As Hurricane Dorian approached the Bahamas, the mainstream media  “scared the hell” out of thousands of Floridians as they trembled with the forecast of a calamitous weather scenario about to ravage the entire east coast.  Intimidated by the power of the storm and their own lack of hurricane smarts, their trepidation was understandable since the MSM can take credit for assorted faulty disasters like WMD’s in Iraq, Russian collusion influencing the 2016 election and the complexity of 9/11 was accomplished by unemployed Saudi Arabian wanna-be pilots armed with box cutters.

In other words, since only 6% of the American public have confidence in the MSM to provide  objective factual reporting, can we realistically expect the media to report on whether an extreme weather disturbance is geo-engineered by pulsing microwave transmissions or a true phenomena of Mother Nature and how would the public know the difference?

Before the next potential weather cataclysm is upon us, it would behoove citizens to do their own due diligence to determine for themselves if a hurricane’s path is a real threat, the result of media hoopla or one meant to frighten the public into fear and submission.

With their storm shutters firmly screwed on, thousands of Florida’s east coast residents lived in a cave for the first few days of September before they realized that Hurricane Dorian’s category 5 storm was not going to materialize as the Weather Channel and MSM meteorologists predicted.  Dorian’s assault on the Bahamas notwithstanding, the Greatest Hurricane Ever was down graded to a category 3 and then to a tropical storm avoiding landfall along the Florida coast.

As it turned out, there was no need to suffer through the ad nauseam media hubris and bluster as stressed out residents could have tuned into the National Hurricane Center (NHC) maps or the Hurricane.Terrapin.com (HT) storm track plot.  Both sites provided accurate detailed information  clarifying some of the MSM’s problematic predictions and demonstrated that Dorian’s ‘Eye’; that is the Eye wall, potentially the most damaging part of any hurricane, was never directly threatening the Florida coast.  

Barring a last minute shift in direction, theEye wall was not going to make landfall and instead would take its treacherous low pressure area out to sea. The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale identifies an ‘absolute devastation” event as “in the path of the Eye of a landfall Category 5” In the case of Dorian, Category 5 was not traveling the same path as the Eye as the NHC and HT clearly demonstrated.

However, little, if any, of that crucial information was conveyed to millions of anxious Floridians who were left with the belief that an ominous Category 5 was imminently about to destroy their homes along with the entire coastline.  It is true that hurricanes, like the weather and climate in general, may be notoriously unpredictable, always shifting and changing but both of the aforementioned websites offered alternative factual basis for the storm’s evolution into a less threatening tropical storm.

Nor was any mainstream  explanation offered that as Category 5 is identified as one band of weather, it naturally follows that there will be a downgrade to Cat 4 and so on down the line as both NHC and NT provided estimates of how and when those downgrades were expected to occur.

When the storm stalled, just after passing through the Bahamas, the media continued to report on the stall as “dangerous” while weather professionals confirmed that Dorian’s stall was indicative of an imminent northward shift which is exactly what happened; thus changing the entire forecast for the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. None of that made it into the mainstream news until it was embarrassingly obvious that Dorian was not cooperating in fulfilling its earlier pessimistic predictions.

In the future, would-be meteorologists might be interested in tracking a storm’s direction by monitoring its longitude and latitude comparing Dorian in the Bahamas to those potentially threatened communities.  For instance, if Dorian had stayed on a westward track after the Bahamas, it would have come in at the Jupiter Inlet but it stalled out in preparation for its northward shift, just as the HT’s track plot had always predicted.

Here are two examples of ‘fake news’ broadcast on live tv by the mainstream media hyperventilating on a storm’s local impacts:

• In 2011 NBC’s Matt Lauer was interviewing a reporter about Hurricane Irene’s ‘severe flooding’ along the Passaic River in NJ as she was paddling a canoe when two men wearing waders nonchalantly ambled through the interview scene with the alleged flooded river barely up to their ankles.
• In 2018 during Hurricane Florence, the Weather Channel’s Mike Seidel was allegedly braving   furious winds and struggling to stay upright  as he proclaimed “this is about as nasty as it’s been” when two men in bermuda shorts casually strolled into view behind Seidel.

If the mainstream media will deceive the American public on weather forecasting, why should they be trusted to truthfully report on issues of greater magnitude?

So how did the establishment media get the forecast so consistently askew when they had access to the same information that any inquisitive Floridian had access to?  You already know the answer:  a bevy of television personalities (aka meteorologists) were scripted to present a version of extreme weather events in order to enhance audience ratings and thereby assure an increase in advertising revenue. as well as exhibit how easily an emergency can be used to control the population.

It is not a stretch that long time Floridians who have experienced multiple hurricane threats over the years may exhibit PTSD symptoms with an irrational anxiety or an overwhelming sense of panic as living through a real robust hurricane is not a normal life experience – all of which makes it easier to negatively influence those vulnerable citizens.

It is interesting to note that the Weather Channel television network (formerly owned by Bain Capitol, Comcast et al) was sold recently to Entertainment Studios which focuses on lifestyle programming such as pets, recipes and cars rather than science.  That sale says something about the commitment to provide scientifically authenticated weather forecasts.   Inexplicably the Weather Channel’s digital assets, its app and website, were not included in the Entertainment Studios $300 million purchase as they were acquired by IBM in 2016.  Separate corporate ownership using the same Weather Channel name leaves open the question as how each entity serves the greater public good as they compete for headlines, ratings and advertising revenue.

In case you had not noticed, there is a concerted effort to dominate an unsuspecting and unquestioning American public with a very specific reality that requires a consistent unanimity of thought.  That reality is necessary to continue the wars and global military dominance,  to create severe economic disturbance and disparities; a reality that relies on disinformation and hypocrisy while stirring citizens into a frenzied level of confusion, worry and anxiety about the future.  A distracted population living on the edge is more easily stage managed to accept a further loss of civil liberties than a politically informed, diligent population of infinite consciousness.

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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001.

The four words “Building Seven Freefall Speed” provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called “official narrative” promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004.

Building.

Seven.

Freefall.

Speed.

Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by any airplane on September 11, 2001, and concluded that fires could not possibly have caused the collapse of that 47-story steel-frame building — rather, the collapse seen could have only been caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every support column (43 in number).

This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt “official” narrative of the events of September 11, 2001.

Various individuals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to argue that the collapse of Building 7 was slower than freefall speed, but its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview.

Although the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building prior to the flight of the aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (Buildings One and Two), as well as the power to cover up the evidence of this criminal activity and to deflect questioning by government agencies and suppress the story in the mainstream news, the collapse of Building 7 is by no means the only evidence which points to the same conclusion.

Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states).

However, eighteen years later there is simply no excuse anymore — except for the fact that the ramifications of the admission that the official story is a flagrant fraud and a lie are so distressing that many people cannot actually bring themselves to consciously admit what they in fact already know subconsciously.

For additional evidence, I strongly recommend the work of the indefatigable Kevin Robert Ryan, whose blog at Dig Within should be required reading for every man and woman in the united states — as well as those in the rest of the world, since the ramifications of the murders of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001 have led to the murders of literally millions of other innocent men, women and children around the world since that day, and the consequences of the failure to absorb the truth of what actually took place, and the consequences of the failure to address the lies that are built upon the fraudulent explanation of what took place on September 11, continue to negatively impact men and women everywhere on our planet.

Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11, which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day.

I would also strongly recommend listening very carefully to the series of five interviews with Kevin Ryan on Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner, which can be found in the Guns and Butter podcast archive here. These interviews, from 2013, are numbered 287, 288, 289, 290, and 291 in the archive.

I would in fact recommend listening to nearly every interview in that archive of Bonnie Faulkner’s show, even though I do not of course agree with every single guest nor with every single view expressed in every single interview. Indeed, if you carefully read Kevin Ryan’s blog which was linked above, you will find a blog post by Kevin Ryan dated June 24, 2018 in which he explicitly names James Fetzer along with Judy Woods as likely disinformation agents working to discredit and divert the efforts of 9/11 researchers. James Fetzer appears on Guns and Butter several times in the archived interview page linked above.

In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled “Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative?” which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019.

That article contains a number of stunning quotations about the ongoing failure to address the now-obvious lies we are being told about the attacks of September 11. One of these quotations, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996), is particularly noteworthy — even though I certainly do not agree with everything Carl Sagan ever said or wrote. Regarding our propensity to refuse to acknowledge what we already know deep down to be true, Carl Sagan said:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.

This quotation is from Sagan’s 1995 text, The Demon-Haunted World (with which I have points of disagreement, but which is extremely valuable for that quotation alone, and which I might suggest turning around on some of the points that Sagan was arguing as well, as a cautionary warning to those who have accepted too wholeheartedly some of Sagan’s teachings and opinions).

This quotation shows that on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. This internal division is actually addressed in the world’s ancient myths, which consistently illustrate that our egoic mind often refuses to acknowledge the higher wisdom we have available to us through the reality of our authentic self, sometimes called our Higher Self. Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here.

The important author Peter Kingsley has noted that in ancient myth, the role of the prophet was to bring awareness and acknowledgement of that which the egoic mind refuses to see — which is consistent with the observation that it is through our authentic self (which already knows) that we have access to the realm of the gods. In the Iliad, for example, Dr. Kingsley notes that Apollo sends disaster upon the Achaean forces until the prophet Calchas reveals the source of the god’s anger: Agamemnon’s refusal to free the young woman Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has seized in the course of the fighting during the Trojan War, and who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. Until Agamemnon atones for this insult to the god, Apollo will continue to visit destruction upon those following Agamemnon.

Until we acknowledge and correct what our Higher Self already knows to be the problem, we ourselves will be out of step with the divine realm.

If we look the other way at the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001, and deliberately refuse to see the truth that we already know deep down in our subconscious, then we will face the displeasure of the Invisible Realm. Just as we are shown in the ancient myths, the truth must be acknowledged and admitted, and then the wrong that has been done must be corrected.

In the case of the mass murder perpetrated on September 11, eighteen years ago, that admission requires us to face the fact that the “terrorists” who were blamed for that attack were not the actual terrorists that we need to be focusing on.

Please note that I am very careful not to say that “the government” is the source of the problem: I would argue that the government is the lawful expression of the will of the people and that the government, rightly understood, is exactly what these criminal perpetrators actually fear the most, if the people ever become aware of what is going on. The government, which is established by the Constitution, forbids the perpetration of murder upon innocent men, women and children in order to initiate wars of aggression against countries that never invaded or attacked us (under the false pretense that they did so). Those who do so are actually opposed to our government under the Constitution and can be dealt with within the framework of the law as established by the Constitution,  which establishes a very clear penalty for treason.

When the people acknowledge and admit the complete bankruptcy of the lie we have been told about the attacks of September 11, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate repeal and dismantling of the so-called “USA PATRIOT Act” which was enacted in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001 and which clearly violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Additionally, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate cessation of the military operations which were initiated based upon the fraudulent narrative of the attacks of that day, and which have led to invasion and overthrow of the nations that were falsely blamed as being the perpetrators of those attacks and the seizure of their natural resources.

The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of “preventing terrorism” (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That human right has been grievously trampled upon under the false description of what actually took place during the September 11 attacks. Numerous technology companies have been allowed and even encouraged (and paid, with public moneys) to create technologies which flagrantly and shamelessly violate “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” and which track their every move and even enable secret eavesdropping upon their conversation and the secret capture of video within their homes and private settings, without any probable cause whatsoever.

When we admit and acknowledge that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, which has been falsely used as a supposed justification for the violation of these human rights (with complete disregard for the supreme law of the land as established in the Constitution), then we will also demand the immediate cessation of any such intrusion upon the right of the people to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” — including the cessation of any business models which involve spying on men and women.

Companies which cannot find a business model that does not violate the Bill of Rights should lose their corporate charter and the privilege of limited liability, which are extended to them by the people (through the government of the people, by the people and for the people) only upon the condition that their behavior as corporations do not violate the inherent rights of men and women as acknowledged in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

It is well beyond the time when we must acknowledge and admit that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, 2001 — and that we continue to be lied to about the events of that awful day. September 11, 2001 is in fact only one such event in a long history which stretches back prior to 2001, to other events which should have awakened the people to the presence of a very powerful and very dangerous criminal cabal acting in direct contravention to the Constitution long before we ever got to 2001 — but the events of September 11 are so blatant, so violent, and so full of evidence which contradicts the fraudulent narrative that they actually cannot be believed by anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time looking at that evidence.

Indeed, we already know deep down that we have been bamboozled by the lie of the so-called “official narrative” of September 11.

But until we admit to ourselves and acknowledge to others that we’ve ignored the truth that we already know, then the bamboozle still has us.

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David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army’s Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division’s Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.

An unpublished manuscript investigating the alleged cell phone calls from the 9/11 flights has recently been released by the well-known British writer and Consensus 9/11 panelist, Rowland Morgan.

Morgan, a former columnist for London’s The Guardian and The Independent, undertook an in-depth investigation of the 9/11 phone calls in his extraordinary manuscript, Voices, researched from 2008 to 2010.  (He also co-authored, with Ian Henshall, Flight 93 Revealed, Carroll and Graf, 2006).

Voices cites an Associated Press report on April 6th, 2006, that “much of what happened aboard Flight 93 is known because passengers used cell phones in flight to call their loved ones.”

However, the US government’s own telephone data presented at the Moussaoui trial in 2006 showed that Moussaoui prosecutor David Raskin “had not studied his own evidence, which claimed only two cellular telephone calls out of some 35 ostensibly heard from Flight 93.”

Morgan goes on to reveal:

“The telephone data contained more bombshells of which Moussaoui’s prosecutors apparently were unaware:

• The world-famous 9/11 telephone calls from TV-pundit Barbara Olson to her husband Theodore Olson at his office in the Department of Justice had never occurred. The U.S government’s call data said she made a call but did not get through. This meant that the U.S. Solicitor-General, a key member of the Bush administration, had connived at, or been deluded about, a crucial deception, one that had placed “hijackers” armed with “cardboard-cutters” aboard Flight 77 ostensibly speeding towards the Pentagon.
• The world-famous 9/11 in-flight telephone call from Todd Beamer, the one in which an Airfone operator heard him shout the Pentagon’s recruitment slogan “Let’s Roll”, had never occurred. The U.S. government’s fudged data said Beamer had made separate calls in the same second.

Because the existence of hijackers aboard the rogue planes partly relied on them, the collapse of these two vital telephone calls alone badly damaged the U.S. Government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory.”

The full manuscript for Rowland Morgan’s brilliant study of all the alleged 9/11 cell phone calls, Voices, is available on the 9/11 Consensus Panel’s website.

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The 18th anniversary of the attacks on 11 September 2001 (9/11) will be commemorated in the US and worldwide by the corporate media to keep the legend about 9/11 alive.

The official 9/11 narrative, however, is not only riddled with contradictions and outright lies, but any deviation from this fairy tale will cost any detractor his existence. “Conspiracy theorists” works like a weapon of mass destruction, meaning, nobody of the ruling class and their moral mainstream media enforcer will deviate one inch from the official story.

After 13 minutes, Osama bin Laden surfaced as the guy responsible for the attacks. President George W. Bush declared shortly after America is under attack”. The official account emerged within days and goes the following:

“On the morning of 11 September 2001 four civilian airlines with dozens of passengers and crew, designated as flights AA11, UA175, AA77 and UA93, were hijacked by teams of four or five Muslim fanatics. Each team included one trained pilot. The hijackers took control of the airliners and flew a Boeing 767 assigned to flight AA11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York, another Boeing 767 assigned to flight UA175 into the South Tower and a Boeing 757 assigned to flight AA77 into the Pentagon. The fourth airliner, a Boeing 757 assigned to flight UA93, presumed to have been destined to crash on the White House, did not reach its target. It crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania after the passengers rose up and tried to seize control of the aircraft. As a result of the impact of the aircraft on the Twin Towers and the ensuing fires, both towers collapsed soon afterwards onto their own footprint, causing massive deaths. Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa’eda network were shortly thereafter blamed for conceiving, planning, financing and coordinating the attacks.”

The swiftness of the fabricated account is remarkable; such is everything surrounding the context of 9/11. One can state with confidence that the story the peoples are made to believe is false from start to finish.

To start with the alleged hijackers for whom there is not a shred of evidence that they did it. The collapse of the Twin Towers caused by fire has been repudiated a thousand times. The Towers were brought down by controlled demolition, which pulverized the two 110 stories high-rises. Also, WTC 7 that wasn’t hit by a plane came down in free fall. Another airplane crashed into the Pentagon. This aerial maneuver couldn’t even be undertaken by the well-experienced pilot not to speak of amateurs who could hardly navigate a Cessna. Even more implausible was the disappearance of the United-Airlines flight 93 on a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There was just a whole, no debris, only nothing.

Within a month, the contaminated wreckage was sold abroad to prevent an investigation. From the beginning, the Bush/Cheney administration sabotaged any inquiry and curtailed its authorities. The cover-up, however, overseen by then FBI Director Robert Mueller, the infamous guy responsible for the solution of the Russian hoax against President Donald Trump. Bush was pressured by Congress and the public to appoint a commission of inquiry. He came up with the most dubious figure in US politics; Henry Kissinger. The outrage was long in the coming and Kissinger had to resign. On 17 December 2002, appointed former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean as chairman of the commission. The Democrats nominated Lee H. Hamilton. The executive director of the 9/11 Commission was Philip Zelikow, the most untrustworthy figure Bush could find. He was involved in Bush’s preemptive war strategy. Accordingly, the 9/11 Commission Report is not worth the paper it’s written on. This storybook didn’t waste a single word on the collapse of WTC 7.

Neither the witnesses who reported explosions during the collapse of the Twin Towers nor the witnesses who didn’t see any debris in Shanksville were heart. Instead Zelikow ramp his premeditated report down the throat of the commission members. Finally, the commission was set up to fail and to cover up what really happened on 9/11. This report is just a joke but the world has no other choice than to believe in it.

9/11 was a propaganda-coup, unprecedented in history. “When the sun rose on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, the official legend of 9/11 lay ready to be promoted worldwide. It was conceived before the events and confirmed by the U.S. Congress – give or take minor details – within 24 hours of the deadly incidents.“ Within hours, the entire world was led astray into believing what can be labeled an absurd tale. The author can’t understand that the Western world swallowed “this legend hook, line, and sinker.“

The main suspects of the heinous crime committed on 9/11 are not found in the caves of Afghanistan but in government offices in Washington. Elias Davidsson writes in his book “The Betrayal of America”:

“Had the crime of 9/11 been carried out by rogue elements of the U.S. government or by a foreign state against the real interests of the ruling class of the United States and its allies, the plotters and perpetrators would have been exposed and punished long ago.“

The disgusting spectacle designed as a horror show lasted 90 minutes just like an ordinary movie. The incident was intended to rally the Americans behind the flag and their President. And the media promoted the official account day in, day out. And even the leftists capitulated before this brainwashing. No one of the so-called left asked for evidence that Afghanistan or the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11. Even when counter-evidence surmounted against the legend of 9/11, the left kept mum and stuck to Bush’s fairy tale. They also slandered respectable critics.

Instead of celebrating the myth about 9/11, the American public and peoples around the world should demand an independent investigation into 9/11. The curtain of lies about this organized crime, which plunged the world into an endless war on terror aimed at the peoples of the so-called Third World, must be lifted.

As long as military, intelligence and law enforcement officials worldwide cooperate with the rulers of the murderous U.S. regime or its stooges in other countries the physical security of ordinary citizens is in danger.

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Dr. Ludwig Watzal is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Trump Sacks Bolton. Who is the Next National Security Advisor?

By Stephen Lendman, September 11, 2019

It’s a good start, way short of what’s needed — cleaning house of all Trump regime far-right extremists, notably Pompeo and likeminded hardliners.

The Whitewashing of the Nazis

By Christopher Black, September 11, 2019

On June 30 1934, Hitler ordered the unit to arrest the members of the SA organisation, led by Ernst Rohm, that was vying for power with him in the overall Nazi organisation. The arrests were carried out in Munich and that night men of the unit murdered several leaders of the SA including five generals and a colonel.

9/11 Truth: Foreknowledge of WTC 7’s Collapse

By wtc7.net, September 11, 2019

Witness reports show that officials who controlled the streets around WTC 7 evacuated the area in the hour before the 5:20 PM collapse, and that various officials forwarded verbal warnings conveying certainty that the collapse would occur. Network television broadcasts contain announcements of the collapse at least 23 minutes before the event.

Will Iran be a Full Nuclear Power by the End of 2020? No Return to the 2015 Agreement

By Elijah J. Magnier, September 11, 2019

Iran has been following a “strategy of patience” since US President Donald Trump unlawfully revoked the nuclear deal. Tehran allowed Europe, for an entire year, to think about a way to tempt Iran to stay within the nuclear deal on the basis of 4 (France, Russia, China, UK) + 1 (Germany), excluding the US.

9/11 “Justice”: The Pentagon’s Upcoming Kangaroo Show Trial in Cuba

By Jacob G. Hornberger, September 11, 2019

After 18 years, there is a possibility that the Pentagon is finally going to permit a “trial” of five men who are accused of conspiracy to commit the 9/11 attacks. If so, the proceedings will prove what a charade the Pentagon’s entire “judicial system” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been and continues to be.

The Bill of Rights Turns 230, and What Do We Have to Show for It? Nothing Good

By John W. Whitehead, September 11, 2019

We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document, but the reality of life in the American police state tells a different story.

Western Media Portrays Hong Kong Hooligans as Heroes. But Are They?

By Andre Vltchek, September 11, 2019

On Sunday, huge US flags were waving in the air. A massive demonstration, consisting of mainly young people, was moving up from the old British-built downtown area of the city towards the US Consulate General, often erroneously called the “embassy.”

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It’s a good start, way short of what’s needed — cleaning house of all Trump regime far-right extremists, notably Pompeo and likeminded hardliners.

Chance for positive change is virtually nil. Dirty business as usual in Washington won’t miss a beat — other than perhaps somewhat less toxic rhetoric with Bolton gone, short of enough to matter.

From inception, the US has been a culture of violence. Throughout most of its history, it’s been at war at home and/or abroad.

Since attacking North Korea preemptively in June 1950, it’s been permanently at war against one or more nonthreatening states, waging them endlessly today in multiple theaters.

Democracy is its deadliest export, a notion it deplores, tolerating it nowhere, especially at home.

US post-WW II history isn’t pretty. Its record includes assassinations of foreign leaders, staging color revolutions and coups, along with meddling in elections worldwide — what imperialism is all about.

Trump announced the news on Bolton, tweeting:

“I informed (him) 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 I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning.”

Trump added that he’ll name a new national security advisor next week. Bolton’s deputy Charles Kupperman replaced him on an interim basis — perhaps to remain in the post.

Hold the cheers. He’s closely tied to US military, industrial, security interests, earlier holding senior Lockheed Martin and Boeing positions.

From 2001 – 2010, he was a board member of neocon/Islamophobe Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, a far-right figure The American Conservative called an “uber-foreign policy hawk…re-ascendent in Trump’s orbit” through his connection to Kupperman.

Bolton earlier praised his deputy, saying

he “has been an advisor to me for more than thirty years, including during my tenure as National Security Advisor to President Trump,” adding:

“Charlie’s extensive expertise in defense, arms control and aerospace will help further President Trump’s national security agenda.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif accused Bolton and Netanyahu of “lur(ing) Donald Trump into killing (the) JCPOA (by) delu(ding)” him.

On Tuesday, Russia’s envoy to the IAEA Mikhail Ulyanov said Iran’s “full cooperation with the” agency confirms its nuclear program is peaceful.

Bolton’s announced sacking came shortly before a press conference with Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin he was scheduled to attend.

In office since April 9, 2018, he proved his raging hawk reputation time and again — one critic saying “(h)e never met a country he didn’t want to destroy.”

Another said he’s far more than “a run-of-the-mill hawk…He’s never seen a foreign policy problem that couldn’t be solved by bombing.”

He earlier called for military action against North Korea and Iran.

On the DPRK, he said  “the only longterm way to deal with (its) nuclear weapons program is to end (the) regime,” adding:

“It’s not enough…to impose sanctions…(North Korea) poses a threat to stability in the region that undermines security…”

“I think further discussions with North Korea, further efforts to pressure North Korea, are basically a waste of time. The way to end the North’s nuclear program is to end the North.”

He falsely said “Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear weapons has long been evident,” adding:

“The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure.”

“The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required.”

Iran’s legitimate nuclear program has no military component — confirmed time and again by the IAEA. The US intelligence community found no evidence of Iran seeking the bomb because none exists.

Pyongyang called Bolton a “war maniac,” adding:

“(I)t will be fit to call (him) not a security adviser striving for security but a security-destroying adviser who is wrecking peace and security” worldwide.

He earlier said

“(t)here is no United Nations. There is a international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world (the US) when it suits our interest, and when we can get others to go along.”

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation director Alexandra Bell said

“(b)etween Pompeo and Bolton, you’re looking at a neocon foreign policy (team) jacked up on steroids.”

They and their henchmen are militantly hostile toward Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other countries unwilling to subordinate their sovereign rights to US interests.

They never met a conflict resolution plan they didn’t want to undermine — notably against Trump’s announced troop pullout from Syria, rapprochement steps with North Korea, and cutting a deal with the Taliban.

They sabotaged Obama’s Cuba agenda by Trump’s imposition of new illegal sanctions on the country. They orchestrated a color revolution attempt in Nicaragua that failed — so far.

They planned and got Trump to go along with all-out war by other means on Venezuelan social democracy and nonbelligerent Iran — both countries threatening no one, seeking cooperative relations with other nations.

They got Trump to veto a congressional measure to end US involvement in Yemen. They convinced him to escalate hot wars he inherited, wage trade war on China, and helped prevent improved relations with Russia.

In Washington, names and faces change. Dirty business as usual continues under both right wings of the US war party — waging endless wars at home and abroad, serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of ordinary people everywhere.

Bolton’s departure won’t change a thing with Pompeo at state, Abrams as White House envoy for regime change in Venezuela, Brian Hook in the same capacity against Iran, along with numerous other Trump regime hardliners in place, and a hornet’s nest of likeminded bipartisan congressional members.

Commenting on Bolton’s ouster, Iranian President Rouhani advisor Hesameddin Ashena  mistakenly said it’s a “sign of the failure of US ‘maximum pressure’ strategy.

Last week, Brian Hook said more Trump regime sanctions on Iran are coming, indicating no letup in its “maximum pressure” policy.

Through his spokesman Abbas Mousavi, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif said

“(w(e) will not be issuing any statement on US internal affairs” — referring to Bolton’s sacking.

Iran’s UN envoy Majid Takht-e Ravanchi stressed that

“there is no room for talks as long as the US administration’s economic terrorism and cruel sanctions against the Iranian people are in place.”

“The topic could be discussed only when they lift the sanctions,” adding: Possible future talks will only occur through the P5+1, indicating they also depend on the Trump regime returning to the JCPOA it illegally abandoned, breaching international law.

In Washington and the West, everything changes but stays the same.

Since the neoliberal 90s, it’s been for the worse with no prospect for positive change.

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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.

I was going to write about Iraq and the American control of that tragic nation that has been, like many others, destroyed by the American war machine, but it is difficult to find out any real facts about anything in Iraq. All the news and reports are controlled, events are unexplained, the politics unclear, the American influence hidden in the dark shadows of their crimes, so I decided to write about the whitewashing of Nazis.

For while pondering what to write I watched a film on Netflix, a film that exposes just what the NATO countries are, the roots of their present foreign policies and treatment of their peoples. It’s a film that really excuses the barbarity of the US and NATO war machine, and their objective of revisiting World War II, which never ended for them and their Nazi friends, but was transformed into the Cold War, and the new Operation Barbarossa they are preparing against Russia, as the American withdrawal from the intermediate nuclear missile control treaty proves to be their intent.

The film bears the title, “My Honour Was My Glory.” It sounds like it could be the title of any war film, but it has a special meaning because that phrase was the motto of the Waffen SS unit, Der LiebstandarteSS-Adolf Hitler Panzergrenadier Division, the elite unit of the Waffen SS, the military formation of the Nazi Party of Germany and fascists from across Europe. It was this unit that was Hitler’s personal bodyguard.

So, is this film an expose of the many war crimes committed by that unit in World War Two? Does it show what they did in Russia, in Italy, in France? No. Instead, it is a portrayal designed to raise our sympathies, to see these criminals as heroes fighting for “home and hearth,” lost souls ultimately betrayed by their leaders, whose crimes are no worse than the crimes of other armies. Vivid battle scenes are connected by sad reflections of the SS men about their lives, their wives, their hopes, their fears. Hitler would have loved every second of it.

But what is the truth about this unit that the Italian director, Alessandro Pepe, now living in the USA, has turned into a group of lovable heroes? What did he erase from history?

The truth begins with the formation of the unit as Hitler’s personal bodyguard in the 1920s. In 1933, on the tenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, in which Hitler tried to seize power in a coup that failed, the men of the unit swore a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and were made into a military formation. On swearing allegiance to Hitler the unit received the name Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler, or, personal bodyguard of Hitler. A year later the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, added the initials SS to the name of the unit to make it clear it was not part of the regular army or the still existing SA. Under its commander, Sepp Dietrich, it vaunted itself as a Nazi unit and then, in its first action, declared what it was going to be from then on, an organised gang of thugs and murderers.

On June 30 1934, Hitler ordered the unit to arrest the members of the SA organisation, led by Ernst Rohm, that was vying for power with him in the overall Nazi organisation. The arrests were carried out in Munich and that night men of the unit murdered several leaders of the SA including five generals and a colonel. Others were shot in Berlin. On July 1, 1934 on what is known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered the unit to act as a death squad and its men murdered well over a hundred other people connected to the SA.

Having proved that it was willing to commit murder on his behalf, the unit was then expanded in size and became the honour guard at many of Hitler rallies and took part in the seizure of a number of lands Hitler desired, including the Saarland, and Sudetenland. In the invasion of Poland in 1939, the unit became famous for burning whole villages to terrorise the population, for murdering 50 Jews in the town of Blonie, for machine-gunning over 200 men, women and children at Zloczew, and for committing atrocities in a number of other towns.

During the operations in France in May 1940, in the fighting around Dunkirk, the unit murdered 80 prisoners of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and some French soldiers in a barn at Wormhoudt.

In April 1941 they were the lead German unit in the invasion and occupation of Greece, then were transferred to join other units for the invasion of the USSR, in Operation Barbarossa. According to reports of its staff journalist, the unit murdered 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war on August 18, 1941. During the fighting around and in Kharkov in March 1943 it became notorious for murdering wounded Soviet soldiers found in a military hospital. Several hundred Soviet wounded were killed in that hospital and other prisoners were routinely executed during its operations.

On February 17, 1943 its men burned down the two villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka, killing 872 men, women and children, with 240 of those burned alive in a church at Yefremovka. The battalion that committed this atrocity was given the name the “Blowtorch Battalion.” During this same period it and its reserve units in Germany rounded up Jews and took their property.

Transferred to Italy in September, 1943 the unit murdered 49 Jewish refugees near Lake Maggiore and killed 34 civilians in the village of Bove. Some victims at the lake were thrown into the water with their hands and feet tied. Then transferred to France in 1944 they murdered French civilians in the villages of Tavaux and Plomion. During the Ardennes fighting near Malmedy, the unit executed 84 American prisoners. They also captured eleven black US soldiers of the 333rd Artillery Battalion in another engagement. When their bodies were found, their fingers had been cut off and legs broken.

This is the unit that Alessandro Pepe wants us to connect with. The film references the Jews being massacred in the death camps, but the stories are dismissed by the men as unbelievable; quite a distortion since we know these men massacred Jews in Russia and Germany. Shooting of prisoners is excused because, well the Americans were worse and the Soviets deserved it. The killing of civilians is never mentioned. Instead we watch as these young men walk through beautiful fields in Ukraine and comment on how war scars the beauty of nature, or in Italy sigh at the beauty of the Tuscan landscape and in France the French countryside, rhapsodising like poets. But in Russia, what do we see? The Red Army soldiers are “Bolshevik scum” and prisoners are savagely beaten to death with rifle butts.

This is a film that makes heroes out of murderers, poets out of Nazis, a film designed to distort history, in fact to erase history and recreate it so that Nazis are lovable and even desirable to have around. Yet, in Germany and Austria it is illegal to use the motto of this unit and to use it to promote Nazism, But that is what Pepe does, what Netflix does.

But how is it possible that such a film could be financed and produced today and then shown on a major network? Because the governments of the NATO countries are composed of people who share the beliefs of the Nazis; anti-communist, anti-worker, anti-Semitic, despite their pretending otherwise so long as Israel does their bidding, sharing the same lust for world domination as Hitler, willing to use the same barbarism to terrorise and dominate the world.

We have seen the savagery of the Nazis, the same propaganda in the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China; the same savagery, the same contempt for law and civilised behaviour. And for the same objectives, to make money by stealing and murdering.

The NATO countries installed and support a regime in Ukraine that is heavily infected with Nazis. Canada has a foreign minister who denies that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator who helped the SS round up Jews in Ukraine. Nazi sympathisers are routinely discovered in Nato army units. Far right parties, fascist parties are gaining influence all over Europe. In Britain, France and the USA, right wing parties have been in control for a long time. And though there are fake expressions of dismay at this, these same governments encourage the rise of the far right by suppressing left parties, pushing people to essentially right wing social democratic parties, putting out false histories of socialism in those countries, and making sure the far right gets lots of media coverage that the left parties are denied. They ban and slander communist parties and their leaders, and all the while foster hatred against foreigners, telling the people that their enemies are the Jews, the Muslims, the Russians, the Chinese and to instil fear in the people tell them that ever tighter surveillance and security are needed to protect them from the “enemy,” and if that does not convince them, there is always a bombing or two or a mass shooting to make the point, along with the constant drone of “you are being watched,” repeated over and over again, to try to keep us in line.

Watched is not the right word; more like gloated over, as the far right leaders, masquerading as liberals, watch us drift into despair at our conditions, knowing that people are seeking any answer, but are told not to look to the left, but to look to the far right to find. We see the black shirts in action again in Hong Kong, supported by the black shirts of the right in the west who hold power over us.

The British and Canadian prime ministers stated on the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 that the Soviet Union was the aggressor against Poland when German armies invaded, that Poland was caught between “two tyrannies,” the big lie since the British, French and Americans refused Soviet requests to form an alliance against Hitler since they were encouraging Hitler to attack the Soviet Union. The USSR was forced to protect itself against the fascists, to protect the revolution that raised the workers and peasants of Russia out of poverty into a new life, a struggle so vividly described in Ilya Ehrenburg’s account of the resistance of the Soviet peoples to the Nazi invasion described so well in his novel, The Storm. Yet all across eastern Europe, monuments to the men and women of the Red Army who died fighting the Nazi armies are desecrated or demolished while statues to Nazi thugs are raised. And never are the people told that the Nazis were capitalists on a rampage, that they were and are the face of capitalism with the gloves off. No, there is no monument to the crimes of the capitalists. And so now we have films praising the SS shown to millions of people and not a word said, until now.

We thought the Red Army defeated fascism in 1945. It looks like we going to have fight them again.

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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Of the two principal theories of WTC 7’s collapse — one being global structural failure due to prior debris impact and ongoing fire damage, and the other being controlled demolition — the second is favored by foreknowledge of the collapse. This is particularly true given the lack of precedent of total collapses of steel framed structures during fires. So unprecedented was the collapse of Building 7 that the government has yet to explain it, in 2007.

That would probably be lost on most responders on the site, who would have the fresh memories of the Twin Towers’ explosions to help them accept the notion that the total of collapse of smoking skyscrapers is a natural and even predictable occurrence.

Witness reports show that officials who controlled the streets around WTC 7 evacuated the area in the hour before the 5:20 PM collapse, and that various officials forwarded verbal warnings conveying certainty that the collapse would occur. Network television broadcasts contain announcements of the collapse at least 23 minutes before the event.

Witness Accounts of Foreknowledge

This overview of witness accounts shows that the evacuation of the area surrounding WTC 7 started sometime around 4 PM, and was completed only a few minutes before the 5:20 collapse. The warnings of the collapse, which are recalled in dozens of accounts by emergency responders, show a striking consistency of conviction that the collapse would occur.

Premature Announcements on Television Broadcasts

At least two television networks made premature announcements of the collapse of WTC 7. The BBC unequivocally announced the collapse about 23 minutes before the fact, and even featured a New York correspondent speaking of the collapse in past tense with the still-erect skyscraper standing behind her.

CNN anchor Aaron Brown announced that the building “has either collapsed or is collapsing” about an hour before the event. Unlike the BBC correspondent, Brown seemed to be able to read the skyline and see that Building 7 was still standing — perhaps accounting for the muddled announcement.

These premature reports were uncovered in the wake of the publication of URLS of a vast archive of television footage.

The following pages contain partial transcripts of these premature reports.

• BBC premature announcement of WTC 7’s collapse
• CNN premature announcement of WTC 7’s collapse

Vast Archive of Footage

The premature announcements of the collapse of WTC by television networks went unnoticed until researchers discovered a vast archive of television broadcast footage from the day of the attack. On February 22, 2007, a post on 911Blogger.com listed the URLs on Archive.org of 417 mpeg recordings capturing about 60 hours broadcast coverage starting on the morning of 9/11/01 from each of six different television stations. Each of the high-quality recordings covering about 41 minutes of broadcast.

The coverage included the following television stations and time spans:

Unfortunately, Archive.org made the footage archive inaccessible to the public shortly after the BBC foreknowledge story was publicized.

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Read the Irish Independent article here.

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Dear Adrian,

I read with dismay your article in Saturdays Independent on the safety of 5G. I think you do a huge disservice to Ireland Inc but in particular to Irish Children and Pregnant Mothers. These people should be warned on the adverse effects of Pulsed Polarised Modulated Microwave Radiation on their health and wellbeing.

The Irish Government has consistently failed to meet its obligations from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe with Resolution 1815 in (2011), the Phone manufacturers are totally disingenuous, in that they bury the Warnings six deep in their T+C and an Oireachtas Bill No 24 of 2011, The Mobile Phone Radiation Warning Act 2011 which fell because of the government change was never followed up.

As result of this huge vacuum in reliable health and safety information, nobody in authority is telling our children and pregnant mothers about the dangers of their exposure to this ubiquitous sea of Pulsed Polarised Modulated Microwave Radiation.

It is respected technical journalists like you that need to reinforce and amplify these responsible warnings.

When you say the following in today’s article I would think that a huge number of Independent Scientists Worldwide will strongly disagree with your dated assertions.

“According to Ireland’s regulator, this type of radiation only has sufficient energy for “excitation” and can’t “break bonds that hold molecules in cells together”.

This is just 100% Wrong / Incorrect / Scientifically Not Correct / it is also a Disingenuous Lie and shame on Comreg for repeating and perpetuating a misconception of classical physics.

There are two main issues that confound and amplify the widespread misunderstandings that we are facing today. The first is a misassumption of Classical Physics in a Biological System, the famous “Non-Ionizing Radiation Story” and the second is the historical mistake of using a totally inappropriate “Thermal Effects Safety Guidelines” from ICNIRP to the assess safety of the mobile phone microwave radiation.

Physical science tells us that Non-Ionising Radiation (NIR) does not possess the energy to damage Chemical Covalent Bonds, so it could not damage DNA and is therefore perfectly safe!

This is part of the official disinformation that industry and regulators buy and sell.

The disinformation comes because Microwave Radiation energy is classified in the Electro-Magnetic Spectrum as a Non-Ionising Radiation (NIR) and by definition the energy of this  radiation is not strong enough to ionise a molecule by breaking a covalent chemical bond.

The typical energy of a covalent bond is in the order of 1 electron–Volt (1 eV = 1.6 .10^-19 Joules). The force required to break a covalent bond is in the order of 1 eV/0.1 nm ~ 1600 pN. (pico Newtons)

The energy in the microwave radiation is well below this level. At 3 GHz it is 1.8*10⁻²⁴Joules.

See this.

So, this is the science that lays out the impossibility of Microwave radiation being able to damage DNA because it is too weak in energy terms to rip the electrons off and break any of the bonds present in DNA.  And this is the “rock-solid classical physics” that the whole disinformation story rests on.

So, most Engineers will spout out this story, almost as religious Dogma and poo-poo the whole idea of Microwaves causing any negative health effects.

The only problem with the story is the horrible fact that microwave radiation at the levels present in mobile phones does in fact damage DNA. Not expected, but sadly true. So, this is the reason why there is so much deliberate confusion, from an Engineering standpoint it is not going to happen, yet in Biology it happens!

This short reference summarises the science that attests to the reality that the biologists are correct. It is known as the 2004 EU Reflex Study and the following link gives a summary.

See this.

If you read the last paragraph of the article you will see the skulduggery the industry resorted to try to discredit this work.

This is the study that showed 24 hours of mobile phone radiation did the same amount of DNA damage as 60 CT Scans in or 250 years of The Earth’s background radiation.  

How many people would voluntarily submit to 60 CT scans in 24 hours?

Science is getting better as time goes by and there are thousands of studies that back up the fact that NIR effects our biology and can in fact damage DNA. One theory of how this may happen is that NIR in living systems can create “Free Radicals” which in turn can damage DNA. But even if there is some debate as to the nature of the mechanisms that can cause the damage to occur, there is absolutely no debate that DNA damage does take place.

See this and this.

But Adrian don’t take my word for this, you have a simple choice, listen to compromised regulators in Comreg dishing out 30-year-old myths about Non-Ionising Radiation or just Google and see they don’t make any sense.

Try to Google (“Microwave Radiation” “DNA Damage”) you may see that there are approx. 53,300 hits on Google.  Now that’s not bad for something that can’t happen!

And guess what there is even a field of Science called Bio-electromagnetics dedicated to this type of research with many tens of thousands of peer reviewed articles from Scientists all over the world that all working on something COMREG says can’t happen.

However even with science on the side of the Biologists, being right is not enough to upset the whole NIR house of cards story that is supported by a multi trillion-euro global business.

Thermal Based Standards Irish (cut and paste) ICNIRP guidelines are not a measure of the damage the radiation may be doing to our bodies they are simply a measure of the amount of heat absorbed by a body. The ICNIRP thermal-only exposure limit is not safe.

Microwave Radiation Affects our Biology, it has an effect which varies between people but it does have deleterious effects on all life forms.

There are many well documented Bio-effects on our health and well-being, related to mobile phone and wireless technology. Bioeffects are clearly established and occur even at very low levels of exposure to electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency radiation.

Just look at these two web sites which are up to date (2019) with the latest information on these Bioeffects.

See this and this.

• Evidence for fertility and reproduction effects: Human sperm and DNA damaged
• Foetal and Neonatal effects of EMF
• EMF is a plausible biological mechanism for autism (ASD)
• The opening up of the Blood Brain Barrier
• Epidemiology studies consistently show elevations in risk of Brain Cancers
• Evidence for Genetic Effects.
• Evidence for Childhood Cancers (Leukaemia)
• Significant disruption of our Voltage Gated Calcium Channels (VGCC)
• Decreased Melatonin levels, Breast Cancer and Alzheimer’s

If you want to learn more about the 8 Bioeffects caused by exposure to RF please read Prof Martin Pall’s 91-page review article (or even just read the two-page summary) here.

The work that Martin Pall has highlighted on VGCC’s and the very simple lab experiments showing direct effect of RF on live cells in a flask with an electrode measuring the reactive nitrogen species when exposed to RF are so clear, RF at the levels present in mobile phones rapidly releases oxidative species.

Every living entity is different and will react differently to external and internal EMF stimuli.

We know that RF has biological effects what we don’t know well enough are the consequences for living creatures.

I have tried to convey to you the complexity of the effects of EMF’s on living creatures, we are only beginning to see a little of what goes on at the molecular and cellular levels.

With respect your reporting on 5G is incomplete.

At present the five Irish operations have purchased spectrum only in the 600 MHz to 3.6 GHz frequencies. These are similar type of frequencies being used in LTE 4G. One of the big worries for people is that the use of higher frequencies which are planned for future 5G installations (already in the US) have had no safety testing according to the US Telecom’s trade organisation CTIA.

Couple that with the evisceration of the Irish planning laws (S.I. No. 31 of 2018) which means that Telecom Operators can decide when and where the thousands of mini-cell antennae are placed not the local planners.

Your 5G hype tells us ….Aside from speed, 5G is being touted as infrastructure that may be necessary for new types of emergency healthcare and, eventually, autonomous vehicles. This is partly due to its instantaneous connection capability, otherwise referred to as ‘low latency’.

What you don’t tell us is that there is nothing wireless can do that fibre cannot do in terms of speed or low latency.

You also fail to mention that “Wireless broadband” is more profitable for the operators. So instead of supplying safe wired / fibre broadband to all our citizens, we hear from you that their profits are more important than citizens health.

When 5G is fully rolled out there will be hundreds of thousands of antennae in our homes, streets, factories, offices, schools and hospitals it will be impossible to escape this Untested 5G Weaponised Radiation.

The 5G hype is: It will deliver 1000 times the download speed (full length movie in 1 to 2 seconds), 1000 times the data transfer, thanks to using the Higher Energy 5G Frequency spectrum (Millimetre Waves).

Now take a moment and think about it !  Will the electricity usage be 1000 time higher ? Or even just 100 times higher or even just 10 times higher ? No-body in authority really knows at this moment.

5G promises 1000-time faster speeds because of the higher frequencies (higher energy). Unfortunately, this will come at a high cost in electrical energy usage and the corresponding Carbon Footprint.

See this.

Questions need to be asked on who is driving this 5G madness, who stands to benefit and who stands to lose. The people of Ireland will definitely be the biggest losers, more EU fines, increasing Carbon Footprint meaning severe reductions in other vital areas that really need to use the carbon.

Paraphrasing what Susan Pockett says about New Zealand, can easily be extended into the Irish context. See this.

Our DCCAE and Comreg are not presently credible sources of information. On the contrary, these government department appears to be firmly and unshakably committed to the ICNIRP thermal-only dogma, exactly because that dogma allows unbridled expansion of the wireless and telecommunications industries.

• It is time to stop believing ICNIRP spin. Tissue heating is not the only biological effect of radiofrequency radiation. The ICNIRP thermal-only exposure limit is not safe.
• Like tobacco smoke, low intensity radiofrequency radiation has multiple harmful effects on human health. Unlike second-hand smoke, second-hand radiation is fast becoming inescapable. The present situation is thus worse than the Big Tobacco story.
• Elected politicians should stop accepting biased reports from individuals with blatant conflicts of interest and start taking seriously the health and safety of their constituents; or at least of their own children and grandchildren.
• The unchecked expansion of Big Wireless permitted by ICNIRP’s thermal-only guidelines is actively harmful to all biological inhabitants of planet Earth. Further expansion to 5G technology will inevitably involve yet more radiation exposure. The fact that this exposure will not breach the ludicrously high ICNIRP-based standard is no defence at all.

The people of Ireland deserve to hear the truth about 5G from our information sources such as the Press / TV / Web and not modulated hype and 30-year-old misinformation.

Thank you,

David Sullivan

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French President Emmanuel Macron failed to promote successfully his Iranian initiative with the US administration despite the initial blessing of his US counterpart. This failure led Iran to make a third gradual withdrawal from its JCPOA nuclear deal commitment, raising two main issues. Iran has become a regional power to be reckoned with, so we can now scrap from reactions to its policies the words “submit,” or “bow to the international community”. Moreover, since Europe is apparently no longer in a position to fulfil its commitments, Iran will now be headed towards a total pull-out following further gradual withdrawal steps. Just before the US elections due in November 2020, Iran is expected to become a nuclear country with the full capability of producing uranium enriched to more than 20% uranium-235, weapons-usable and therefore in a position to manufacture dozens of nuclear bombs (for which uranium must be enriched to about 90%). However, this does not necessarily mean that this is Iran’s ultimate objective.

Industry data shows that half of the effort goes into enriching from 0.7% to 4%. If Iran reaches the level of 20%, the journey towards 90% is almost done. A few thousand centrifuges are needed to reach 20% enrichment while a few hundred are enough to cross from 20% to the 90% needed for a nuclear bomb. When Iran announces it is reaching a level which is considered critical by the west, there is the possibility that Israel might act militarily against Iran’s capability as it did in Iraq in 1981, in Syria in 2009, and in assassinating nuclear scientists. If this happens, the Middle East will be exposed to a mega earthquake whose outcome is unpredictable. But if Israel and the US are not in a position to react against Iran’s total withdrawal from the JCPOA (nuclear deal), Iran will no longer accept a return to the 2015 deal. Its position will become much stronger and any deal would be difficult to reach.

Sources within the decision-making circle have said

“Iran will become a state with full nuclear capability. It is also aiming for self-sufficiency and is planning to move away from counting solely on its oil exports for its annual budget. It is starting to generate and manufacture in many sectors and it will certainly increase its missile development and production. Missile technology has proved to be the most efficient and cheapest deterrent weapon for Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Yemen”.

Iran has been following a “strategy of patience” since US President Donald Trump unlawfully revoked the nuclear deal. Tehran allowed Europe, for an entire year, to think about a way to tempt Iran to stay within the nuclear deal on the basis of 4 (France, Russia, China, UK) + 1 (Germany), excluding the US. After that long waiting period, Iran has taken the initiative into its own hands and is gradually pulling out of the deal. It seems Trump did not learn from President Obama who signed the deal, convinced that US sanctions would be ineffective.

But Iran is not missing an opportunity worth trying to make its case. At the G7 in France, Iran Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif cut short his visit to Beijing to meet European leaders and ministers at the request of President Macron. It was hinted that there were chances for Iran to sell its oil and that Macron had managed to break through the US-Iran tension.

Iran President Hassan Rouhani thought there was a real opportunity to smooth over tensions and that Trump, according to the source in Tehran, was ready to ease the sanctions in exchange for a meeting and the beginning of discussion. This is why Rouhani overtly stated his readiness to meet any person if that helped. But Zarif was surprised to learn that Macron didn’t fulfil his promises- because Trump had changed his mind. The initiative was stillborn and all are back at square one.

Macron understood that the problem doesn’t lie with the US President but in his consigliere Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and his neo-con team Pompeo-Bolton. The meeting between the French Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly and the Pentagon Chief Mark Esper was an attempt to convince the US Secretary of Defence to distance himself from the Pompeo-Bolton team before the situation gets out of control and Iran became unstoppable.

“Trump rejected the French idea to offer Iran a line of credit of 15 billions of Euros (not Dollars). This credit is part of Iran’s acquired right since it has agreed with Europe to sell 700,000 barrels of oil daily as part of a signed deal. Following the US sanctions on any country or company buying Iranian oil, Europe refrained from honouring the agreement. Vice Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi calculated the amount at stake of 15 billion euros with European representatives. The agreement was that Iran would sell oil to Europe for this amount in the future, and that Iran could buy any product, not limited to food and medicine which were originally excluded from the US sanctions. Iran, according to the deal with European partners, would have had the right to take the money in cash and transfer it to any other country, including Iran”, said the source.

All this has been thrown to the winds. The result is simple: Iran will continue its nuclear programme but will allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor development. It is relying on the nuclear deal articles 26 and 36 to partially withdraw, a deal that was not signed based on trust, but on respect for law. This is the reason why Iran announced its third withdrawal step, increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium and replacing its IR-1 and IR-2m with IR-6 centrifuges (supposed to happen in 2026, as stated in paragraph 39).

Europe has used all its resources to persuade Iran from taking withdrawal steps, but to no avail. Iran has moved from a “patience strategy” to an “aggressive strategy” and will no longer accept a soft approach. It has undergone sanctions since 1979 and though it has learned to live with them, its patience is exhausted.

The US has nothing to offer to Iran but further sanctions and additional pressure on Europe, so the old continent follows its withdrawal path. The US administration planned to form various coalitions, including an Arab NATO, but failed so far to pull off any such alliance. US officials believed the Iranian regime would fall in months and that the population would turn against their leaders. Nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary: Trump and his neo-cons brought Iranian pragmatists and hardliners together for the same cause. The US destroyed the possibility of any moderate argument with people like Rouhani and Zarif, and showed that it was too untrustworthy for any reliable deal or agreement.

Iran is feeling stronger: it has downed a US drone, sabotaged several tankers and confiscated a British-flagged tanker despite the presence of the Royal Navy nearby. It has shown its readiness for war without pushing for it. Iran knows its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Palestine will be united as one in the case of war. The Iranian officials did not use revolutionary or sectarian slogans to face down US sanctions but instead managed to create national solidarity behind its firm policy of confrontation with the US. Washington, largely responsible for the status quo in the Gulf, failed to weaken Iran’s resolve and has so far been unsuccessful in undermining the Iranian economy. It is putting about the idea that its “suffocation policy” has been successful, but Iran is not giving the submission signals the US administration wants and needs, to justify the tension it has created in the Middle East and the Gulf.

Iran is handling its policy towards the US and Europe in the same way Iranians weave carpets. It takes several years to finish an artisanal carpet and many more years to sell it. The nuclear deal needed several years of preparation but even more time for establishing acceptance and the bona fides of the signatories. Trump’s simple-minded decision destroyed all that work. The US and Europe have lost the initiative. Europe is not politically in any position to stand against the US sanctions, nor does it have sufficient tools or standing to offer Iran and thus force it to the negotiating table.

Iran is becoming stronger and much more difficult to tame than in the past. It is imposing itself as a regional power and a challenge to the west. It has advanced nuclear technology and capabilities, a self-sufficient armament programme and it is strengthening its allies in the Middle East.

It is difficult to foresee any negotiation between Iran and the West before November 2020, the date of the US elections. Iran is no longer willing to accept in 2019 what it signed in 2015; Trump is responsible for the new scenario. Destroying the nuclear deal now redounds to the benefit of Iran. There will be a time when the US administration, due to the realisation of its ignorance in Iranian affairs, will feel regret, and will ask to return to the negotiating table- perhaps after Trump? But conditions will definitely no longer be the same and it may very well come too late to see Iran accepting what it signed for in 2015.

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Featured image is from the author

After 18 years, there is a possibility that the Pentagon is finally going to permit a “trial” of five men who are accused of conspiracy to commit the 9/11 attacks. If so, the proceedings will prove what a charade the Pentagon’s entire “judicial system” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been and continues to be. In fact, the trial, if it is even permitted to take place, will serve as a mirror for how “trials” are conducted in communist China or, for matter, in communist Cuba.

Let’s review how the Pentagon’s “judicial” system got established in the first place. After the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon decided to establish a prison, torture center, and “judicial” system for accused terrorists that it would be capturing and kidnapping around the world. It decided to locate this center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Why Cuba rather than somewhere in the United States? The Pentagon wanted to make certain that it would have omnipotent power to run its center any way it wanted, without having to bother with the rights and guarantees enumerated in the Constitution, especially in the Bill of Rights. It also didn’t want any interference with its operation from the U.S. Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary. In other words, the Pentagon wanted a Constitution-free zone in which to operate its prison, torture center, and “judicial” system.

Ultimately, much to the Pentagon’s chagrin, the Supreme Court ruled that it did have ultimate jurisdiction over the Guantanamo operations. However, while the federal judiciary has accepted some petitions for writ of habeas corpus from Guantanamo inmates, overall it has followed its longtime policy of deference to the national-security establishment when it comes to matters of “national security.”

What the Supreme Court should have done from the very beginning was to order a complete shutdown of the Pentagon’s prison, torture center, and “judicial” system at Guantanamo Bay. There is a simple reason for that: the Constitution, which is the higher law that controls the actions of federal officials, including the Pentagon, does not authorize the Pentagon to operate such a center.

It is critically important to keep in mind that terrorism is not an act of war. Instead, it is a federal criminal offense. That is why there are terrorism trials in federal courts in New York, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and elsewhere. Terrorism is listed among federal crimes in the U.S. Code. In fact, the Pentagon’s upcoming “trial” in Cuba is itself an acknowledgement that terrorism is, in fact, a criminal offense, one that here is being prosecuted by the Pentagon in Cuba rather than by the U.S. Justice Department in federal district court here in the United States.

Two different systems

It is also critically important to recognize that the Constitution does not provide for two separate judicial systems to try criminal cases, one run by the military and the other run by the federal courts. The Constitution provides for only one judicial system for all criminal offenses, including terrorism cases.

It is also critically important to recognize that the principles being followed in both systems — the federal court system and the military system — are as different as night and day.

In the federal court system, people who are accused of terrorism or any other crimes are presumed innocent. Judges and law-enforcement personnel are prohibited from torturing people or inflicting other “cruel and unusual” punishments on them. An accused has the right to remain silent — i.e., no forced confessions. Communications between attorney and client are confidential. The accused has the right to confront his accusers — i.e., hearsay evidence is inadmissible. Trials can be by jury, where ordinary citizens, not a judge, decide the facts of the case and the guilt or innocence of the accused. Trials must be speedy — i.e., no 18-year delay, as there has been in the Pentagon’s system.

Things are the exact opposite in the Pentagon’s system, which is precisely why it established its system in Cuba rather than the United States. Remember: the Pentagon’s goal is establishing its center in Cuba was to avoid the principles of the Constitution and the interference of the Supreme Court.

Why would the military want to avoid the principles of the Constitution, especially given that military personnel take oaths to support and defend the Constitution? The answer lies in the conservative military mindset that has long held that the Bill of Rights consists of constitutional “technicalities” that permit guilty people to go free. By establishing an independent prison, torture center, and “judicial” system at Gitmo, the Pentagon was going to show the American people and the world what a “real” judicial system should look like, one where “the guilty” got what was coming to them and where there was no possibility of an acquittal by some ignorant jury.

Thus, under the Pentagon’s system, the accused are presumed guilty. They are subject to being brutally tortured, not only to secure information but also confessions. Forced confessions are admissible at trial. There is no right of trial by jury. A tribunal of military personnel, all of whom are answerable to the President, decide the facts in the case and the guilt or innocence of the accused. Communications between attorney and client are secretly monitored. Hearsay evidence is admissible. Trials can be delayed indefinitely. The outcome of the “trial” is not in doubt.

There is something else that is of critical importance to recognize: When an accused terrorist is taken into custody, U.S. officials have the discretionary authority to decide into which system to send him. They can select the federal court system, which protects the rights of the accused through the Bill of Rights and where he could possibly win an acquittal. Or they can send him into the military system, where no such rights exist and where the outcome is preordained. There is no way that that type of discretionary and dual system of justice can possibly be reconciled with “the rule of law,” which requires everyone in similar circumstances to be treated in the same manner. There is also no way to reconcile such a dual, competing system with the U.S. Constitution. Finally, there is no way to reconcile such a system with any reasonable definition of the term “justice.”

The Pentagon’s upcoming “trial” at Gitmo won’t be a trial at all. It will be a kangaroo proceeding, one that is no different from those in totalitarian regimes. Along with the Pentagon’s prison and torture center in Cuba, its upcoming kangaroo proceeding will only bring more shame and ignominy to our country.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

The UK public faces the prospect of watered-down food regulations after Brexit with Parliament having little say, the UK Trade Policy Observatory (UK TPO) is warning.

New analysis by legal experts at the University of Sussex-based UK TPO warns that stringent regulation, which currently restricts some of the more controversial US food produce from UK supermarket shelves, could be stripped away with minimal Parliamentary scrutiny through Statutory Instruments (SIs).

The EU Withdrawal Act 2018 allowed the creation of over 10,000 pages of new legislation to retain EU rules, including on food safety.

Risk

Some of these provide extensive scope for ministers to make future changes to food safety legislation, notably potentially significant concessions to the US over GM crops and pesticides, in the pursuit of a headline-grabbing trade deal, without the level of scrutiny that primary legislation would provide.

The use of SIs would give a UK prime minister determined to overcome opposition to loosening UK food safety legislation a relatively clear path to ratifying a US-UK FTA – particularly as the UK Parliament has a much weaker influence on treaty negotiation in comparison to both the US or EU.

Such a move could prove extremely unpopular with the UK public, 82 per cent of the UK public favour retaining high food standards over a US trade agreement, and could damage future food trade with the EU, which accounts for around 70 per cent of UK food exports.

This risk is most applicable in the event of no deal or in a scenario of a basic free trade agreement (FTA) with the EU. Parliament would have only limited means of opposition through blocking ratification of an FTA or specific SIs.

Revoke

Dr Emily Lydgate, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Law at the University of Sussex and Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory, said:

“In the event of no deal, or a basic EU-UK Free Trade Agreement, the UK Government will be under pressure to make a success of Brexit through new trade agreements.

“The concern is that ministers have extensive scope to make significant food safety concessions in order to reach an agreement with the US potentially in the face of opposition from consumers or food producers who would worry about losing access to the EU market.

“The US has long complained about the EU’s hazard-based approach to banning some pesticides categorically, rather than permitting their residues, and also over the lengthy EU process for approving new genetically modified crops, which the US Trade Representative (USTR) estimates costs US agriculture $2 billion/year.”

Chloe Anthony, a LLM student at the University of Sussex, said:

“The real risk is that there are SIs giving ministers a lot of power on controversial policy areas which the US will be pushing very hard to reform.

“Through SIs, UK ministers have the ability to amend, revoke and make regulations on how active ingredients in pesticides are authorised, the maximum residue levels permitted in food and to the GMO application and authorisation process.”

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Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.

Today is the 18 anniversary of 9/11, an event that has turned a once free America into a domestic police state and an international warmonger during the 21st century.  America’s reputation has been shattered along with the Constitution, international law, and seven nations in whole or part.  The massive crimes against the Bill of Rights and the population of seven nations are the direct consequence of 9/11.

Global Research has assembled some articles that indicate that not only Americans but the people of the world have been massively deceived about that event.  

Over the years I have reported the findings of scientists, engineers, and architects that indicate that the official story is false.  I had an open mind for two reasons.  One is that having been an engineering student, I could tell the difference from a building falling down from asymmetrical structural damage and a building blowing up.  The other is that having been involved in policy issues in Washington for a quarter century I knew that such a humiliating defeat suffered by the world’s only superpower at the hands of a few Muslim terrorists would have brought instant demands from the White House, Congress, and media for investigation into how every aspect of the American national security state failed simultaneously on one morning.  Instead the White House resisted the 9/11 families demands for an investigation for one year and never delivered a forensic intestigation.  Instead, the country was given a 9/11 Commission Report that was merely the government’s official story of what happened.  No heads rolled.  No one was fired or even reprimanded.  To hold no one accountable for such a massive failure and humiliating defeat is not a believable response if the official 9/11 story is true.

It is much easier for government to deceive people in a democracy where people assume everything is above board than in a dictatorship where they know it is not.  

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

On September 9, Hezbollah announced that it had shot down an Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle over the village of Ramyeh in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah added that the UAV is now in its hands.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed in a statement that the UAV had been lost claiming that it was “on a routine mission in northern Israel” but somehow “fell into Lebanese territory.” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesperson for the IDF, declined to comment on the specific nature of the UAV’s activities. However, he said that “there is no risk of breach of information”.

The development followed claims by the IDF that overnight into September 9 Shia militias operating under command of the Qods Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched several rockets towards Israel from the countryside of the Syrian capital, Damascus.

Watch the video here.

On September 8, several explosions rocked near the Syrian city of Al Bukamal, located on the border with Iraq. The incident reportedly happened in the area where Iranian-backed militias are deployed. Pro-Israeli media outlets immediately speculated that the explosions were a result of Israeli strikes and killed at least 18 Iranian-backed fighters. No evidence to confirm these claims was provided. The situation remains unclear.

The Israeli military political leadership openly exploits the current tensions across the Middle East to achieve own political goals. In fact, Tel Aviv is interested in the existence of the so-called Iranian-Hezbollah threat because it helps to justify Israeli regional policy and gain more and more financial and military support from the Trump administration. In own turn, the Israeli attitude serves as a direct confirmation of the official rhetoric of Hezbollah and Iran regarding ‘the Zionist aggression’ in the region. Therefore, Iranian and Hezbollah influence on Shia groups across the Middle East are growing.

This may be compared to the conflict Syria, in which the US and Israel played an anti-Iranian card backing various radical groups and even striking supposed Iranian targets. Nonetheless, Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Syria were strengthened because of this policy. A new round of limited escalation in the region may lead to similar consequences.

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“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

It’s been 230 years since James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, and what do we have to show for it?

Nothing good.

In America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document, but the reality of life in the American police state tells a different story.

“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, etc.), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called named of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago.

Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, the courts and the like)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution today.

The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus “contempt of cop” charges such as “disrupting the peace” or “resisting arrest” for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a government forum.

The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited for the battlefield. As such, this amendment has been rendered null and void.

The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.

As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts. Indeed, the federal governmental bureaucracy has grown so large that it has made local and state legislatures relatively irrelevant. Through its many agencies and regulations, the federal government has stripped states of the right to regulate countless issues that were originally governed at the local level.

If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.

Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

Still, it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.

As the National Review rightly asks, “How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.”

Americans are constitutionally illiterate.

Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, when Newsweek asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights.

A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one. Only a quarter of Americans (27 percent) know it takes a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto. One in five Americans (21 percent) incorrectly thinks that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration. And more than half of Americans do not know which party controls the House and Senate.

A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.
It gets worse.

Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, 21% said the “right to own a pet” was listed someplace between “Congress shall make no law” and “redress of grievances.” Some 17% said that the First Amendment contained the “right to drive a car,” and 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.

Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.

In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude, “Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the Internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.”

Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.

So what’s the solution?
Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties”  is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.

As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

If this constitutional illiteracy is not remedied and soon, freedom in America will be doomed.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have managed to keep the wolf at bay so far. Barely.

Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.

As actor-turned-activist Richard Dreyfuss warned:

“Unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle of government, it will go away in your kids’ lifetimes, and we will be a fable. You have to find the time and creativity to teach it in schools, and if you don’t, you will lose it. You will lose it to the darkness, and what this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of oppression and darkness and cruelty. If it lasts for more than our lifetime, for more than our kids’ lifetime, it is only because we put some effort into teaching what it is, the ideas of America: the idea of opportunity, mobility, freedom of thought, freedom of assembly.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Whenever Hong Kong protesters are destroying public property, there are no cameras of Western media outlets in sight. But when police decide to intervene, protecting their city, Western media crusaders emerge in full force.

First published on April 4, 2008

The official story of 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. One of these contradictions involves the question of how long President Bush remained in classroom in Sarasota, Florida, on the morning of 9/11.

Bush was there to publicize his education policy by being photographed listening to students read. He arrived at the school at 8:55 AM, at which time he reportedly first learned that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers. Dismissing the crash as an accident, Bush said that they would go ahead and “do the reading thing anyway.”

Bush entered the second-grade classroom of teacher Sandra Kay Daniels at about 9:03. At about 9:06, the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, came in and whispered in Bush’s ear, telling him, Card later reported, “A second plane hit the second Tower. America is under attack.”

What Happened Next

Thanks to Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, which came out in 2004, the world knows what happened next: Bush remained sitting there minute after minute after minute.

Journalists, however, had reported Bush’s strange behavior much earlier. On September 1, 2002, for example, Jennifer Barrs had reported in the Tampa Tribune that, after Card whispered in Bush’s ear, the president picked up his book and read with the children “for eight or nine minutes.” In his 2002 book Fighting Back, Bill Sammon, the White House correspondent for the Washington Times, said that even after the reading lesson was over, Bush continued to linger, leading Sammon to dub him “the dawdler in chief.”

The White House’s First Anniversary Account

On the first anniversary of 9/11, however, the White House, with Andrew Card taking the lead, started giving a radically different account. On September 9, 2002, Card told Brian Williams on NBC News: “I pulled away from the president, and not that many seconds later, the president excused himself from the classroom, and we gathered in the holding room and talked about the situation.” In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 11, Card said that, after he had informed Bush about the second attack, the president “looked up—it was only a matter of seconds, but it seemed like minutes. . . . And he just excused himself very politely to the teacher and to the students and he left.”

That same day, Karl Rove told Campbell Brown of NBC News:

Andy Card walked in to tell the President, and you can remember the famous photograph of him whispering in the President’s ear. And the President was a little—you know, he didn’t want to alarm the children. He knew the drill was coming to a close. So he waited for a few moments just to—literally—not very long at all before he came to the close, and he came into the staff room.

Also that same day, Card and Rove got ABC News, during another program that aired on the first anniversary of 9/11, to endorse their revisionist account. This program contained the following segment:

Andrew Card: I think there was a, a moment of shock and he did stare off maybe for just a second.

Charles Gibson: The President stays calm and lets the students finish.

Karl Rove: The President thought for a second or two about getting up and walking out of the room. But the drill was coming to a close and he didn’t want to alarm the children.

Gibson: Instead Bush pauses, thanks the children. . . and heads for the empty classroom next door.

Help from Mrs. Daniels

Besides putting out this revisionist account, the Bush-Cheney White House also evidently enlisted support from Sandra Kay Daniels, the teacher of the second grade class at the Sarasota school. In a Los Angeles Times story published on September 11, 2002, she said:

I knew something was up when President Bush didn’t pick up the book and participate in the lesson…. He said, ‘Mrs. Daniels, I have to leave now. I am going to leave Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan here to do the speech for me.’ Looking at his face, you knew something was wrong. I said a little prayer for him. He shook my hand and left.

This account by Daniels was radically different from what she had said for the aforementioned article by Jennifer Barrs, which had appeared only ten days earlier. After saying that “Bush, obviously lost in thought, forgot about the book in his lap,” Barrs quoted Daniels as saying: “I couldn’t gently kick him. . . . I couldn’t say, ‘OK, Mr. President. Pick up your book, sir. The whole world is watching.’”

Given the fact that Mrs. Daniels had given this account just ten days earlier, her revisionist account cannot be explained in terms of a bad memory. The only possible explanation appears to be that the White House had convinced her to help spread its revisionist account. What would have been the White House’s motive for spreading a false account and even convincing Mrs. Daniels to help?

The Likely Motive

On the one hand, the Secret Service, which has the responsibility for protecting the president from any possible threat to his life, should have assumed, once it was clear that terrorists were going after high-value targets, that the president might have been one of those targets. As one article put it, “Bush’s presence made . . . the planned reading event a perceived target,” because “the well-publicized event at the school assured Bush’s location that day was no secret.” On the other hand, people observed that the Secret Service had not acted accordingly. The day after 9/11, Canada’s Globe and Mail commented: “For some reason, Secret Service agents did not bustle [Bush] away.”

The background for this comment was explained by Philip Melanson, the author of a book about the Secret Service. “With an unfolding terrorist attack,” Melanson said, “the procedure should have been to get the president to the closest secure location as quickly as possible.” That this indeed would have been standard operating procedure is illustrated by the fact that, as soon as the second strike on the World Trade Center was seen on television, one agent said to Sarasota County Sheriff Bill Balkwill: “We’re out of here. Can you get everybody ready?”

But this agent’s decision was obviously overridden by some higher-level Secret Service agent, as Bush was allowed not only to remain in the classroom for seven or more minutes, but also to remain at the school for another twenty minutes. He was even allowed to deliver a television address to the nation, thereby letting everyone know that he was still at the school.

This behavior seemed especially reckless in light of reports, issued at the time, that as many as eleven planes had been hijacked. The Secret Service should have feared that one of those planes was bearing down on the school at that very moment. The Secret Service’s behavior, however, suggested that it had no fear that the school would be attacked.

This behavior by the Secret Service contrasted strongly with the response, two months earlier, to a report that Islamic terrorists might crash an airliner into the summit of industrialized nations in Genoa, Italy, in an effort to kill President Bush. The Italian government closed the airspace above Genoa and installed anti-aircraft missiles at the airport (David Sanger, New York Times, September 25, 2001). Even with all this protection, Bush stayed overnight on an aircraft carrier, instead of staying, like the other leaders, on a luxury ship (CNN, July 18, 2001). Why so much concern about merely possible terrorist airplane attacks in Genoa in July but no such concern in Sarasota in September, when such attacks were actually in progress?

The Secret Service’s failure to hustle Bush away seemed even stranger in light of the reports that Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and several congressional leaders were quickly taken to safe locations. Should not protecting President Bush have been an even higher priority? As Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times put it on July 4, 2004: “One of the many unanswered questions about that day is why the Secret Service did not immediately hustle Bush to a secure location, as it apparently did with Vice President Dick Cheney.”

The fact that this question was raised immediately after 9/11, then continued to be raised, could well have been perceived by the White House as dangerous. This question did, in fact, have dangerous implications, because it could—and in some circles did—lead to the inference that Bush was not evacuated from the school because the Secret Service knew that he would not be targeted. The desire to stop this kind of speculation was likely behind the White House’s attempts at getting a revisionist account of Bush’s behavior instilled into the public consciousness.

The 9/11 Commission’s Treatment of the Issue

The strange behavior of Bush and his Secret Service in Sarasota was of great concern to families of the 9/11 victims. One of the central questions raised by the Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission was: “Why was President Bush permitted by the Secret Service to remain in the Sarasota elementary school where he was reading to children?” (That this question was asked was admitted by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice-chair of the Commission, in their 2006 book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, p. 54.) The 9/11 Commission, however, provided no answer. Its only response was to say: “The Secret Service told us they were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door” (The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 39). That response, however, implied that the Secret Service had only two options: (a) running the president out the door or (b) allowing him to remain at the school for another half hour. But there was a third option: The Secret Service could have simply walked the president out the door, put him in the presidential limo, and whisked him away.

The Treatment by Press

A Wall Street Journal story in March 2004, “Government Accounts of 9/11 Reveal Gaps, Inconsistencies,” was one of the few stories in the mainstream press to report on contradictions in the official story of 9/11. When the Journal asked the White House about the contradictions about the Sarasota event in particular, spokesman Dan Bartlett, not trying to defend the White House’s revisionist version, confirmed that Bush had remained in the classroom for at least seven minutes after receiving the report of the second crash. Bush did not leave immediately, Bartlett said, because his “instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room.”

However, even if Bartlett’s statement were an acceptable explanation of why Bush did not do what Card and Rove had claimed he did, the real question, which the WSJ article did not address, was why the White House, through Card, Rove, and Mrs. Daniels, had given a false account. Surely this is a question that the press in general should have explored. Especially ABC News, NBC News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times, which had been used to spread the White House’s false account, should have demanded that the White House explain why it put out a completely false account. These papers and networks owed their readers and viewers a correction and an attempt to find out why the White House had used them to spread a lie.

While discovering why the White House lied, the press should also, of course, seek to discover the answer to the original question: why the Secret Service did not immediately rush Bush to a safe location.

This essay is an abbreviated version of Chapter 1 of David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, March, 2008.

Global Research Editor’s Note

Today, September 11, 2019. The anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11. 18 years laters, are we any closer to the truth about what really happened on that fateful day?

George Szamuely’s incisive article published more than 17 years ago raises some “uncomfortable questions” regarding Air Force Preparedness in the case of a national emergency: “Why were no fighter planes launched until after the Pentagon was hit?”

“Talk about a lack of urgency! Assuming Otis Air National Guard Base is about 180 miles away from Manhattan it should have taken the F-15s less than six minutes to get here. Moreover, since Washington, DC, is little more than 200 miles from New York, the two F-15 fighters would have had time to get to DC, intercept Flight 77 and grab breakfast on the way.”

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 11, 2019

Nothing Urgent

by George Szamuely 

New York Press, Vol. 15, No. 2

Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG),  globalresearch.ca,   15  February 2002

Let’s revisit the curious lack of military action on the morning of September 11.

That morning, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, was having a routine meeting on Capitol Hill with Sen. Max Cleland. While the two men chatted away, a hijacked jet plowed into the World Trade Center’s north tower, another one plowed into the south tower and a third one into the Pentagon. And still they went on with their meeting. “[W]hen we came out,” Myers recounted to American Forces Radio and Television Service, “somebody said the Pentagon had been hit.” Myers claims no one had bothered to inform him about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Meanwhile, in Florida, just as President Bush was about to leave his hotel he was told about the attack on the first WTC tower. He was asked by a reporter if he knew what was going on in New York. He said he did, and then went to an elementary school in Sarasota to read to children.

No urgency. Why should there be? Who could possibly have realized then the calamitous nature of the events of that day? Besides, the hijackers had switched the transponders off. So how could anyone know what was going on?

Passenger jet hijackings are not uncommon and the U.S. government has prepared detailed plans to handle them. On Sept. 11 these plans were ignored in their entirety. According to The New York Times, air traffic controllers knew at 8:20 a.m. “that American Airlines Flight 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had probably been hijacked. When the first news report was made at 8:48 a.m. that a plane might have hit the World Trade Center, they knew it was Flight 11.” There was little ambiguity on the matter. The pilot had pushed a button on the aircraft yoke that allowed controllers to hear the hijacker giving orders. Here are the FAA regulations concerning hijackings: “The FAA hijack coordinator…on duty at Washington headquarters will request the military to provide an escort aircraft for a confirmed hijacked aircraft… The escort service will be requested by the FAA hijack coordinator by direct contact with the National Military Command Center (NMCC).” Here are the instructions issued by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 1, 2001: “In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC will be notified by the most expeditious means by the FAA. The NMCC will…forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval.”

In addition, as Vice President Cheney explained on Meet the Press on Sept. 16, only the president has the authority to order the shooting down of a civilian airliner.

The U.S. is supposed to scramble military aircraft the moment a hijacking is confirmed. Myers’ revelation to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 13 that no fighter planes had been launched until after the Pentagon was hit was therefore surprising. Senators and even some tv commentators were a little incredulous. Dan Rather asked: “These hijacked aircraft were in the air for quite a while… Why doesn’t the Pentagon have the kind of protection that they can get a fighter-interceptor aircraft up, and if someone is going to plow an aircraft into the Pentagon, that we have at least some…line of defense?”

Good question. Clearly another, more comforting, story was needed, and on the evening of Sept. 14 CBS launched it by revealing that the FAA had indeed alerted U.S. air defense units of a possible hijacking at 8:38 a.m. on Tuesday, that six minutes later two F-15s received a scramble order at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod and that by 8:56 the F-15s were racing toward New York. Unfortunately, the fighters were still 70 miles away when the second jet hit the south tower. Meanwhile, at 9:30 a.m., three F-16s were launched from Langley Air Force base, 150 miles south of Washington. But just seven minutes later, at 9:37 a.m., Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. The F-16s arrived in Washington just before 10 a.m.

This story, which has now become the “official” version, raises more questions than it answers. F-15s can travel at speeds of 1875 mph while F-16s can travel at 1500 mph. If it took the F-16s half an hour to cover 150 miles, they could not have been traveling at more than 300 mph–at 20 percent capability. Boeing 767s and 757s have cruising speeds of 530 mph. Talk about a lack of urgency! Assuming Otis Air National Guard Base is about 180 miles away from Manhattan it should have taken the F-15s less than six minutes to get here. Moreover, since Washington, DC, is little more than 200 miles from New York, the two F-15 fighters would have had time to get to DC, intercept Flight 77 and grab breakfast on the way.

Ah, but of course the transponders were turned off. So no one could keep track of the planes. If it were true that the moment a transponder is turned off a plane becomes invisible there would be no defense against enemy aircraft. Normal radar echo return from the metal surface of an aircraft would still identify it on the radar scope.

Luckily, we still have first-rate establishment media to make sure that we retain confidence in our government.

Copyright  New York  Press, Vol 15, Issue 2, 2002. The original URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SZA202A.html

Trump’s decision to fire Bolton likely stemmed from the latter’s string of failures in Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia, with the American President finally realizing that enough is enough and that he needs to once again shuffle the “deep state” deck if he’s to start “winning” on the hard power foreign policy front ahead of next year’s elections.

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Here is a crucial fact which has escaped the notice, or been suppressed, in all of the media coverage and discussions regarding the current round of Hong Kong mass demonstrations.

Hong Kong currently has no extradition agreement with mainland China, and the proposal to create one was the initial trigger for the mass demonstrations. But Hong Kong has had an extradition agreement with the U.S. since December 20 1996! [adopted less than seven months prior to the Handover, or Return of Hong Kong to China, on 1 July 1997].

The proposed extradition treaty with the mainland was considered as a threat to the human rights of Hong kong people. But the U.S. extradition agreement, which is a “proven” threat to the human rights of Hong Kong people, has been passed over in silence.

When the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden arrived in Hong Kong in 2013 with vital information related to Hong Kong peoples’ human rights, the U.S.-Hong Kong extradition agreement was immediately invoked by the U.S. in an attempt to ‘shut him up’.

The U.S. governments immediate response was to invoke the extradition treaty and demand that Edward Snowden be returned to the U.S. to stand trial for having disclosed this massive assault on the privacy rights of Hong Kong people. Only because he was spirited quickly out of Hong Kong and onto an international air flight did he avoid the brutal treatment he would have received at the hands of U.S. authorities for exposing their crimes against Hong Kong.

It should be noted that the U.S. regime has never apologized for this gross infringement on the rights of Hong Kong people; nor to my knowledge has it even stated that it would not do so again. Yet the extradition treaty which was used against the man who awakened Hong Kong to the threat has “never” been questioned.

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President Trump has finally fired his neocon national security adviser, John Bolton.

The decision to show Bolton the door came after Trump suggested a meeting between himself and the Taliban at Camp David. 

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….I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2019

As should be expected, Bolton strongly disagreed—the idea runs counter to the neocon vision of US foreign policy—and Trump, being Trump, fired him. 

Rumor has it Trump will talk to Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, although the Iranians say they will not talk with Trump until sanctions are lifted. For the neocons, the mere idea of talking to the mullahs or engaging any kind of diplomacy with Iran is unacceptable heresy. They’d rather kill Iranians than talk with them. 

What Iran says is clear: no war, no sanctions, no threats, no bullying; just acting according to the law and fulfilling obligations. Our proposal is clear: commitment for commitment; violation for violation; threat for threat; and step for step, instead of talk for talk. #UNGA

— Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) September 25, 2018

The latest game of musical chairs at the White House underscores the fact Donald Trump has absolutely no idea what he is doing. 

If, as claimed during the campaign, Trump wants to shut down the wars and bring home the troops, why did he hire one of the most violent and scurrilous of neocons to advise him on foreign policy, a guy who penned a New York Times op-ed calling for bombing Iran as a response to its nonexistent nuclear weapons program? 

The Taliban were created and nurtured into power by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. Phil Gasper writes: 

The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban’s reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul,” adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.” “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said another U.S. diplomat in 1997.

That was before 9/11 and the creation of another CIA asset, Osama bin Laden. Neocons rife in the Bush administration decided the Taliban would represent in part the new face of radical Islamic evil, never mind the previous stance of the US government that the Taliban would become good friends like the Saudis. 

The Bush invasion of Afghanistan was planned before the 9/11 attack, as former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice admitted during testimony before the 9/11 commission.

Moreover, the US set aside terrorism investigations of al-Qaeda and the Taliban at the behest of transnational oil corporations. 

From Julio Godoy of Inter Press Service:

Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, the government of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim… They affirm that until August [2001], the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime ”as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia”, from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean.

The invasion of Afghanistan had little to do with Osama bin Laden—the Taliban said they would turn him over if his role in 9/11 could be proven—but rather the illegal invasion was part of a plan before 9/11 to secure the impoverished country for an oil pipeline and a hunt for minerals, thus the deal with the Taliban disappeared under a rain of bombs and a deadly fog of depleted uranium. 

It was reported that one US official proclaimed during negotiation with the Taliban: “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”

On October 14, 2001, The Guardian reported:

In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir—the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime—told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country.” 

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky brings the real objective of the invasion into focus.

The economic dimensions of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) are rarely mentioned. The post 9/11 “counter-terrorism campaign” has served to obfuscate the real objectives of the US-NATO war.

The war on Afghanistan is part of a profit-driven agenda: a war of economic conquest and plunder,  “a resource war”.

While Afghanistan is acknowledged as a strategic hub in Central Asia, bordering on the former Soviet Union, China and Iran, at the crossroads of pipeline routes and major oil and gas reserves, its huge mineral wealth as well as its untapped natural gas reserves have remained, until June 2010, totally unknown to the American public.

According to a joint report by the Pentagon, the US Geological Survey (USGS) and USAID, Afghanistan is now said to possess “previously unknown” and untapped mineral reserves, estimated authoritatively to be of the order of one trillion dollars (New York Times, U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan – NYTimes.com, June 14, 2010, See also BBC, 14 June 2010).

John Bolton and the neocons are largely responsible for the numerous wars and violations of international law. They have managed to keep the US in what appears to be an endless war against Wahhabi-inspired fanatics (created by US and Pakistani intelligence). 

President Trump wants something else—to be at the center of a historic peace deal ending the longest war in American history—and Bolton was jettisoned due to his disagreement and sticking to his neocon principles, if they can be termed such. 

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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

Since becoming prime minister in late July, virtually everything he asked parliamentarians to support was rejected.

His tenure shaky, he may one day be remembered as Britain’s most unpopular PM — pushing all-out for what most Brits and majority parliamentarians oppose, a no-deal Brexit, despite its disruptiveness if happens.

He may end up being Britain’s shortest ever serving PM, the current record held by George Canning — in office from April 12, 1827 until his death on August 8, 119 days later.

On July 24, Johnson took office. His unparalleled parliamentary defeats, at least in modern times, may force his resignation or risk being voted out of office by parliamentarians or the electorate if snap elections are held in November which seems likely.

A self-promoting serial liar, an embarrassment to the office he holds, a Trump clone with an English accent, he’s a caricature of what leadership is supposed to be.

As London Telegraph’s political columnist in the mid-1990s, his reporting lacked credibility.

According to one critic, “Boris told such dreadful lies.” Another called him “a caricature” of what journalism is supposed to be.

He operated the same way in parliament as an MP, as London mayor, foreign secretary and now prime minister.

In office less than two months, he lost every no-deal Brexit/snap election vote, winning no support from majority MPs, including from some fellow Tories, expelling 21 party members for opposing his agenda, losing a parliamentary majority — maybe his job as PM after the body reconvenes.

The London Guardian said he lost six votes in six days ahead of proroguing parliament on Monday, suspending it for five weeks until October 14.

On Monday, Speaker John Bercow, stepping down from his post on October 31, said

“this is not a standard or normal prorogation. (It’s) an act of executive fiat.”

Others called his aim to ram through a no-deal Brexit a coup attempt. On Monday, legislation blocking a no-deal Brexit on October 31 became the law of the land.

MPs blocked another attempt for snap elections Johnson called for next month. With parliament suspended, it can’t be held until at least mid-November, perhaps coming before December 1, maybe Johnson’s coup de grace when votes are tallied — even if Tories retain power.

No majority for a no-deal Brexit exists, what Johnson pledged to deliver. Multiple parliamentary defeats and no triumphs left his tenure hanging by a thread, perhaps ending after MPs return if snap elections are held in November.

On Sunday, the Financial Times slammed Johnson, headlining: “A zombie government means an election must be held,” saying:

Johnson created a mess.

His “government is in meltdown. Through blunder and bullying, it has thrown away its majority and cannot govern,” adding:

“The prime minister has lost the political support of two dozen of the most distinguished Tories, including this weekend another cabinet minister (and) his own brother.”

If voters don’t oust him in snap elections, perhaps a parliamentary motion of no confidence will end his disastrous tenure.

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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.

We bring to the attention of our readers the video transcript of Michel Chossudovsky’s presentation at the 2012 9/11 Conference organized by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history. a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11. 

September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. 

A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11. Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” were set in motion.  

9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”. 

September 11, 2001 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.  

At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history. a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.

September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society.

A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.

Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” were set in motion. 

9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.

September 11, 2001 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest. 

Existe, finalmente, um Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros que se empenhará em fazer aderir a Itália ao Tratado ONU sobre a proibição das armas nucleares? O novo Ministro Luigi Di Maio assinou, em 2017, o Juramento Parlamentar do ICAN, a coligação internacional agraciada com o Prémio Nobel da Paz.

Deste modo, o líder político do Movimento 5 Estrelas – o actual Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros – empenhou-se em “promover a assinatura e a ratificação deste Tratado de relevância histórica” por parte da Itália. O Empenho ICAN também foi assinado por outros ministros actuais 5 estrelas – Alfonso Bonafede (Justiça), Federico D’Incà (Relações com o Parlamento), Fabiana Dadone (Administração Pública) – e outros parlamentares do M5S, como Roberto Fico e Manlio Di Stefano.

No entanto, há um problema. O Artigo 4 do Tratado estabelece: “Cada Estado Parte que tenha no seu território, armas nucleares, possuídas ou controladas por outro Estado, deve assegurar a rápida remoção de tais armas”. Para aderir ao Tratado ONU, a Itália deve, portanto, solicitar aos Estados Unidos para remover do nosso território as bombas nucleares B-61 (que já violam o Tratado de Não Proliferação) e de não instalar as novas B61-12, nem outras armas nucleares.

Aliás, como a Itália faz parte dos países que (como declara a própria NATO) “fornecem à Aliança aviões equipados para transportar bombas nucleares, sobre as quais os Estados Unidos mantêm controlo absoluto e pessoal treinado para esse fim”, para aderir ao Tratado ONU, a Itália deve pedir para estar isenta de tal função. Pedidos impensáveis da parte do segundo Governo Conte que, como o primeiro, considera os Estados Unidos um “aliado privilegiado”.

Aqui mostram-se as cartas. O Empenho ICAN foi assinado em Itália por mais de 200 parlamentares, a maior parte do Partido Democrata e do M5S (cerca de 90 cada um), os partidos actuais do governo. Com que resultado?

Em 19 de Setembro de 2017, um dia antes do Tratado ser aberto para assinatura, a Câmara aprovava uma moção PD (votada também por Forza Italia e Fratelli d’Italia) que empenhava o Governo Gentiloni a “avaliar a possibilidade de aderir ao Tratado ONU”.  Da sua parte, o M5S não pedia a adesão ao Tratado ONU e, portanto, a remoção de Itália, das armas nucleares USA, mas de “declarar a indisponibilidade da Itália utilizar armas nucleares e de não adquirir os componentes necessários para tornar os aviões F-35 adequados para o transporte de armas nucleares”. Ou seja, que os F-35, concebidos para ataques nucleares, especialmente com as B61-12, sejam usados pela Itália com uma espécie de segurança que impeça o uso de armas nucleares.

No dia seguinte, o Conselho do Atlântico Norte, com o pleno consenso italiano, rejeitou e atacou o Tratado ONU. Ele tinha sido assinado, até a esse momento, por 70 países, mas, devido à pressão USA/NATO, foi ratificado só por 26, se bem que sejam necessários 50 para que entre em vigor. O mesmo aconteceu com o Tratado sobre as Forças Nucleares Intermediárias, destruído por Washington. Tanto na NATO, como na UE e na ONU, o primeiro Governo Conte enfileirou com a decisão dos EUA, dando luz verde à instalação de novos mísseis nucleares dos EUA na Europa, incluindo em Itália.

O Empenho solene subscrito pelo PD, 5 estrelas e outros revelou-se assim, à prova dos factos, um expediente demagógico para recolher votos. Se para alguém não é assim, demonstre-o com factos.

Por causa do “vínculo imprescindível com os Estados Unidos”, reiterado ontem por Conte no seu discurso na Câmara, a Itália está privada da sua soberania e transformada na primeira linha da frente da estratégia nuclear USA. Com o consentimento e o silêncio cúmplice multipartidário.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Dov’è l’Impegno antinucleare di Luigi Di Maio?

il manifesto, 10 de Setembro de 2019

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Through the summer the world has watched as protests shook Hong Kong. As early as April they began as peaceful demonstrations which peaked in early June, with hundreds of thousands, in protest of an extradition bill. That bill would have allowed Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, to return criminals to Taiwan, mainland China or Macau for crimes committed there – after approval by multiple layers of the Hong Kong judiciary. In the wake of those enormous nonviolent demonstrations, Carrie Lam, CEO of Hong Kong, “suspended” consideration of the extradition bill, a face-saving ploy. To make sure she was understood, she declared it “dead.” The large rallies, an undeniable expression of the peaceful will of a large segment of the Hong Kong population had won an impressive victory. The unpopular extradition bill was slain.

But that was not the end of the story. A smaller segment continued the protests. (The Hong Kong police at one point estimated 4,000 hard core protesters.) pressed on with other demands, beginning with a demand that the bill be “withdrawn,” not simply “suspended.” To this writer death by “suspension” is every bit as terminal as death by “withdrawal.” As this piece is sent to press, news comes that Corrie Lam has now formally withdrawn the bill.

As the summer passed, two iconic photos presented us with two human faces that captured two crucial features of the ongoing protests; they were not shown widely in the West.

First, Fu Guohao, a reporter for the Chinese mainland newspaper, Global Times, was attacked, bound and beaten by protesters during their takeover of the Hong Kong International Airport. When police and rescuers tried to free him, the protesters blocked them and also attempted to block the ambulance that eventually bore him off to the hospital. The photos and videos of this ugly sequence were seen by netizens across the globe even though given scant attention in Western media. Where were the stalwart defenders of the press in the US as this happened? As one example, DemocracyNow! (DN!) was completely silent as was the rest of the U.S. mainstream media.

Fu’s beating came after many weeks when the protesters threw up barriers to stop traffic; blocked closure of subway doors, in defiance of commuters and police, to shut down mass transit; sacked and vandalized the HK legislature building; assaulted bystanders who disagreed with them; attacked the police with Molotov cocktails; and stormed and defaced police stations. Fu’s ordeal and all these actions shown in photos on Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, a paper leaning to the side of protesters, gave the lie to the image of these “democracy activists” as young Ghandis of East Asia. (The South China Morning Post is based in Hong Kong and its readership is concentrated there so it has to have some reasonable fidelity in reporting events; otherwise it loses credibility – and circulation. Similarly, much as the New York Times abhorred Occupy Wall Street, it could not fail to report on it.)

Which brings us to the second photo, much more important to U.S. citizens, that of a “Political Counselor” at the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong who in August was pictured meeting with, Joshua Long and Nathan Law, at a hotel there. The official was formerly a State Dept functionary in the Middle East – in Jerusalem, Riyadh, Beirut, Baghdad and Doha, certainly not an area lacking in imperial intrigues and regime change ops. That photo graphically contradicted the contention that there is no US “black hand,” as China calls it, in the Hong Kong riots. In fact, here the “black hand” was caught red-handed, leading Chen Weihua, a very perceptive China Daily columnist, to tweet the picture with the comment: “This is very very embarrassing. … a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if a Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters.”

And that photo with the protest leaders is just a snap shot of the ample evidence of the hand of the U.S. government and its subsidiaries in the Hong Kong events. Perhaps the best documentation of the U.S. “black hand” is to be found in Dan Cohen’s superb article of August 17 in The Greyzone entitled, “Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence.” The article by Cohen deserves careful reading; it leaves little doubt that there is a very deep involvement of the US in the Hong Kong riots. Of special interest is the detailed role and funding, amounting to over $1.3 million, in Hong Kong alone in recent years, of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED), ever on the prowl for new regime change opportunities. Perhaps most important, the leaders of the “leaderless” protests have met with major US political figures such as John Bolton, Vice President Pence, Secretary Pompeo, Senator Marco Rubio, Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel, Nancy Pelosi and others, all of whom have heartily endorsed their efforts. This is not to deny that the protests were home grown at the outset in response to what was widely perceived as a legitimate grievance. But it would be equally absurd to deny that the U.S. is fishing in troubled Hong Kong waters to advance its anti-China crusade and regime change ambitions.

That said, where is the U.S. peace movement on the question of Hong Kong?

Let us be clear. One can sympathize with the demand of many citizens of Hong Kong to end the extradition bill or even the other four demands: an inquiry into police handling of their protests; the retraction of a government characterization of the demonstrations as riots; an amnesty for arrested protesters; and universal suffrage. (The first three all grow out of violence of the protests, be it noted.) But that is the business of the citizens of Hong Kong and all the rest of China. It is not the business of the U.S. government. Peace activists in the US should be hard at work documenting and denouncing the US government’s meddling in Hong Kong, which could set us on the road to war with China, potentially a nuclear war. And that is a mission for which we in the U.S. are uniquely suited since, at least in theory, we have some control over our government.

So, we should expect to hear the cry, “US Government, Hands Off Hong Kong”? Sadly, with a few principled exceptions it is nowhere to be heard on either the left or right.

Let’s take DemocracyNow! (DN!) as one example, a prominent one on the “progressive” end of the spectrum. From April through August 28, there have been 25 brief accounts (“headlines” as DN! calls them, each amounting to a few paragraphs) of the events in Hong Kong and 4 features, longer supposedly analytic pieces, on the same topic. Transcripts of the four features are here, here, here and here. There is not a single mention of possible US involvement or the meetings of the various leaders of the protest movement with Pompeo, Bolton, Pence, or the “Political Counselor” of the US Hong Kong consulate.

And this silence on US meddling is true not only of most progressive commentators but also most conservatives.

On the Left when someone cries “Democracy,” many forget all their pro-peace sentiment. And similarly on the Right when someone cries “Communism,” anti-interventionism too often goes down the tubes. Forgotten is John Quincy Adams’s 1823 dictum, endlessly quoted but little honored, “We do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Where does this lapse on the part of activists come from? Is it a deep-seated loyalty to Empire, the result of endless indoctrination? Is it U.S. Exceptionalism, ingrained to the point of unconsciousness? Or is it at bottom a question of who the paymasters are?

On both sides anti-interventionism takes an especially hard hit when it comes to major competitors of the US, powers that could actually stand in the way of US global hegemony, like Russia or China. In fact on its August 12 program, DN! managed a story taking a swipe at Russia right next to the one on Hong Kong – and DN! was in the forefront of advancing the now debunked and disgraced Russiagate Conspiracy Theory. In contrast, the anti-interventionist movement is front and center when it comes to weaker nations, for example Venezuela – and quite properly so. But when one puts this advocacy for weaker nations together with the New Cold War stance on China and Russia, one must ask what is going on here. Does it betoken a sort of imperial paternalism on the part of DN and like-minded outlets? It certainly gains DN!, and others like it, considerable credibility among anti-interventionists which can help win them to a position in favor of DN!’s New Cold War stance. And the masters of Empire certainly understand how valuable such credibility can be at crucial moments when support for their adventures is needed from every quarter.

Fortunately, there are a handful of exceptions to this New Cold War attitude. For example, on the left Popular Resistance has provided a view of the events in Hong Kong and a superb interview with K.J. Noh that go beyond the line of the State Department, the mainstream media and DN! And on the libertarian Right there is the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and the work of its Executive Director Dan McAdams.

We would all do well to follow the example of these organizations in rejecting a New Cold War mentality which is extremely dangerous, perhaps fatally so. A good beginning for us in the U.S. is to demand of our government, “Hands Off Hong Kong.”

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John V. Walsh can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from The Unz Review

There was a speech that the smug Harvard neoconservative Graham Allison presented at the US aristocracy’s TED Talks on 20 November 2018, and which is titled on youtube as “Is war between China and the US inevitable?” It currently has 1,217,326 views. The transcript is here.

His speech said that the US must continue being the world’s #1 power, or else persuade China’s Government to cooperate more with what America’s billionaires demand. He said that the model for the US regime’s supposed goodness in international affairs is The Marshall Plan after the end of World War II. He ended his speech with the following passage as pointing the way forward, to guide US foreign policies during the present era. Here is that concluding passage:

Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.

My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.

The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population. Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the USSR was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the USA. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the US itself. It brought them to America whenever the US regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the USSR Right away, the US was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the US conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the US as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the USSR.)

The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the US, which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the US regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the US regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the US rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually? (The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him.)

Truman was unfortunately an extremely effective agent of America’s billionaires in advancing them first to continue their MIC (or, actually, the weapons-making firms), so that the billionaires who controlled them had no reason to fear the breakout of peace in the post-war era — America right away started its world-record-shattering number of coups and invasions, virtually as soon as Truman took over.

First was the coup in Thailand in 1948 — right at the CIA’s very start — in order to grab hold of Asia’s narcotics traffic so that the needed off-the-books funding for that spy-agency could be instituted (and its existence didn’t become public until the great investigative journalist Gary Webb uncovered its operations in Nicaragua during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, which entailed illegal funding — from cocaine-sales — of Reagan’s war against Nicaragua, a Soviet-friendly country) The heroic Gary Webb became blackballed from America’s ’news’-(actually propaganda)-media and plunged into poverty so that he (according to the government) committed suicide and “wasn’t murdered,” but (either way) his death was another of the CIA’s secret victories.

Hey, if this looks bad for the United States, then the truth looks bad. This is not the propaganda. Deceits such as Graham Allison’s slick distortions are the propaganda — and thus he and the others who do such work are enormously successful and highly honored by America’s billionaires and the rest of their retinues. People such as that, train the next generation of and for America’s aristocracy, so that they can become just as smug in their evil and self-deception as their trainers are. Their parents get vindicated by Allison and others of the billionaire-class’s propaganda-merchants (‘historians’ ‘journalists’, etc.). What’s not to like in this? It’s virtually a cult of the world’s most-powerful people and of their retinues. Lots of people would like to join it — and, “To hell with the truth.”

Even the U.N. has caved to the American behemoth. It offers an article “UN/DESA POLICY BRIEF #52: THE MARSHALL PLAN, IMF AND FIRST UN DEVELOPMENT DECADE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: LESSONS FOR OUR TIME”, eulogizing what maybe its authors didn’t know was actually the very start of the Cold War:

Three events from the Golden Age that left significant lessons relevant for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals include: the contributions of the Marshall Plan, the experience leading to the achievement of current account convertibility under the IMF Articles of Agreement and the declaration of the First UN Development Decade. The Marshall Plan marked the very beginning of successful international cooperation in the post-war period.

No mention is made, there, either, that this was the start of the Cold War. The fact that this was the start of America’s war against Russia is simply ignored. Instead, all of this is celebrated. But even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia acknowledges, in its (heavily propagandistic pro-US-regime) article “Molotov Plan”:

The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. It can be seen to be the Soviet Union’s version of the Marshall Plan, which for political reasons the Eastern European countries would not be able to join without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan (1947), proposing instead the Molotov Plan — the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping which was eventually expanded to become the Comecon.[1]

Just think about that, for a moment: The Soviet Union is being blamed there because it “rejected” the US regime’s demand upon all nations that accepted aid from The Marshall Plan, that they be “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence.” How stupid does the writer of that particular passage have to be? Wikipedia’s description of the Molotov Plan continues:

The Molotov Plan was symbolic of the Soviet Union’s refusal to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, or allow any of their satellite states to do so because of their belief that the Marshall Plan was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states through the conditions imposed and by making beneficiary countries economically dependent on the United States (Officially, one of the goals of the Marshall Plan was to prevent the spread of Communism).

The Marshall Plan wasn’t merely “an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states” but was instead an actual lure, to draw into “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence,” the nations “that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union.” This wasn’t really about “Soviet interest in their satellite states” but instead it was about the US regime’s policy, immediately after WW II, to take over not merely the nations that the US had helped in Europe to defeat Hitler, but also the nations that the Soviet Union had helped to defeat Hitler. It was, in short, a US grab, to control territory within the lands that the Soviet Union had saved from Nazism. This is the reality.

Look at these tables, again, of how much the US and the Soviet Union — and all other countries — had suffered losses from actually fighting against Hitler, and then consider that the nation which had lost the least was now so war-mongering as to immediately try to grab “sphere of influence” — the very border-nations which were crucial to the Soviet Union’s national security against that very same grabber — grabbing away from the one that had lost the most.

Here is another piece of US-regime propaganda about the Molotov Plan (which they say was the Soviet response to The Marshall Plan even though it wasn’t and the Soviet Union had been so destroyed by Hitler as to have made any such donations to their own satellites only minuscule by comparison):

The plan was a system of bilateral trade agreements that established COMECON to create an economic alliance of socialist countries. This aid allowed countries in Europe to stop relying on American aid, and therefore allowed Molotov Plan states to reorganize their trade to the USSR instead. The plan was in some ways contradictory, however, because at the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern bloc countries, they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR.

Those weren’t “socialist” countries; they were dictatorial socialist countries, as opposed to democratic socialist countries such as in Scandinavia — the proper term for what the Soviet alliance was is “communist,” not “socialist” — and there was a very big difference between the Scandinavian countries, versus the communist countries (though the US regime wants to slur one by the other so as to sucker fools against democratic socialism — progressivism).

And, by “they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR,” we’re supposed to think that Germany, and Italy, and Japan, shouldn’t have compensated their victims? What? And yet we’re alsosupposed to believe that Germany should pay it for Jews who lived in Israel? What’s that about? Why?

Why ‘should’ Germany be funding Jews to grab land that for thousands of years has been populated almost entirely by Arabs and for perhaps a thousand years almost entirely by Muslims, thus subsidizing the theft of that land, the grabbing of that land, by Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Holocaust? What is all of this really about, and what is propaganda such as Graham Allison delivers, really about? America’s manufacturers of the machinery of mass-death need to “make a living,” don’t they? And isn’t that propaganda the most effective way to do it? So, that’s what it really is about.

There is the presumption by neoconservatives — American imperialists — that the US Government is both democratic and well-intentioned, but at least after the death of FDR, it hasn’t been either one. (Back in his time, it was a limited democracy, verylimited for Blacks.) And this is the reason why the US regime double-crossed Russia and shamed The West when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended communism and ended the USSR and even ended its Warsaw Pact in 1991, but the US side secretly continued the Cold War, and does so increasingly today.

None of this fits the US regime’s propaganda-narrative, such as Graham Allison, and many other thousands of other regime-shills, present. Theirs is called ‘history’. The reality is called “history.” In the US and its vassal-nations, there is vastly more of a market for ‘history’ than for “history,” because the billionaires not only control the government — they also control the alleged news-media, history-publishers, and other means of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the public. So, it’s a self-selecting circle of deceivers that are at the top.

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Post Scriptum. Truman’s Diary

To get to the beginning of the Cold War, Truman’s complete diary needs to be published. The excerpts that have been published do include information that contradicts and overrides his published statements, and that thereby helps researchers penetrate to what was really going on in his head at the time. What they show is a tragically unintelligent but well-intentioned person, who had some guiding prejudices and therefore thought in labels instead of trying actually to understand the other person’s real problems (such as FDR did).

For example, at the Potsdam Conference during 17 July to 2 August 1945, Stalin tried to explain why the Soviet Union needed to be surrounded by friendly countries just as much as the US and Britain did, but neither Truman nor Churchill would accept any such concern by Stalin. As the BBC summarized that, “Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.”

Truman got his views on such matters from his top generals and other advisors. His diary on 16 July 1945 said

“Talked to Mc Caffery about France. He is scared stiff of Communism, the Russian society which isn’t communism at all but just police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.”

But Stalin actually had lots of reason to distrust both Truman and Churchill — just as they had lots of reason to distrust him. FDR hadn’t been so totally in thrall of his generals, nor as naive — nor as manipulable. Just a day after that entry on July 16th, came this on July 17th: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.”

The problem isn’t that Truman often misunderstood, but that he surrounded himself with people that his Party’s top donors liked. Truman wanted to be a progressive but ended up being only a liberal — which his Party’s wealthiest found to be acceptable. His main achievements were in foreign policy and amounted to leading Churchill’s Cold War, pretty much as Stalin had expected. For example, at Potsdam, as Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40),

“Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [But] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, Ike said,] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’”

So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration for Japan’s leaders, and nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex.”)

So: those bomb-drops were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, not really for the hot WW II to beat Japan. However, Truman could also have deceived himself about what his motives actually were, because his diary on 25 July 1945 said:

“This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.” The two bombings occurred on 6 and 9 August — right after Potsdam. Obviously, it wasn’t just “soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” And, never, after he perpetrated that, did he express regret about all those “women and children.” He had no difficulty ignoring embarrassing realities.

Truman’s intentions were progressive — for example, his diary-entry on 16 July 1945said (in the context of damning the Soviet Government)

“It seems that Sweden, Norway, Denmark and perhaps Switzerland have the only real peoples government on the Continent of Europe. But the rest are as bad lot from the standpoint of the people who do not believe in tyrany.” (He routinely misspelled like that.) Unlike Republicans, who love to equate “socialism” with communism and simply to ignore the Scandinavian examples disproving that equation, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to fall for the billionaires’ line on it. He didn’t need to be: he was a Democrat. Even the billionaires in his Party don’t spout that line — it’s strictly Republicans who equate “socialism” with “communism.”

FDR was a leader. Truman didn’t know how to lead, because he didn’t even know himself. Himself was a puppet, and he didn’t even know it, much less know the strings (from Ike etc. — the billionaires’ knowing agents) (which were pulling his own brain).

And that’s how the road to today started.

And 200 years from now is, by now, virtually certain to be vastly worse.

If persons of FDR’s calibre had been America’s Presidents after his death, then none of this would likely have happened (at least not nearly as much); but none of them were.

Leadership matters. It really does. It really did.

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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.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

C’è finalmente un ministro degli Esteri che si impegnerà a far aderire l’Italia al Trattato Onu sulla proibizione delle armi nucleari? Il neoministro Luigi Di Maio ha sottoscritto nel 2017 il Parliamentary Pledge dell’Ican, coalizione internazionale insignita del Premio Nobel per la Pace.

In tal modo il capo politico del Movimento 5 Stelle – attuale ministro degli Esteri – si è impegnato a «promuovere la firma e la ratifica di questo Trattato di rilevanza storica» da parte dell’Italia. L’Impegno Ican è stato sottoscritto anche da altri attuali ministri 5 Stelle – Alfonso Bonafede (Giustizia), Federico D’Incà (Rapporti con il Parlamento), Fabiana Dadone (Pubblica Amministrazione) – e da altri parlamentari del M5S, come Roberto Fico e Manlio Di Stefano.

C’è però un problema. All’Articolo 4 il Trattato stabilisce: «Ciascuno Stato parte che abbia sul proprio territorio armi nucleari, possedute o controllate da un altro Stato, deve assicurare la rapida rimozione di tali armi». Per aderire al Trattato Onu, l’Italia dovrebbe quindi richiedere agli Stati uniti di rimuovere  dal nostro territorio le bombe nucleari B-61 (che già violano il Trattato di non-proliferazione) e di non installarvi le nuove B61-12 né altre armi nucleari.

Inoltre, poiché l’Italia fa  parte dei paesi che (come dichiara la stessa Nato) «forniscono all’Alleanza aerei equipaggiati per trasportare bombe nucleari, su cui gli Stati uniti mantengono l’assoluto controllo, e personale addestrato a tale scopo», per aderire al Trattato Onu l’Italia dovrebbe chiedere di essere esentata da tale funzione. Richieste impensabili da parte del secondo governo Conte che, come il primo, considera gli Stati uniti «alleato privilegiato».

Qui si scoprono le carte. L’Impegno Ican è stato sottoscritto in Italia da oltre 200 parlamentari, per la maggior parte del Pd e del M5S (circa 90 ciascuno), gli attuali partiti di governo. Con quale risultato?

Il 19 settembre 2017, il giorno prima che il Trattato venisse aperto alla firma, la Camera approvava una mozione Pd (votata anche da Forza Italia e Fratelli d’Italia) che impegnava il governo Gentiloni a «valutare la possibilità di aderire al Trattato Onu». Da parte sua il M5S non chiedeva l’adesione al Trattato Onu, e quindi la rimozione dall’Italia delle armi nucleari Usa, ma di «dichiarare l’indisponibilità dell’Italia ad utilizzare armi nucleari, e a non acquisire le componenti necessarie per rendere gli aerei F-35 idonei al trasporto di armi nucleari». Ossia che gli F-35, concepiti per l’attacco nucleare soprattutto con le B61-12, siano usati dall’Italia con una sorta di sicura che impedisca l’uso di armi nucleari.

Il giorno dopo il Consiglio nord-atlantico, con il pieno consenso italiano, ha respinto e attaccato il Trattato Onu. Esso è stato finora firmato da 70 paesi ma, a causa delle pressioni Usa/Nato, ratificato solo da 26 mentre ne occorrono 50 perché entri in vigore. Lo stesso è  avvenuto con il Trattato sulle forze nucleari intermedie affossato da Washington. Sia in sede Nato, Ue e Onu, il primo governo Conte si è accodato alla decisione statunitense, dando luce verde alla installazione di nuovi missili nucleari Usa in Europa, Italia compresa.

Il solenne Impegno sottoscritto dai parlamentari Pd, 5 Stelle e altri si è rivelato dunque, alla prova dei fatti, un espediente demagogico per raccogliere voti. Se per qualcuno non è così, lo dimostri coi fatti.

A causa dell’«imprescindibile legame con gli Stati uniti», ribadito ieri da Conte nel discorso alla Camera, l’Italia viene privata della propria sovranità e trasformata in prima linea della strategia nucleare Usa. Con il consenso e il complice silenzio multipartisan.

Manlio Dinucci

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Where Was Osama bin Laden on September 10, 2001? One Day Before 9/11. His Whereabouts Were Known

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 10, 2019

This CBS Report suggests that Osama bin Laden had been admitted to a Pakistani Military hospital in Rawalpindi on the 10th local time, less than 24 hours before the terrorist attacks.

9/11 after 18 Years. “Hard Evidence Cannot Prevail over a Transparent Official Lie”

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, September 09, 2019

The 9/11 Commission report was not an investigation and ignored all forensic evidence. The NIST simulation of Building 7’s collapse was rigged to get the desired result.  The only real investigations have been done by private scientists, engineers, and architects.

Who Is Osama Bin Laden?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 08, 2019

A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that “Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects”. CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.” Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”.

9/11 Truth: Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, September 06, 2019

These “9/11 Truthers” have been unfairly labeled “conspiracy theorists” (a pejorative term invented by the CIA after the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 raised all sorts of skepticism doubting the official story blaming “the single shooter”).

9/11, Drug Money, Oil Resources and the Invasion of Afghanistan: Michael Ruppert Refutes the Official 9/11 Story

By Michael Welch and Michael Ruppert, September 05, 2019

Pertinent questions as to ulterior motives for a deadly military invasion of Afghanistan, or about the failure to scramble military aircraft to intercept the hijacked airplanes when they veered off course were never asked in the prominent newspapers, television networks and other major media organs of the day.

Another Official 9/11 Big Lie Exposed — Again

By Stephen Lendman, September 05, 2019

On September 10, 2001 (one day before 9/11), CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported his admittance to a Rawalpindi, Pakistan hospital. He was dying.

Fire Did Not Cause 3rd Tower’s Collapse on 9/11, New Study Finds

By AE911Truth, September 04, 2019

Despite calls for the evidence to be preserved, New York City officials had the building’s debris removed and destroyed in the ensuing weeks and months, preventing a proper forensic investigation from ever taking place. Seven years later, federal investigators concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires.

Call for New 9/11 Investigation: New York Area Fire Commissioners Make History

By Ted Walter, July 29, 2019

They started off by saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Ten minutes later, they were reading the text of a resolution claiming the existence of “overwhelming evidence” that “pre-planted explosives . . . caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings.”

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In 2020, the participants in the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will congregate for the treaty’s 10th review conference. Which means that it may be a good time to re-examine the relevance of the NPT, and even consider the idea of dropping this treaty in its entirety, in favor of the new kid on the block: the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, also know as the Ban Treaty. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying, one treaty seeks to stop the further spread of nuclear weapons, while the other goes further and seeks to get rid of them entirely. This difference is reflected in their formal titles.

Why should we ditch the former in favor of the latter? To answer that, let us look at history.

In the half-century of its existence, the broader objective of the NPT—to restrict the spread of nuclear weapons—has been corrupted. Instead, states possessing nuclear weapons have used the NPT to legalize their own nuclear weapons and criminalize everyone else’s. The result is a one-sided and duplicitous nuclear order that is unstable, dangerous, and contrary to the expectations on which non-nuclear weapon states joined the NPT. The nuclear weapon states have squandered a number of opportunities to fulfill their end of the bargain embedded in the treaty. These include reneging on commitments given at the 1995 Review and Extension Conference, the 2000 and 2010 Review Conference conclusions, and boycotting the UN-mandated multilateral negotiations of a legal prohibition on nuclear weapons. These failures line up as proof that nuclear weapon states have no intention to give up their nuclear weapons.

Consequently, it may be time for states that are serious about nuclear disarmament to consider withdrawing from the NPT entirely. The only terms on which we see any use for these states to remain members would be if the NPT becomes a forum for an orderly and time-bound transfer from the old nuclear order—based on disingenuous and cynical interpretations of the NPT by the five nuclear weapon states (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to uphold the status quo—to a new nuclear order where the premise is that nuclear weapons are illegal for all.

A “cornerstone” of what? The NPT has often been described as the “cornerstone” of the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime. This metaphor conjures up an image of a key building block securing a structure of sorts—let’s say a house. The intention with the NPT was to build a house where nuclear weapons would eventually become illegal and illegitimate. Accordingly, at key points in the NPT’s history, states without nuclear weapons were assured that the NPT is a blueprint for a world without nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons’ so-called legality in the hands of those states which had conducted nuclear tests by 1967 was understood to be only a temporary measure—a means to an end, intended as a practical measure to make nuclear disarmament negotiations easier. It was based upon an earlier proposal, known as the Irish Resolution—the idea that by curbing the spread of nuclear weapons up front, it would ultimately be easier to negotiate disarmament down the road, because there would be fewer states with nuclear weapons to begin with.

Herein lies the problem: The house that was built (and continues to be built) on the NPT cornerstone is not the one that the architects promised. Instead, the nuclear weapon states have used this treaty to argue that their nuclear weapons are legal and a sovereign right. As a result, the NPT became the cornerstone of a severely hypocritical nuclear order where a few states regard wielding their nuclear weapons as legitimate while proscribing this sovereign right to other states—something which India dubbed “nuclear apartheid.”

The disingenuous interpretation of the NPT has led to and reinforced entrenched nuclear military-industrial complexes. Moreover, this order has structurally enabled proliferation, arms races, the continuation of conflicts that should long ago have been resolved politically (such as the Korean Peninsula and Kashmir), war under the pretence of counter-proliferation (Iraq in 2003 and likely against Iran in the near future) and unacceptable nuclear risks—from hair-trigger alerts and accidents to terrorism. Four out of the five nuclear weapon states are not even prepared anymore to endorse the Reagan-Gorbachev principle, which states that nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. This led observers such as former California governor Jerry Brown and nuclear expert William Potter to conclude that “it is hard to maintain faith in the future of the NPT.”

Put on the spot, defenders of the nuclear order have tried to convince us that although the house built over the last 50 years is not the one that the NPT promised, we should remain patient: The house, they claim, is simply just not finished yet. The slow pace of nuclear disarmament is attributed to the world not being safe for the elimination of nuclear weapons at the present time. The US initiative in the NPT forum, Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament, is just the latest excuse to delay nuclear disarmament by postulating mythical prerequisites for its implementation.

A house of cards? Article 6 of the NPT demands that all signatories—both nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states—“pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament…” While the height of the (quantitative) nuclear arms race is hopefully behind us, there are still 14,000 nuclear weapons on Earth, each with a destruction capacity that is on average much larger than the Hiroshima bomb. The use of only a fraction of this worldwide arsenal is enough to destroy the world beyond recovery.

Multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations by 124 states—which only started up in 2017—were boycotted by all the nuclear-armed states and most of their allies. Not one of the nuclear-armed states has signed the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Instead, all the nuclear weapon states have gone the other direction, and are in the process of what they call “modernizing” their nuclear arsenals. The United States, for instance, is planning to spend $1.2 trillion (not counting inflation) over the next 30 years to modernize its nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles. The United States and Russia, collectively possessing more than 90 percent of all nuclear weapons, are quick to point to bilateral arms control treaties as evidence of their step-by-step nuclear disarmament approach. However, they have no qualms about dismantling these treaties on a whim when it suits them, as was the case with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediary Nuclear Forces Treaty. That makes a mockery of Article 6.

Furthermore, contradicting one of the agreed negotiation guidelines that the NPT must embody “an acceptable balance of mutual responsibilities and obligations of nuclear and non-nuclear powers,” there have been discriminatory extensions over time that tip the scales against non-nuclear weapons states. The establishment of the Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, for instance, institute informal nuclear export controls on non-nuclear weapon states, while the IAEA Additional Protocol further lengthens the list of requirements for these states to prove their non-proliferation credentials.

The non-nuclear weapon states have been patient for a long time. Every five years, they reminded the nuclear weapon states about their disarmament promises. Sometimes, additional promises were made by the nuclear weapon states. In 1995, at the Extension Conference, a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and a fissile material ‘cut-off’ treaty were promised, as well as negotiations of a Middle East weapons of mass destruction free zone. Today, none of these has become a reality (the CTBT is in limbo as it has not entered into force). The same applies for similar promises made at the 2000 and the 2010 Review Conferences. The United States even backtracks on these earlier promises—something that was criticized at the 2019 NPT Prepcom by countries like Sweden, Switzerland, and NATO member state Latvia. The final outcome of this Prepcom was a strong signal from the non-nuclear weapon states to the nuclear weapon states that they are running out of patience.

Let’s also not forget that the “cornerstone” of the non-proliferation regime still does not contain the only nuclear proliferator in the Middle East (Israel). Nor does the non-proliferation regime contain three out of four nuclear armed states in Asia—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—as members. In sum, one third of all nuclear armed states are not at all covered by the NPT, and the prospects for bringing them in are nil. At the same time, these non-official nuclear armed states give permanent incentives to the further spread of nuclear weapons, especially in the Middle East and East Asia.

The nuclear order built on the infamous “cornerstone” therefore seems to be a house of cards, ready to topple with the next wave of proliferation, in all likelihood in the Middle East (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and maybe others like Turkey and Egypt). Former Canadian diplomat Paul Meyer concludes that

“it is a wonder that the NPT retains any credibility as a framework for global nuclear governance.”

Along the same lines, Harvard academic Rebecca Davis Gibbons fears that “without change, [the NPT] will likely suffer a slower but no less consequential death.”

A Hobbesian world after withdrawal? Many observers, like the Ukrainian scholar, Polina Sinovets, fear the end of the NPT, as it might lead us to “a truly Hobbesian nightmare” where the old rules are abandoned and the new ones have not been developed or have not been accepted by all.

That fear is unjustified for two reasons. First, as stated above, the NPT is not the cornerstone of the non-proliferation and disarmament regime anymore. It has become an obstacle to its own ideals, a farce of empty promises. The longer it persists (without fulfilment of Article 6), the less relevant and more politically void it becomes. We are reaching the moment where more states—perhaps many more states—will start leaving the treaty anyhow. Some may leave because they are tired of not being treated respectfully; others for fear of becoming targets of aggression under fabricated premises of nuclear proliferation.

Second—and this is something that many observers have not thought through—the NPT can and in all likelihood will be replaced by the Ban Treaty. Most states, at least if they sign the Ban Treaty, would be bound by the Ban Treaty’s prohibitions—which include NPT safeguards. The Ban Treaty embodies all that the NPT stood for originally and more. It provides the necessary framework for negotiating the verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons when nuclear armed states join.

What would states who withdraw from the NPT lose?

Nothing. On the contrary, we would end up living in a different world, that replaces a discriminatory regime with a regime in which all states are equal—at least with respect to the possession of nuclear weapons. It would be a world without a treaty that ends up legitimizing nuclear weapons for a small group of states while condemning their acquisition by most other states. It would be a world in which nuclear weapons and their possessors would be regarded as pariah states, possessing defense instruments that are not only inhumane, immoral and illegitimate, but also illegal once the Ban Treaty enters into force.

Is it possible to redeem the NPT? If the original intent of the NPT is followed through to its logical conclusion, the NPT must be superseded or amended. A world without nuclear weapons does not need an NPT, because there would be no (legal) nuclear weapon states. However, such a world has need for the system of safeguards and verification that the NPT has established.

The only way that we see any worth in states continuing to be members of the NPT is if the NPT becomes a dynamic and time-bound forum for the orderly transition to a new nuclear order where nuclear weapons are illegal for all. Such a transition would start with nuclear weapon states and their allies joining the Ban Treaty or initiating the negotiation of a Convention on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The NPT Review Conferences could then be used to determine what aspects of the NPT must survive into the new nuclear order—such as safeguards and how to bring non-NPT nuclear armed states into the fold of nuclear disarmament. But, inevitably, the NPT must be replaced with another international agreement—be it the Ban Treaty or a newly negotiated instrument—that abolishes nuclear weapons, oversees their elimination, and institutes a universal system to ensure nuclear abstinence for all.

If the penny doesn’t drop soon for nuclear weapon states that this is the only way forward, then rationally there seems little else for states that are serious about a world without nuclear weapons to do, but to walk away from the NPT.

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Joelien Pretorius is an associate professor in Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Tom Sauer is an associate professor in international politics at the Universiteit Antwerpen in Belgium. 

Featured image: UN/IAEA inspectors examine suspect equipment in Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War. Photo Credit: IAEA Action Team

Did South Africa need another high-profile reminder of climate chaos, after the Cape Town drought in 2015 to 2018; the two cyclones in March to April that ravaged Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe and killed more than 1 000 of our neighbours; and Easter Monday’s “Durban Rain Bomb”, which dropped 170mm that day, leaving 71 people dead?

Unless we take action, extreme weather will be amplified further, by an extreme inferno. More than 72 000 fires are now raging across the Amazon, the world’s biggest and most biodiverse rainforest, which is 55-million years old. The lives of indigenous people who depend on the forest have received limited attention, with the world’s focus mainly on climate change.

The Amazon is a carbon sink that stores carbon dioxide, and destroying the forest releases massive amounts into the atmosphere.

Amazon deforestation had declined 70% between 2004 and 2012, thanks to the Brazilian Workers’ Party government’s clamp down on abusive plantations, logging and mining. Brazil adopted laws protecting half of the Amazon and its indigenous people, which means 80% of the forest is still standing. However, 30% of this area is not under legal protection.

Brazil’s new right-wing president, Jair Bolsanaro, is destroying the Amazon to benefit the elites who elected him on that platform. The result of this ecocide is an 84% increase in fires in 2019 compared to 2018. The fires have mainly been set intentionally to clear land for cattle ranches, soya bean farms and palm oil plantations.

This increases the likelihood of runaway climate change. If we lose another fifth of the Amazon, a loop of “die back” will be triggered: a cascade of collapse that is beyond human intervention. Overall, the Amazon forest holds about 90-billion tons of carbon, which would put the equivalent of a decade’s worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

The immediate task is to put out the fires. The growing intensity of global pressure is finally forcing Bolsanaro to act. He’s responding like a petulant child, typical of the new brand of extremely conservative leaders, accusing nongovernmental organisations of trying to make him look bad and world leaders of insulting him. He is claiming that the world is undermining Brazil’s sovereignty over the Amazon — not incorrectly given what is at stake — and has demanded an apology from French President Emmanuel Macron before accepting the G7’s paltry $20-million aid offer. Finally, last Friday, Bolsonaro called in 43 000 army troops and two aeroplanes to help to extinguish fires and stop illegal deforestation.

What can amplify the pressure further? On social media, people post pleas to boycott products produced on deforested land. We should stop eating meat fed by those soya plantations, and reduce consumption of paper products. The world needs to demonstrate a dramatic cut in demand, because it typically takes years for markets to adjust. Aside from widespread declarations of vegetarianism, another approach would be people’s sanctions against Brazilian products so as to punish the companies that support the Bolsonaro government. The Amazon inferno is just one reason, as Bolsonaro, like US President Donald Trump, deserves sanctions on many other grounds.

According to Maria Luísa Mendonça, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil,

“The international community needs to call for a boycott of the main commodities produced by agribusiness: beef, soy, sugarcane and timber. I think this is the only message that is going to have an effect in terms of pressuring the Bolsonaro administration, because he doesn’t believe in climate change and he is implementing policies that are giving a green light for deforestation.”

In mid-November, President Cyril Ramaphosa is due to join the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (Brics) summit, which Bolsonaro will host in Brasília — and what better time for a boycott, against a man who, in any case, prioritises his alliance with fellow climate-denialist Trump ahead of other considerations?

Those are some of the “sticks” we need to wield, but others suggest we give Bolsonaro more “carrots”. Some bankers, bureaucrats and even conservative nongovernmental organisations believe in “commodifying nature” by compensating the Brazilian government for protecting natural assets as “carbon offsets”. Could we pay Brazil not to destroy the world’s most important rainforest?

Misguided incentive schemes to protect the forest have sprouted up, such as the 2010 ‘Amazon Fund’ set up by governments in Norway and Germany, wasting millions in payments to large and medium-sized farmers. The United Nations’ so-called ‘Reducing Emissions through forest Degradation and Deforestation’ (‘REDD’) financing and similar offset schemes fall prey to all manner of scams, not to mention massive fires (as exposed here).

Asked her opinion on Democracy Now television, Mendonça responds, “Giving aid to the Bolsonaro administration? I don’t think that is going to help very much. I think we need to support indigenous communities, small farmers, that are protecting their land and who produce over 70% of the food for our internal markets.” One respected group that is doing just this is Amazon Watch.

More resources for — and solidarity with — climate defenders are vital to combat the economic logic driving the climate destroyers. Agri-corporate profits from the Amazon are worth an estimated $20-billion annually. Misguided incentive schemes have sprouted up, such as the 2010 “Amazon Fund” set up by governments in Norway and Germany, which wasted millions in payments to large and medium-sized farmers. The United Nations’ so-called Reducing Emissions through forest Degradation and Deforestation (Redd) financing and similar offset schemes fall prey to all manner of scams, not to mention massive fires, as exposed on Redd-Monitor.

Those in South Africa who care about climate and indigenous people’s rights have opportunities to join the struggle. September 5 is a global day of protest action, including vigils at Brazilian embassies, such as the one at 152 Dallas Avenue in Pretoria. The day before, the University of the Witwatersrand’s international relations department is hosting a People’s Climate Justice Charter workshop.

Then, on September 20, an unprecedented Fridays For Future climate strike is expected in every country, as children lead the world in demanding immediate emissions cuts and rapid adoption of 100% renewable energy, plus massive investments in a green economy and society. Protest sites across South Africa include the Sasol headquarters in Sandton, the Joburg City Council and the Gauteng provincial legislature, among others.

Because of the inherited reliance on apartheid’s coal-addicted “minerals energy complex”, the average South African is the 11th-highest polluter on earth among countries with more than 10-million people. In that category, our emissions per person per unit of economic output is third-highest on earth (trailing only Kazakhstan and the Czech Republic). So we have a special obligation to act.

The carbon tax that treasury applied to big industry in June was shamefully tokenistic, at $0.43 a tonne, compared to Sweden’s tax of $132 a tonne.

And because, owing to apartheid and patriarchy, the vast majority of benefits of coal, smelting and high-carbon industry have gone largely to South Africa’s tiny rich, white, male minority, this struggle is a logical extension of long-standing local campaigns for racial, gender and class equity.

But as the tireless 16 year-old activist Greta Thunberg reminds us, it’s now a matter of generational justice — and our children are absolutely correct to exhibit rage against adults for, as they put it, stealing our future.

The burning Amazon is the clearest sign that the capitalist search for profits — damn the environmental “externalities” — is at the root of the climate crisis. Instead of holding onto what we know and the comforts that we have or yearn for, those of us with a comfortable lifestyle need to question the corporate-dominated power structure and, in a personal way, commit to an existence that transcends materialist desire for consumer goodies.

But what about all the workers and communities dependent upon coal and high-carbon industry? All of us need to envisage and demand a genuine just transition from climate-threatening livelihoods, not just the empty rhetoric from politicians. An example of this is the Million Climate Jobs campaign, which, if it implemented properly, even the giant metalworkers union will support.

The burning Amazon is the clearest sign that the capitalist search for profits is at the root of the climate crisis. Instead of holding onto what we know and the comforts that we have or yearn for, those of us with a comfortable lifestyle need to question the corporate-dominated power structure, and in a personal way, commit to an existence that transcends materialist desire for consumer goodies.

For the sake of our common future, the response to the climate catastrophe must be urgent, rational and fair. South African leaders and society must take a particularly strong stand, because so much is at stake, because we owe so much “climate debt” to our children and neighbours, and because we have the ability to take meaningful action, personally and politically.

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Mary Galvin and Patrick Bond are scholar-activists working on climate justice issues, based at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg and at the Wits School of Governance respectively.

Featured image is from Greenpeace

In a small town in southern Mexico, a public square is decorated with the bust of Mariano Abarca Roblero, a beloved father whose violent death remains unsolved.

Abarca was shot dead in 2009 after organizing protests against Canadian mining company Blackfire Exploration Limited, which was operating in his hometown of Chicomuselo with political support from the Canadian Embassy in Mexico. Activists accused the mining company of damaging the environment and harming the surrounding communities.

For his family, the past decade has been one long struggle for justice, fraught with obstruction, dismissal, and impunity — obstacles that advocates say are all too common in places where Canadian mining companies plant their flags.

Mexican authorities have arrested several people in connection with Abarca’s murder, but all have been released either before trial or on appeal. Nothing has come of public allegations that high-ranking local government officials were involved in the killing.

Meanwhile, the Canadian mining lobby has successfully blocked Canadian legislation to improve accountability for Canadian natural resource companies that operate in developing countries.

Last year, the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project, a legal and advocacy organization representing the Abarca family, filed a request in Canada for a judicial review of the Canadian authorities’ decision not to investigate the actions embassy officials took while protesters were clashing with company representatives.

In July 2019, a federal judge rejected the family’s request, saying that embassy officials did not violate any laws. However, he added, “perhaps Mr. Abarca would not have been murdered” if the embassy had acted differently.

“This decision adversely impacts the ethical operation and accountability of not just embassies, but of the public service more broadly,” said Yavar Hameed, a lawyer who represented Abarca’s family.

Mountains of Chiapas

In the mid 2000s, Canadian brothers Brent and Brad Willis left their offices in Calgary and traveled to the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, where a local mining company was sitting on one of the largest barite deposits in North America. Within a few years, they would obtain permission to operate the mine named “Payback.”

Payback pierced the side of a lush mountain overlooking the forests of Chiapas. It was located on communal lands, known in Mexico as ejidos, near a small town of about 6,000 called Chicomuselo. Mexican law requires agreement from the largely indigenous communities residing on ejidos for any extractive projects to move forward.

Beginning in late 2007, Blackfire negotiated agreements with locals, but rifts quickly emerged within the small community. Some saw an opportunity to benefit from foreign money and welcomed the chance to work in the mine. Others opposed Blackfire’s operations for various reasons, including environmental risks and concerns that the community would not benefit economically.

Mariano Abarca, an organizer from Chicomuselo and founding member of an activist network, soon became a recognizable face of the resistance to Blackfire. Abarca helped spearhead major confrontations with the company, including protests and blockades.

In one instance, according to locals, Blackfire began extracting barite near a road, in an area not covered by an agreement between the company and the ejido. Activists blocked the road and demanded compensation. Another time, protesters blocked a narrow street where clay houses had been damaged after Blackfire’s ore-filled trucks drove through Chicomuselo.

One night in August 2008, three men who had worked for Blackfire came to Abarca’s home, beat him and his son, and held a gun to his wife’s head, according to testimony by his family. One of the men — a manager of personnel and security, and driver for the executive of the mine — was eventually sentenced to prison for the attack. A complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, filed by the Abarca family and supporting organizations, said the attacker was freed after paying a fine.

While activists accused individuals linked to Blackfire of intimidation and harassment, the company’s executives continued to enlist the help of the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City. Canadian officials lobbied Mexican authorities on behalf of Blackfire on a number of issues, even as violence erupted during protests, according to documents released in 2013 under a Freedom of Information request, which include internal emails.

“All of us at Blackfire really appreciate all that the embassy has done to help pressure the state government to get things going for us. We could not do it without your help,” a Blackfire employee wrote to embassy staff in September 2008.

In the midst of the turmoil in Chicomuselo, Blackfire began depositing money into the personal bank account of the town’s then-mayor, Julio Cesar Velasquez Calderon. According to deposit slips submitted in a 2018 court affidavit, multiple monthly payments of 10,000 pesos (US$750) were documented by the company as “tips” or “rewards” over the course of a year. Blackfire also paid for a trip to the resort town of Aguascalientes for the mayor, his family, and members of his entourage.

The payments came to a dramatic end when the mayor allegedly demanded a “sexual encounter” with Cuban singer Niurka Marcos, who was scheduled to perform at a town fair paid for by Blackfire. The allegation was made in a court complaint filed by Blackfire, which also described their monthly payments as extortion by the mayor and requested that the court remove him from his post.

Brent Willis, the former president of Blackfire, told OCCRP that only two payments were made to the mayor’s bank account, but claimed they were intended to compensate Chicomuselo for damage to sidewalks from mining work and to pay for the town fair. He said the money was paid to the mayor because no one else in the town had a bank account.

In a self-published LinkedIn article, Willis told a different story, claiming that the money was for an infrastructure project. He also said the mayor stole the funds, and that Blackfire was a victim of corruption and “anti-mining propaganda.”

The documented payments were investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which raided Blackfire’s Calgary office in 2011, but the corruption probe was closed in 2015, citing a lack of evidence to support criminal charges.

As Blackfire squared off with the mayor of Chicomuselo, Abarca continued to organize protests.

When the runoff from the mine began polluting a river that locals relied on for fresh water, he led a delegation of activists and residents to the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City to challenge its support for Blackfire. In a video recorded at the time, Abarca accused Blackfire of using “shock troops” against protestors.

The following month, Blackfire filed a complaint with the Mexican authorities, accusing activists of criminal activity. The company also sent a letter to the Canadian embassy, outlining safety concerns for planned protests. According to embassy emails, officials shared the concerns with Mexican authorities.

During that period, Abarca was arrested for allegedly disturbing the peace, criminal association, organized delinquency, blocking roadways and damages, his lawyer said. Emails indicate that embassy officials sought information about Abarca’s detention by sending inquiries to various agencies in Mexico, the local human rights commission, as well as Blackfire. Abarca was released after eight days.

In the following months, Abarca reportedly filed a complaint claiming a Blackfire employee threatened to “pump lead” into him to prevent him from further obstructing the mine.

Four days later, on the evening of Nov. 27, 2009, Abarca was shot and killed in front of his home by an assassin who fled on a motorcycle.

Pointing Fingers

Four months after Abarca’s murder, Horacio Culebro Borrayas, a former lawyer for Blackfire who was himself detained in connection with the murder, gave a statement to the National Human Rights Commission saying he had attended a meeting between Blackfire Mexico’s general director and the sub-secretary of the state of Chiapas, Nemesio Ponce Sanchez.

According to Borrayas, at that meeting the Mexican official identified the amount of money that needed to be paid to officials and other interested parties to get the mine up and running. When the Blackfire director brought up the blockade of the road, Sanchez claimed that the only real problem was Abarca, and said he would “weed him out” and if necessary “eliminate” him.

In an interview with OCCRP, Borrayas detailed a surprise meeting with Sanchez shortly after he spoke out against the Chiapas government. According to Borrayas, Sanchez denied ordering the hit, and implicated a different high-ranking public official.

Borrayas also said he feared for his life as a result of his statement to the rights commission.

“They know I’m not going to give up on my conviction that it was the government who killed him.”

Multiple attempts by reporters to reach both former officials were unsuccessful.

Hundreds attended Abarca’s funeral. His coffin was carried down the streets of Chicomuselo, and the procession stopped in front of Blackfire’s local office before heading to the cemetery. Ten days after the murder, the state environment ministry closed the Payback mine, citing unauthorized road use and environmental violations.

When news of the activist’s murder broke, the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City crafted a strategy with press releases, talking points, and briefings that were circulated among the staff to solidify the official message: “This is a matter for Mexican Officials.”

Internally, Canadian officials discussed how Blackfire could file a claim under NAFTA’s dispute settlement clause, but the case never moved forward.

Mexican authorities initially arrested three people in connection with Abarca’s murder, all of whom were linked to Blackfire. One was convicted and spent time in prison, but was released on appeal when a court ruled that he did not receive due process. Others were later arrested and released, including Borrayas. The allegations that a Chiapas state official proposed “eliminating” Abarca for obstructing the mine remain unaddressed by officials and, according to the Abarca family, no one is currently being investigated for the murder.

The Chiapas state prosecutor did not respond to requests for comment.

The state of Chiapas granted Abarca’s widow and their four children a lifetime pension, the details of which remain undisclosed. The family, however, continues to demand justice and push for a thorough investigation into who is responsible for the murder, both in Mexico and in Canada, where a powerful mining lobby has been instrumental in protecting the country’s extractives industry from litigation.

In 2010, the Canadian parliament voted against a proposed law that would have provided an avenue for mining companies to be held accountable for allegations of human rights abuses abroad.

Liberal MP John McKay, the author of the bill, told OCCRP that a representative of Blackfire visited his office to explain that the situation in Chiapas was a labor dispute.

“I thought that was an interesting description of how you handle labor disputes,” McKay said.

Willis told OCCRP that he did not recall who met with McKay.

In the decade since Abarca’s murder, several other cases have been brought forward by foreign nationals in Canadian courts against mining companies for alleged corruption, environmental damage, and human rights violations. In a precedent-setting case in 2017, a judge ruled that British Columbia-based Tahoe Resources would have to answer complaints by Guatemalan activists in a Canadian court. The case is ongoing.

Last year the government created the Canadian Ombudsman for Responsible Enterprise, an oversight body charged with addressing human rights complaints against Canadian businesses abroad. The office has been criticized by activists as a “powerless advisory post” because it lacks the judicial power to compel evidence from companies accused of abuses. Furthermore, advocates said that the appointment of a former petroleum industry lobbyist as the first ombudsman was not a promising start.

The Mining Association of Canada told OCCRP in an email that it doesn’t support empowering the ombudsman’s office to investigate complaints of misconduct. Instead, the association believes the watchdog should engage in “collaborative dispute resolution,” working directly with accused mining companies and affected communities.

On Aug. 19, the Abarca family said in a public statement that they plan to appeal the recent decision in a Canadian court.

“This won’t bring my father back to life. The family knows that,” said Jose Luis Abarca. “But we can’t keep allowing Mexico to be a pantheon for foreign companies who pay money, contract killers, and we end up burying our loved ones.”

Additional reporting by Lilia Saúl and files from MiningWatch Canada.

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Featured image: A memorial to Mariano Abarca Roblero. 2010. (Credit: Dawn Paley)

First, a few quotes to give a bit of background.

5G speed, for people who must download a whole season of their favorite show in two seconds:

“It’s the next (fifth) generation of cellular technology which promises to greatly enhance the speed, coverage and responsiveness of wireless networks. How fast are we talking about? Think 10 to 100 times speedier than your typical cellular connection, and even faster than anything you can get with a physical fiber-optic cable going into your house. (You’ll be able to download a season’s worth of ‘Stranger Things’ in seconds.)” [CNET.com]

Lunatic 5G installation of small transmitters packed close together every few hundred feet:

“The next big thing in cellular technology, 5G, will bring lightning-fast wireless Internet — and thousands of antenna-topped poles to many neighborhoods where cell towers have long been banned.”

“Wireless companies are asking Congress and state lawmakers to make it easier to install the poles by preempting local zoning laws that often restrict them, particularly near homes. The lobbying efforts have alarmed local officials across the country. They say they need to ensure that their communities do not end up with unsightly poles cluttering sidewalks, roadsides and the edges of front yards.”

“They also are hearing from residents worried about possible long-term health risks. Until now, much of the cell equipment that emits radio-frequency energy has been housed on large towers typically kept hundreds of feet from homes [also harmful to health]. The new ‘small cell’ technology uses far more antennas and transmitters that are smaller and lower-powered, but clustered closer together and lower to the ground.” [The Washington Post]

I keep hammering on this 5G issue, because it contains the blueprint of a future only elite madmen want.

For the rest of us, it’s a catastrophe in the making.

I’ve covered the extreme health dangers of 5G in another article. Here, I want to flesh out the hidden agenda.

A few decades ago, a movement was started to create an interconnected power grid for the whole planet. We were told this would be the only way to avoid wasting huge amounts of electricity and, voila, bring all nations and all people into a modern 21st century.

But now, it’s a different story, a classic bait and switch. The bait was the promise of One Grid for all. The switch is what 5G will bring us:

100 billion or more NEW devices online, all connected to the Internet and the Cloud. What could be more wasteful? What could be more ridiculous? This is the opposite of sane energy use.

Who really cares whether his 5G-connected refrigerator keeps track of the food items inside it and orders new items when the supply dwindles? Who has to have a 5G driverless car that takes him to work? Who must have a 5G stove that senses what is being cooked and sets the temperature for four minutes? Who lives and who dies if a washing machine doesn’t measure how much soap is stored inside and doesn’t order new soap? Who is demanding a hundred devices in his home that spy on him and record his actions?

With 5G, the ultimate goal is: every device in every home that uses energy will be “its own computer,” and the planetary grid will connect ALL these devices to a monitoring and regulating Energy Authority.

As Patrick Wood details in his classic, Technocracy Rising, that worldwide Energy Authority was the dream of the men who launched the Technocracy movement, in America, in the 1930s.

They set out the key requirements—which weren’t technically possible then, but are quite doable now: continuous real-time measuring of both energy production and energy use from one end of the planet to the other…

So that both energy production and energy consumption could be controlled. “For the good of all,” of course.

5G is the technology for making this happen.

The Globalists:

“We’re promising a stunning long-range future of ‘automatic homes’, where everything is done for you. But really, that’s the cover story. Ultimately, we want to be able to measure every unit of energy used by every device in every home—and through AI, regulate how much energy we will let every individual consume, moment to moment. We control energy. We are the energy masters. If you want to run and operate and dominate the world, you control its energy.”

Terms and projects like smart grid, smart meters, sustainability, Agenda 21, smart cities, climate change—all this is Technocratic planning and justification for Rule through Energy.

The beginning of an actual rational plan for energy would start this way: DUMP 5G. Dump the whole plan of installing small transmitter-cells on buildings and homes and trees and lampposts and fences all over the planet. Forget it. Don’t bring 100 billion new devices online. Aside from the extreme health dangers, it’s ridiculously expensive. It’s on the order of saying we need thousand-foot robots standing on sidewalks washing the windows of office buildings.

If some movie star wants to install 30 generators on his property and have engineers build him an automatic home, where he can sit back, flip a switch, and have three androids carry him into his bathtub and wash him and dry him, fine. But planning a smart city? Who voted for that? Who gave informed consent? Nobody.

A global Energy Authority, of course, is going to decide that a small African country needs to be given much more energy, while Germany or France or the US will have to sacrifice energy for the cause of social justice. But this is yet another con, because you won’t see government cleaning up the contaminated water supplies of that small African country, or installing modern sanitation, or curtailing the forced movement of populations into poverty-stricken cities, or reclaiming vast farm land stolen by mega-corporations and giving that land back to local farmers.

The whole hidden purpose of an Energy Authority is control.

And because the Authority is Globalist and Technocratic, it aims to lower energy use in industrial nations and help wreck their economies, making it much easier to move in and take over those countries.

Who in his right mind would propose a wireless system that relies on many, many, many cells/transmitters placed closely to each other, all over the world? This system would be far more vulnerable to physical disruption than the present 4G.

You can find many articles that claim the US military must have 5G for their most advanced planes—and for their developing AI-controlled weapons. How does that work? Where will all the transmitter/cells be placed on the ground and in the air?? Something is missing here. Is there another version of 5G we’re not being told about? Is geoengineering of the atmosphere the means for tuning up space so 5G signals can be passed along without cells/transmitters?

Part of the US obsession to bring 5G online quickly stems from competition with China, which at the moment is in the lead on developing and exporting the technology. “If China has it, we have to have it sooner and better.” This attitude sidesteps the issue of why we must have 5G in the first place.

And now there are reports that the US government is considering a plan to build the whole 5G network itself—rather than leaving the job to corporations. Of course, a few favored companies (like Google) would be chosen by the government in a non-bid situation to provide VERY significant help. If such a plan were to launch, we would have a very tight club at the top of the communications and energy pyramid. And that club would maximize 5G to expand already-saturated surveillance of populations.

Wouldn’t you—if you had nothing better to do than control the world?

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The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.

The US continues to deny any involvement in ongoing unrest in China’s special administrative region of Hong Kong.

However, even a casual look at US headlines or comments made by US politicians makes it clear the unrest not only suits US interests, but is spurred on almost exclusively by them.

The paradoxical duality of nearly open support of the unrest and denial of that support has led to headlines like the South China Morning Post’s, “Mike Pompeo rebukes China’s ‘ludicrous’ claim US is behind Hong Kong protests.” The article claims:

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said it is “ludicrous” for China to claim the United States is behind the escalating protests in Hong Kong. 

Pompeo rebuked Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, who had claimed violent clashes in the city prompted by opposition to the Hong Kong government’s controversial extradition bill were “the work of the US”.

However, even US policymakers have all but admitted that the US is funnelling millions of dollars into Hong Kong specifically to support “programs” there. The Hudson Institute in an article titled, “China Tries to Blame US for Hong Kong Protests,” would admit:

A Chinese state-run newspaper’s claim that the United States is helping pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong is only partially inaccurate, a top foreign policy expert said Monday. 

Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland the U.S. holds some influence over political matters in the region.

The article would then quote Pillsbury as saying:

We have a large consulate there that’s in charge of taking care of the Hong Kong Policy Act passed by Congress to insure democracy in Hong Kong, and we have also funded millions of dollars of programs through the National Endowment for Democracy [NED] … so in that sense the Chinese accusation is not totally false.

A visit to the NED’s website reveals an entire section of declared funding for Hong Kong specifically. The wording for program titles and their descriptions is intentionally ambiguous to give those like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plausible deniability.

However, deeper research reveals NED recipients are literally leading the protests.

The South China Morning Post in its article, “Hong Kong protests: heavy jail sentences for rioting will not solve city’s political crisis, former Civil Human Rights Front convenor says,” would report:

Johnson Yeung Ching-yin, from the Civil Human Rights Front, was among 49 people arrested during Sunday’s protest – deemed illegal as it had not received police approval – in Central and Western district on Hong Kong Island.

The article would omit mention of Johnson Yeung Ching-yin’s status as an NED fellow. His profile is – at the time of this writing – still accessible on the NED’s official website, and the supposed NGO he works for in turn works hand-in-hand with US and UK-based fronts involved in supporting Hong Kong’s current unrest and a much wider anti-Beijing political agenda.

Johnson Yeung Ching-yin also co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post with Joshua Wong titled, “As you read this, Hong Kong has locked one of us away.”

Wong has travelled to Washington DC multiple times, including to receive “honors” from NED-subsidiary Freedom House for his role in leading unrest in 2014 and to meet with serial regime-change advocate Senator Marco Rubio.

It should also be noted that the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum also sits on the NED board of directors.

This evidence, along with extensively documented ties between the United States government and other prominent leaders of the Hong Kong unrest reveals US denial of involvement in Hong Kong as yet another willful lie told upon the international stage – a lie told even as the remnants of other victims of US interference and intervention smolder in the background.

The direct ties and extreme conflicts of interest found under virtually every rock overturned when critically examining the leadership of Hong Kong’s ongoing unrest all lead to Washington. They also once again reveal the Western media as involved in a coordinated campaign of disinformation – where proper investigative journalism is purposefully side-stepped and narratives shamelessly spun instead to frame Hong Kong’s ongoing conflict in whatever light best suits US interests.

What’s worse is big-tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google purging thousands of accounts attempting to reveal the truth behind Hong Kong’s unrest and the true nature of those leading it. If this is the level of lying, censorship, and authoritarianism Washington is willing to resort to in order for Hong Kong’s opposition to succeed, it begs one to wonder what this so-called opposition is even fighting for. Certainly not “democracy” or “freedom.”

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

On Sunday, six military vehicles from Akcakale district in southeast Sanliurfa in Turkey, crossed the border into Syria and joined a US military convoy in carrying out joint military ground patrols from Tel Abyad, Al Raqqa governorate to Ras Al Ain, Al Hassaka governorate. Two helicopters flew overhead, and unmanned aerial vehicles were also used according to Turkey’s Defense Ministry.

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) are leaving areas on Turkey’s border and uprooting fortifications as part of the US-Turkey “safe zone” agreement, which was the result of relentless pressure from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had threatened to unilaterally proceed with his plans if the US dragged its feet. Turkey also threatened to carry out a military operation last month, against Kurdish militias east of the Euphrates, but US officials stopped the operation.

Under the “safe zone” initiative Erdogan wants to establish a “peace corridor” through which he can send back a million of the four to five million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey. Refugees would be forced to resettle in northern Syria on Turkey’s borders to create a buffer zone whereby changing the demographics of the area. It’s worth noting that many of these displaced refugees are not from the northern Syria.

Erdogan has threatened to “open the gates” and allow millions of refugees currently residing in Turkey to flood Europe and specifically Greece, if his requests are not met in Syria. Some have noted that these refugees are not even Syrian and came from dozens of other countries to fight alongside foreign-funded extremist groups in Syria.

Ankara has also been looking into Russian military equipment and threatened to build nuclear weapons.

In a statement made to the Syrian national news agency SANA an official source at the Foreign and Expatriates Ministry stated, “The Syrian Arab Republic condemns in the strongest terms launching joint patrols by the US administration and the Turkish regime in the Syrian al-Jazeera region in a flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic.”

Syria sees this as a form of aggression which is aimed at complicating and prolonging the crisis in Syria and to hinder significant progress made by the Syrian Arab Army against the remaining terrorist groups. Syria absolutely rejects the creation of a “safe zone” and affirms its determination to counter any attempts that put its safety and territorial integrity at risk.

The Syrian government has highlighted previously that Erdogan’s true intentions include “expansionist ambitions” and reviving the Ottoman empire, under the façade of protecting his borders from Kurdish terrorist groups.

In January 2018, Erdogan carried out Operation Olive Branch by invading Afrin and effortlessly defeating the YPG. In a matter of months more than 150,000 Kurds were displaced when they fled to neighboring areas and were replaced with refugees that had fled to Turkey. The demographics were changed and many of the residents who did stay complained about living under harsh extremist conditions enforced by the Turkish-aligned resettled refugees.

At that time, the Kurdish population in Afrin realized that the US will not defend them against an onslaught by NATO ally Turkey and had left them to fend for themselves. The mistake that separatist Kurds have made for the past four years during this war is relying on the United States to save and protect them. Thinking that Washington cares about their independence or political ambitions has put them in several embarrassing situations, including the one they are in now, east of the Euphrates river.

Ultimately, separatist Kurds are responsible for the illegal presence of foreign armed forces from the United States, France, Britain, and coming in at the eleventh hour, Denmark in northern Syria. Had they not turned against the Syrian government and sold their dignity for weaponry, training, and funds from the US led coalition, Turkey would not have had an excuse to invade. This does not take away from the blame that should be placed on all other parties that are impeding the Syrian militaries progress.

Before the war, Kurdish minorities lived peacefully alongside their fellow Syrian brothers and sisters and many were enlisted in the Syrian army fighting against terrorists. It was only when the United States started backing and providing them with funds, supplies, training, etc. did they turn to treason and treachery. This sort of behavior is not uncommon, Kurds with separatist ambitions have previously been used to create division and instability in the region, including during the Iraq/Iran war. They are closely allied with Israel and have worked with several terrorist groups during the eight-year war in Syria.

The SDF/YPG are seen by Turkey as the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) with whom they have been in conflict for over three decades.

The hostile environment created by the self-declared autonomous Kurdish administration has been rejected by not only the Syrian government and the non-Kurdish Syrian majority in Al Hassaka governorate but by Russia, Iran, and Turkey who’ve issued joint statements declaring their opposition to the autonomous regions set by the Kurdish-led SDF and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units in northern Syria saying they “reject…all attempts to create new realities on the ground under the pretext of combating terrorism.” On Sunday, Syrians held a massive rally in Deir Ezzor against the US-backed Kurdish militias calling for their expulsion from the area.

Last December, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, separatist Kurds turned to Damascus for talks, but when Washington didn’t follow through with the withdrawal, the talks turned stale. There has been mention that talks are now resuming but as long as the Kurdish militias and their political mouthpieces continue receiving handouts from Western nations and direction from the US/Israel, negotiations will be futile.

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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 InfoBrics

Nuclear armed and dangerous Israel is a global menace, an indisputable fact. 

It maintains unlawful stockpiles of chemical, biological, and other terror weapons as well.

The world community and establishment media remain silent about its existential threat to regional peace and stability — its global threat in cahoots with US-led NATO wars of aggression.

Iran’s legitimate nuclear program with no military component is the world’s most intensively monitored.

Each time nuclear watchdog IAEA monitors inspect its sites, they affirm its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)/JCPOA compliance.

Rolling back its voluntary commitments under the deal is permitted by Articles 26 and 36 because of non-compliance by other JCPOA signatories — to be reversed if Britain, France, Germany, and the EU fulfill obligations they breached so far.

Time and again for years, Netanyahu and other Israeli hardliners cried wolf about Iran’s legitimate nuclear program, blasting the Big Lie about a nonexistent Iranian threat.

Ahead of September 17 Israeli elections, his political future at stake, Netanyahu once again used fear-mongering tactics as a vote-getting scheme.

Numerous times before, he claimed an Iranian nuclear threat that doesn’t exist, and never did throughout Islamic Republic history — ignoring real threats posed by Israel’s WMDs and hegemonic aims.

In a 2012 General Assembly address, Netanyahu’s cartoon bomb presentation on Iran bombed.

He falsely claimed the JCPOA “deal paved Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal.”

He lied claiming sanctions lifted by the JCPOA’s adoption “fueled Iran’s campaign of carnage and conquest throughout the Middle East” that doesn’t exist — how the US, NATO and Israel operate, not Tehran.

He turned truth on its head again Monday, falsely claiming Iran seeks nukes — despite no credible evidence supporting his Big Lie.

In May 2018, timed with Trump’s JCPOA pullout, he falsely claimed Israel has thousands of incriminating documents, charts, presentations, photos and videos, showing Tehran lied for years to the international community.

Citing no credible evidence because none exists, he lied claiming Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program called Project Amad – to “design, produce and test 5 warheads, each of 10 kilotons TNT yield for integration on a missile.”

Despite IAEA inspectors with full access to Iranian nuclear facilities affirming the full “implementat(ion) (of) its nuclear-related commitments,” Netanyahu turned truth on its head, falsely claiming Iran built a “secret (underground) atomic warehouse” for developing nuclear cores and implosion systems.

No evidence affirmed any of his clearly fabricated accusations about Iran earlier or now.

On Monday, he was at it again, falsely claiming Israel discovered a (nonexistent) secret Iranian nuke development site it destroyed.

“They just wiped it out” after Israeli intelligence discovered it, he roared — one of his many Big Lies, followed by another, saying:

“Israel knows what you’re doing. Israel knows when you’re doing it, and Israel knows where you’re doing it.”

Responding to Netanyahu’s latest Big Lies, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif tweeted:

“The possessor of REAL nukes cries wolf—on an ALLEGED ‘demolished’ site in Iran.

He & (the Trump regime’s) #B_Team just want a war, no matter innocent blood & another $7 TRILLION.

Remember his ‘GUARANTEE’ of ‘positive reverberations’ in ’02?

This time, he assuredly won’t be on the sidelines watching.”

Note: Zarif “positive reverberations” remark referred to MK Netanyahu’s 2002 congresssional testimony, falsely claiming Saddam Hussein was developing nukes, pushing the US for war on Iraq, adding:

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

“And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

The Big Lie promoted by Bush/Cheney was later exposed too late. US aggression on Iraq destroyed the cradle of civilization, caused millions of casualties, immiserated its people, and created chaotic conditions in the country and region — polar opposite what Netanyahu claimed.

He’s a longstanding serial liar. In 1992, MK Netanyahu said Iran was “3 to 5 years” from having a nuclear weapon.

In 1995, US and Israeli officials claimed Iran would have the bomb by around 2000.

In 1998, Donald Rumsfeld (later Bush/Cheney’s war secretary) falsely told Congress that Iran would have ICBMs able to strike the US by 2003. It has none today.

Since its 1979 revolution, ending a generation of US-installed fascist dictatorship, Big Lies about a nonexistent Iranian threat were blasted by US and Israeli officials, repeated by establishment media — about the region’s leading proponent of peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other states.

Following Netanyahu’s Monday Big Lies about Iran, co-head of Israel’s Blue and White party Yair Lapid accused him of engaging in pre-election “propaganda.”

Last year, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi called Netanyahu “an infamous liar (head of a) child-killing Zionist regime…who has had nothing to offer except lies and deceits.”

Zarif earlier called him “(t)he boy who can’t stop crying wolf,” adding: “You can only fool some of the people so many times.”

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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 Massoud Nayeri

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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.

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

In a post last week I took issue with the Trump administration’s claim–repeated ad nauseam in the media–that wages were rising at a 3.1% pace this past year, according to the Labor Dept. In my post I explained the 3 major reasons why wage gains are much lower, or even negative.

First, the 3.1% refers to nominal wages unadjusted for inflation. If adjusted even for official inflation estimates of 1.6%, the ‘real wage’, or what it can actually buy, falls to only 1.5%.

Second, the 1.5% is an average for all the 162 million in the US work force. The lion’s share of the wage gain has been concentrated at the top end, accruing to the 10% or so for the highly skilled tech, professionals, those with advanced degrees, and middle managers. That means the vast majority in the middle or below had to have gotten much less than 1.5% in order for there to be the average of 1.5%. More than 100 million at least did not get even the 1.5%. In fact, independent surveys showed that 60 million got no wage increase at all last year.

Third, the 1.5% refers to wages for only full time employed workers, leaving out the 60 million or so who are part time, temp, gig or others, whose wages almost certainly rose less than that, if at all. Other surveys noted in my prior post found wage gains last year only between -0.8% of 1.1%, depending on the study, and not the 3.1%.

But here’s a Fourth reason why even real wages are likely even well below 1.5%.

As I suggested only in passing only in my prior post, the 1.6% official US government inflation rate is itself underestimated. Not well known–and almost never mentioned by the media–is the fact that Labor Dept. stats do not include rising home prices at all in its estimation of inflation! Incredible, when home prices are among the fastest rising prices typically and always well above the official 1.6% or whatever. And the ‘weight’ of home prices in the budgets of most workers is approximately 30% or more of their total spending. So that weight means the effect on households is magnified even more. If appropriately included in inflation estimates, housing prices would boost the reported inflation rate well above the official 1.6%. How much more? Some researchers estimate it would raise the official inflation rate of 1.6% to as high as 4%. (see the discussion n the August 30, 2019 Wall St. Journal, p. 14).

If the inflation rate is higher, then the nominal 3.1% adjusts to a real wage even less than 1.5%.

If the inflation rate were 4%, not 1.5%, then real wages adjusted for inflation would be -0.9%. And when the ‘averaging’ and ‘full time employed’ effects are considered, real wages for the majority of US workers last year almost certainly fell by as much as -2.0% to 3.0%.

Since we’re talking about housing, here’s another official government stat related to housing that should be reconsidered since it makes US GDP totals higher than they actually are:

US GDP is over-estimated because gross national income (i.e. the income side to which GDP must roughly equal) is greatly over-stated. How is national income and therefore GDP over stated? The US Commerce Dept., which is responsible for estimating GDP, assumes that the approximately 50 million US homeowners with mortgages pay themselves a rent. The value of the phony rent payments boosts national income totals and thus GDP as well. But no homeowners actually pay a mortgage and then also pay themselves an ‘imputed Rent’, as it is called. It’s just a made up number. Of course there’s a method and a logic to the calculation of ‘imputed rent’, but something can be logical and still be nonsense.

Government stats–whether GDP, national income, or wages or prices, or jobs–are full of such questionable assumptions like ‘imputed rents’. The bureaucrats then report out numbers that the media faithfully repeat, as if they were actual data and fact. But statistics are not actual data per se. Stats are operations on the raw or real data–and the operations are full of various assumptions, many questionable, that are explained only in the fine print explaining government methodology behind the numbers. And sometimes not even there.

Here’s another reason why US and other economies’ GDP stats should be accepted only ‘with a grain of salt’, as the saying goes: In recent years, as the global economy has slowed in terms of growth (GDP), many countries have simply redefined GDP in order to get a higher GDP number. Various oil producers, like Nigeria, have redefined GDP to offset the collapse of their oil production and revenue on their GDP. In recent years, India notoriously doubled its GDP numbers overnight by various means. Some of ‘India Statistics’ researchers resigned in protest. Experts agree India’s current 5% GDP number is no more than half that, or less.

In Europe, where GDP growth has lagged badly since 2009, some Euro countries have gone so far as to redefine GDP by adding consumer spending on brothels and sex services. Or they’ve added the category to GDP of street drug sales. But any estimate for drug spending or brothel services requires an estimate of its price. So how do government bureaucrats actually estimate prices for these products and services? Do they send a researcher down to the brothel to stand outside and ask exiting customers what they paid for this or that ‘service’ as they leave? Do they go up to the drug pushers after observing a transaction and ask how much they just sold their ‘baggie’ for? Of course not. The bureaucrats just make assumptions and then make up a number and plug in to estimate the price, and therefore the service’s contribution to GDP. Boosting GDP by adding such dubious products or services is questionable. But it occurs.

The US Commerce Dept. that estimates US GDP has not gone as far as some European countries by adding sex and illicit drug expenditures. But in 2013 the US did redefine GDP significantly, boosting the value of business investment to GDP by about $500 billion a year. For example, what for decades were considered business expenses, and thus not eligible to define as investment, were now added to GDP estimation. Or the government asked businesses to tell it what the company considered to be the value of its company logo. Whatever the company declared was the value was then added to business investment to boost that category’s contribution to GDP. A number of other ‘intangibles’ and arbitrary re-definitions of what constituted ‘investment’ occurred as part of the re-definitions.

Together the 2013 changes added $500 billion or so a year to official US GDP estimates. The adjustments were then made retroactive to prior year GDP estimates as well. Had the 2013 re-definitions and adjustments not been made, it is probable that the US economy would have experienced three consecutive quarters of negative GDP in 2011. That would therefore have meant the US experienced a second ‘technical recession’ at that time, i.e. a second ‘double dip’ recession following the 2007-09 great recession.

The point of all these examples is that one should not blindly accept official government stats–whether on wages, inflation, GDP, or other categories. The truth is deeper, in the details, and often covered up by questionable data collection methods, debatable statistical assumptions, arbitrary re-definitions, and a mindset by most of the media, many academics, and apologists for government bureaucrats that government stats are never wrong.

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Dr. Rasmus is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, October 2019. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and tweets @drjackrasmus. His website is http://kyklosproductions.com and podcasts from his Alternative Visions radio show are available at http://alternativevisions.podbean.com.

Featured image is from The Daily Coin

The Afghanistan government has been miffed and apprehensive for some time that the Trump administration has been talking to the Taliban in Qatar without any representation from Kabul. Government officials were therefore happy about Trump’s abrupt cancellation of what he depicted as a summit with the Taliban at Camp David (to which Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani was not invited). Trump cancelled on the grounds that the Taliban killed a US serviceman on the eve of the talks.

According to Hasht-i Subh, Abdullah Abdullah, the chief executive of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, remarked,

“We were looking at the possibility of a joint meeting in Camp David as an opportunity, but unfortunately the peace efforts being conducted against the will and the aspirations of the Afghan people were sabotaged by increased violence and terror attacks by the Taliban and other elements.”

He actually said the talks were conducted against the will of the Afghan people.

There is no indication Trump was going to invite the Kabul government alongside the Taliban.

According to BBC Monitoring President Ghani’s office issued a statement saying,

that they “consider the Taliban’s current war and violence against Afghans as the main obstacle to the ongoing peace process” and that “real peace would come only when the Taliban stop killing Afghan people, accept a ceasefire and start face-to-face talks with the Afghan government”.

The draft agreement between the US and the Taliban negotiated by former US ambassador in Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad over the past year pledges that 5,400 US troops would be withdrawn from the country within 4 months of its finalization.The Taliban refused to have president Ashraf Ghani involved, calling him an American puppet.

All this reminds me of the Nixon-Kissinger Paris Agreement with North Vietnam in 1972, which was billed as a peace accord but really consisted of articles of surrender. The US rapidly withdrew its 500,000 troops and by 1975 Saigon had fallen.

Trump seems to be doing what Nixon did, and I suspect the results would be similar. Gerald Ford took the fall for the defeat in Vietnam, and it may have helped Jimmy Carter win the presidency.

The US has long since lost the Afghanistan War. As of the beginning of this year Rod Nordland at the NYT reported, the Kabul government of president Ashraf Ghani only surely controlled about 54% of the country’s 407 districts and has been steadily losing those districts each quarter. The Taliban insurgency only itself surely controlled 12 percent of these districts. The other 34% were contested.

The Taliban have made further advances this year, even this month. The Dari press reported that just two days ago the Taliban seized Anar Dara district of Afghanistan’s western Farah province, as the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) “withdrew,” after a Taliban bomb killed the district’s police chief’s wife and daughters.

On August 30, The Taliban took the center of Chah Ab district of Afghanistan’s northern Takhar province, according to BBC Monitoring.

On August 28, Pajhwok said that the Taliban overran the center of Qarghan district of northwestern Faryab province.

Somehow I get the idea that the Taliban have more now than the 12% they had in fall of 2018.

In fact this recent map from the Long War Journal gives them about 16%:

#Afghanistan FDD’s Long War Journal #Taliban #Control of Terrain map displays an assessment of districts controlled and contested by the Taliban. https://t.co/BNDSIIZuv1 via @tableaupublic

— Wingert (@n_wingert) September 5, 2019

These advances come despite the US bombing runs on the Taliban and the help given the ANA by the 14,000 US troops in country.

Not to mention, the campaign of bombing by the Taliban in Kabul and elsewhere. Here’s a map of violent incidents in the country so far this year:

President Trump has cancelled peace talks between the Taliban and US/government forces, citing insecurity and the Taliban's recent attack in Kabul which killed a US soldier.
– Map shows incidents in #Afghanistan recorded in 2019 to date. (1/2)@IntellFusion pic.twitter.com/ujw31e2Mew

— Afghan OSINT (@AfghanOSINT) September 8, 2019

Not to mention that they have launched yet another campaign to take Kunduz in the north of the country (the Taliban are a southern and eastern, Pushtun force). Only about a third of Kunduz province is even Pushtun, and if the Kabul government can’t hold it, there is something very wrong with its military.

You can only have meaningful peace talks with an insurgency if they think they are losing and want to win through talks at least some concessions before they go down completely.

The Taliban don’t think they are losing, because they are not. Objectively speaking, they are taking district after district, increasing the territory they control by 4% in just the past year.

Trump-Taliban is just for show, like Trump-North Korea. It is like a photo op on the deck of the Titanic as it headed to sea.

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Model, actress, and Julian Assange defender Pamela Anderson said something you rarely if ever hear on corporate television: the US is guilty of war crimes. She made this remark during an exchange with the daughter of the late John McCain, Meghan McCain. 

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It’s unfortunate, however, Ms. Anderson decided to expound upon her liberal ideas.

Pam Anderson believes everyone around the world should get to vote for US president https://t.co/hEKm7F40ty via @BIZPACReview

— Nancy Perkins.  (@nperk10195) September 9, 2019

Thanks to “public” education (indoctrination) and the corporate media, far too few Americans understand the founders designed a constitutional republic. Instead, we’re told America is a “democracy”—the ideal of mob rule—and we all have a role to play in deciding who will lead the nation.

This is, of course, nonsense. We are spectators in the bleachers of the three-ring circus of national elections. The state is run by and for the sake of the financial class and transnational corporations. The election of handpicked yesmen (and women) every four and eight years is routinely portrayed as the will of the people. 

This is why Donald Trump is a big problem—he went around the political class and made grandiose promises (deep-sixed after the election) and this is why so many Americans voted for him and why the state and its professional careerist class of politicians hate him and want him impeached, even dead.  

McCain stands in her father’s stead—a warmonger and apologist for war crimes. She is the face of neocon America and its obsession with destroying small nations that stand in the way of Israel and neoliberal pillage and fire sale operations in “third world countries” abundant in oil, minerals, and other important natural resources.

“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” said neocon Michael Ledeen. 

This is the neocon creed embraced by McCain—the United States is the indispensable and exceptional nation, thus international treaties on war crimes and crimes against humanity are null and void, especially when dealing with Israel’s enemies. 

McCain and the neocons want to execute Julian Assange—and Edward Snowden as well, if he ever leaves Russia—and the idea Chelsea Manning is once again rotting away in prison for the crime of not ratting out Assange fills them with a putrid sense of patriotism. 

Roger Waters: "This smear campaign against him [Assange] is all about getting him extradited to the US. They want him dead as a warning (…) The message is: if you tell the truth, we will kill you, watch! The same with Chelsea Manning" pic.twitter.com/5tm6674aFe

— joão carneiro (@CfreitasJoao) September 9, 2019

Chelsea #Manning has been jailed for 160 days and amassed $51K in fines after a judge ordered sanctions to continue despite the fact this will "never coerce her compliance.” She's being pressured to testify against @WikiLeaks publisher Julian #Assange. https://t.co/5uIl0iwuQu

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) August 20, 2019

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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

This CBS Report suggests that Osama bin Laden had been admitted to a Pakistani Military hospital in Rawalpindi on the 10th local time, less than 24 hours before the terrorist attacks.

The report does not mention when he was actually released. 

Nonetheless, this report casts doubt on the official narrative to the effect that Osama bin Laden was responsible for coordinating the 9/11 attacks.

From where? From his hospital bed? From his laptop or his cell phone?  

The Pakistani military headquarters located in Rawalpindi is integrated by resident US military and intelligence advisers working with their Pakistani colleagues, who routinely report to Washington. It would be impossible for Osama bin Laden to enter a Pakistani military hospital unnoticed. Osama is a CIA “intelligence asset”. His whereabouts are known.

This CBS report confirms that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden on September 10 were known to the Bush Administration.

Did “intelligence asset” Osama bin Laden have a GPS “Embedded Locator Chip”  within his body, or a GPS in his laptop or cell phone which would have enabled US intelligence to establish his precise location in real time? (That GPS technology including the embedded locator chip was readily available to US intelligence and law enforcement well before 2001).

Osama could have been arrested on the 10th of September 2001. But that did not happen.

Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown: “It is like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.   It’s an outright lie.  Needless to say, “Going after bin Laden” in the wake of 9/11 has served to sustain the legend of the “world’s most wanted terrorist”.

The complete transcript of the CBS report is given below (emphasis added). The original CBS video is also provided.

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Bin Laden Whereabouts Before 9/11

CBS Evening News with Dan Rather; Author: Dan Rather, Barry Petersen

CBS, 28 January 2002

DAN RATHER, CBS ANCHOR: As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.

This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.

Pakistan intelligence sources tell CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. On that night, says this medical worker who wanted her identity protected, they moved out all the regular staff in the urology department and sent in a secret team to replace them. She says it was treatment for a very special person. The special team was obviously up to no good.

“The military had him surrounded,” says this hospital employee who also wanted his identity masked, “and I saw the mysterious patient helped out of a car. Since that time,” he says, “I have seen many pictures of the man. He is the man we know as Osama bin Laden. I also heard two army officers talking to each other. They were saying that Osama bin Laden had to be watched carefully and looked after.” Those who know bin Laden say he suffers from numerous ailments, back and stomach problems. Ahmed Rashid, who has written extensively on the Taliban, says the military was often there to help before 9/11.

AHMED RASHID, TALIBAN EXPERT: There were reports that Pakistani intelligence had helped the Taliban buy dialysis machines. And the rumor was that these were wanted for Osama bin Laden.

PETERSEN (on camera): Doctors at the hospital told CBS News there was nothing special about that night, but they refused our request to see any records. Government officials tonight denied that bin Laden had any medical treatment on that night.

(voice-over): But it was Pakistan`s President Musharraf who said in public what many suspected, that bin Laden suffers from kidney disease, saying he thinks bin Laden may be near death. His evidence, watching this most recent video, showing a pale and haggard bin Laden, his left hand never moving. Bush administration officials admit they don`t know if bin Laden is sick or even dead.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: With respect to the issue of Osama bin Laden`s health, I just am — don`t have any knowledge.

PETERSEN: The United States has no way of knowing who in Pakistan`s military or intelligence supported the Taliban or Osama bin Laden maybe up to the night before 9/11 by arranging dialysis to keep him alive. So the United States may not know if those same people might help him again perhaps to freedom.

Barry Petersen, CBS News, Islamabad.

by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715List Price: $24.95click here to order

Special Price: $18.00

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

Every Israeli prime minister – not least Benjamin Netanyahu – understands that a military entanglement with Hezbollah, Lebanon’s armed Shia movement on Israel’s northern border, is a dangerous wager, especially during an election campaign.

It was Shimon Peres who lost to Netanyahu in 1996, weeks after the former prime minister had incensed Israel’s Palestinian minority – a fifth of the population – by savagely attacking Lebanon in a futile bid to improve his military, and electoral standing.

Netanyahu has faced off with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah for the full 13 years he has been in power. But unlike his political rivals, he has preferred to play a cautious hand with his Lebanese opponent.

Which makes a recent spate of drone attacks by Israel across the region, including in Lebanon, all the more surprising, even in the context of a highly contested election due to take place next week. During the campaign, Netanyahu has been buffeted by yet more corruption allegations.

According to the Israeli media, two drones dispatched over Beirut late last month were intended to destroy Iranian-supplied equipment that would allow Hezbollah to manufacture precision-guided missiles.

It was the first such Israeli attack on Lebanese soil since a ceasefire ended the 2006 war. Hezbollah and Israel have preferred to flex their muscles in neighbouring Syria, weakened after more than eight years of war.

The attack outraged Lebanon’s leaders, with Nasrallah warning that Hezbollah would shoot down any Israeli drones encroaching on Lebanese airspace. He also vowed revenge, which finally came a week ago when Hezbollah fired at an Israeli military vehicle carrying five soldiers close to the border. Israel said there were no casualties.

That was followed by Hezbollah shooting down an Israeli drone in southern Lebanon early on Monday. The Israeli army confirmed the drone had been on a “routine mission” when, it claimed, it fell in Lebanese territory.

In retaliation for last week’s attack, Israel shelled Hezbollah positions, a clash Israeli media described as being a “hair’s breadth” from escalating into all-out war.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah appear to want such an outcome. Both understand the likely heavy toll in casualties and the damaging political consequences.

Nonetheless, Netanyahu appears to be stoking a fire he might ultimately struggle to control – and not just in Lebanon. Around the time of the Beirut attack, Israeli drones were also in action in Iraq and Syria. 

First, Israel hit a building near Damascus, killing two Hezbollah operatives. According to Israel, they were working with Iranian forces to prepare a drone attack on the Golan Heights, Syrian territory annexed by Israel in violation of international law. 

Then a day later, more Israeli drones – apparently launched from Azerbaijan – targeted depots housing Iranian weapons close to the Iraqi-Syrian border. 

More strikes occurred early this week when 18 people were reportedly killed on the Syrian side of the border with Iraq, and a further 21 Iraqis died a day later in an explosion in Iraq’s Anbar province.  

There have been reports of more than half a dozen such attacks since mid-July. They are the first known Israeli strikes on Iraq’s territory in four decades. 

The running thread in these various incidents – apart from Israel’s violation of each country’s sovereignty – is Iran. 

Until recently, Israel had launched regular forays deep into Syrian airspace to target what it said was the transport through Syria of long-range precision missiles supplied by Iran to Hezbollah, its Shia ally in Lebanon. 

Hezbollah and Iran view this growing stockpile of precision weapons – capable of hitting key military installations in Israel – as a vital restraint on Israel’s freedom to attack its neighbours. 

Over the past year, Israel’s ability to hit missile convoys as they pass through Syria has narrowed as Bashar Al Assad has regained control of Syrian territory and installed more sophisticated, Russian-made air defences.

The US has not taken kindly to Israel’s actions in Iraq, fearing that a local backlash could endanger the 5,000 troops it has stationed there and push Iraq further into Iran’s arms. In response, the Pentagon issued a statement condemning “actions by external actors inciting violence in Iraq”.

The answer could be that he feels he has little choice. 

The same weekend that Israel launched its wave of attacks across the region, French President Emmanuel Macron engineered an unexpected visit by Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to the G7 summit in Biarritz.

It was part of efforts by Macron, and Europe more generally, to encourage Trump to repair relations with Tehran after the US pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement last year and reimposed sanctions. Netanyahu has taken credit for the administration’s tough stance. 

Now he has been jolted by Trump’s apparent willingness to reconsider, possibly to protect shipping lanes and oil supplies in the Gulf from Iranian disruption, just as the US president seeks re-election.

Any U-turn would conflict sharply with Netanyahu’s agenda. Domestically he has long presented Iran as the ultimate bogeyman, hellbent on gaining a nuclear bomb to destroy Israel. His strongman image has been built on his supposed triumph both in reining in Tehran and recruiting the Trump administration to his cause.

If Trump indicates a readiness for rapprochement with Iran before polling day, Netanyahu’s narrative is sunk – and the corruption allegations he faces are likely to take a stronger hold on the public imagination.

That was why, as he headed to London last Thursday, Netanyahu issued a barely veiled rebuke to Trump: “This is not the time to talk to Iran.”

It might also be why a report in the New York Times last week suggested that Israel is contemplating a risky, go-it-alone strike on Iran, something Netanyahu has reportedly been mulling for several years. 

Presenting them this week as “new revelations”, he also recycled old claims of Iranian nuclear activity predating the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and the US. 

Certainly, Netanyahu has every interest in using attacks like the recent ones to provoke a reaction from Iran in the hope of pre-empting any US overture. 

It is a high-stakes gamble and one that risks setting off a conflagration should Netanyahu overplay his hand. These are desperate times for Israel’s longest-serving but increasingly embattled prime minister. 

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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi. 

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from IMEMC

On 2 October 2019, it will be the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Mohandas K. Gandhi in Gujarat, India. I would like to reflect on the visionary leadership that Gandhi offered the world, briefly comparing it with some national leaders of today, and to invite you to emulate Gandhi’s leadership.

While Gandhi is best remembered for being the mastermind and leader of the decades-long nonviolent struggle to liberate colonial India from British occupation, his extraordinary political, economic, social, ecological, religious and moral leadership are virtually unknown, despite the enormous legacy he left subsequent generations who choose to learn from what he taught. This legacy is available online in the 98-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

While touching on Gandhi’s legacy in each of these regards, I would particularly like to highlight Gandhi’s staggering legacy in four of these fields by briefly comparing his approach to politics, economics, society and the environment with the approach of contemporary political leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Xi Jinping (China), Emmanuel Macron (France), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India), Binjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Shinzo Abe (Japan), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Mohammad bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Boris Johnson (UK) and Donald Trump (USA).

Before doing so, let me offer a little basic background on Gandhi so that the foundational framework he was using to guide his thinking and behaviour is clear.

Gandhi in Brief

In order to develop his understanding of the human individual and human society, as well as his approach to conflict, Gandhi engaged in ongoing research throughout his life. He read avidly and widely, as well as keenly observing the behaviour of those around him in many social contexts in three different countries (India, England and South Africa). Shaped also by the influence of his mother and his Hindu religion, this led to Gandhi’s unique understanding of the human individual and his approach to the world at large.

For a fuller elaboration of the points about Gandhi discussed below and the precise references, see relevant chapters and sections on Gandhi in The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

Gandhi’s conception of the human individual and human nature

In order to understand Gandhi generally, it is imperative to comprehend his conceptions of the human individual and human nature simply because these are the foundation of his entire philosophy.

Gandhi attached enormous importance to individual responsibility. He also had a very positive view of human nature. Gandhi believed that humans could respond to ‘the call of the spirit’ and rise above selfishness and violence. Moreover, this was necessary in their quest for self-realization. Self-realization, as the Gandhian scholar Professor Arne Naess explains it, ‘involves realizing oneself as an autonomous, fully responsible person’.

In Gandhi’s view, this quest is an individual one that relies on nonviolence, self-reliance, and the search for truth. ‘To find Truth completely is to realize oneself and one’s destiny.’ But what should guide this search? According to Gandhi, it can only be the individual conscience: The ‘inner voice’ must always be ‘the final arbiter when there is a conflict of duty’. And in his view, ‘the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or “the still small Voice” mean one and the same thing.’

This point is centrally important, because the usual descriptions of Gandhian nonviolence stress its morality, humility and sacrifice while neglecting the fundamental norm ‘that you should follow your inner voice whatever the consequences’ and ‘even at the risk of being misunderstood’.

The point, of course, is thatcreation of the nonviolent society which Gandhi envisioned required the reconstruction of the personal, social, economic and political life of each individual. ‘We shall get nothing by asking; we shall have to take what we want, and we need the requisite strength for the effort.’ Consequently, the individual required increased power-from-within through the development of personal identity, self-reliance and fearlessness.

So what is fearlessness? For Gandhi, it means freedom from all external fear, including the fear of dispossession, ridicule, disease, bodily injury and death. In his view, progress toward the goal of fearlessness requires ‘determined and constant endeavour’. But why is fearlessness so important? Because a person who is fearless is unbowed by the punitive power of others and that makes them powerful agents of change.

Gandhi’s approach to society and political economy

Gandhi’s conception of society is based on a rejection of both capitalism and socialism.

In relation to capitalism, he rejected the competitive market and private property, with their emphasis on individual competitiveness and material progress and their consequent greed and exploitation of the weak. He also rejected the major institutions of capitalism, including its parliamentary system of democracy (which denied sovereignty to the people), its judicial system (which exacerbated conflict and perpetuated elite power), and its educational system (which divorced education from life and work).

In relation to socialism, he rejected its conception of conflict in terms of class war, its claim that state ownership and centralization are conducive to the common welfare, its emphasis on material progress, and its reliance on violent means.

The Gandhian vision of future society is based on a decentralized network of self-reliant and self-governing communities using property held in trust, with a weak central apparatus to perform residual functions. His vision stresses the importance of individuals being able to satisfy their personal needs through their own efforts – including ‘bread labor’ – in cooperation with others and in harmony with nature.

For Gandhi, this horizontal framework is necessary in order to liberate the exploiter and exploited alike from the shackles of exploitative structures. This is vitally important because, in his view, ‘exploitation is the essence of violence.’ Self-reliance and interdependence must be built into the structure in order to enhance the capacity for self-regeneration and self defense and to eliminate the potential for structural violence inherent in any dependency relationship.

This social vision was clearly evident in Gandhi’s ‘constructive program’, which was intended to restructure the moral, political, social and economic life of those participating in it. The constructive program was designed to satisfy the needs of each individual member of society and was centrally concerned with the needs for self-esteem, security, and justice. The program entailed many elements, some of which are outlined below in order to illustrate this point.

A crucial feature of the constructive program was the campaign for communal unity. This was intended to encourage reciprocal recognition of the identity of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and those of other religions. According to Gandhi, all people should have the same regard for other faiths as they have for their own.

The campaign to liberate women was intended to secure self esteem, security, and justice for those most systematically oppressed by India’s patriarchal society. ‘Woman has been suppressed under custom and law for which man was responsible… In a plan of life based on nonviolence, woman has as much right to shape her own destiny as man.’

The campaign for the removal of untouchability was meant to restore self-esteem, dignity, and justice to the Harijans (Gandhi’s term for those without caste) in Hindu society. Similarly, the constructive program was concerned with recognizing the needs of indigenous peoples and lepers throughout India. ‘Our country is so vast… one realizes how difficult it is to make good our claim to be one nation, unless every unit has a living consciousness of being one with every other.’

The khadi (handspun/handwoven cloth) and village industries programs were intended to make the villages largely self-reliant and Indians proud of their identity after centuries of oppression and exploitation under British imperial rule. Khadi, Gandhi argued, ‘is the symbol of unity of Indian humanity, of its economic freedom and equality.’ The struggle for economic equality was aimed at securing distributive justice for all. It meant ‘leveling down’ the rich, who owned the bulk of the nation’s wealth, while raising the living standards of ‘the semi-starved’ peasant millions.

Thus, Gandhi stressed the centrality of the individual and the importance of creating a society that satisfied individual human needs. ‘The individual is the one supreme consideration’; individuals are superior to the system they propound. In fact: ‘If the individual ceases to count, what is left of society?… No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.’

According to Gandhi then, the foundation of this nonviolent society can only be the nonviolent individual: No one need wait for anyone else before adopting the nonviolent way of life. Hesitating to act because the whole vision might not be achieved, or because others do not yet share it, is an attitude that only hinders progress.

So how is this nonviolent society to come into being? For Gandhi, the aim is not to destroy the old society now with the hope of building the new one later. In his view, it requires a complete and ongoing restructuring of the existing social order using nonviolent means. And while it might not be possible to achieve it, ‘we must bear it in mind and work unceasingly to near it’.

The political means for achieving this societal outcome entailed three essential elements: personal nonviolence as a way of life, constructive work to create new sets of political, social, economic and ecological relationships, and nonviolent resistance to direct and structural violence.

Gandhi the nonviolent conflict strategist

So what did nonviolence mean to Gandhi?

According to Gandhi: ‘Ahimsa [nonviolence] means not to hurt any living creature by thought, word or deed.’ The individual, humanity, and other life forms are one: ‘I believe in the essential unity of [humanity] and for that matter of all that lives.’

Given Gandhi’s understanding that conflict is built into structures and not into people, and that violence could not resolve conflict (although it could destroy the people in conflict and/or the issues at stake) his religious/moral belief in the sanctity of all life compelled him to seek a way to address conflict without the use of violence. Moreover, despite his original training as a lawyer in England and his subsequent practice as a lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi soon rejected the law as a means of dealing with conflict too, preferring to mediate between conflicting parties in search of a mutually acceptable outcome.

According to Gandhi, British imperialism and the Indian caste system were both examples of structures that were perpetuated, in large part, as a result of people performing particular roles within them. The essence of Gandhi’s approach was to identify approaches to conflict that preserved the people while systematically demolishing the evil structure. Moreover, because he saw conflict as a perennial condition, his discussions about future society are particularly concerned with how to manage conflict and how to create new social arrangements free of structural violence.

More importantly, according to Gandhi conflict is both positive and desirable. It is an important means to greater human unity. Professor Johan Galtung explains this point: ‘far from separating two parties, a conflict should unite them, precisely because they have their incompatibility in common.’ More fundamentally, Gandhi believed that conflict should remind antagonists of the deeper, perhaps transcendental, unity of life, because in his view humans are related by a bond that is deeper and more profound than the bonds of social relationship.

So how is conflict to be resolved? In essence, the Gandhian approach to conflict recognizes the importance of resolving all three corners of what Galtung calls the ‘conflict triangle’: the attitude, the behavior, and the goal incompatibility itself. The Gandhian method of conflict resolution is called ‘satyagraha’, which means ‘a relentless search for truth and a determination to reach truth’, it is somewhat simplistically but more widely known (and practiced) in English as ‘nonviolent action’ (or equivalent names). While the perpetrator of violence assumes knowledge of the truth and makes a life-or-death judgment on that basis, satyagraha, according to Gandhi, excludes the use of violence precisely becauseno one is capable of knowing the absolute truth. Satyagraha, then, was Gandhi’s attempt to evolve a theory of politics and conflict resolution that could accommodate his moral system.

It is for this reason then that ‘Satyagraha is not a set of techniques’. This is because the actions cannot be detached from the norms of nonviolence that govern attitudes and behavior. Therefore, an action or campaign that avoids the use of physical violence but that ignores the attitudinal and behavioral norms characteristic of satyagraha cannot be classified as Gandhian nonviolence. Moreover, the lack of success of many actions and campaigns is often directly attributable to a failure to apply these fundamental norms to their practice of ‘nonviolent action’ (by whatever name it is given locally). To reiterate: ‘Satyagraha is not a set of techniques’.

But Gandhi was not just committed to nonviolence; he was committed to strategy as well. Because he was a shrewd political analyst and not naive enough to believe that such qualities as truth, conviction and courage, nor factors such as numbers mobilized, would yield the necessary outcomes in conflict, he knew that strategy, too, was imperative.

Consequently, for example, he set out to develop a framework for applying nonviolence in such a way that desirable outcomes were built into the means of struggle. ‘They say “Means are after all means”. I would say “means are after all everything”. As the means so the end.’

Gandhi the ecologist

According to Karl Marx, the crisis of civilization was created by the production relations of capitalism; for Gandhi, it was created by the process of industrialization itself. This process both stimulated and was fueled by the unrestrained growth of individual wants. The remedy, according to Gandhi, lay in individuals transforming themselves and, through this transformation, founding a just social order.

He argued that social transformation, no matter how profound, would be neither adequate nor lasting if individuals themselves were not transformed. A part of this strategy was ‘the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants’. Gandhi did not begrudge people a reasonable degree of physical well-being, but he made a clear distinction between needs and wants. ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every [person’s] need but not for every [person’s] greed.’

But, as with everything else in Gandhi’s worldview, he did not just advocate this simple material lifestyle; he lived it, making and wearing his own khadi, and progressively reducing his personal possessions.

Contemporary Political Leaders

While contemporary national leaders obviously display a wide variety of styles, it is immediately evident that individuals such as Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Xi Jinping (China), Emmanuel Macron (France), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India), Binjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Shinzo Abe (Japan), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Mohammad bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Boris Johnson (UK) and Donald Trump (USA) might be readily identified as representative of virtually all of them.

And whatever one might say about each of these leaders, it is clear from both their words and behaviour that none of them regards the human individual and their conscience as the foundation on which their national societies or even global society should be built. On the contrary, individuals are destroyed, one way or another, so that society is not inconvenienced more than minimally by any semblance of ‘individuality’ or individual conscience.

Moreover, while in some countries there are clearly articulated doctrines about reducing inequality and, in a few cases, some effort to achieve this, there is little or no concerted effort to restructure their national societies and economies so that inequality is eliminated; on the contrary, the wealth of the few is celebrated and defended by law. None of these leaders wears a local equivalent of khadi to express their solidarity with those less privileged and model a lifestyle that all can (sustainably) share.

The oppression of certain social groups, such as women, indigenous peoples, racial and religious minorities, particular castes or classes, those of particular sexual and identity orientations or with disabilities, remains widespread, if not endemic, in each of these societies with considerably less than full effort put into redressing these forms of discrimination.

Not one of these leaders could profess an ecological worldview (and national policies that reflected a deep commitment to environmental sustainability) or the simplicity of material lifestyle that Gandhi lived (and invited others to emulate).

And not one of them could pretend that killing fellow human beings was abhorrent to them with each of these countries and their leaders content to spend vast national resources on military violence rather than even explore the possibility of adopting the strategically superior (when properly understood and implemented) strategy of nonviolent defense that Gandhi advocated. ‘I have always advised and insisted on nonviolent defence. But I recognize that it has to be learnt like violent defence. It requires a different training.’ See The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach or, more simply, Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

For just a taste of the discriminatory, destructive and violent policies of contemporary political leaders, see ‘Equality Reserved: Saudi Arabia and the Convention to End All Discrimination against Women’, ‘156 Fourth World Nations suffered Genocide since 1945: The Indigenous Uyghurs Case’, ‘Weaponizing Space Is the New Bad Idea Coming From Washington D.C.’ and ‘Report Shows Corporations and Bolsonaro Teaming Up to Destroy the Amazon’. But for further evidence of the support of contemporary political leaders for violence and exploitation in all of their forms, just consult any progressive news outlet.

As an aside, it is important to acknowledge that the world has had or still does have some national leaders with at least some of Gandhi’s credentials. It also has many community leaders who display at least some of these credentials too, which is why there are so many social movements working to end violence, inequality, exploitation and ecological destruction in their many forms.

Was Gandhi realistic? Was he right?

But even if you concede that Gandhi was a visionary, you might still ask ‘Was Gandhi realistic?’ Surely it is asking too much for modern political leaders to live simply and nurture ecological sustainability, to work energetically against all forms of inequality and discrimination, and to deal with conflicts without violence, for example. Especially in a world where corporations are so powerful and drive so much of the inequality, violence and ecological destruction that takes place.

Of course, ‘Was Gandhi realistic?’ is the wrong question. With human beings now on the brink of precipitating our own extinction – see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’– the more appropriate question is ‘Was Gandhi right?’

And if he was, then we should be attempting to emulate him, however imperfect our attempts may be. Moreover, we should be endeavouring to improve on his efforts because no-one could credibly suggest that Gandhi’s legacy has had the impact that India, or the world, needs.

Can we improve on Gandhi?

Of course we can. As Gandhi himself would want us to do: ‘If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors.’

One key area in which I would improve on Gandhi is an outcome of doing decades of research to understand the fundamental cause of violence in human society: the dysfunctional parenting and teaching models we are using which inflict virtually endless ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence on children and adolescents. See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

This cause must be addressed if we are to have any chance of eliminating the staggering and unending violence, in all of its forms, from our families, communities and societies while empowering all individuals to deal fearlessly and nonviolently with conflict.

Hence, I would encourage people to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will require them to learn the art of nisteling. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

For those who need to heal emotionally themselves in order to be able to engage with children in this way, see ‘Putting Feelings First’.

There are several vitally important reasons why a radical reorientation of our parenting and teaching models is necessary as part of any strategy to end human violence. One reason is that the emotional damage inflicted on children leaves them unconsciously terrified and virtually powerless to deal with reality; that is, to respond powerfully to (rather than retreat into delusion about) political, military, economic, social and ecological circumstances. As casual observation confirms, most individuals in industrialized societies become little more than mindlessly obedient consumers under the existing parenting and teaching models. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. This is as far as it can get from Gandhi’s aspiration to generate individuals who are fearless.

Moreover, at their worst, these parenting and teaching models generate vast numbers of people who are literally insane: an accurate description of most of the political leaders mentioned earlier but particularly those who pull the strings of these leaders. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Another reason that a radical reorientation of our parenting and teaching models is necessary is so that we produce a far greater number of people of conscience who can think, plan and act strategically in response to our interrelated existential crises. Too few people have these capacities. See, for example, ‘Why Activists Fail’ and ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’. Consequently, most activism, and certainly that activism on issues vital to human survival, lacks the necessary strategic orientation, which is explained in Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

A fourth reason that transformed parenting and teaching approaches are necessary is that it will open up a corner of the ‘conflict square’ that Gandhi (and Galtung) do not discuss: the feelings, particularly fear, that shape all conflicts (that is, the other three corners of the ‘conflict square’: attitude, behaviour and goal incompatibility) and then hold them in place. Fear and other suppressed feelings are central to any conflict and these must be heard if conflict is to be resolved completely. But, more fundamentally, conflict is much less likely to emerge (and then become ‘frozen’) if fear and other feelings are not present at the beginning. Imagine how much easier it would be to deal with any situation or conflict if the various parties involved just weren’t scared (whether of the process and/or certain possible outcomes). See ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’.

Anyway, separately from the above, if you share Gandhi’s understanding that the Earth cannot sustain the massive overconsumption that is now destroying our biosphere, consider participating in a project that he inspired: ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

And consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if none of the above options appeal or they seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge 

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not buy rainforest timber
8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Despite the now overwhelming odds against human survival, can we get humanity back on track? Gandhi would still be optimistic: ‘A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.’

Are you one of those ‘determined spirits’?

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

This article was originally published in September 2011.

Strange isn’t it? To be labelled a 9/11 “conspiracy theorist” you don’t even need to have a theory. It’s enough to express any doubt about the official version of events.

Stranger still, those who consider themselves too wise to entertain such “nonsense” forget that they, too, are conspiracy theorists. They either believe the official conspiracy theory or they have no view. But having no view doesn’t let them off the hook. The 9/11 events had to be caused by a conspiracy of some sort. So, just to acknowledge that 9/11 happened is to be a conspiracy theorist.

So, what’s really going on here? Could it be that those dismissive of alternative views are so short on knowledge and the inclination to acquire it that they have nothing to contribute but ridicule? Could it be that they simply don’t care? Could it be that alternative views are so scary that it’s safer to stifle debate? Could it be simply easier to go with the flow than to risk the discomfort inflicted upon those who doubt the status quo?

My doubt and discomfort began as it happened, while I watched the towers come down on TV.

I’m not a physicist, but I can do simple maths. Simple maths tells me that a building can’t fall at close to free fall speed unless all but the tiniest resistance posed by the structure below has first been removed.

I wonder if they called Isaac Newton a conspiracy theorist when that apple hit him on the noggin and he started babbling about something called gravity? Probably.

Ask yourself: Could the aircraft impacts and jet fuel fires really render the structures so feeble that they offered little more resistance than air? If common sense doesn’t provide the answer, do a little research and you’ll find that it couldn’t. And if it couldn’t, the whole official narrative falls apart as quickly as the buildings.

If, since 2001, you haven’t watched a video of the three towers (yes, three) coming down, do so again. Just watch. Really watch. Use your stopwatch if you like. Do some simple maths (the acceleration of gravity is 9.81 metres per second/per second).

Consider the structures – marvels of architectural engineering. Picture the thousands of tonnes of steel beams and girders that held those buildings up for decades. Watch those thousands of tonnes of steel beams and girders offering next to no resistance as the buildings come down, defying the laws of physics if the official explanation is to be believed – not once, but three times in one day.

There’s more, much more, and the implications are horrific. Just how horrific will be all too obvious when future generations marvel at how easily and eagerly so many were deceived.

Some of us would rather not wait for the bright light of hindsight. Call us “conspiracy theorists” or “thruthers” or nut cases if you like, but know that all we want is the truth, because without truth there can be no justice. Anything less dishonours the people killed on that day and the millions killed, maimed, demonised, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, widowed, orphaned, traumatised, and made homeless in the wars raging still in their name and ours.

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This article was originally published on Countercurrents.

Robin Davis is a freelance writer who lives in Victoria, Australia.

The fires in the lowlands of Bolivia have burnt more than 1 million hectares, affecting forest reserves, protected areas and national parks. These fires represent the environmental tensions generated by the agricultural extractivism (McKay, 2018) that the drives the Bolivian government, which in recent years has favoured the agribusiness and livestock sectors, through laws and political agreements and, generating an agro-state alliance based around land occupation as a source of wealth.

Given the fall in price of hydrocarbons and minerals in 2013, the government then saw it as appropriate to promote the increase of exportation of monocultures (3rd highest export product), in order to raise its contribution to Bolivia’s GDP, which in the past 10 years has seen an average growth of 4,5%, data which the government boasts about. So, in 2015 agricultural industries and the government organised an agricultural summit, where the details of the new plans for agricultural expansion were discussed, consolidating the political relationship between agriculture and the state.

One of the goals of the agricultural summit is to extend the agricultural frontier by 10 million hectares by 2025. Expanding in the east, over the Bolivian Chiquitania (the area that is currently affected by fires) and to the north-eastern lands neighbouring the Beni province in order to increase monoculture exports (soy, sorghum and corn), livestock, ethanol production and biofuels. This has meant promoting and strengthening partnerships with the countries landowning elite and transnational food companies (Monsanto, Cargill, Bayern Syngenta), who are in charge of the monoculture production chain, by giving transgenic seeds and chemical inputs to the farmers, being involved in the transformation of products in commodities (cake, flour) and the commercialisation them to the international markets. All this, through the agricultural cluster established in Santa Cruz in the nineties.

In this context, you can see how agricultural policies in Bolivia are designed to prioritize monocultures which has led to an obsession with increasing productivity and cultivation areas, with a purpose of increasing the income that this type of agriculture brings. This has put the modern agricultural development model in tension with the preservation of the environment. It also highlights the governments contractions between its commitment to agrarian capitalism and its rhetorical discourse about respect for mother earth.

Another key actor in understanding these fires and the deforestation, is the peasant’s unions who are linked to the governing party and play a key role in this conflict. Firstly, they benefit from the government provision of land to farming communities in protected areas that are unfit for cultivation. The government does this on purpose as it has positive consequences for them. Firstly, the farmers take part in land clearing (deforestation) and establish a territorial presence for the governing party in the East. The land they are given is also dependent on them becoming part of the monoculture circuit and becoming small and medium producers. Finally, large parts of the land that is initially endowed to famers and peasants is subsequently sold on and/ or rented to agricultural or livestock owners due to the land trafficking that occurs in the area.

As well as facing social stigma for their land clearing practises the farmers are unable to plant anything other than soy, sorghum or other monocultures given that their land and financial credits are tied to monoculture cultivation. They have to pay for machinery and chemical inputs (herbicides and pesticides such as glyphosate that cause desertification of the soil), and also try to avoid floods, droughts or pests affecting their crop and thereby ruining their investment. This generates an unequal agriculture that enriches large companies, impoverishes small families and destroys the environment.

The uncontrolled fires that are affecting the dry forests of Chiquitano are thanks the irresponsibility of the government in offering land in protected areas and due to the ignorance of the farmers, who have practised land clearing in the area. The Chiquitano dry forest is a transitional ecoregion, that sits somewhere in between the humidity of the Brazilian and the aridity of the Paraguayan Chaco and, due to the characteristics of the found there vegetation it houses more than 200 species of wood many of the flammable, particularly in dry seasons, such as right now (Ibisch & Mérida: 2008).

The loss of biodiversity and natural wealth is incalculable; the Otuquis National Park, the Tucabaca Valley, the San Matias Area of Integrated Management, the Chiquitana mountain range, among others, are natural areas that give the area an ecological balance. It is estimated that between 50 and 170 years will have to pass before the natural wealth of the forest is recovered. Preliminary data suggests that around 500 different animal species are in a vulnerable position and more than 50 farming communities have seen their crops and pastures turn to ash. The fire has also damaged the Ñembi Guazú Nature Reserve, home of the Ayoreo indigenous people who are some of the very few uncontacted people that are now threatened by the dispossession of their land.

This disaster shows how policies relating to land, the environment and indigenous people are considered inferior to the model of extractive development, that threatens the country’s natural and cultural heritage. The destruction of the environment in exchange for economic growth and modern agriculture is also a consequence of the lack of agricultural policies that promote sustainable and diversified agriculture, which would take advantage of current cultivation areas and whose products would be intended for internal consumption and therefore do not obey the pressures of international market.

Despite this, the agricultural model that the government is promoting is successful for their political aims. It fulfils the promise of giving land to their peasant bases; increases its territorial and political presence in the East; satisfies the interests of the agro-industrial elites by expanding monoculture production and securing international markets (china) which will aid future production; and in turn, multiplys income from agriculture.

However, it is not only agricultural policy that is being used as a political tool, the uncontrolled fires are also being exploited by the president particularly since the Bolivian presidential elections take place on 20th October. This can be seen in the fact that the government have refused to declare a national emergency, there has been a lack of coordination between the different levels of government and a delayed response to international aid. The fires have also revealed the government’s inability and lack of political will to deal with a disaster of magnitude.

In this light, we can see that the fires and deforestation that is occurring within Bolivia is matching up with global agricultural trends, where the agro-state alliance obeys the demands of the multinational food companies, who dictate that monocultures should be grown in the Southern Cone countries. At the same time, the model is used politically by the government who can give land to farmers in protected areas, ignoring the significance of the land and the irreparable ecological damage.

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Featured image is from Dr Claire Wordley via Bright Green

Denmark is recognized as one of the most socially and economically developed countries in the world, which enjoys a high standard of living as well as high metrics in national performance, protection of civil liberties, and the lowest perceived level of corruption in the world, has announced that it will be boosting military contributions to missions around the world, including joining the United States in its illegal and unauthorized deployment in northeastern Syria. 

The sovereign and proud nation of Syria has neither invited nor does it accept any foreign invaders on its land and has repeatedly demanded that all foreign forces leave on their own before they are forced out. Syria is highly committed to liberating every inch of its land from terrorist control whether that be domestic or foreign, and protecting its territorial integrity.

On Friday, U.S. Department of Defense Chief Pentagon Spokesperson, Jonathan R. Hoffman provided the following statement on Denmark’s deployment to Syria:

“The United States welcomes the announcement by the Danish Government to make a military deployment to Syria in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and to continue to share the burden and responsibilities of this important mission. As a founding member of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, this deployment demonstrates Denmark’s continued commitment to working with our partners, to include the SDF, to ensure ISIS cannot re-emerge. Our Danish partners will work with the residual U.S. military force in northeast Syria to support stability and security. We look forward to working with our Danish ally to continue our shared mission of achieving ISIS’s enduring defeat-in Syria and wherever else the group may operate.”

The Nordic nation, along with its NATO allies; the United States, France, Britain, Turkey etc.  do not have authorization by the Syrian government nor the UN Security Council to even be in Syria, let alone carry out any military operations.

With the exception of Turkey, these foreign troops are seen as illegal invaders supporting a Kurdish-led separatist movement in northeastern Syria which is closely aligned with and supported by Israel and has even employed Daesh-like tactics during the war. The so called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is simply a rebranding by the US of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian offshoot of the Turkish based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and other NATO members, and has been in conflict with the Turkish government since 1984.

The US-led coalition has killed at least 1,319 civilians during its unauthorized operations in Syria and Iraq since 2014, by its own admission, although the actual number is most likely higher.

On Friday, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod stated that Denmark must lift its share of the burden as a member of NATO. Danish Minister of Defense Trine Bramsen said that she was proud that the country will be contributing to peace and stability in one of the world’s hotspots.

Ironically, Syria would not have become a “hotspot” if the US and their allies didn’t support terrorist factions and weren’t committed to “regime-change” for the past eight years.

In addition to sending support to the “Global Coalition against Islamic State” in northeast Syria, the Danish military will also be sending support to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali, France’s mission in the Sahel, and a U.S. aircraft carrier group in the north Atlantic and Mediterranean seas, as well as increasing its contributions to NATO and as if that wasn’t enough there’s also talks of a possible deployment to an international maritime effort in the Strait of Hormuz. In response to calls from the U.K. and France for a “European-led maritime mission” in the Persian Gulf region which would probably be in addition to an increased U.S. presence.

“When we make new military contributions in the Sahel region and in Syria to the fight against ISIL, it is about more than immediate firefighting,” Danish Foreign Minister Kofod said Friday. Kofod also said, “We are working across several fronts to create security, stability, and – in the long term – a positive development in the immediate neighborhoods of Europe.”

The aforementioned “military contributions” including sending a “helicopter contribution of up to 70 people and one-to-two staff officers” to France’s Operation Barkhane in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel region, for the first time. As well as, sending a medical team consisting of fourteen members including doctors, nurses, therapists, and support staff to provide trauma care at a coalition base in northeastern Syria.

Denmark will also be sending a C-130J transport aircraft along with approximately 65 personnel as well as a staff contribution of up to 10 to MINUSMA, the United Nations stabilization mission in Mali.

Also, to strengthen NATO’s deterrence and defense profile Denmark will be sending around 700 personnel to NATO missions, including a combat battalion, a “larger warship” and four fighter aircraft.

A frigate will be sent by Denmark to accompany a U.S. Navy carrier group for three months on an upcoming deployment in the Med and North America as well. It appears that building a closer and stronger cooperation with the U.S. is a priority for Denmark, maybe even more so than their supposed mission to strengthen maritime security.

Last December, U.S. President Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops from Syria, stating we had won against ISIS and called on other nations to step in. His plans were derailed and currently there exists a fair amount of British and French troops in addition to U.S. Special Operations Forces who have trained and advised the SDF in the northeastern region. France and the U.K have stated during the past few months, that they will increase their presence.

Some are questioning whether Denmark’s surprise announcement to deploy troops to Syria is an attempt to make amends with President Donald Trump. After refusing to sell him Greenland, Trump canceled his trip to Denmark.

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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 InfoBrics

The Russian-Ukrainian prisoner swap proves that some degree of goodwill exists on both sides towards the other after Zelensky’s historic election and recent clinching of a parliamentary majority, thus making it more likely that they’ll continue down the path of peace and rapprochement with one another and thus advance the spirit of the nascent “New Detente”.

Turkey is increasing its military presence in northern Syria.

On September 8, Turkish and US forces carried out a first joint patrol east of the Euphrates in the framework of the ‘safe zone’ agreement recently reached by Ankara and Washington. The patrol involving at least 6 Turkish military vehicles and supported by unmanned aerial vehicles took place in the area between Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ain.

Earlier, US-backed rebels, often described by mainstream media as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), removed a part of their fortifications and withdrew military equipment from the area.

The start of joint patrols and withdrawal of SDF equipment from the border area became a diplomatic victory of Aknara. Turkey describes Kurdish armed groups that are the core of the SDF as terrorist organizations and a threat to its national security.

Watch the video here.

Meanwhile, the Turkish military reinforced its observation post near the town of Surman in the southeastern countryside of Idlib with at least four armoured vehicles. The Surman post is one of twelve such posts established last year in the framework of the Astana Process. The post is located 15km southeast of Ma`arat al-Nu`man, the biggest urban center in southern Idlib. Many pro-government sources describe Ma`arat al-Nu`man as the main target of the possible Syrian Army advance in the event of resumption of military hostilities in Greater Idlib. Therefore, the Turkish decision to reinforce its positions there indicate that even Ankara does not expect that the new ceasefire may last in the area for a long time.

Iranian-backed forces have reportedly deployed reinforcements on the frontlines with Turkish-occupied areas in northern Aleppo. Reports indicate that Iranian-backed units have deployed in the town of Marnaz and the nearby Minaq airbase.

Maraanaz and the Minaq airbase are jointly controlled by the Syrian Army and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units. Several units of the Russian Military Police are also deployed in the nearby area.

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The information below and the quotes were taken from the 12-page report that accompanied Rosemary Mason’s recent open letter to the Chief Medical Officer to England, Sally Davies. It can be accessed here.

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Campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has written an open letter to the Chief Medical Officer of England, Sally Davies. In it, Mason states that none of the more than 400 pesticides that have been authorised in the UK have been tested for long-term actions on the brain: in the foetus, in children or in adults.

The UK Department of Health (DoH) has previously stated that pesticides are not its concern. But, according to Mason, they should be. She says that Theo Colborn’s crucial research in the early 1990s showed that endocrine disrupters (EDCs) were changing humans and the environment, but this research was ignored by officials. Glyphosate, the most widespread herbicide in the world, is an EDC and a nervous system disrupting chemical.

In a book published in 1996, ‘Our Stolen Future: How Man-made Chemicals are Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival’,Colborn (d. 2014) and colleagues revealed the full horror of what was happening to the world as a result of contamination with EDCs. There was emerging scientific research about how a wide range of these chemicals can disrupt delicate hormone systems in humans. These systems play a critical role in processes ranging from human sexual development to behaviour, intelligence and the functioning of the immune system.

In addition to glyphosate, EDCs include polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). DDT, chlordane, lindane, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, toxaphene, heptachlor, dioxin, atrazine and dacthal.

Colborn stated:

“The concentration of persistent chemicals can be magnified millions of times as they travel to the ends of the earth… Many chemicals that threaten the next generation have found their way into our bodies. There is no safe, uncontaminated place.”

Mason says that Colburn predicted that this would involve sexual development and adds this is why certain people may be confused about their sexuality.

She says to Davies:

“You were appointed as interim CMO by David Cameron in June 2010; you became the permanent holder in 2011. Was that once you had assured him of your loyalty by not mentioning pesticides?”

She continues by saying:

“You did not train as a specialist in public health but as a consultant haematologist, specialising in haemoglobinopathies. You joined the Civil Service in 2004 and became Chief Scientific Adviser to the Health Secretary. Did David Cameron instruct Tracey Brown OBE from Sense about Science, a lobby organisation for GMO crops, to be your minder? When the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists published a paper saying that exposure to chemicals during pregnancy could damage the foetus, you and Tracey Brown publicly made fun of it.

“After that I wrote to you about the Faroes Statement: in 2007, twenty-five experts in environmental health from eleven countries (including from the UK) met on the Faroes and contributed to this statement: ‘The periods of embryonic, foetal and infant development are remarkably susceptible to environmental hazards. Toxic exposures to chemical pollutants during these windows of increased susceptibility can cause disease and disability in infants, children and across the entire span of human life.’ You asked Dr John Harrison from Public Health England to write to me to reassure me that there was no evidence that it was true.

“You made an announcement in 2011 that antibiotic resistance was an apocalyptic threat to humans and the issue should be added to the government’s national risk register of civil emergencies… When I informed you that one of glyphosate’s many actions was as an antibiotic, you ignored me.  Dr Don Huber, a Plant Pathologist from Purdue University, Indiana, says that glyphosate is an antibiotic, an organic phosphonate, a growth regulator, a toxicant, a virulence enhancer and is persistent in the soil. It chelates (captures) and washes out the following minerals: boron, calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, nickel and zinc.^”

Mason doesn’t waste much time in drawing conclusions as to why her previous letters to Davies and other officials have been ignored or sidelined. She notes that between May 2010 and the end of 2013 the UK Department of Health alone had 130 meetings with representatives of industry and concludes that commercial interests are currently in control of key decisions about the public’s health. 

In 2014, an open letter from America warned citizens, politicians and regulators in the UK and EU against adopting GM crops and glyphosate. It was endorsed by NGOs, scientists, anti-GM groups, celebrities, food manufacturers and others representing 60 million citizens in the US. Mason draws attention to the fact that the letter outlined eight independent papers describing environmental harm and six about the threat to human health.

But David Cameron, PM at the time, ignored it. The European Commission and the European Food Safety Authority also ignored it. Glyphosate was relicensed.

Mason asked relevant officials why the EFSA was regularly increasing the maximum residue levels of glyphosate in foods at the request of Monsanto but has received no reply.

Professor Philippe Grandjean, the leader of the conference that issued the ‘Faroes Statement’, released the book: ‘Only One Chance: How Environmental Pollution Impairs Brain Development – and How to Protect the Brains of the Next Generation’ (2013). In reviewing the book, Theo Colbern said:

“This book is a huge gift to humankind from an eminent scientist. Grandjean tells the truth about how we have been ruining the brain power of each new generation and asks if there are still enough intelligent people in the world today to reverse the problem. I cannot rid myself of the idea that too many brains have been drained and society is beyond the point of no return. We must learn from the follies and scandals that Grandjean reveals and stop the chemical brain drain before it is too late.”

But pesticides are ignored

A key point that Mason wants to make to Davies is that lifestyle choices are not to blame for rising rates of diseases, cancer and obesity; these increases are the outcome of the toxic cocktails of pesticides and other chemicals we are consuming.

Mason says to Davies about the Chief Medical Officer for England’s 2019 annual report:

“For your final report, you failed to mention many diseases afflicting people in the UK… You claim that you work independently and you are going to write about childhood obesity in September. But why did you collude with Cancer Research UK to blame the people for obesity?”

Not only did David Cameron ignore the ‘Letter from America’, he also appointed Michael Pragnell, founder of Syngenta and former Chairman of CropLife International, to the board of Cancer Research UK in 2010. He became Chairman in 2011. As of 2015, CropLife International´s member list included BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, FMC Corp., Monsanto, Sumitomo and Syngenta. Many of these make their own formulated glyphosate.

Mason says to Davies:

“CRUK, you, the Chief Medical Officer for England, and Public Health England, linked cancer to alcohol, obesity and smoking. You all blamed the people for ‘lifestyle choices’. Where is the scientific evidence for this?” 

Syngenta is a member of the European Glyphosate Task Force, which sought to renew (and succeeded) European glyphosate registration. Not surprisingly, Mason says, the CRUK website denies that there is any link between pesticides and cancer. Its website says the following about pesticides:

“For now, the evidence is not strong enough to give us any clear answers. But for individual pesticides, the evidence was either too weak to come to a conclusion, or only strong enough to suggest a “possible” effect. The scientific evidence on pesticides and cancer is still uncertain and more research is needed in this area.”

Mason refers to a survey commissioned by CRUK, ‘People lack awareness of link between alcohol and cancer’, but asks what credible scientific evidence is there that alcohol causes seven different types of cancer and that obesity causes 13 different types of cancer? She concludes, none, and writes that certain top scientists have questioned (ridiculed) the messages being conveyed to the public about alcohol use.

In the Observer and the Guardian in July 2019, CRUK took out half-page advertisements stating that obesity (in huge letters) is a cause of cancer. In a smaller box, it was stated that, like smoking, obesity puts millions of adults at greater risk of cancer. Bus stops and advertising hoardings were replete with black text on a white background. The adverts invited people to fill in the blanks and spell out OBESITY, asking the public to ‘Guess what is the biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking’.

Mason notes that CRUK has also paid for many TV adverts, describing how it looks after people with cancer and encourages donations from the public. It claims to have spent £42 million on information and influencing in 2018. 

She says that the Department of Health’s School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme (SFVS) has residues of 123 different pesticides that seriously impact the gut microbiome. Mason states that obesity is associated with low diversity of bacteria in the microbiome and glyphosate destroys most of the beneficial bacteria and leaves the toxic bacteria behind. In effect, she argues (citing relevant studies) that Roundup (and other biocides) is a major cause of gross obesity, neuropsychiatric disorders and other chronic diseases including cancers, which are all on the rise, and adversely impacts brain development in children and adolescents.

She asks Davies:

“Why did you not attend the meeting in the Houses of Parliament on Roundup? If you were away, you have hundreds of staff in the DOH or Public Health England that could have deputised for you. Dr Don Huber, Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology at Purdue University, Indiana, and one of four experts on Roundup, spoke at a meeting in the House of Commons on 18^th June 2014 on the dangers of Roundup. In what was one of the most comprehensive meetings ever held in Europe on Glyphosate and Roundup, experts from around the World gathered in London to share their expertise with the media, members of a number of UK political parties, NGO representatives and members of the general public. EXCEPT THAT NONE OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA WAS PRESENT, NOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH NOR PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND. They are protecting the pesticides industry.”

Mason makes much of the very cosy relationship between the Murdoch media and successive governments in the UK and asks:

“Roundup weed killer is present in all our foods: why does the UK media not want us to know?”

She notes that women in the UK are being warned to cut back on sweet treats or risk cancer. Sally Davies says women are consuming “two biscuits too much each day” and should lose weight. Davies says obesity will surpass smoking as the leading cause of cancer in women by 2043. Last year, official figures revealed 30 per cent of women in the UK are overweight and 27 per cent are obese. Obesity levels across all genders have risen from 15 per cent to 26 per cent since 1993.

But as Mason has shown time and again in her reports and open letters to officials, pesticides (notably glyphosate) are a key driver of obesity. Moreover, type 2 diabetes is closely associated with being very overweight. According to NHS data, almost four in five of 715 children suffering from it were also obese.

“Type 2 diabetes is a disaster for the child and their family and for the NHS,” says Graham MacGregor, a professor of cardiovascular health at Queen Mary University of London who is also the chair of the campaign group Action on Sugar. “If a child gets type 2 diabetes, it’s condemning them to a lot of complications of that condition, such as blindness, amputations and kidney disease,” he said. “These figures are a sign that we are in a crisis and that the government doesn’t seem to be taking action, or not enough and not quickly enough. The UK obesity levels now exceed those of the US.”

Mason explains:

“I am one of the many British women in 2014-16 who were spending nearly 20 years of their life in poor health (19.3 years) while men spend just over 16 years in poor health. Spanish women live the longest, with UK longevity ranked 17th out of 28 EU nations, according to Public Health England’s annual health profile. Each year there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers in the UK and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers.”

She concludes:

“Britain and America are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. These countries are experiencing not merely a slowdown in life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across all our populations, men and women alike. We are needlessly allowing our people to die early.”

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the foreign policy of the United States is some kind of theatrical performance, like a comic opera, with new characters appearing on stage willy-nilly and then being driven off after committing an incredible faux pas only to be replaced by even more grotesquely clownish figures. Unfortunately, while the musical chairs and plot twists contrived by a Goldoni or Moliere generally have a cheerful ending, the same cannot be said about what has been taking place in the White House.

The latest White House somewhat unexpected departure was that of ex-real estate lawyer Jason Greenblatt, who has been hanging around for over two years putting together the Deal of the Century for the Middle East. The Deal will reportedly end forever the possibility of any real Palestinian state but has run into a problem because Israel does not want its hands tied in any way while the Saudis and friends are reluctant to come up with the cash to fund the arrangement. Back to square one, though the Administration has replaced Greenblatt with thirty-year old Avi Berkowitz, whose only qualification for the position is that he is a friend of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner whose most recent job at the White House consisted of managing “daily logistics like getting coffee…” The president is nevertheless still insisting that the peace plan will be revealed in all its glory after the Israeli election on September 17^th.

Another administration notable who now appears to be waiting for the hook to come out from offstage and take him away is National Security Adviser John Bolton. Bolton has long been regarded by those who still believe that Donald Trump actually has a heart and a mind as the eminence grise seated behind the throne who has encouraged the president’s bad angels. That may indeed be so, but leaks are now suggesting that the president has been disagreeing with his chief minister and marginalizing his presence in meetings. But as bad as Bolton truly is, one should not dismiss from consideration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, both of whom, like Bolton, have exhibited extraordinary ability to provide bad advice and to simultaneously say and do stupid things.

Pence’s recent error plagued trip to Ireland left one exasperated Irish journalist complaining that it was as if the Vice President had been invited to someone’s home and had “shat on the new carpet in the spare room, the one you bought specially for him” before his departure. Pence had unwisely made comments about Brexit that were both uninformed and regarded as “humiliating” by his hosts. But his real crime was that he blamed his boss for the ridiculous decision to stay at a Trump property 180 miles away from Dublin. President Trump denied the claim and, as he does not like being embarrassed by his subordinates, there is already talk that Pence will be replaced on the Republican ticket in 2020. Unfortunately, Attila the Hun is no longer available but it is certain that the GOP will be able to come up with someone else who will, like Pence, offend almost everyone. Tom Cotton maybe? Nikki Haley?

Now that North Korea is not cooperating with Trump’s distinctive brand of diplomacy, the Great Negotiator has turned to America (and Israel’s) enemy number one, suggesting a sit down with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The only problem with that is that Rouhani is not playing because the United States has been engaged in nothing less than “maximum pressure” economic warfare against his country. End the sanctions and Rouhani would consider talking directly.

Israel, of course, is deeply concerned lest American and Iranian heads of government actually get together to discuss things. According to some observers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is believed to be somewhat nervous over that possibility and wants to get a hotter war going in the region to disrupt any consideration of entente between Tehran and Washington. That is why the Israelis have been escalating their attacks against claimed “Iranian targets” in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, an initiative intended to provoke an Iranian reaction which will then be escalated by Netanyahu to draw Washington in supporting Israel while also putting an end to any consideration of top-level talks.

As a side show to the deep thinking going on in the White House, there is the Iranian tanker saga. One might recall that the tanker Adrian Darya 1, which claimed to be registered in Panama while carrying alleged Iranian oil allegedly bound for Syria, was halted in Gibraltar by the British at the request of the American State Department even though it was in international waters at the time. The U.S. has been sanctioning nearly everything having to do with Iran, to include its export of oil, and is also enforcing sanctions imposed on the government in Syria. Pompeo claimed, in fact, that he had “reliable information” the ship was transporting oil to Syria in defiance of wide-ranging U.S. and European Union initiated sanctions directed against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over false claims that it had been using chemical weapons. The Treasury Department added that the vessel was “blocked property” under an anti-terrorist order, and “anyone providing support to the Adrian Darya 1 risks being sanctioned.”

After six weeks detention, the British released the tanker on August 18^th when a Gibraltar judge ruled that there were no grounds for seizing it in the first place, adding that it could not be turned over to Washington. Since that time, it has been making its way across the Mediterranean headed for ports unknown. It is, inevitably, being stalked by the United States Navy, which may or may not attempt to take control of it before it heads to shore in Lebanon or Syria.

The entire situation is farcical, but here is where the fun comes in: Brian Hook, a true Trumpean know-nothing who somehow has been designated U.S. Grand Poobah for Iran, sent an email on August 26^th to the ship’s Indian captain Akhilesh Kumar. The message said

“This is Brian Hook . . . I work for secretary of state Mike Pompeo… I am writing with good news.”

The “good news” consisted of an offer to give Captain Kumar millions of dollars if he would sail the Adrian Darya 1 to a port that would impound the ship for the U.S. Kumar did not respond to the offer to turn pirate and steal the vessel, so “Captain” Hook dropped the hammer in a second email, writing that: “With this money you can have any life you wish and be well-off in old age. If you choose not to take this easy path, life will be much harder for you.”

The sublimely ridiculous proposal to Kumar comes on top of a similar appeal from the Department of State, which last week offered rewards of up to $15 million for information that would enable the disruption of the financial mechanisms used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). State, acting through its humorously named “Rewards for Justice” program, will pay money for any information regarding the revenue sources of the IRGC, which was listed as a foreign terrorist organization in April.

The State Department announced the rewards at a briefing late last Wednesday morning, with Brian Hook saying that

“The IRGC trains, funds, and equips proxy organizations across the Middle East. Iran wants these groups to extend the borders of the regime’s revolution and sow chaos and sectarian violence. We are using every available diplomatic and economic tool to disrupt these operations.”

Having experienced schemes involving paying rewards for information while I was overseas with the CIA, I can with considerable confidence predict that the U.S. Embassies in Turkey and Dubai will be flooded with desperate Iranians peddling what stories they have made up in exchange for money or visas. The actual information obtained will be approaching zero.

The American beneficence towards the Middle East currently also includes, apparently, intervening yet again in Syria to prevent the Syrian Army and its Iranian and Russian allies from eliminating the last major terrorist pocket in the country’s Idlib province. Fact is, it is the United States being led by the nose by Israel that has both supported terrorists and created most of the unrest and violence in the Middle East, central Asia and North Africa.

Additionally, also last week, the Treasury Department’s Office for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence headed by Under Secretary Sigal Mandelker, an Israeli, sanctioned more than two-dozen entities and individuals as well as 11 ships allegedly supporting IRGC oil shipments going to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and other “illicit actors.” One has to wonder if the Treasury’s Office “for Terrorism” might actually be “for Terrorism” as long as it is carried out by the U.S. and its “best friend and closest ally” in the Middle East.

All in all, one hell of a week. A Greenblatt gone replaced by a Berkowitz, possibly Bolton and Pence going, piracy on the high seas, cash for info schemes, and lots more sanctions. Can’t get much more exciting than that, but let’s wait for next week to see what Donald Trump will give his good buddy Benjamin Netanyahu as a pre-electoral gift. Rumor has it that it will include American recognition of Israel’s right to annex most of the rest of the West Bank plus security guarantees that the U.S. will have the Jewish state’s back no matter what it seeks to do with its neighbors. Stay tuned!

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

Featured image is from The Unz Review

Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Tulsi Gabbard (Presidential Candidate) about the lack of transparency of the democratic debates, suing Google, smears from the media, challenging the Democratic Party establishment, the 2020 election, the future of the Democratic party, Donald Trump, and more.

Watch the interview below.

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A crise ambiental e diplomática promovida pelo governo brasileiro, em razão de sua cumplicidade com o Dia do Fogo organizado por setores do agronegócio na Amazônia e das hostilidades que dirigiu ao governo francês, é apenas mais um capítulo de um projeto, em curso, de submissão neocolonial ao imperialismo unilateral de Trump e à extrema-direita estadunidense. Apresentada por Bolsonaro e sua base como uma reação do governo brasileiro a um imperialismo francês e europeu que pretenderia internacionalizar a Amazônia, representa em verdade o exato oposto: a subordinação visceral de um subimperialismo títere e vassalo ao poder estadunidense e à internacional fascista que o trumpismo organiza.

Fragilizado internacionalmente com a diminuição acelerada de sua competitividade a partir de 2008, pressionado pela expansão de sua dívida pública, pela projeção da China na economia mundial, pela afirmação de distintos projetos de integração regional e de um novo eixo geopolítico mundial, através da rota da seda, do BRICS e das pretensões de um projeto de Sul Global, os Estados Unidos têm buscado reagir a essa conjuntura que lhe é globalmente desfavorável de diferentes formas.

Obama combinou as políticas de ampliação da globalização neoliberal com as de desestabilização, cerco ou intervenção militar, a pretexto humanitário, de acordo com espaços e circunstâncias. Expressão da busca de ampliação da globalização neoliberal foi a tentativa de firmar o Acordo de Parceria Transatlântica em Comércio e Investimento com a União Europeia, a assinatura do Acordo de Parceria Transpacífica, o acordo com o Irã sobre enriquecimento do Urânio e o projeto de flexibilização do bloqueio a Cuba, para frear sua integração crescente à economia chinesa. As políticas de cerco e desestabilização se orientaram para a Rússia – buscando separá-la de regiões fronteiriças, como a Ucrânia, e conf rontá-la à União Europeia – para o Norte da África e, principalmente, a América Latina, por meio da preparação e apoio aos golpes de Estado no Paraguai e no Brasil, ou do cerco à Venezuela, declarada ameaça à segurança dos Estados Unidos. As políticas de intervenção se manifestaram nas coalizões que liderou para a intervenção na Líbia, ocasionando a derrubada e assassinato de Muammar Al Gaddafi, e na Síria, que fracassou em função do apoio da Rússia a Bashar-al-Assad.

Trump rompe com as políticas regionais de livre-comércio e investimento, paralisa organismos multilaterais como a OMC, assume uma perspectiva hostil à defesa do ecossistema, retirando os Estados Unidos do Acordo de Paris e se opõe ao Pacto Mundial Para Migração. Toma a sério os efeitos da globalização neoliberal sobre a destruição do setor industrial estadunidense e o rebaixamento dos salários dos trabalhadores. Entretanto, não rompe com a globalização financeira e a financeirização do capital: corta os impostos das grandes corporações, ampliando o déficit e a dívida pública, e escolhe, como inimigos, os Estados competidores e os trabalhadores imigrantes. Para atingi-los usa a força do Estado não apenas contra a China, mas contra aliados históricos como a Alemanha e o M&e acute;xico: impõe tarifas sobre os produtos chineses; ameaça com sanções as empresas e os Estados que negociarem com a Huawei; intimida a Alemanha anunciando o propósito de estabelecer cotas sobre as exportações dos seus automóveis por razões de segurança nacional; e chantageia o México com impostos sobre suas exportações, caso não imponha um controle das fronteiras que impeça ou derrube drasticamente o fluxo migratório para os Estados Unidos, exigindo ainda que compre grandes volumes de sua produção agrícola.

O America First, de Trump, deve ser entendido ainda como uma retomada da Doutrina do Destino Manifesto. Trata-se de restabelecer o controle político e econômico sobre a América Latina e o Caribe, que considera o seu espaço continental vital, reduzindo os seus Estados à condição de semicoloniais e neocoloniais, para enfrentar ameaças estrangeiras ou obstáculos ao expansionismo dos Estados Unidos. Esta doutrina, que guiou a política externa dos Estados Unidos de 1846 até 1933, entre a guerra pela conquista do território mexicano até a Política de Boa Vizinhança de Roosevelt, está sendo ampliada para incluir não apenas o México, o Caribe, a América Central e o Canal do Panamá, como antes, mas a América do Sul, zona então vista como de autonomia relativa. Isto tem rela& ccedil;ão com o grau de desafio, muito superior, ao imperialismo estadunidense, representado pela ascensão da China no sistema mundial.

Trump dá sequência a um giro já realizado por Obama para conter a integração latino-americana e sua articulação geopolítica mundial. Mas o faz de forma muito mais unilateral e violenta. Rompe com o liberalismo global, restabelece com maior intensidade a estratégia do cerco contra Cuba e busca derrubar o que chamou de Troika da Tirania, que imputou aos governos deste país, da Venezuela e da Nicarágua. Estabelece nova escala de sanções econômicas e de guerras híbridas, estimulando ainda uma intervenção militar na Venezuela por meio do Grupo de Lima. Seu objetivo é o de controlar os imensos recursos estratégicos da região para dar novo impulso à industrialização dos Estados Unidos, ameaçada pela competição internacional. Neste projeto, se reserva a desindustrializa&cced il;ão à América Latina, convertendo-a em produtora de alimentos e de matérias-primas minerais e agrícolas. A desindustrialização atinge inclusive o setor petrolífero, onde os Estados Unidos se lançam como uma potência industrial, exportadora de diesel e gasolina, e importadora de petróleo cru. Abre-se assim um enorme espaço para a corrida sobre os recursos naturais da Amazônia visando a exploração mineral, pecuária e agrícola. De especial interesse torna-se a área constituída pela Reserva Nacional do Cobre e Associados (RENCA), que se pretende extinguir, revertendo a demarcação de terras indígenas e outras reservas naturais que estão no seu perímetro e equivalem em tamanho à Dinamarca.

O governo Bolsonaro impulsiona internamente essa estratégia e encontra resistência limitada dos segmentos industriais. Estes aceitam reconverter-se na financeirização, ou em estratégias de diversificação produtivas mais específicas, como a mineração e o agronegócio, recusando qualquer projeto mais amplo de desenvolvimento que eleve o nível de emprego e, com isso, as pressões dos trabalhadores para a redistribuição do excedente. Abandona-se o desenvolvimento em nome do controle político sobre o Estado

O imperialismo unilateral de Trump implica uma mudança na relação com a União Europeia. Trump, ao contrário de Obama, apoia o Brexit e a liderança de Boris Johnson para enfraquecê-la Ele a vê cada vez mais como competidora e busca limitar sua penetração tanto sobre o mercado interno dos Estados Unidos. Busca limitar ainda sua atuação sobre a área que supõe de dominação continental dos Estados Unidos, recuperando a dimensão imperialista da Doutrina Monroe. Quando Mercosul e União Europeia acertaram os termos de um acordo de livre-comércio, Trump exigiu ao Brasil abrir a negociação para firmar um TLC e despachou o Secretário de Comércio Exterior estadunidense, que não vinha desde 2011 a este país, para alertar sobre o risco de armadilhas que inviabilizassem um futuro com os E stados Unidos. Desde então Bolsonaro abriu fogo contra o acordo com a União Europeia, escolhendo a França, a potência europeia mais sensível em questões ambientais, como alvo.

Na véspera da chegada de Wilbur Ross ao Brasil, Bolsonaro desmarcou a reunião com o Chanceler francês, alegando problemas de agenda, para cortar o cabelo, durante o horário marcado, em live inspirada no registro fotográfico de corte do cabelo de Hitler em uma barbearia. Ele cruzou os braços diante Dia do Fogo, forjado para exibir apoio à sua política para a Amazônia, retardando o socorro à floresta, às reservas indígenas e aos seus habitantes. Acusou as ONGs ambientais de estarem por trás do incêndio, ofendeu a Primeira-Dama francesa, recusou a ajuda da União Europeia para combater o incêndio e promover a reflorestação. Fez o possível para criar um incidente diplomático irreversível que inviabilize o acordo, enquanto simulava um nacionalismo retórico denunciando a suposta tenta tiva europeia e francesa de internacionalizar a Amazônia, quando em discurso de campanha, afirmou entender não ser mais do Brasil. Ele anunciou estar articulando junto com os Estados Unidos uma solução para a Amazônia e liderar a formulação de um documento de governantes sul-americanos repudiando o intervencionismo europeu.

As atitudes de Bolsonaro não devem ser vistas como improvisadas e impensadas, mas como parte de uma estratégia deliberada e articulada para comprometer o multilateralismo da política externa brasileira e submeter o país ao imperialismo neocolonial de Trump. Representam uma cruzada ideológica para impor um governo forte e repressivo internamente, mas fraco e servil no plano internacional. Sua defesa do nacionalismo brasileiro se revela patética quando os fatos indicam que age como uma marionete de Trump para entregar nossas riquezas e o controle da Amazônia ao capital estadunidense. A imprudência de Macron em revelar sua pretensão de internacionalizar a Amazônia, caso o governo brasileiro não a protegesse, serviu de pretexto para que Bolsonaro levantasse uma cortina de fumaça em torno de suas reais intenções. A ameaça de um imperialismo franc&e circ;s sobre a Amazônia equivale a um risco zero para o Brasil. Não há nenhuma possibilidade de emprego da força francesa ou europeia que contrarie os interesses dos Estados Unidos na região. Por outro lado, o nacionalismo não deve ser defendido como instrumento para aniquilar direitos dos trabalhadores, promover ecocídio, extermínio das populações indígenas, destruir a democracia e ameaçar governos socialistas vizinhos. Foi por esta razão que a Alemanha nazista terminou invadida pela URSS durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, com amplo respaldo internacional e de grande parcela dos alemães, oprimidos pelo fascismo.

Bolsonaro expressa no século XXI e, de forma acentuada, as formulações da ala fascista que organizou o Golpe Militar do grande capital em 1964, e que teve seus principais representantes nos generais Artur da Costa e Silva e Silvio Frota. Algumas de suas principais inciativas ecoam as diretrizes básicas deste grupo: a subordinação da política externa ao alinhamento ideológico dirigido pela extrema-direita dos Estados Unidos, a aproximação com o sionismo, a redução drástica do Estado na economia, a busca do protagonismo dos militares e dos setores repressivos no aparato de Estado e o rechaço à democracia.

Em Ideais Traídos, Sylvio Frota expõe essas teses: alega que as razões ideológicas são mais importantes que as motivações de comércio exterior; recusa a política externa de pragmatismo responsável e ecumênico de Geisel; ataca o estabelecimento de relações diplomáticas com a China, afirmando que o maoísmo não seria compatível com a civilização democrática (sic) e cristã brasileira, procedimento que Ernesto Araujo reverbera, quando diz que o Brasil não deve vender a alma para exportar soja e minério à China; opõe-se ao voto brasileiro contra o sionismo; rechaça a abstenção no bloqueio à Cuba; e critica o estabelecimento de relações com Angola e Moçambique. Ele ainda acusa Geisel e Golbery de serem de centro- esquerda; arremete contra o capitalismo de Estado na economia, que considera precursor do comunismo; opõe-se à redemocratização e à liberdade de imprensa; propõe o alinhamento radical aos Estados Unidos, nomeando-os como o derradeiro reduto da democracia, ainda que não a todos os seus dirigentes, como Jimmy Carter, a quem imputa agir sob influência soviética quando tentou conter o sionismo.

Um dos aspectos da política de submissão neocolonial de Bolsonaro, que já começa a despontar, é a liquidação das reservas brasileiras para impedir que forças políticas no futuro possam usá-las para o desenvolvimento do país e da integração latino-americana. Apenas em setembro, o Banco Central, sob o comando de Roberto Campos Neto, pretende se vender U$ 11 bilhões a pretexto de manter estável o valor do real frente ao dólar. Tal iniciativa, caso se torne sistemática, pode atuar para reforçar a liquidação dos ativos do Estado e ameaçar as poupanças das camadas médias em favor da centralização financeira em grandes bancos internacionais.

Este projeto, se prosperar, cristalizará o poder quase absoluto de uma burguesia compradora e parasitária sobre o aparato de Estado, que o utilizará para fazer seus negócios particulares, destruindo-lhe a autonomia relativa e impondo um estilo de gestão privado e familiar, como na máfia. Para tanto, buscará colocar no lugar da ciência, da educação e da cultura, o fanatismo religioso e a cultura de extermínio, reduzindo a classe trabalhadora à condição de um lumpemproletariado desamparado, composto por uma ralé de indivíduos pobres, ignorantes, violentos e ressentidos, que sem direitos e o mínimo de consciência anticapitalista, se aproximarão a situações de trabalho análogas à escravidão, tornando ainda mais viva a metáfora do retorno a um Brasil colonial.

Carlos Eduardo Martins

Foto por Jakob Reimann, Flickr.com

Carlos Eduardo Martins é Professor Associado do Instituto de Relações Internacionais e Defesa da UFRJ e Coordenador do Laboratório de Estudos sobre Hegemonia e Contra-Hegemonia (LEHC/UFRJ). Membro do conselho editorial da revista semestral da Boitempo, a Margem Esquerda, é autor, entre outros, de Globalização, dependência e neoliberalismo na América Latina(2011) e um dos coordenadores da Latinoamericana: Enciclopédia contemporânea da América Lat ina e do Caribe (Prêmio Jabuti de Livro do Ano de Não Ficção em 2007) e co-organizador de A América Latina e os desafios da globalização (2009), ambos publicados pela Boitempo. É colaborador do Blog da Boitempo quinzenalmente, às segundas.

On the 9th of September 2001, the Global Research website at www.globalresearch.ca was born, two days before the tragic events of September 11.

We started up in late August with a handmade web design in FrontPage.  A student in philosophy gave me a hand in drafting the home page and putting the project online.

On the morning of September 8, I took a two hour “crash course” on the use of file transfer FTP software from a young software specialist, who taught me how to upload articles to the website.

THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE

Among our first articles was a coverage of the events surrounding 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan on October 7.

From these modest beginnings, with virtually no resources, the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) has evolved into a dynamic research and independent media group.

The landscape of the internet has shifted dramatically during the 18 years we have been in operation. Over the last five years, freedom of expression has become a key issue, with censorship becoming more prevalent and insidious. The situation for independent media has changed significantly, and not for the better. Despite this, in the face of large corporations attempting to censor our content and curtail our traffic and revenue, we are still here – largely thanks to you, our core readership.

Our goal is to keep this project going for another 18 years and beyond, however our finances have taken a significant hit over the past year or more. We have made it this far together, and for that I am truly grateful. With your help, GlobalResearch.ca can continue to be a resource for many years to come. Please see the information below regarding donations and membership subscriptions. Your support truly makes the difference.

Michel Chossudovsky
Editor of globalresearch.ca,
Director, Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Montreal, September 9, 2019

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The Center For Auto Safety – a non profit car safety advocacy group – is asking the NHTSA for a recall of Tesla vehicles, according to Law 360.

The outcry comes after a an NTSB report blamed a 2018 Tesla crash, in part, on the company’s Autopilot system. The CFAS said that the NTSB report confirmed that Autopilot is “dangerous and leads to crashes”. They also argue that the NTSB report highlights a design flaw in the technology which allows drivers to disengage.

The CFAS stated that the system (along with its “Autopilot” label) encourages drivers to rely too much on the technology – an argument that Tesla skeptics, short sellers and, well, anybody with common sense have been making for years.

In a statement, the Center said: 

“Put simply, a vehicle that enables a driver to not pay attention, or fall asleep, while accelerating into a parked fire truck is defective and dangerous. Any company that encourages such behavior should be held responsible, and any agency that fails to act bears equal responsibility for the next fatal incident.”

Additionally, CFAS also criticized Tesla for its “claims of superior safety,” stating that it didn’t think the company would do anything to address or respond to the NTSB’s findings.

We wrote about the NTSB’s findings on Wednesday, reporting that the organization concluded  that the probable causes of a 2018 Culver City, California crash were:

1. The Tesla driver’s lack of response to the stationary fire truck in his travel lane, due to inattention and overreliance on the vehicle’s advanced driver assistance system.
2. The Tesla’s Autopilot design, which permitted the driver to disengage from the driving task
3. And the driver’s use of the system in ways inconsistent with guidance and warnings from the manufacturer.

About 8:40 a.m. on Monday, January 22, 2018, a 2014 Tesla Model S P85 car was traveling in the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane of southbound Interstate 405 (I-405) in Culver City, California. The Tesla was behind another vehicle. Because of a collision in the northbound freeway lanes that happened about 25 minutes earlier, a California Highway Patrol (CHP) vehicle was parked on the left shoulder of southbound I-405, and a Culver City Fire Department truck was parked diagonally across the southbound HOV lane. The emergency lights were active on both the CHP vehicle and the fire truck. When the vehicle ahead of the Tesla changed lanes to the right to go around the fire truck, the Tesla remained in the HOV lane, accelerated, and struck the rear of the fire truck at a recorded speed of about 31 mph.

The Center for Auto Safety was founded in 1970 by Consumers Union and Ralph Nader as a consumer safety group to protect drivers.

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The planned merger between Raytheon and United Technologies will only further consolidate a bloated military-industrial complex.

That’s the take of William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

He is is the author, most recently, of a Nation magazine article titled Defense Contractors Are Tightening Their Grip on Our Government.

“When you build one of those huge, industrial defense conglomerates like we have in Lockheed Martin, they multiply their power,” Hartung told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “They have more money to make campaign contributions, more money to spend on lobbying, they have more facilities in more states and Congressional districts and thus they have leverage over more members of Congress. They can drive a better bargain for themselves with the Pentagon.”

“And also, you have the revolving door. Most notably you have a former Raytheon lobbyist, Mike Esper, who is now Secretary of Defense. You had a former Raytheon lobbyist, Charles Faulkner, at the State Department, who lobbied for arms sales for Saudi Arabia – bombs –  Raytheon products – they were going to use in Yemen. He left under a cloud.”

“This is just a small proportion of what is out there. Hundreds of people go back and forth every year – either from the Pentagon to the major contractors or from the contractors into government. The revolving door swings both ways. You have this elite that works back and forth. If you are at the Pentagon and used to work at Lockheed Martin you might look more favorably on Lockheed Martin. If you come from the Pentagon and go to Lockheed Martin, you can use your connections with your former colleagues to try and get a better deal for your company.”

“And perhaps most insidious, if you are at the Pentagon and are looking ahead to employment in the defense industry, you may go lightly on the companies because you are going to turn around in a few years and be asking them for a job where you will make a lot more money than in government.”

Who are the top five Pentagon contractors?

“Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics split about $100 billion of Pentagon spending a year. They are the huge corporate beneficiaries.”

When we started this publication more than thirty years ago, a major issue we covered was defense contractors ripping off the Pentagon and being brought to justice under the False Claims Act. That’s the law that allows whistleblowers to recover a bounty if they blow the whistle on corporations defrauding the government.

You see very few of those cases in the defense procurement field anymore. Why is that?

“I’m not sure why there haven’t been more of those kinds of cases. I know the Project on Government Oversight works closely with whistleblowers. They try to help whistleblowers protect themselves. And there have been whistleblowers on things like overpriced Coast Guard combat ships and the F-35. As for these kinds of False Claims Act cases, they do seem to be reduced, even though there is a new wave of revelations about fraud, waste and abuse.”

“Under Reagan, there was a big scandal on overspending on spare parts – hundreds of dollars on toilet seats, thousands of dollars for a coffee maker for a transport aircraft. Stories like that are coming back. There is a company called Transdigm which has been charging the Pentagon many multiples of what things should cost.”

“That case has gotten a little bit of attention. The Project on Government Oversight has done a report on how prevalent this practice has been in recent years. The Pentagon hasn’t cleaned up its act on that front decades later.”

Defense attorneys say that in fact the reason there has been a decline in False Claims Act cases in this area is that contractors have cleaned up their act and there are stricter compliance programs within the companies.

“You may not have as many cases of outright fraud and illegal activity. Much of the waste is because of poor management procedures at the Pentagon. And it’s a little harder to proportion blame. Is it primarily the Pentagon? Or is the greedy contractors? It seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the two.”

Support for the Pentagon budget is a bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill.

“Trump came in initially at $700 billion. Under pressure from the industry and the hawks, he went up to $750 billion. The Democrats in the House said – oh, no, let’s do $733 billion. It was only a couple of percentage points difference. And part of that was a dispute over whether Trump’s border wall should be paid by Pentagon funds”.

“Now it is true that the number that the Democrats came up with was an increase over the prior year, from $716 billion to $733 billion, even though it was already at historically high levels.”

“There are also a lot of cases of members trying to increase funding in weapons systems built in their districts – more than the Pentagon has asked for. That includes the F-18, more F-35s, more combat ships, more transport planes. Sometimes that pushes up the top line. And sometimes they just steal it from other parts of the budget like operations and maintenance.”

“It is kind of ironic because there is this standard complaint about readiness – not enough spare parts, not enough training, not enough flight hours. And as a result, there are accidents. Yet Congress periodically dips into the operations and maintenance accounts where some of those readiness funds reside and throws those funds at big ticket weapons built in their districts.”

“If there is a readiness problem, which is substantially overblown, Congress has been complicit.”

You said that the primary objection to the Raytheon United Technologies merger is the concentration of corporate power. But corporate power has been effectively written out of the antitrust laws. There were people like former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas who wanted to put curtailing corporate power as a goal of antitrust laws. You wouldn’t just look at consumer welfare, but also at the question of corporate power.

Is there an antitrust review of the merger?

“I believe there is a review ongoing. But I don’t think anyone thinks the government will block the merger. There is some overlap of businesses, but the solution will be divestment of certain units if necessary.”

“Raytheon focuses heavily on bombs and missiles. United Technologies makes military aircraft engines through its Pratt and Whitney division. At least on the big items, there is no clear overlap. If you take a narrow question – is there going to be less competition in the defense industry, where there is very little competition left anyway? the answer is probably going to be no.”

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For the complete q/a format Interview with William Hartung, see 33 Corporate Crime Reporter 31(10), Monday August 5, 2019, print edition only.

The planetary consequences of injecting  910 billion tons CO₂ into the atmosphere are playing in real time.

The Arctic Circle is suffering from an unprecedented number of wildfires in the latest sign of a climate crisis. With some blazes the size of 100,000 football pitches, vast areas in Siberia, Alaska and Greenland are engulfed in flames. The World Meteorological Organisation has said these fires emitted as much carbon dioxide in a month as the whole of Sweden does in a year. The world is literally on fire – so why is it business as usual for politicians?

The recent spate of regional to continent-scale fires, in Brazil, Siberia, California, southern Europe, Queensland and elsewhere, represents temperature rises over tinder-dry regions of Earth where forests, originally developed under Mediterranean to sub-polar climate conditions, are overtaken by heat waves associated with the polar-ward migration of tropical and subtropical climate zones. For over 40 years, fully cognizant of but ignoring the stern warnings by climate scientists, the ‘powers that be’, including so-called ‘progressive governments’, have continued to allow and commonly enhance the fatal greenhouse gas overloading of the planetary atmosphere, leading to global fires and a climate state destroying the habitability of large parts of Earth for a myriad species, including ‘Homo sapiens’.

A. Wildfires in the Arctic often burn far away from population centers, but their impacts are felt around the globe. From field and laboratory work to airborne campaigns and satellites, NASA; B. Thermal effects of aerosol form biomass burning in Siberia and the Arctic @CopernicusEU

As the globe warms, to date by a mean of near ~1.5^oC, or ~2.0^oC when the masking effects of sulphur dioxide and other aerosols are considered, and by a mean of ~2.3^oC in the Polar Regions, the expansion of warm tropical latitudes and the polar-ward migration of climate zones ensue in large scale droughts in subtropical latitudes such as in inland Australia and southern Africa. A similar trend is taking place in the northern hemisphere where the Sahara desert is expanding northward, with consequent heat waves across the Mediterranean and Europe.

Since 1979 the planet’s tropics have been expanding poleward by 56 km to 111 km per decade in both hemispheres. A leading commentator called this Earth’s bulging waistline. Future climate projections suggest this expansion is likely to continue, driven largely by emissions of greenhouse gases and black carbon, as well as warming in the lower atmosphere and the oceans. This expansion is associated with heating and drying at the expense of originally temperate habitats rich in flora and fauna.

Turning the Earth into a gas chamber.

Whereas in ‘good old’ medieval times the poisoning of wells constituted a hanging offence, nowadays despite of overwhelming scientific and empirical evidence, overloading of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and acidification of the water is fully legal and constitutes the foundation of great Big Oil economic empires, and through that decisive political influence.

Human resistance to this reality is weak. Regardless of political labels, two fundamental forces can be identified to operate in societies:

1. Ideologies, policies and actions aimed at enhancing life.
2. Ideologies, policies and actions that amounts to the opposite.

It is not a coincidence that movements which promote injustice, racism and war are commonly oblivious to the protection of nature or promote poisoned power, including carbon-overloading of the atmosphere and a dissemination of radioactive isotopes in the biosphere, despite their immense consequences. By contrast these object to clean solar and wind energy, for supposedly ‘economic’ reasons, unware there can be no ‘economy’ in a +4 degrees Celsius world.

This nexus is consistent. However there exists a third group, those who pay lip service to the reality of the global climate calamity but, when in power, rarely place limits or try to reverse the deleterious effects of environmental devastation.

Unfortunately, in a heating world dangerous fires can only become a norm, requiring fire-fighting defense on the scale no less than that of the current military. Worldwide however, the powers that be are too busy creating enemies and diverting resources for military defense, co called, aimed at yet another catastrophe.

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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and climate scientist, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Neither the Taliban nor the US wanted to throw away the unprecedented progress that’s been made towards peace thus far, but pressure on both sides from within their own ranks and outside regrettably led to the suspension of the Afghan peace process.

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Oliver Sacks, the “neurological philosopher”,  did a “different sort of medicine on behalf of chronic often warehoused and largely abandoned patients.” It combined art and science. Lawrence Weschler, in a new biography, says  Sacks was from “the period before the science and the humanities split apart”.[i]

But they didn’t just “split apart”. They were torn apart. Weschler doesn’t name the ideology responsible.

It didn’t convince everyone. Some saw through it, especially in the global South. Like Sacks, they wanted to know persons. Sacks had the “audacity to imagine that there might in fact be ongoing life persisting deep within those long-extinguished cores.” A nun at Little Sisters in the Bronx said:

“Everyone who reads his [clinical] notes sees the patients differently …. Most consultants’ notes are cut and dried, aimed at the problem with no sense of the person …. With him the whole person becomes visible.”

European philosophers separated science and the humanities. They invented the “fact/value” distinction, between what is and what ought to be. They said knowledge of the latter doesn’t exist, or might not exist. Cuban scholar Armando Hart says anyone who cares about global justice in the 21^st century should notice the damage done to the world by European philosophy. He meant liberalism. It denied truth – or at least put it in doubt – about humanness.

It made sense for those who defined humanness.

Sacks called himself a “clinical ontologist”. His science was about being, but not in the abstract. He meant the being of people, the “living statues” who were the subject of his masterpiece, Awakenings, later a film and a one-act play. He saw their stillness as active. Being as doing. Sacks responded to “philosophical emergencies”. It was part of his science.

There is an expectation in the North that Philosophy is useless, that it is at best a luxury for elite academics who live in universities and speak in complicated ways, only to each other. But Gramsci said that if you don’t understand the ideas explaining ideas, making them plausible, new ideas are ineffective because they are understood in terms of the old, mitigating their effect.

Weschler presents Sacks (affectionately) as odd without naming the ideology that makes him odd. Yet Sacks’ view was not odd.

Tolstoy knew it. Lenin commented that Tolstoy’s ideas were ‘bourgeois’ but his writing revolutionary. It’s because artists, unlike philosophers, articulate the human condition. And human emancipation is impossible without knowing the human condition.

Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov (War and Peace) reverses the popular myth of instrumental rationality. Pierre “did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them”.

Tolstoy calls it “insanity”. Pierre feels love, and as a result, has reasons. He doesn’t have purpose and from that get reasons. Indeed, he has no purpose. He has feeling, which Tolstoy describes as love. Pierre’s feelings explain what matters to him; it is not what matters to him – purpose – that explains his feelings: of energy, for instance, or importance.

In theory, Pierre’s approach is suspect. The 20th century philosopher, Che Guevara, said,

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”.

The risk is real because love is not rational. Feelings are not rational.  Love cannot guide because it is a feeling.

But this is ideology. And Guevara rejected it. He argued against the splitting of mind and body, feeling and intellect, art and science, faith and proof. Moreover, he followed a whole tradition of thinkers, not all revolutionaries, who also so argued. They wanted human, not just political, liberation, and they needed to know what “human” meant. They rejected liberalism because it didn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense, and this is known. But it persists because liberal intellectuals like Weschler don’t bother with philosophy. He admires Sacks, and names repeatedly the philosophers Sacks cared about. But he doesn’t do the work Gramsci said is essential to criticism: explaining the ideas that make other ideas plausible, even when they’re not, and it’s known.

It is significant that Pierre comes to his “insanity” after confronting death. He is a prisoner of Napoleon and is lined up to be executed. He watches the young man before him as he is shot dead. He notices how he crosses his leg as he stands, waiting to die. It is an ordinary gesture, but striking in the face of death, precisely for being ordinary.

Pierre expects to die. There’s no storytelling, no generating of meaning “from within” aimed at some abstraction called “self” or “purpose”.  Herein lie what Tolstoy calls “unshakeable foundations”.

It’s mental silence: experience of the here and now, without expectations. A quiet mind is the exercise of one’s faculties – to see, hear, touch, smell, remember – without jarring, uncontrollable, mostly illogical mental conversation. Quietness fascinated Sacks.

He didn’t like Sartre’s “uncalmness”, his “chargedness”. Weschler mentions this but doesn’t explain. But we know Sacks didn’t like his own 1960s theory of behaviour because it didn’t account for “peacefulness, enoughness, satiety, repletion.” Sacks wouldn’t have liked Sartre because Sartre’s existentialism can’t handle stillness.

Liberal philosophy generally can’t handle it. It doesn’t fit with the liberal, capitalist “man of action”, the unrealistic individual with “power to seize their destiny”. Philosophers invented the “fact/value” distinction, suggesting knowledge about existence – what is – but not about what it means to be human.

It doesn’t respect science because it doesn’t respect cause and effect. But this is known, intellectually. It’s been argued for more than half a century in analytic philosophy of science.  In practise, though, philosophy of science has no effect beyond its narrow specialization.

Sacks did have effect. His effect could be made more useful, though, if its real target were named and fully denounced.

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

[i] And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoire of Oliver Sacks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

See review https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/and-how-are-you

New evidence has surfaced to demonstrate how both American and Israeli intelligence services, aided by European partners, have long been targeting Iran in spite of clear evidence that it constituted no threat. The story involves the Stuxnet virus or “worm,” which was first employed in 2007 and eventually identified and exposed by cybersecurity experts in 2010. It constituted one of the first effective uses of a cyber-weapon, carried out in secret by two countries against a third country with which the two were not at war.

Stuxnet was one of a series of viruses developed by Israel and the United States shortly after the turn of the century to target and disrupt specific operating systems in computers by accessing what are referred to as the programmable logic controllers, which operate and manage machinery, to include the centrifuges that are employed in separating and enriching nuclear material. The systems are accessed through Microsoft Windows operating systems and networks, which in turn provide access to the Siemens software that was in use at the Iranian nuclear research facility at Natanz. The centrifuges themselves could be ordered by the virus to speed up and spin wildly, causing them in many cases to tear themselves apart.

The insertion of Stuxnet in the Iranian computers in 2007 by means of a thumb drive reportedly ruined twenty percent of Iran’s existing centrifuges, more than 1,000 machines, but it also spread and infected several hundred thousand computers using Microsoft and Siemens software and eventually wound up in large numbers of machines outside Iran. Though the Stuxnet virus had been designed with safeguards to prevent its spread, it did eventually infect other computers and propagate worldwide. Its use by its developers was regarded as particularly reckless after it was discovered and identified.

Ironically, two comprehensive studies by the American Government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted in 2007 and 2012 determined that no Iranian nuclear weapons program existed and that Iran had never taken any serious steps to initiate such research. Israel was also aware that there was no program but it was active in planting fabricated information suggesting that a secret facility existed that was engaged in weapon development. It has frequently been observed that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning for twenty years that Iran is “six months away” from having an atomic bomb.

Nevertheless, even though the Iranian nuclear threat was known to be a fantasy by 2007 at the latest, the Israeli government, sometimes working in collusion with American intelligence agencies, took steps to interfere with Iran’s existing and completely legal and open to inspection civilian atomic energy program. A multifaceted plan was developed and executed that included using surrogates to identify then kill Iranian scientists and technicians while also developing and introducing viruses into the country’s computer systems. This was in spite of the fact that Iran was fully compliant with international norms on nuclear research and had its facilities regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran was also a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel, possessing its own nuclear arsenal consisting of as many as 200 weapons, had refused to sign.

The Dutch external intelligence service AIVD had been approached by the U.S. and Israel in 2004 to provide help in locating a suitable Iranian to be groomed for the project. At that time, Holland had a large expat Iranian community and it was a relatively easy country for Iranian travelers to enter. Eventually, an Iranian engineer was identified, recruited and trained to plant the Stuxnet virus at the Natanz Iranian nuclear research site in 2007, with the objective of sabotaging the uranium enrichment centrifuges in what was to be the first-ever major use of a cyber-weapon.

The actual insertion of the thumb drive was part of a broader operation which began with a thorough debriefing of the engineer, who had previously been a contractor at Natanz, regarding the location of the centrifuges and other hardware within the facility, making it possible to write code that could target the centrifuges and their control systems specifically.

The Israeli-American-Dutch agent/mole, who was responding to an offer of considerable money and resettlement in the West, set up a computer systems maintenance and repair company in Iran that eventually was able to obtain contract work at Natanz. The agent made several visits to the facility to fine-tune his approach to installing the virus prior to actually doing so.

According to the media report, the operation was called the “Olympic Games” after the five-ring Olympian symbol because it wound up including the intelligence agencies of five countries after Germany and France joined in on the effort. It should be noted that Holland, Germany and France all had nominally friendly relations with Iran at the time. Then U.S. President George W. Bush personally approved the attack after his concerns that the virus might escape from Iran and cause a major international crisis were addressed by technical experts.

There were several arrests and executions at Natanz after the virus was discovered and it is not known if the Dutch mole ever collected on his money and the promised resettlement. More recently, Iran entered into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with the U.S., the United Nations, Britain, Germany, France, China and Russia in 2015. President Donald Trump withdrew from the arrangement last year for reasons best described a fatuous and, as of now, JCPOA is still in place but under considerable strain from all sides.

One might argue that the continuing Iran nuclear crisis all started with the reckless deployment of Stuxnet, which was based on a flawed assessment, did not have to be done, and was executed for all the wrong reasons, primarily consisting of pressure from Israel on Washington to “do something.” It also demonstrated that cyber-warfare was for real and could do great damage to infrastructure, a genie that has been let out of the bottle and has made the world a much less safe place. It has, in fact, become a global problem that continues to vex politicians and national security experts worldwide.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Graham Cluley/ Twitter

There are rare moments in history, when even the most determined enemies can suddenly recognize the futility of battle. Sometimes, just for a moment or two. Sometimes, for longer. Such moments of sanity may save thousands, even millions of human lives. And, such moments are not expressions of weakness or cowardice; on the contrary; they are embodiments of courage.

I want to believe that what happened at the Lebanese – Israeli border in August 2019, was precisely one of those such rare moments of sanity.

It changes nothing in terms of the big, geopolitical picture: Israel is a Western outpost in the Middle East. It is tormenting the Palestinian people, illegally occupying the Golan Heights, bombing Syria, and antagonizing Iran.

But an important point was established: there are limits! Israel will not go ‘all the way’, risking self-annihilation, and the annihilation of the entire region. This fact alone gives a fragile, but at least some hope, for a better future of this long-suffering territory.

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What prompts me to write the above?

At the end of August, it appeared that Israel had lost its mind. It attacked, without warning, four countries simultaneously, within just 24 hours: Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. It used drones full of explosives, as well as fighter jets.

Palestine and Syria have been attacked, regularly, for years and decades. Iraq, still de facto under US occupation, was quite a different story. There, a group of outraged lawmakers, ‘exploded’, demanding the immediate withdrawal of the US, and calling the Israeli attack a ‘declaration of war’.

Lebanon, too, did not remain silent. Israeli drones damaged the media center of Hezbollah in Beirut. They also attacked a communist Palestinian faction in the Beqaa Valley. For years, the Israeli air force has been violating Lebanese airspace, during the bombing raids of Syria. But this time it was different.

Even the Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, an enemy of Hezbollah, and a man who holds double citizenship (Saudi and Lebanese), protested, asking the United States and France for protection. The President of Lebanon called it out rightly, a declaration of war.

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, went live on television, and in a chilling statement promised a ‘measured response’.

At that point, it became clear that the entire region could soon be consumed by flames.

During coverage of the event, on both Press TV and RT, I warned against the enormous danger: Israel was attacking every armed Shi’a group in the region, and was only stopping short of attacking Iran itself. A few more assaults like these, and the entire region could explode, dragging into the conflict countries like Saudi Arabia, on the side of Israel, and Iran, on the side of Syria, Palestine and Hezbollah. Realistically, that could lead to the annihilation of entire areas and nations.

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In that period of time, I drove to, and managed to enter the border region. I first arrived at the city of Naqoura on the Mediterranean coast, and then drove all the way to the Lebanese border with the occupied Golan Heights, following the so-called Blue Line, controlled by UNIFIL.

At several places on my right, the huge Israeli border wall was now clearly visible. UNIFIL patrols consisted of armored vehicles, manned mainly by indifferent looking Indonesian soldiers. Some were taking selfies, with Israel behind them. For the United Nations, there seemed to be no urgency in the region. In fact, right after the Israeli attacks, the UN began discussing the possibility of cutting the number of UNIFIL soldiers, as well as the UNIFIL budget.

As always when visiting this border, what appeared striking to me was the proximity of Israeli and Lebanese villages; tens of meters only, in some areas.

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What followed, was a chilling, tense silence.

Then, about one week after the Israeli attacks, Hezbollah retaliated.

I was called by a TV station, asked to analyze events. As I spoke, journalists were getting the latest news from the border.

Hezbollah fired anti-tank rockets at an Israeli vehicle patrolling near the Blue Line. It hit an Israeli tank (other reports said ‘armored vehicle’). According to Hezbollah, all Israeli soldiers inside the vehicle either died or were injured. Allegedly, among the casualties, was an Israeli top-ranking commander – described as ‘a General’.

Those who are familiar with Israeli tactics for Palestine and the Golan Heights know that Israeli ‘retaliations’ in such scenarios, include the bombing of civilian targets, and the destruction of houses or entire blocks of houses.

Entire Lebanon held its breath.

This time it became clear that Hezbollah was not going to back down. And Lebanon in general obviously has reached the point when it was ready to confront Israel, if that was what it would take to maintain its dignity.

I spoke to many Lebanese people. They were frightened, concerned, particularly if they had family and children. But they were also surprisingly calm. “If this is what fate brings, then so be it!”

Then, quickly, events became bizarre and confusing:

Israeli newspapers, including the Jerusalem Post, began quoting the Israeli Defense Forces, who were claiming that ‘Yes, an attack against Israel took place, but there were no Israeli casualties.’

Almost simultaneously, Israeli-leaked videos began appearing on YouTube and elsewhere, showing Israeli soldiers carrying injured buddies to helicopters. Later, these very clips were blocked by YouTube itself, for “violating terms and conditions”.

A few days later, the entire discussion generally stopped, at both ends.

Israel ‘retaliated’ promptly. In the most peculiar way, too: it fired around one hundred rockets into Lebanon. But all the rockets landed in fields. No target was hit. Meaning: it was decided not to aim at any targets, considering the Israeli capacity to hit with great precision. More exactly: it was decided to make sure that no target would be hit. In the end, nobody was killed, and no one injured.

As I wrote above, villages, several towns and settlements are constructed right near the border line. Both Israel and Hezbollah have enormous firepower. If they wanted to, they could inflict tremendous damage and losses of lives on each other.

For some reason, they decided not to.

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I think, this is what happened:

By attacking four countries simultaneously, Israel miscalculated. Iraq and Lebanon were not ready to accept the humiliation and barefaced attacks against their territories.

There were clear signals sent in Tel Aviv’s direction. And Netanyahu understood.

For days after the Israeli attacks, Hezbollah and Israel faced each other, in chilling defiance, separated only by a concrete wall, and by the inept UNIFIL troops. Both sides were aiming at each other great arsenals of missiles and other weaponry.

One wrong move, and the entire region could go up in flames. One tiny, erroneous move, and who knows how many lives of innocent people would be lost.

I believe, or perhaps I want to believe, that both sides suddenly imagined a huge ‘black hole’ – what of this part of the world could become. They envisioned smoke, destruction and death; inevitable if they would not decide to immediately back down.

At the last moment, they did. They backed down. I don’t know how, who made the decision first. Were they communicating, even coordinating the de-escalation?

It was what, in Asia, we call ‘saving face’.

Shots were fired. Most likely, no one died. Halas!

Was an Israeli ‘general’ killed? I don’t know. Actually, I do not want to know. I am absolutely fine with the outcome: no full war in the Middle East. For now, this is the best we can get.

Of course, this should be just the beginning. The insanity has to end. I am not convinced that it will. But what happened at the end of August 2019 clearly indicates that it could.

Unfortunately, we are living in a world when only strength guarantees survival. If Hezbollah was not as strong as it is now, Israel would most likely not have thought twice; it would have overrun the entire Lebanon, in order to destroy its Shi’a adversary inside it.

But Hezbollah is strong.

And also, we have just learnt that there are at least some ‘boundaries’ which Israel is not willing to cross. In brief: Netanyahu is brutal, but he is not suicidal. For now, Lebanon, Israel and the rest of the Middle East, have survived. For now.

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Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including China and Ecological Civilization. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

Featured image is from NEO