 failed, the multiple coup efforts with Juan Guaido have failed, Venezuela exposed a series of terrorist plots the US was backing and there is little support for military intervention. In addition, because of Trump’s threats, Venezuela has strengthened its relationships with China and Russia, bringing them into Latin America in ways they have never happened before and squeezing out US interests.

John Bolton has put Trump in a trap in Venezuela. Trump has two choices: continued his failed strategy of regime change which has become a quagmire or stop interfering in the internal affairs of the sovereign nation of Venezuela. Once Trump recognizes that Venezuela is an independent nation he can have a diplomatic relationship with the country as exits between most nations. It is time to give up on the embarrassing failed Bolton strategy and pursue a new approach of non-interference and diplomacy.

For most of its history, the US and Venezuela have been allies. It has only been during the eras of Clinton through Obama and the Bolton-era during the Trump administration that the US has been in conflict with Venezuela. Trump can now reverse those mistaken policies and put the United States back on a constructive track.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

“Every time the president, or Pompeo, or anyone in the [Trump] administration came up with an idea, they had to face Dr No.” — Cliff Kupchan, Chairman of the Eurasia Group, The Washington Post, Sep 11, 2011. 

It was compelling viewing (one does not so much read Twitter as see it as a series of violent flashes).  John Bolton, the armed-and-ready national security adviser who has been tiring of the US President’s jerks and adjustments, had floated the prospect of resignation. 

“I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’” 

To the New York Times, Bolton reiterated the account. 

“Offered last night without [Trump] asking.  Slept on it and gave it to him this morning.”

Hours are lethal in Trumpland; entire worlds can implode at that time, and new ones grow with equal violence.  President Donald Trump was keen to set the record crooked. 

I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2019

“I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed in the White House.  I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration”. 

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was certainly one of them. 

“There were many times Ambassador Bolton and I disagreed; that’s for sure.” 

It pays, however, to qualify: “But that’s true for lots of people with whom I interact.”

What matters in a Trump sacking is less the normality of its occurrence but its manner of execution.  The axe is always held aloft, and, as with any court run by a fickle despot, may fall at any given time.  On Tuesday morning, the signs of any movement regarding Bolton were entirely absent.  At 11, a news briefing was announced by the White House for 1.30 that afternoon.  Bolton would keep company with Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a chat on terrorism.  Bolton never appeared, leaving Pompeo and Mnuchin to chuckle before the cameras.

Pompeo, unlike Bolton, has certainly found it easier keeping up appearances.  Disagreements with the President are kept close to his broad chest.  He is the manager of Trump’s ever changing approach to policy, and capable articulating foreign policy swerves.  But do not be fooled, suggest the talking heads. 

“Pompeo is as much a hawk on Iran as Bolton,” claims John Glaser, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.  Glaser’s diagnosis of it all?  “It mostly boils down to Bolton’s reputation as a bureaucratic manipulator who makes enemies within the executive branch as a matter of habit.”

The manipulation had been placed in another register over the US-Taliban peace agreement.  Trump was happy with the detail; Bolton wanted the agreement sunk as textbook example of capitulation.  Trump’s circle of aides had gotten irate as Bolton’s public dissatisfaction grew.  There were leaks into the atmosphere, and not very pleasant ones at that. 

The decision to evict Bolton could easily have been caused by something else, the straw that tantalisingly, and destructively, broke the camel’s back.  On Monday, the possibility of easing sanctions against Iran as part of a preliminary step to meeting Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, was mooted by the President and aides.  Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was certainly open to the suggestion.  Trump tested the water and concluded that “they’d like to make a deal.”  A far cry from June, when Bolton’s apocalyptic fantasy was being entertained: a possible airstrike on Iran.  With 10 minutes to spare, Trump called it off.

On Wednesday, the president attempted to add more light and shine to the canvas.  Areas of disagreement with Bolton were articulated.  The former adviser had not been “getting along with people” in the administration; he had been “way out of line” on Venezuela.  Such points merely underscore the difficulties Bolton was always going to face: from his moustache, which Trump detests, to his priestly dogmatism in international relations. 

North Korea was always a case in point: for Trump, a moment for the picture books, the firm handshake for history, and promises for rosy readjustments; for Bolton, a chance to cause a flutter of terror in Pyongyang, airing the view that a “Libya” solution for nuclear disarmament might be in the offing.  (That corker eventually assisted the toppling of the Qaddafi regime, hardly a recipe for smooth talking and deal making.) 

The point was something Trump did not miss. 

“We were set back very badly when John Bolton talked about the Libyan model!  And he made a mistake!  As soon as he mentioned that, the Libyan model, what a disaster!  Take a look at what happened to Qaddafi with the Libyan model.”

Bolton’s sabre-rattling enthusiasts were bound to see things differently.  “While John Bolton was national security adviser for the last 17 months, there have been no bad deals,” claimed a Bolton confidante.  In another take, Bolton has been portrayed as the less mad of the two.  Jay Nordlinger, senior editor at The National Review, saw JB as a model of consistency. Trump, on the other hand, had been dancing merrily off queue, breaking much fine china on the way. Certainly on Russia; certainly on Ukraine.  At the last G7 meeting in Biarritz, Trump expressed his desire that Russia be readmitted to the club. He sported a curious account of Crimea, which was “sort of taken away from President Obama”.  It was “embarrassing” for him, being “outsmarted by Putin” as he was.

Trump had put a halt on military aid to Ukraine and shown a coldness to the newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky.  His idea here is to push for a Ukrainian investigation of Joe Biden, the stuff of side-splitting hilarity.  Bolton, on the other hand, was in Kiev paying respect to Ukrainians felled “in the defence of their nation against Russian aggression.”  In saluting “the Stache” Nordlinger was hoping for his return.  The chicken hawks will have their day.

Such shuffling and bloodletting is normally the stuff that thrills political wonks and media vultures.  Engineered in-house political assassinations are manna from heaven, and supply good copy in bureaucratic hot houses like Washington.  But Trump has made political sacking the stuff of banal ritual, ceremonial inevitability made that much duller for its frequency.  Bolton came in praise, worked in disagreement and discomfort, and was ejected.  Time for the next mug to take his place.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Christopher Halloran via Shutterstock

Israel is the only nation without official borders. Its longstanding policy calls for redrawing the Middle East map.

It aims to annex more territory, including from neighboring states and all valued parts of Judea and Samaria.

Ahead of last April’s Israeli elections, Netanyahu said the following:

“A Palestinian state will endanger our existence (sic), and I withstood huge pressure over the past eight years (sic). No prime minister has withstood such pressure (sic). We must control our destiny,” adding:

“Will we move ahead to the next stage? Yes. I will extend sovereignty, but I don’t distinguish between the settlement blocs and the isolated ones, because each settlement is Israeli, and I will not hand it over to Palestinian sovereignty.”

“I will not divide Jerusalem. I will not evacuate any community, and I will make sure we control the territory west of Jordan…I promised and it will happen at the soonest opportunity.”

At the time, Israel’s Channel 13 said Netanyahu is “more ready than ever” to annex and extend Israeli law to the settlements.

Israel controls the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem, annexation if occurs to formalize what already exists.

On Tuesday, feeding red meat to his base pre-election next week, Netanyahu said if reelected he’ll annex the Jordan Valley.

It’s around 30% of West Bank territory. He called Trump’s no-peace/peace plan a “historic opportunity” to annex Palestinian land, adding:

“…I want to apply sovereignty in the communities and other areas with maximum coordination with the US.”

“But there is one place where it is possible to apply Israeli sovereignty immediately after the election.”

“Today I am announcing my intention to apply, with the formation of the next government, Israeli sovereignty on the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea.”

Netanyahu wants all settlements annexed, earlier saying:

“All the settlements, without exception, those that are in blocs and those that aren’t, need to remain under Israeli sovereignty. This will happen.”

On Tuesday, a Trump regime statement said

“(t)here is no change in United States policy at this time. We will release our vision for peace (sic) after the Israeli election and work to determine the best path forward to bring long sought security, opportunity and stability to the region (sic).”

Joint (Arab) List chairman Ayman Odeh called Netanyahu’s campaign propaganda his “vision of apartheid.”

Israel controls the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem, including illegal settlements, outposts, military areas, no-go zones, checkpoints and other barriers, nature reserves, commercial areas, by-pass roads, and the separation wall — constructed more for land theft than security.

According to StoptheWall.org:

“The Wall is an integral part of the Zionist project to remove Palestinians from Palestine.”

It’s being built on 10% or more of Palestinian land. B’Tselem said its construction “la(id) the groundwork for” annexing the settlements, including “much land for their future expansion.”

It’s part of Israel’s plan to isolate Palestinian communities from each other. Still under construction, its 712 km route is double the Green Line’s length — the 1949 armistice lines established between Israel and neighboring Arab states.

Israel seized West Jerusalem in 1948, the remainder in 1967, formally and illegally annexing the UN-designated international city in 1980.

Years earlier, a two-state solution was possible, no longer. Netanyahu and majority hardline MKs reject the idea.

Israel has virtual control over the entire West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza by blockading and isolating the Strip.

Whether Netanyahu is reelected or defeated next week won’t matter for Palestinians.

Their fundamental rights are denied no matter what ruling coalition is formed — including no chance for self-determination, free from repressive occupation.

In response to Netanyahu’s Tuesday remarks, PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi tweeted the following:

“Netanyahu’s cheap pandering to his extremist racist base exposes his real political agenda of superimposing ‘greater Israel’ on all of historical Palestine & carrying out an ethnic cleansing agenda. All bets are off! Dangerous aggression. Perpetual conflict.”

That’s how it’s always been since creation of the Jewish state on stolen Palestinian land.

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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.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Executive summary

“In 2018 and early 2019, the performance of the Palestinian economy and humanitarian conditions reached an all-time low. Per capita income fell, mass unemployment increased, poverty deepened and the environmental toll of occupation has been rising in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The Palestinian people are denied the right to exploit oil and natural gas resources and thereby deprived of billions of dollars in revenue.

The international community should help the Palestinian people to secure their right to oil and gas in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and ascertain their legitimate share in the natural resources collectively owned by several neighbouring States in the region.

In March 2019, the Government of Israel started to deduct $11.5 million monthly (equivalent to $138 million annually) from Palestinian clearance revenues.

The Palestinian National Authority responded that it would not accept anything less than the full amount of its rightful clearance revenues, which represent two thirds of Palestinian fiscal revenue. This fiscal shock is compounded by declining donor support.

UNCTAD continues to respond positively to the needs of the Palestinian people. However, securing extrabudgetary resources remains critical to fulfilling the requests in the Nairobi Maafikiano and in General Assembly resolutions for UNCTAD to report on the economic costs of occupation for the Palestinian people,”

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The UNCTAD report focusses on the impoverishment of the Palestinian population: “Falling per capita income and worsening depression-level unemployment”

It also examines in length how Israel took control of Palestine’s offshore oil and natural gas reserves in derogation of both Israeli and international law.

This constitutes an act of outright theft by Israel of billions of dollars of revenue, which is barely acknowledged by the Western media.

Below are selected excerpts of the UNCTAD Report pertaining to the theft of oil and gas revenues (emphasis added by Global Research):

Read the full UNCTAD report here.(pdf)

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Question. What leader saw his country’s military dropping 26,171 bombs in one year?

That works out at every day of that year, the country’s military dropped 72 bombs, or 3 bombs every hour, 24 hours a day, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a Nobel peace prize winner.

Answer: Barack Obama. That same year, 2016, special operators from the United States could be found in 70 percent of the world’s nations.

One last question. What UN Security Council member has not fired a shot in anger outside its borders for 30 years but is nonetheless being accused of military expansionism?

Answer: China.

They see things differently in China. What we in the West refer to as the Middle East, they call the Middle West.

There are many in the West who view China as a military threat, a clear and present danger. China, needless to say, see things from a different perspective.

The United States occupies prime global real estate. It has two friendly neighbors in Canada and Mexico. China has strained relations stretching back centuries with many of its neighbors. These include India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. Of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom), China is the only one that has not fired a single military shot outside its border in thirty years. A naval clash with Vietnam in 1988 was the last time a shot was fired in anger.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was, in the West, viewed as a victory for human rights. In China it was viewed as a damming indictment of poor economic planning. China learned its lesson. Economic growth must come before military expenditure. The Chinese economy may not be as strong as official figures suggest. No one here really believes that the economy is growing at 6.5 per cent annually.

But there can be no doubting the economic growth over the last four decades or so.

By comparison after adjusting for inflation, workers’ wages in the US are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973 when Nixon was in the White House. Annual real wage growth is just below 0.2 percent. The US economy has experienced long-term wage stagnation.

Trade between the US and China grew from $5 billion in 1980 to $660 billion in 2018. A communist run country is the largest foreign holder of US Treasury securities. This funds the federal debt and keeps US interest rates low.

China is also the largest US merchandise trading partner, biggest source of imports, and third-largest US export market.

Have the Chinese played fast and loose with global trade rules? Probably. Do they try to use their money to buy political influence overseas? Probably. Does China use unfair trade practices (such as an undervalued currency and subsidies given to domestic producers) to flood US markets with low-cost goods? Yes. But China is not to blame for the stagnation in US wages. That was apparent long before China was a factor.

Since 1978 China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty and created the largest middle class in the world.

The Chinese people are not blind to the inequalities, injustices and brutality in their own society. The Chinese people admire much about the US. Many send their children to be educated there.

The Chinese people would relish the opportunity to have a greater say in the running of their affairs.

But history and its lessons are important in China.

They have learned from bitter experience over several thousand years of history that they suffer most when the central government is weak and divided.

After the Opium War of 1842 the country was torn asunder by invasions, civil wars and famines. Since 1949 its borders have been secure and after the disaster of the Mao years, its people have a standard of living unimaginable when Nixon was in the White House in 1973 reflecting on meeting Mao the previous year and wondering how best to deal with a word that was entering the political lexicon; Watergate.

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Tom Clifford is an Irish journalist based in China. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research