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“Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.” – Kabir, “To Be a Slave of Intensity”

Strange how a man

Can enter your life

Just like that: a knock

Out of nowhere

And you’ve slipped away

To a rendezvous with destiny

That always awaited you.

 – EJC, “The Birth and Death of Trauma”

Myths and popular tales, like life, are replete with accounts of those not answering the call, of locking the door to their hearts and shutting themselves up in sterile and safe lives where the rest of the world is not even an afterthought, where others suffer and die because of one’s indifference.  Answering can be very dangerous, for it can take you on a journey from which you may never return, surely, at least, as the same person.  Only the courageous heed the call.

When Carolyn Forché, a twenty-seven year old naïve academic poet living in the San Diego area, miraculously answered the call of a Salvadorian stranger named Leonel Gómez Vides, who showed up at her door out of the blue, to go to El Salvador, a country she knew very little about but to which he said war was coming and her poet’s eye was needed, she acted intuitively and bravely from her deep soul’s murmurings and said yes, not knowing why or where she was heading except into the unknown.

This memoir, a souvenir of hope and terror and a call to resistance, a poet’s lucid dreaming between childhood and an adult awakening, invites the reader to examine one’s life and conscience through language that emulates our living experience as it strains toward meaning through a wandering dialectical consciousness that weaves the past present with the present past and lucid dreaming with the waking state. One experiences this book as one does life, not, as the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, has said, “as a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” It is impossible to adequately “review” a book that breathes.  One can only conspire with it to uncover the conspiracy of silence that is American government propaganda.

For at the heart of this mystery are facts, which Forché describes in graphic detail, the truth of how the United States government has long been doing the devil’s murderous work in El Salvador, throughout Latin America and the world, as current events confirm. Forché asks us to enter into her memories not to wax nostalgic, but to wake to the truth of today.  The truth that little has changed and the past was prologue.  The U.S. is still “Murder Incorporated,” and Americans must see this clearly, and resist.

Image on the right: Leonel Gómez Vides via Carolyn Forche

Carolyn’s “Yes” to the enigmatic stranger Leonel, so I sense from her reveries, was the fruit of a seed of faith planted when she was a child of ten or so in Michigan.

“The girl I once was, who had been a Catholic, woke for the bells of the Angelus at six in the morning, Angelus Domini.  I sang to myself as I walked to morning Mass under a canopy of maples, through a wetland of swamp cabbage and red-winged blackbirds, the quiet, low Mass where it was possible to pray in peace, with the Latin liturgy a murmur in the air….I felt at peace in the church, on the padded kneeler near the stained-glass windows depicting the seven sorrows along the west wall, the seven joys along the east….When I knelt beside them, the floor, the pews, and my own body were quilted in colored light.”

But she tells Leonel that she has “fallen” because she no longer attends Mass.

Leonel, a “non-believer” who says “I believe with my life, how I live,” tells her about Padre Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit priest who was murdered with an old man and a boy by the U.S. trained and supported Salvadorian death-squads.

“God that Padre Grande taught was not up in the sky lying in some damn cloud hammock.  This was a God who expected us to be brothers and sisters and to make of earth a just place.”

This was her introduction to a new theology, a way of connecting her spiritual core from a conservative Catholic childhood piety to the liberation theology that created Christian base communities of the poor and persecuted in El Salvador and other Latin American countries.  Dissident Christianity. True Christianity. When she went to El Salvador soon thereafter, not only did the poet leave the quiet of her study where her work might have revolved around herself, but the little girl left the church building to discover, as a changed woman, Christ among the poor and persecuted in the living world.

One night she meets a man in the shadows of such a Christian base community where a few of its members had been killed and dismembered by the government death squads.  His pseudonym is Inocencio.  “You can say Chencho,” he tells her.  At first he thinks she is a nun, (“although,“ as a girl, “I considered that vocation.”) because she smokes, and some of the foreign nuns smoke and don’t dress in traditional habits.  He asks her why she is there and she says, “You know, I’m not sure.”  She then explains how an unnamed person invited her to come to see the truth for herself because war was coming, and when she returned to the United States to “explain the reasons for the war to the North Americans, because my friend tells me that this will be important, that the real reasons be known, so that the people of the United States understand.”

Chencho is a catechist who secretly moves under darkness of night from one small Christian base community to another, encouraging the campesinos to keep the faith because God is with them, la gente, los pobres, the people, the poor. He says to Carolyn,

Listen to me, hermana.  We are brothers and sisters in Christ, and Christ is moving through the world now, through us.  He is acting through us in the struggle against injustice, poverty, and oppression. To be with God now is to choose the fate of the poor, to be with them, to see through their eyes and feel through their hearts, and if this means torture and death, we accept.  We are already in the grave.

Later, Leonel takes her to visit a friend who is in a prison from hell where men are tortured in padlocked wooden boxes the size of washing machines.  Afterwards she vomits. Then they go to visit a dirt poor young mother give birth in a casita in which there was nothing, “really nothing: a candle, a plastic basin, a ladle hanging against the wall, and, in the candlelight, the shadow of a wooden chair dancing on the wall.”

I followed him [Leonel] through the darkness into a passage, then through a door lit by a candle and, by the light of it, saw people gathered and one of them, someone, took me by the hand and drew me into the circle surrounding a young woman who was lying on her side on a blanket on the floor, her head propped in her hand.  There was a cardboard box beside her, and in the box, a newborn girl with her hair still wet, lying in a towel.  Leonel was looking at me from across the room.  ‘She was born about a half hour ago,’ a young man beside me whispered.  ‘She’s early. We’re going to name her Alma. Bellisima!’

Then it is on through night to meet with four young impoverished men who read their “political” poems for her, written under pseudonyms for fear for their lives, poems they hope might stir the hearts of people in the United States.

That night I knew something had changed for me, and that I wasn’t going to get tired or need a shower or want to call something off so I could rest, and I hoped that if I forgot this I would somehow remember Alma in the cardboard box in the barrio, and the mimeographed poems….The woman who went into the prison in Ahuachapán left herself behind in a barrio called La Fosa, the grave.

The naïve young poet is buried and the political poet of witness is born.  It is impossible not to be deeply moved and nourished by such a birth. Who, I wonder, are the “fallen” ones? What is writing for?  What good are poets?  Why say yes to a stranger’s request when it is so much easier to not answer the knock on the door?  So much easier to barricade ourselves behind walls of denial and say “me first.”  So much easier to ignore the truth that this book reveals: that the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and our society rests on keeping the poor poor and under the vicious thumbs of the rich.

The world is filled with writers who witness only to their imprisonment in their own egos.  When Carolyn Forché said yes to Leonel and then returned from El Salvador to write “political” poems such as “The Colonel,” she was attacked by writers wishing a poet would stay in her box and not disturb their universe.  That she was not like them angered them, J. Alfred Prufrocks who were not going to come back from the dead to tell us all as she has, poets who had time on their hands to neurotically contemplate their navels with their fellow Americans:

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Having heard Leonel’s descriptions of “the silence of misery endured” and the American supported death-squads massacring impoverished Salvadorians, she tells us,

I knew that if I didn’t accept his invitation, I could never live as if I would have been willing to do something, should an opportunity have presented itself.  I could never say to myself: If only I’d had the chance.  This was, I knew, my chance.

Wasn’t such a daring decision by this “fallen” poet the quintessence of the creative act, exactly what inspired artists do when they see the act of writing as an adventure into the unknown where startling truths wait to reveal themselves to the unsuspecting author?  A journey fraught with danger and delight, perhaps delightful danger or dangerous delight, but always ready to surprise with hidden truths that might unlock the prison gates that enclose the world in suffering and pain? Does not the artist proceed into this alien territory armed only with a fierce faith in the power of truth to reveal its face and so strengthen us through disarmament? Doesn’t a poet trust in a power greater than herself and know what she wishes to say only in the act of saying it? Isn’t real writing a transmission between the creative spirit and the world of flesh and blood, the living and the dead, a visionary opening into the future where freedom beckons?

Carolyn somehow knew this then and now, and her memoir is the result, a haunting trip into the past to liberate the present.  “The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps redeeming comfort that there is in writing,” wrote Kafka in his diary.  Perhaps there are certain writings that cannot be adequately reviewed but must be experienced. As I said, I think What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance is such a book.  How do you review a prayer and a mystery?  You must enter them if you are willing.

Carolyn, drawing on the uncanny spirit of her mystical, Gypsy-spirited Czechoslavian grandmother Anna (“I will get Anna out of you if it’s the last thing I do” her mother told her, to no avail), chose to develop her “legitimate strangeness,” as the French poet René Char urged, heeding his words that “what comes into the world to disturb nothing merits neither attention or patience.”  Disturbed and perplexed by the stranger’s tales and her former husband’s experiences in Vietnam and the United Sates’ savage war there, as well as by her mystical Catholic childhood’s faith and its tug of conscience, she joins the mysterious Leonel in El Salvador.

To those ensconced in instrumental rationality, her decision seems insane. However, instrumental rationality is insane, and it has taken us to the brink of nuclear extinction.  It is to the poet’s truth we should turn.  The data driven instrumental rationalists have given us WW I, II, Auschwitz, Vietnam, the CIA, death squads, Iraq, Syria, etc. – should I give you numbers, list it all, do the logic?  When has such logic convinced the disbelievers? Logicians don’t trust the soul’s promptings and, like Carolyn, take a chance, take a leap of faith.  They do calculations, follow computer models, and dare not enter the world outside if they are told there is a 60% chance of rain. And if they are told the sun will shine and all will be well with the world, but a hard rain does fall and the poet shouts there is blood on our hands, they act shocked.  Always shocked at the truth that was there from the start. If only we had known.

Is it any wonder so many Americans are depressed?

For Carolyn, the child of Czechoslovakian ancestry, the German holocaust atrocities haunted her, and she grew up suffering from periodic depressions that would lift once she felt the urge to do something about the injustices she saw. The urge to act for others freed her from wallowing in depression.  Rather than becoming a nun, she became a poet, and when Leonel told her that an American poet was needed to witness the truth of the American supported atrocities in El Salvador, she trusted the spirit to lead her on, not knowing why this might be so.  What use are poets, she wondered, in the U.S. poetry “doesn’t matter.”  She would soon help change that.

There is an old Catholic prayer that goes like this: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.”

Might such words have bubbled up from her unconscious?  I have long felt it was a prayer for poets as well as the religiously faithful – are not all inspired together?  Is there a difference?  “I believe in the magic and authority of words,” said Char, the French resistance fighter.  Witness and resistance.  Words. Poetry.  Prayers.

It is best that I not tell you too much about Leonel.  You will wonder about him, and you will wonder with Carolyn what her relationship with him is all about.  You will discover his essence in the reading. You will learn that he once said to Carolyn that “it isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up, it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind.  Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.”  You might, like me, question whether this is true only for the most oppressed, or whether it applies to Americans whose lives depend on the subjugation of others in foreign lands.

You will be terrified to learn of the death squads, the brutality and cold-bloodedness of their murders, and Forché’s close escapes as they hunted her.  You will feel her fear.

You will learn of the courageous women who befriend her, her meeting with Monseñor Oscar Romero the week before he is assassinated while saying Mass and Carolyn has left the country at his urging, and you too will be lost in reveries as you travel between worlds of night and day, wealth and poverty, life and death, now and then.

If you are like me, you will be inspired by what the poet Char called “wisdom with tear-filled eyes.”  This book is just that.  It is a call to Americans to face the truth and resist.

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/.

Putin actually sounded pretty concerned about the future of Nord Stream II for the first time ever during Tuesday’s press conference with his Austrian counterpart, strongly suggesting that Pompeo might have delivered a serious message to him during Monday’s meeting that got the Russian leader to finally have a more realistic assessment of the grand strategic challenge that the US poses to its interests, therefore pushing him to consider what compromises his country might have to make in order to reach a sought-after “New Detente” for relieving this unprecedented pressure. 

Sanctioning Nord Stream II?

Putin seems to have a much more realistic assessment of the challenge that the US poses to his country’s energy interests after Monday’s meeting with Pompeo, with the Russian leader actually sounding pretty concerned about the future of Nord Stream II for the first time ever during Tuesday’s press conference with his Austrian counterpart. Sputnik quoted him as saying that

“As for the attempts of our American partners to derail certain agreements, some projects — I mean Nord Stream 2 and some other projects, we have repeatedly said this and want to reiterate: these are attempts of unfair competition under various political pretexts…I already said it yesterday, the United States has become the largest oil producer and we need to think about how we influence the global energy market.”

For a man who’s carefully cultivated a “tough guy” image, it’s out of character for him to complain about how “unfair” the US is being, which is an allusion to the possibility of sanctions being imposed on the pipeline and its partners in order to create unbearable costs on the European side and subsequently derail the project.

The Reagan Redux

Putin’s right, though, because Trump is using all the tricks in the book to make matters more difficult for Russia, though what he’s doing really isn’t anything too novel in and of itself. While it can be said that the weaponization of sanctions as one of his administration’s preferred foreign policy instruments is unprecedented in its scale and scope, the underlying principle of increasing costs on his adversaries and their partners in order to reverse some of their policies isn’t anything novel. In fact, it’s actually very similar to what Reagan did against the USSR in restarting the arms race through “Star Wars” simultaneously with manipulating global oil prices in order to bankrupt the so-called “Evil Empire”. Trump, as a successful billionaire businessman, has a keen ability to sniff out economic weaknesses in his adversaries, and he understands that there’s no better time than now to put maximum pressure on Russia ahead of negotiating a “New Detente” in order to get as many concessions as possible out of it prior to clinching this long-sought deal.

The Systemic Transitions

The fact of the matter is that Russia is in the beginning of two interconnected domestic systemic transitions, the “Great Society” socio-economic one and its political counterpart PP-24 (Post-Putin 2024). Chaos theory preaches that the outcome of complex processes such as these is disproportionately influenced by their initial conditions, so in other words, disrupting these transitions as much as possible at this highly vulnerable time could possibly lead to their ultimate failure. The modus operandi that the US is applying seems to be raw economic warfare through primary and “secondary” sanctions, with the whole point of this asymmetrical assault being to compel Russia into agreeing to a lopsided deal that’s tilted against its grand strategic interests but is publicly presented as a “New Detente” in order for Putin to “save face”. For as much as Alt-Media might dismiss this as a “neocon conspiracy theory”, it shouldn’t be overlooked just how sensitive Russia is to economic shocks at this moment, particularly in terms of the political and strategic consequences that they might lead to.

Two Decades Of Missed Opportunities

Despite being in office for nearly two decades already, Putin failed to reform Russia’s economy, and its state budget is still significantly dependent on natural resource (energy and mineral) and arms exports. The US’ sanctioning of these industries is intended to reduce the amount of revenue that Russia receives from them precisely at the moment when it needs those funds the most, which could in turn jeopardize the “Great Society” socio-economic development plan and possibly inflict irreversible damage to its overall competitiveness in the technologically driven Multipolar World Order. Although Russia currently holds a monopoly on hypersonic missile technology, it’s been unable to leverage this beyond the military sphere of defensively upholding its nuclear second-strike capabilities and actually reaping real-sector economic dividends from it for its people. In the event that some of the “Great Society’s” projects are curtailed or outright canceled, Russia’s already restive and highly influential oligarchic elite might once again begin rumbling for regime change ahead of PP-24.

The Return Of The Oligarchs

There’s no credible threat to Putin’s presidency, but since he’s basically a “lame duck” in the sense that this is his final term in office, he might gradually lose the power to determine his successor if his meticulously crafted domestic political “balancing” act of the past two decades begins to unravel as a result of the US’ sanctions assault at what would be precisely the worst time for that to happen. It should be remembered that while Putin made a notable example out of several oligarchs who refused to stop meddling in politics during the early 2000s, he actually never got rid of this class like his “Putinist” followers abroad assumed that he did but only “incentivized” them through those dramatic precedents to remain outside the political sphere in exchange for not being investigated for tax and other crimes by the FSB (which he led right before the presidency). The oligarchs are still very much in power in Russia, it’s just that they’re all allied with Putin nowadays, though that could change if the country’s macroeconomic conditions worsen and they don’t receive the “payoff” they expected from the “Great Society” if Trump’s sanctions hit the Kremlin’s coffers hard enough in the future.

Hard Truths

After all, it’s precisely because of the effect that these weaponized economic instruments could have on the oligarchic class that the Obama Administration initially wielded them in the first place, only to be intensified under Trump who has personal knowledge of what makes people like him tick. That actually explains why Russia has been so desperate to lift the sanctions ever since they were first imposed half a decade ago in spite of its many media surrogates playing “reverse-psychology” and pretending that that’s the last thing that the country wants. It’s true that there have been many unintended benefits of the sanctions and that these have more often than not been in the interests of the average Russian (especially in the sense of encouraging domestic production and inspiring their country’s overall reorientation to the “Global South”), but they’ve been absolutely detrimental to the oligarchs’ interests, which is why they’ve been intensely lobbying Putin to get them lifted as soon as possible. It’s with this in mind why he’s so interested in reaching a “New Detente” as soon as possible so long as it results in at least partial sanctions relief.

The Perfect Storm?

According to chaos theory, the drastic reduction of budgetary revenue caused by America’s sanctions regime could threaten the success of the “Great Society” and lead to a chain reaction of political consequences that might complicate PP24, both of which are only in their initial stages and therefore highly vulnerable to external disruptions that could disproportionately influence their ultimate outcomes and altogether massively disadvantage Russia by possibly inflicting irreparable damage on its strategic competitiveness in what is also coincidentally the beginning of the global systemic transition to the Multipolar World Order. Russia is therefore unprecedentedly vulnerable to the effect that American sanctions could have on its three interconnected systemic transitions of the “Great Society”, PP-24, and the Multipolar World Order, something that Putin appears to have finally grasped after his meeting on Monday with Pompeo. That’s why he’s worried for the first time ever about the future of Nord Stream II, since it’s one of the most prominent examples of where the US is trying to hit Russia the hardest in compelling it to compromise as much as possible as part of a “New Detente”.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

History books may never tell the full story of the dictatorship that terrorized Argentina from 1976 to 1984.

But newly declassified United States military and intelligence documents recently delivered to Argentina offer new details about the country’s brutal military junta.

The archival documents were the fourth and final batch of 43,000 declassified U.S. telegrams, military records, intelligence and confidential memos given to Argentina following an extraordinary 2016 agreement between Argentine President Mauricio Macri and former U.S. President Barack Obama.

“Argentines now have more information about a dark period of our history that will allow us to continue strengthening justice, seeking and finding the truth,” Macri said on Twitter after receiving the 7,500-document report on April 12.

The archives narrate the human rights abuses committed by Argentina’s military government, often with the assistance of the United States. They include the forced disappearances of 30,000 people, international assassination squads that stalked their victims abroad and the kidnapping of hundreds of babies born in detention.

Source: National Security Archive

Bloody history of US intervention

The U.S. declassification effort began under persistent pressure from Argentine human rights groups founded to uncover the atrocities of the dictatorship – a period I have spent my academic career studying.

Argentine democracy was interrupted by military coups six times in the 20th century.

The declassified documents outline what happened after the last coup, staged in 1976 by Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla. It gave way to the cruelest, most repressive and violent eight years of Argentina’s history.

In August 2000 representatives from Argentina’s Center for Legal and Social Studies and the original Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – a human rights group that locates the lost children of the dictatorship, which has since splintered into several factions – met with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

That encounter led to the declassification of 4,700 State Department documents in 2002. Those documents included U.S. diplomatic cables, memoranda, reports and meeting notes related to the Argentine dictatorship, and revealed clear U.S. involvement in the junta’s “dirty war.”

Now, Argentina has the military and intelligence archives behind these operations, too.

The declassified documents show that U.S. intervention in Latin America went well beyond giving “a little encouragement” to Latin American military regimes, as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it in 1976.

Argentina was the operations center for Plan Condor, a U.S-organized alliance between the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, created in 1975 and operational until around 1980.

Fearing the spread of communism across the Americas, the Ford administration offered these rightist military regimes everything from counterinsurgency training and financial assistance to intelligence briefings.

With U.S. support, Argentina’s junta kidnapped leftists, dissidents, union leaders and anyone who looked remotely like a threat. They tortured detainees, and then threw them alive and conscious out of airplanes into the River Plate, near Buenos Aires, or dumped their bodies in mass graves.

Pregnant women were killed after giving birth, their babies adopted by the families of childless generals. Neighbors under police surveillance informed on other neighbors to appease the junta, then were abducted and tortured anyway.

The U.S. eventually grew uncomfortable with the activities of its Argentine allies.

In 1976 Robert C. Hill, U.S. ambassador to Argentina, reported to Washington that the number of people detained by the junta must “run into the thousands” and, with Kissinger’s knowledge, confronted the Argentine government about its human rights abuses.

“[Argentina’s] security forces are totally out of control,” Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlaudeman told Kissinger in 1976.

The U.S. withdrew its support from Plan Condor after Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977. Carter, a Democrat, hoped to see democracy restored in Argentina.

That would take another six years.

A bloody history learned little by little

Argentines have learned the details of this sadistic regime little by little.

Even in the waning days of the dictatorship, human rights groups began filing freedom of information requests and writs of habeas corpus with the dictatorship, to little effect.

The law began to work in democracy’s favor again after Argentina’s first post-dictatorship leader, the late President Raúl Alfonsín, was elected in 1983. He created a truth commission that uncovered 340 secret detention centers across Argentina and identified 8,690 “disappeared” people.

Once some perpetrators and victims were known, the victims’ families could file suits to hold the people who oversaw torture centers criminally responsible for their loved ones’ disappearance.

Painstaking archival research, interviews, investigations, lawsuits and prosecutions have followed under every administration since, albeit with differing levels of priority.

Much of what is known about the fates of those abducted by the military regime was discovered in the basement of the Argentine Air Force in 2013, where “black lists” of identified leftists were archived.

The newly declassified U.S. archives offer little new information that might bring closure to thousands of Argentine families whose loved ones remain, officially, “disappeared.”

As of 2017, 2,979 people had been tried for their role in the dictatorship. The charges include crimes against humanity, arbitrary detention and kidnapping. Another 593 cases remained in process.

‘Never again’

The newly declassified U.S. telegrams and confidential communications may spur new prosecutions.

They include the names of government officials and informants complicit in Plan Condor, as well as details on the torture techniques used to extract information from detainees.

“The release of these documents stands as a uniquely valuable contribution to the cause of human rights, the cause of justice and the cause of our fundamental right-to-know,” said Carlos Osorio, a Latin America analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

In 2014, under President Cristina Fernández, Argentina began its own declassification program, alongside that of the United States. Among other disclosures, it published thousands of dictatorship-era archives, including 648 pages documenting the staffing and day-to-day operations of the military junta’s foreign ministry, including its relations with the United States.

Argentina’s commitment to uncovering every dark detail of the dictatorship derives from a national sentiment that its democracy depends on understanding the past.

“Nunca mas” – “never again” – has become the rallying cry of a population that insists that history should not repeat itself.

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Prof. Rut Diamint is Political Science Professor, Torcuato di Tella University.

Featured image is from IC on the Record

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR): During Protests In Commemoration of 71^st Anniversary of Palestinian Nakba: Israeli Forces Wound 144 Palestinian Civilians, including 49 Children, 4 Women and 1 Paramedic:

On Wednesday, 15 May 2019, Israeli forces wounded 144 Palestinian civilians, including 49 children, 4 women, and 1 paramedic, in excessive use of force against the peaceful participants in the protests organized in commemoration of the 71^st anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba.

Those protests- which were called for by the Supreme National Authority of the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege under the name of “Millions for Land and Return” in commemoration of the 71^st anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba- were preceded by the Israeli forces’ military reinforcements along the border fence with the Gaza Strip, indicating a deliberate intent to use excessive force against the protesters.

PCHR’s fieldworkers monitored the deployment of dozens of Palestinian police officers to control the situation and try to prevent the protesters from approaching the border fence. Meanwhile, the protesters acted in a fully peaceful manner as there were no attempts to burn tires.

However, in very limited incidents, some protesters approached the border fence and tried to throw stones at the fence.

According to PCHR’s fieldworkers, the Israeli forces stationed in prone positions and in their military jeeps along the border fence with Israel continued to use excessive force against the protesters.

They fired live bullets and teargas canisters at the protesters, wounding dozens of them without posing any imminent threat or danger to the soldiers’ life.

The Israeli forces also used skunk water cannons against the protesters, particularly in Khan Younis and eastern al-Boreij, in addition to using drones that fire teargas canisters amid the protesters, who were hundreds of meters away from the border fence.

The incidents on 15 May 2019 were as follows:

At approximately 13:00, thousands of civilians, including women, children and entire families, started swarming to the five encampments established by the Supreme National Authority of Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege adjacent to the border fence with Israel in eastern Gaza Strip cities.

Hundreds of protesters, including children and women, gathered adjacent to the border fence with Israel in front of each encampment and its vicinity and protested between tens and hundreds of meters away from the fence.

The protesters chanted slogans, raised flags, and in very limited incidents attempted to approach the border fence and throw stones at the Israeli forces.

The Israeli shooting, which continued until around 18:00, resulted in the injury of 144 Palestinian civilians, including 49 children, 4 women and 1 paramedic, with live and rubber bullets and by being directly hit with teargas canisters.

Meanwhile, dozens of protesters, paramedics, journalists and PCHR’s fieldworkers suffered tear gas inhalation and seizures due to tear gas canisters that were fired by the Israeli forces from the military jeeps, riffles and drones in the eastern Gaza Strip.

The following table shows the number of civilian casualties due to the Israeli forces’ suppression of the Great March of Return since its beginning on 30 March 2018:

PCHR reiterates Palestinians’ right to peaceful assembly to confront Israel and its forces’ denial of the legitimate and inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to self-determination, right to return and right to end the occupation of the Palestinian territory.

PCHR stresses that the Israeli forces should stop using excessive force and respond to the legitimate demands of the protesters, particularly in regard with lifting the closure that is the real solution to end the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

PCHR emphasizes that continuously targeting civilians, who exercise their right to peaceful assembly or while carrying out their humanitarian duty, is a serious violation of the rules of international law, international humanitarian law, the ICC Rome Statute and Fourth Geneva Convention.

Thus, PCHR reiterates its call upon the ICC Prosecutor to open an official investigation in these crimes and to prosecute and hold accountable all those involved in issuing or applying orders within the Israeli forces either at the security or political echelons.

PCHR also emphasizes that the High Contracting Parties to the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention should fulfill their obligation under Article 1; i.e., to respect and ensure respect for the Convention in all circumstances and their obligations under Article 146 to prosecute persons alleged to commit grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

PCHR calls upon Switzerland, in its capacity as the Depository State for the Convention, to demand the High Contracting Parties to convene and ensure Israel’s respect for this Convention, noting that these grave breaches constitute war crimes under Article 147 of the same Convention and Protocol (I) Additional to the Geneva Conventions regarding the guarantee of Palestinian civilians’ right to protection in the occupied territories.

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ICAN and its partner organisation Pax have released a report with full profiles of 28 companies connected to the production of nuclear weapons.

Here are the 28 companies on ICAN’s Red Flag list. Download the full report here.

1. Aecom (United States)
   Aecom is involved in work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, it is involved in research, design, development and production of nuclear weapons including the life extension program of the B61 nuclear bomb10 and of the W80-1 nuclear warhead for air-launched cruise missiles. Aecom has held this US $45.5 million (€ 40.1 million) per year contract since 2007.
2. Aerojet Rocketdyne (United States)
   Aerojet Rocketdyne is involved in maintaining the propulsion systems for Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles for the US, under a US $28.9 million (€ 25.5 million) contract initially awarded in 2013. It also produces propulsion systems for the Trident II (D5) missiles for the US and UK.  Aerojet Rocketdyne is also a subcontractor on the new Ground Based Strategic Deterrent for the US arsenal. In 2018, Aerojet Rocketdyne secured an additional five-year contract for US $20 million (€ 17.6 million) for solid boost technology that will be applied to the next generation of weapons systems.
3. Airbus (Netherlands)
   Airbus is a Netherlands based company involved in the ongoing maintenance and development of several nuclear armed missiles for the French nuclear arsenal through ArianeGroup, a joint venture with the French company Safran. Airbus is also part of the joint venture MBDA that supplies medium-range air to surface missiles, also for the French arsenal.
4. BAE Systems (United Kingdom)
   BAE Systems has a maximum value US$ 368.7 million (€ 328 million) contract originally from October 2014 that will run until 2021 that is paid by the US and UK governments for key components for Trident II (D5) missiles. BAE also has a US$ 951.4 million (€ 830.8 million) contract from the US Air Force for Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) system, which will run until 2022. BAE is also involved in the French arsenal directly, through MBDA Systems, developing the mediumrange air-to-surface missile ASMPA and its successor, ASN4G. In July 2017, BAE got a new US$ 45.2 million (€ 39.6 million) modification to an existing contract for development work on the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missile replacement programme.
5. Bechtel (United States)
   Bechtel is a family run company involved in nuclear weapon development at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Y-12 Complex, and the Pantex Plant. Bechtel currently has approximately US $ 1,174 million (€ 1,035 million) in outstanding contracts at these facilities. Bechtel is also involved in one of the new nuclear weapons under design in the US, the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, though their exact contract amount is unclear.
6. Bharat Dynamics Limited (India)
   Bhrat Dynamics Limited produces key components for the Prithvi-II and Agni- V nuclear capable missiles for the Indian arsenal.
   
7. Boeing (United States)
   Boeing is building new nuclear weapons for the US. These include a 2017 contract for US$ 349.2 million (€ 297 million) for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent to replace the Minuteman III ICBMs. Boeing is also involved in the Long-Range Standoff weapon development and has been awarded several contracts since 2017 for this new nuclear weapon, valued at US $ 344.5 million (€ 304 million). Boeing holds several contracts related to the the US long-range nuclear Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM). Boeing currently has contracts valued at over US$ 703.3 million (€ 620 million) for key components for the Minuteman system. One of these contracts includes the development of ‘kill switches’ to cause the missile to self-destruct after launch. Boeing received a new US$ 26.7 million (€ 23.0 million) contract from the US and UK for Trident II (D5) work in October 2018.25 This is in addition to existing outstanding contracts for work related to the system valued at over US$ 88.9 million (€ 79.0 million). Boeing is also producing the tail-kit assembly for the new B61 bombs. More than half of all these bombs are currently deployed by the US in five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey). The US$ 185 million (€ 163 million) in contracts will mean the new B61-12 bombs are ready for use by May 2019. It is yet unclear when the new bombs will be delivered to their European locations, other companies are currently modifying the storage facilities in the host countries.
8. BWX Technologies (United States)
   BWX Technologies has a new US$ 76 million (€ 70.8 million) contract for Trident II (D5) components for the US and UK navies. BWXT also got a US$ 505 million (€ 427.5 million) contract to prepare for additional US nuclear materials production for nuclear weapons, this will initially be Tritium production, but there are also plans to produce additional nuclear materials in the near term. BWXT is also involved in the partnership that oversees the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, including the life extension program of the B61 nuclear bomb and of the W80-1 nuclear warhead for air-launched cruise missiles. The partnership receives US$ 45.5 million (€ 37.6 million) a year for this work.
9. Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (United States)
   Charles Stark Draper Laboratory has a US$ 370.2 (€350.5 million) contract, paid by the US and the UK, for work on the Trident II (D5) system. In 2018, Draper got another US & UK funded to US$ 109.5 million (€ 95.9 million) contract for additional work on the Trident system, including hypersonic guidance and support for hypersonic flight experiments, to be concluded by September 2019.
10. Constructions Industrielles de la Méditerranée (France)
    Constructions Industrielles de la Méditerranée is included for the first time as more information on the specifically designed key components for the French nuclear arsenal has become available. CNIM designs and manufactures the submarine launching systems designed for the nuclear-armed M51 missiles.
11. Fluor (United States)
    Fluor is involved at several US nuclear weapons enterprise facilities. Through a joint venture, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) it has an US$ 8 billion (€ 7.1 billion) contract for efforts related to key components for the W88 Alt 370 program, the nuclear warhead deployed on the Trident II (D5).
12. General Dynamics (United States)
    General Dynamics has a number of contracts related key components for the UK & US Trident II (D5) systems. An initial US$ 30.6 million (€ 28.2 million) contract awarded in 2015 has been modified repeatedly (including five times between November 2017 and December 2018) bringing the total contract value to over US$ 174.4 million (€ 155.6 million). Another General Dynamics subsidiary, General Dynamics Electric Boat received a maximum dollar value of US$ 46.5 (€ 43.4 million) contract in September 2017 for integration work for United Kingdom Strategic Weapon Support System kit manufacturing for the Columbia class ballistic missile submarines. In 2018 this contract was modified significantly, first in April for US$ 126.2 million (€ 102.4 million), and again for US$ 480.6 million (€ 414 million) in September 2018.
13. Honeywell International (United States)
    Honeywell International manages and operates the National Security Campus (NSC) (formerly Kansas City Plant), the facility responsible for producing an estimated 85% of the non-nuclear components for US nuclear weapons under a five year US$ 900 million (€ 817.4 million) contract awarded in July 2015. It is also a co-owner of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) which has a US$ 8 billion (€ 7.1 billion) contract for efforts related to key components for the W88 Alt 370 program, the nuclear warhead deployed on the Trident II (D5). Honeywell is also associated with other US nuclear weapons enterprise facilities, including an outstanding US$ 5 billion (€ 4.6 billion) contract for the Nevada National Security Site and a US$ 2.6 billion (€ 2.5 billion) contract for the Sandia National Laboratory. Both facilities are responsible for warhead production, testing, and design. Also, Honeywell received new contracts in 2018 valued at US$ 19.0 million (€ 16.2 million) for the PIGA guidance instrument for the Minuteman III.
14. Huntington Ingalls Industries (United States)
    Huntington Ingalls Industries took over the management and operations for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2018 with a five-year contracted with an estimated value of US$ 2.5 billion (€ 2.2 billion) annually. Huntington Ingalls Industries will be providing “personnel, systems, tools and corporate reachback in the areas of pit production, plutonium manufacturing, production scale-up and nuclear operations and manufacturing”. Huntington Ingalls Industries is also part of a US$ 5 billion (€ 4.6 billion) contract at the Nevada National Security Site, and the US$ 8 billion (€ 7.1 billion) contract at the US Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site and Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
15. Jacobs Engineering (United Kingdom)
    Jacobs Engineering is part of the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment, which currently has a 25-year £ 25.4 billion (€29.6 billion) contract for maintenance of the UK Trident arsenal. Jacobs was also part of the group that took over management and operations of the Nevada National Security Site in 2017 under a 10-year US$ 5 billion (€ 4.6 billion) contract.
16. Larsen and Toubro (India)
    are involved in producing key components for the Indian nuclear arsenal. These include the launcher system for the nuclear-capable Prithvi II missile. It is also involved in the Dhanush, the ship-based variant of the Prithvi-II.
17. Leidos (United States)
    Leidos is a minority partner of Consolidated Nuclear Services LLC (CNS), which took over the management and operation of the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and the Pantex Plant in Texas under the same US$ 446 million (€ 326.5 million) contract in 2014. These facilities are involved in producing Tritium for US nuclear weapons as well as the M76/MK4A, W76-2, W80-1 and, W88 warhead modifications.
18. Leonardo (Italy)
    Leonardo is an Italian company (formerly known as Finmeccanica) involved in the French nuclear arsenal through MBDA-Systems. In contracts from 2016, MBDA began design and development of the mid-life upgrade of the ASMPA to keep it in the French arsenal through 2035. In the 2019 French Ministry of Defence Budget, three deliveries of upgraded ASMPAs are planned after 2019. MBDA is also involved in work on the successor system (ASN4G) which is meant to be operational after 2035.
19. Lockheed Martin (United States)
    Lockheed Martin has outstanding Trident II (D5) contracts valued at approximately US$ 6,550.1 million (€5,730.4 million). Of these US$ 918.9 million (€ 801.9) were awarded in between March 2018 and January 2019. Lockheed also has at least US$ 495 million (€ 413.6 million) in outstanding contracts related to the Minuteman III ICBM. It is also involved in a US$ 900 million (€ 764.2 million) research and design contract for the new US the Air Force Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) missile. Lockheed Martin’s nuclear weapon associated activities aren’t limited to US missile production alone. It is also part of the 25-year £ 25.4 billion (€29.6 billion) contract for the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment.
20. Moog (United States)
    Moog has developed launch vehicle and strategic missile controls for the Minuteman III and Trident (D5) missiles. Moog is also part of the Boeing team that won a US$ 349.2 million (€ 297.0 million) contract in 2017 for technology maturation and risk reduction activities for the new Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
21. Northrop Grumman (United States)
    Northrop Grumman is currently handing over responsibilities to BAE Systems as the prime contractor for the Minuteman III ICBM system. This process began in 2013, but there have been repeated ‘bridge’ contracts valued at over US$ 165.0 million (€ 128.3 million), most recently in September 2018. Now the handover process is expected to be complete in April 2019. Although Northrop Grumman is no longer the prime ICBM contractor, it still has additional US ICBM related contracts including those it took over when it acquired Orbital ATK. These additional contracts were mostly awarded in 2015, with a total value of approximately US$ 1,852.9 million (€ 1,642.9 million). Northrop Grumman, via ATK Launch Systems was also awarded another Minuteman related contract for US$ 86.4 million (€ 74.5 million) in September 2018. Northrop Grumman is also involved in the Trident II (D5) systems for the US and the UK, with outstanding contracts valued at approximately US$ 531.3 million (€ 493.2 million). Many of these Trident II (D5) related production activities are meant to conclude in 2020. Northrop Grumman is also connected to the nuclear weapons facilities at the Pantex and Y-12 through at US$ 446 million (€ 326.5 million) contract to the Consolidated Nuclear Services (CNS) joint venture.
22. Raytheon (United States)
    Raytheon has an outstanding US$ 33.4 million (€ 24.8 million) contract for work related to the Minuteman III ICBMs. Raytheon is also involved in new nuclear weapons development for the US. It is part of the Boeing team working on the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, and in August 2017, Raytheon received a five-year contract for US$ 900 million (€ 764.2 million) for the new Long-Range Standoff weapon.
23. Safran (France)
    Safran is a French company and two of their subsidiaries (Snecma and Sagem) are developing key components for the M51 missiles for the French nuclear weapons arsenal. Safran is also part of the joint venture with Dutch company Airbus, responsible for ongoing production and maintenance of the missile system overall.  This joint venture is also contracted to carry out the 2019 budgeted tasks of the French Ministry of Defence for three deliveries of upgraded ASMPAs after 2019.
24. Serco (United Kingdom)
    Serco is a UK company involved in management and operations of the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) under 25-year contract (1999 to 2024) valued at £ 25.4 billion (€29.6 billion).
25. Textron (United States)
    Textron has an outstanding US$ 17.2 million (€ 12.5 million) contract to convert up to six Minuteman III MK 12A re-entry vehicles to the Mod 5F configuration.
26. Thales (France)
    According to the French Ministry of Defence, Thales is one of MBDA’s subcontractors supplying medium-range air-to-surface missile ASMPA to the French air force.
27. United Technologies Corporation (United States)
    United Technologies Corporation acquired Rockwell Collins in November 2018 and renamed it Collins Aerospace Systems. This company has an outstanding US$ 76 million (€ 67 million) contract for the Airborne Launch Control System Replacement for the Minuteman III ICBM missiles.
28. Walchandnagar Industries Limited (India)
    Walchandnagar Industries Limited produces launching systems for the Indian Agni series of nuclear armed missiles.

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Clashes between the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led coalition of militant groups continue in northwestern Hama and northern Lattakia.

4 SAA soldiers were killed and 7 others  were injured in a failed attack on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham positions near the town of Kabani, according to pro-militant sources. Militants captured bodies of 2 killed SAA soldiers and decapitated them.

After this, the SAA’s 4^th Division delivered a series of strikes on militant positions near Kabani with Golan-1000 heavy rocket launcher 500mm improvised rocket-assisted munitions.

Last week, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham repelled a similar SAA attack in the same area. Than, a source in the 4^th Division told SouthFront that the SAA was determined to continue its offensive actions in the area.

In northwestern Hama, the SAA and the Tiger Forces imposed control of the villages of al-Huwayz and Huriya and the nearby agricultural strip. Militants employed at least 2 battle tanks and 5 other armoured vehicles in attempts to repel the ongoing SAA advance. However, they failed. Most of the equipment were eliminated.

The main clashes are now ongoing in the area of al-Huwayz. The scale of the SAA operation remains limited, but it continues to make gains almost on a daily basis.

ISIS announced that it had carried out an attack on SAA positions near the Khounayfis phosphate mine in the province of Homs. The situation in the area remains unclear.

On May 15, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and its security forces, commonly known as Asayish, launched a large-scale security operation in southeastern Deir Ezzor.

The operation targeted the remaining ISIS cells in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, especially in the town of al-Shheell, which witnessed a wave of protests against US-backed forces in the last few weeks.

According to the SDF, 20 ISIS terrorists and a large quantity of armament were captured in two tunnels in the village of al-Shheell. The Kurdish Hawar News Agency (ANHA) reported that four of the arrested terrorists were participating in al-Shheell protests.

Last week, the SDF and the US-led coalition killed six civilians during a failed security operation in Shheell. The incident provoked a new wave of anti-SDF protests in the town, which was met with a violent response from Asayish.

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The author delivered this speech at the Perdana Global Peace Forum 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on June 22, 2006. That year the U.S. had deployed aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf and tensions then, as now, were high. 

Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in 1789. The fledgling United States opened the 19th century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (à la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the world.

Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the 20th century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain — in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against the Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal conditions from which they still suffer today. All in the name of securing America’s so-called place in the sun.

And today at the dawn of the 21st century, the world witnesses the effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples, surrounding central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy, which is total nonsense.

The imperialist foreign policy of the United States of America since its foundation, has been predicated upon racism, aggression, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third millennium of humankind’s parlous existence, nothing has changed about the operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack upon Iran.

Now the assigned topic today is “The Middle East Agenda: Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam.” So, I’m only going to limit my comments to that subject. We have to begin the story with the Arab oil embargo in 1973.

As you know in 1967, Israel launched an illegal war of aggression against the surrounding Arab states, stole their land and ethnically cleansed their people. But eventually Egypt offered a peace treaty to Israel, which Israel rejected and the Egyptians and the Arab states decided then to use force to recover their lands. Israel almost collapsed, the United States and Europe came to its support by providing weapons and in reaction the Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States and Europe, and brought their economies to their knees.

Whereupon, then U.S Secretary of State Henry Kissinger threatened them and said: “This will never happen again, and if you do, we will prevent it.” And it was not just a threat. The United States government then, at that time, planned, prepared and conspired, to steal the oil of the Persian Gulf. They did not have the military capability to do this at that time, to carry out the Kissinger threat, which was also then repeated by the Ford administration, and the Carter administration under [Secretary of Defense] Harold Brown and [National Security Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Arrival of U.S. Central Command

So they put into planning an interventionary force, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing Arab oil fields, and that was called the Rapid Deployment Force. And it took 10 years of training, planning, positioning, and supply to build that interventionary force of that capability and eventually it was called the U.S. Central Command.

The purpose of the U.S. Central Command is to steal and control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. And that’s exactly what the U.S. Central Command proceeded to do in the Bush Sr. war against Iraq, their first military expedition.

And as we know, that war exterminated probably 200,000 Iraqis. Half of them innocent civilians. Simply wiped out in a bombing campaign and a military expedition of unprecedented dimensions. But remember, it took 15 years for the Pentagon and three different administrations both Republicans and Democrats to get the capability to do this. And then, when that genocide or conflict was over, what happened?

The United States carved Iraq up into three pieces with their air force, the so-called no-fly zones, a zone for the Kurds in the North, a zone for the Shi’ah in the South, and the Sunni in the middle. Why? To destroy Iraq as an effectively viable state.

In his book, “Clash of Civilizations,” Samuel Huntington from Harvard, who advised the Pentagon and the State Department, pointed out that the only Arab state with the capability to lead the Arab world and challenge the United States and Israel was Iraq. And so, Iraq had to be destroyed, to maintain the domination of the United States and its proxy, Israel. And remember after 1973, whatever it was before then, Israel is nothing more than a catspaw of the United States. They do what America tells them to do! Otherwise Israel is nothing more than a failed state.

In addition then, to destroying Iraq as a state, carving it up into three pieces, was the decision to debilitate and destroy the Iraqi people. And so, they continued the genocidal economic sanctions on the people of Iraq, that my colleagues, Denis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, so courageously resisted and finally resigned from the United Nations as a matter of principle, calling them by what they really were: genocide. The United States and Britain maliciously and criminally imposed genocidal sanctions on the people of Iraq, that killed approximately 1.5 million Iraqis, all of whom were innocent civilians.

Albright: 500,000 Dead Children ‘Worth It’ 

And when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright (later secretary of state) was asked about the 500,000 dead children, she said that she thought the price was worth it. Now, I could have taken that statement to the International Court of Justice, and filed it against the United States as evidence of genocidal intent against the people of Iraq in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. And indeed, I offered to do so to the then president of Iraq, but for whatever reasons he decided against doing that.

So, 1.5 million Iraqis died as the result of these genocidal sanctions. And then came Sept. 11. And we know for a fact that the second Bush administration knew that a major terrorist attack was going to be launched on the United States. And they let it happen anyway deliberately and on purpose. Why? They wanted a pretext for war. And not just one war but for a long war which they are talking about today.

Afghanistan Invasion Plotted Since 1997 

Indeed, from my research, the war plans drawn up by the Pentagon for the war against Afghanistan were formulated as early as 1997. Enormous military forces fielded by that same U.S. Central Command, were already in and around and surrounding the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean before Sept. 11. This war had been long-planned against Afghanistan. And armed, equipped, supplied, trained and war-gamed and ready to go. They just needed the pretext and that was Sept. 11. Why? The United States wanted access to the oil and natural gas of Central Asia.

That had been a Pentagon objective since at least before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And the 9/11 attack gave them the pretext to make this major grab for the oil and gas of Central Asia. And they are there today with their bases, with their troops, in the surrounding countries in Central Asia. We don’t even have an estimate of the Muslims in  Afghanistan who were killed in the air bombardment: 20,000 or 25,000; maybe more. And tens of thousands of others starved to death and still suffering today.

But that, as we know from all the records was only the first step in the process. They wanted to finish the job in Iraq. And so immediately after Sept. 11, Bush ordered [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld to update and operationalize the plans for attacking and invading Iraq. It had nothing at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. We in the peace movement in America had been saying that all along. The United Nations had determined there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These were lies designed to scaremonger the American people and Congress into supporting an illegal war of aggression, a Nuremberg crime against peace, against Iraq. And they told whatever lies and broke what international laws they had to break in order to attack Iraq.

And today the estimate, again we don’t know. Perhaps 200,000 people in Iraq had been killed outright by the United States and Britain, their allies in Iraq. And again, most of them civilians.

Clearly if you add up what United States government has done to Iraq from August of 1990, when it imposed the genocidal economic embargo until today, the United States and Britain have inflicted outright genocide on the Muslim and Christian people of Iraq and they are predominately Muslim as we know.

Dominate Oil and Gas of Persian Gulf

Now comes the third step in the Pentagon’s pre-existing plan, to control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It sounds a bit like the plan that Hitler and the Nazis had in the 1930s. Does it not? First go into Austria, then go into Czechoslovakia, then go into Poland. So first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Iran. Iran is going to be the next victim of these outright criminals unless you and I can stop them.

Right now [in 2006] there are three aircraft carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf. And whenever they had put three aircraft carrier task forcesover there, it’s always to prepare for an attack. And according to Seymour Hersh, the award winning journalist, it will probably be an aerial bombardment, along the lines of what they did to Yugoslavia in 1999.

As you remember there, 78 days of aerial bombardmentby the United States and NATO with no authorization from the UN Security Council. Clearly illegal. Killing again, we don’t know the exact number outright; four-to-five thousand innocent civilians. And targeting civilian infrastructure, all up and down, from which the people still suffer today. The use of depleted uranium ammunitions, with consequent outbreaks of cancer are documented today.

So this is what, is being planned right now as we speak; an attack upon Iran. Using jet fighter aircraft, fighter bombers, on these three aircraft carrier task forces, using cruise missiles on submarines. Of course, Israel will be involved and have a role to play, doing exactlywhat the Americans tell them to do. In addition, it appears that ifthey attack Iran, they will also attack Syria. Yesterday, if you heard President Bush’s press conference in Vienna, he threatened Syria, right? There’s no other word for it. He threatened Syria.

Take Out Syria as Favor to Israel 

These neoconservatives want to take out Syria as a favor to Israel. Remember, many of them are affiliated personally and professionally with the Likhud Party in Israel and Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut, the man who exterminated 20,000 thousand Arabs in Lebanon, most of them were Muslims. And in addition, slaughtered 2,000 completely innocent Palestinian women, children and old men at Sabra and Shatila.

Ariel Sharon, the man who went to Haram Al-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam, where Muhammad, (Peace Be Upon Him) ascended into heaven, and desecrated the Haram on Sept. 28th, 2000, and deliberately provoked the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and has inflicted death and destruction on the Palestinian people since then. Close to 3700 Palestinians since then alone have been killed….most of them shot down like dogs in the street, and what has the Muslim world done about this?

My Palestinian friends tell me that they are worried that the government of Malaysia might recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations with Israel. I certainly hope this is not true. We must treat the criminal apartheid regime in Israel, the same way the world treated the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa.

If the United States attacks Iran, it will probably attack Syria with the Israeli air force and they will attack Lebanon to take out the Islamic resistance movement in southern Lebanon; Hezbollah that defended the legitimate rights of Lebanon and the Lebanese people and expelled the invading longstanding occupying Israeli army that had the full support of the United States government for over 20 years.

So they could attack Iran, Syria, Southern Lebanon and inflict yet another round of ethnic cleansing on the suffering Palestinian people. Remember Sharon and Likhud believe that Jordan is Palestine. And they want to drive as many Palestinians as possible out of their homes and into Jordan.

So if the United States as reported by Hersh and other reliable sources, goes ahead and attacks Iran, we could see warfare erupt all the way from Egypt to the border with India. This whole area convulsed in warfare. And who will be the primary victims of this war? Muslims.

Disregard for Muslim Life

The United States could not care less about Muslim life. Look at the demonization and victimization of Muslims that we have seen inflicted by the United States and its surrogate, Israel. Look at Guantanamo, where 600 Muslim men have been treated like dogs in a kennel. Pretty much the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Look at Abu Ghraib and the sadism and sexual exploitation and perversion of Muslims by their American captors. And the same thing has been done in Baghran in Afghanistan.

And when Professor Sharif Bassiouni, the U.N. special rapporteur, filed the report with the Security Council against U.S. practices in Afghanistan, the Americans had Kofi Annan [then UN secretary-general] fire him. Just as they had Kofi Annan fire Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, when she protested what was going on down in Guantanamo.

The United States could not care less about Muslim life. And the same is true for the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel. They would be happy to use nuclear weapons against Iran. They would be happy to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against Muslims in Iran. It would create no problem at all for them.

Indeed, I went to school with these neoconservatives at the University of Chicago. [Paul] Wolfowitz was there, [Ahmed] Chalabi, [Zalmay] Khalilzad, [Abram] Shulsky, all the rest of them. I went through the exact same program. Their mentor was Professor Leo Strauss. And who was his teacher in Germany and his sponsor? Professor Carl Schmitt, who went on to  become the most notorious Nazi law professor of his day, justifying every atrocity that the Nazis inflicted oneveryone.

We must understand that these neoconservatives are in fact neo-Nazis. They have espoused the Nazi doctrine of Schmitt and Strauss and Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the “superman.” They are the supermen, and the Muslims are the scum of the earth.

Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Now, I do not believe the United States will initially start bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. But if things get out of control they are fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons. And here in our materials, you have the Pentagon’s Joint Publication 3-12, which you can get on the internet…. just do a Google search and read it. And you will see there, dated March 15, 2005; nuclear, tactical nuclear weaponshave been fully integrated into United States conventional forces.

So if Iran were to defend itself, human wave attacks, whatever, they will be happy to use nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Remember, these neo-Nazis, neocons want to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They want to use tactical nuclear weapons, to be able to say to the rest of the world, you do what we tell you to do or else look what we did to the Iranians!

It’s a very serious situation. And this could even get further out of control. Remember that before Bush invaded Iraq, President Vladimir Putin of Russia said that if he invades Iraq he could set off World War Three. Well, I interpreted that as an implicit threat. Even the famous American news broadcaster Walter Cronkite said that if Bush invaded Iraq he could set off World War Three. Two weeks ago we had the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; China, Russia and Iran. So again, if Bush were to attack Iran, he very well could set off a Third World War, a nuclear war.

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This article was originally published on Consortiumnews.

Francis Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Among his many books is “Destroying World Order.”

All images in this article are from Consortiumnews

It’s been 71 years now, to the day, and the Jewish State of Israel is still “thriving” among us as the fictitious “ancestral homeland” of Jews — a deceptive rhetorical ploy Thomas Friedman, among many others, has been spouting, without check — until recently.

“The term ‘Jew’ is fuzzy at this time,” writes. Yossi Gurvitz in “Tom Friedman’s belief in an ‘ancestral homeland’ is a toxic myth and not history — Updated”, a long piece that thoroughly debunks the hoax and explains how the myth was started in the Middle Ages.

And still, the obfuscation persists and Palestinian heart-rending testimony is flicked away like a piece of dust, despite the weight of the evidence. In a recent interview about the creation of the Jewish State of Israel and our Jewish-state Nakba, Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib, U.S. Representative for Michigan’s 13th congressional district, has said:

“all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.”

Forced on us then and about to be forced on us again.

“Under the US plan known as ‘the deal of the century’, the Israeli military would retain control over settlements, the Jordan Valley and borders for five years as final status negotiations continue, a senior US diplomat working on the deal has told Middle East Eye.”

The phrase “for five years as final status negotiations continue” is eerily and frighteningly familiar — reminiscent of another “five-year interim period” that lasted for over two decades.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize what will happen again — endless maneuvers, deceptions and delays, and in the end, deadlock.

“Rarely were nations able to achieve so much in negotiations while making so few cosmetic concessions in return,” wrote Naseer H. Aruri in 2003 about Israel’s negotiations gains in the Madrid and Oslo “peace process” of the 1990s. What’s happening now is a consolidation of these “negotiations” gains.

The so-called “peace process” wasn’t about peace; it was a negotiating strategy for Israel, and so is Trump’s “deal”.

Through the “peace process”, Israel gained significant benefits: full peace with Jordan, de facto normalization with many Arab states, and full relations with many Islamic and third-world states that had boycotted Israel earlier.

As a result of that “process”, Israel and the Zionist movement accomplished a vital strategic goal, on which Israel and the U.S. are now capitalizing: Making a separate peace with Arab states that is not contingent on the necessity of fulfilling any obligations to the Palestinian people as spelled out in various U.N. resolutions.

The West Bank and Gaza, which Israel does not consider occupied, are not an issue in the negotiations (as, for example, a small desert area in southern Jordan was an issue in the negotiations between Israel and Jordan). And neither is Syria’s Golan Heights, as we are now hearing.

Palestinians who rejected Oslo are totally vindicated — and have been so for a long while, in fact. Those who joined Arafat’s bandwagon in the 1980s, whether reluctantly, against their better judgment, or with hope, are now totally disillusioned.

Every single Palestinian in the occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip, child and up, realizes that “negotiations” is a code word for sidelining Palestinians and that the US, especially as headed by Trump who sold Jerusalem down the river, is a dishonest broker.

Israel’s conquest of Jerusalem was the defining issue of the 1967 war, which Israel started without seeking the assistance of the United States with the objective of “adjusting” its 1948 borders by capturing the West Bank, and Jerusalem as a first priority. Jerusalem was annexed within days of the end of the war, every inch of it having been mapped long beforehand. Trump’s deal is nothing more than a U.S. rubber stamp on the status quo.

It is easy for Palestinians, those on the inside and outside, to conclude now that that there is no other alternative to the imposition of the status quo upon them than to make it a hell for Israel. That eventuality may spell continued disaster for the Palestinians, but possibly for Israelis as well. Under Oslo, Palestinian obligations for Israeli security has come to include settlements, and that cannot possibly hold if the deal of the century is rejected. And the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is burgeoning.

From the Paris Peace Conference (the meeting of the victorious Allied Powers following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers) of 1919 to the Paris Protocol (the framework establishing the interim-period economic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority) of 2012, the idea that the Jewish people had an inherent and inalienable right to Palestine was paramount.

And if the Palestinians could not reconcile themselves to this devilish notion to usurp their homeland right from under their feet, why, then, force majeure, not compromise, was and remains the only feasible response, despite abundant proof, then and now, that Palestinians continue to cling to their national identity, their property and heritage in Palestine in the most adverse and bloody circumstances.

The principles adopted, not only by the Zionist movement, but also by its Western-power enablers continue to be, as follows:

1. The Zionist movement is inherently righteous and meets an overwhelming need among Jews worldwide that trumps Palestinian misery.
2. Religious zealots of both the Jewish and Christian variety continue to state the above in religious terms, describing Palestine as a real-estate divine promise to the “tribes of Israel”.
3. The dispossession of Palestinians and their ongoing oppression is the only solution to solving the problem of virulent anti-Semitism in the West — then and now.
4. Arab nationalism is a legitimate, though highly unlikely movement, but Palestinian nationalism is regarded as either illegitimate or nonexistent.
5. Jewish European culture is superior to indigenous Arab, predominantly Muslim, culture.

That last point, in fact, was the ostensible reason (or part of it) why the Madrid and Oslo process dragged on for so long; Quartet funding poured in to civilize Palestinians through endless NGO workshops — to build their “capacity” for state building, for democracy, for planning, for women’s liberation, children’s rights, legal reform — you name it.

As a result of this intensive “training”, almost every other Palestinian can whip up a vision/mission statement for anything under the sun and a detailed strategic plan. It was a pathetic game played by funders on the one hand, and the Palestinian Authority and civil society on the other. Toward the end of this farce, the funders began demanding, as the cost of doing business with Palestinians, normalization practices with Israeli organization. No “final status negotiations”, as we know, were ever even close on the horizon at any point in the process. And, of c0urse, a vision of an unpartitioned Palestine as a solution was, of course verboten.

By the way, ‘The Quartet’ refers to the “foursome of nations and international and supranational entities involved in mediating the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The Quartet comprises the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia.” This time around, the U.S. is acting unilaterally.

The hope now is that the Palestinian Authority, which has caused a schism between itself and Palestinian grassroots and the international solidarity movement as a result of the 1990s Oslo arrangements, will now be able to extricate itself from that unfortunate vise and find a way to avoid jumping into the fire.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

While a price placed on the Earth, estimated at $5000 trillion (New Formula Values Earth), belongs to the unthinkable, the haggle by conservatives over the price of mitigation of climate change underpins the reality of the Faustian Bargain, manifested by extreme weather events (Fig. 1).Under a plethora of misconceptions and cover-ups the current elections take little account of the scientific evidence, with greenhouse gas level reaching 411.97ppm CO₂ and more than 460ppm CO₂-equivalent (CO₂+methane+nitric oxide).

This is just below the 500-600 ppm stability threshold of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. A slow-down or arrest of carbon emissions is no longer sufficient to stabilize the climate, because the warming effect of the high greenhouse gas level is triggering amplifying feedback effects from land, oceans, melting ice sheets and permafrost. As the Arctic warms at twice the rate of lower latitudes and thereby the jet stream and polar boundary are weakening, cold air masses penetrate southward and warm air masses penetrate northward, ensuing in further melting and leading to intensification of extreme weather events.

Fig. 1. (a) distribution of extreme natural events 2017; (b) Number of natural catastrophes 1980-2016. Munich-Re. See this

All but ignored by the main parties and in a sense by the mainstream media:

• The conservatives’ ideology could not have been expressed more clearly than when the current PM introduced a lump of coal into parliament as an ideological statement.
• The opportunism of the alternative government is manifested in accepting the mining and export of coal.
• Even the Greens appear to hesitate in conveying the full science-based consequences of the climate catastrophe to the public, as to not to scare voters.
• The culture of the mainstream media hinges on political, economic and social issues, much less on science and nature, hence a bias away from the underlying factors of global warming and environmental destruction.

Between 1870 and 2014 cumulative emissions totaled about 545 billion tons of carbon (GtC), global annual mean CO₂concentration having increased by more than 47% since the start of the Industrial Revolution.  CO₂emissions are partitioned among the atmosphere (~230 GtC or 42%), ocean (~155 GtC or 28%) and land (~160 GtC or 29%). This represents the largest transfer of carbon from the Earth crust to the atmosphere since the Paleocene-Eocene boundary thermal maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago.

Further transfer of carbon from the known fossil fuel reserve (larger than 3000 GtC) to the atmosphere is threatening a fundamental shift of state in the terrestrial climate, exceeding the stability threshold of the large ice sheets and trigger amplifying feedbacks from land (desiccation of vegetation and fires), ocean (decreased sequestration of CO₂), melting ice sheets and permafrost.

Fig. 2. Fossil fuel CO₂emissions and carbon content. (2.12 GtC = 1 ppm atmospheric CO₂). Estimates of reserves (profitable to extract at current prices) and resources (potentially recoverable with advanced technology and/or at higher prices) are the mean of estimates of Energy. Hansen et al. 2013. See this

The principal method of “manufactured consent” is the Big Lie, articulated by George Orwell as Newspeak, “a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought, personal identity, self-expression, free will, that threatens the ideology of the régime”. Contemporary examples intended to cover-up on the increasing carbon saturation of the terrestrial atmosphere include:

• A climate change denial industry well-funded by fossil fuel corporations and mouthpieces in the media and government is proceeding unabated, disowning the basic laws of physics (the blackbody radiation law of Stefan Boltzmann, Planck and Kirchhoff and direct observations in nature by the peer reviewed scientific literature and the IPCC).
• The common misconception as if restriction of carbon emissions is in itself sufficient to arrest global warming, as unfortunately the stage has been reached when it is no longer sufficient and CO₂draw-down efforts need to be undertaken as well as sharp cutting in emissions in order to stabilize the climate.
• The extraterritorial drilling and the export of fossil fuels are hardly mentioned. In Norway the limits on domestic emissions cannot hide ocean drilling while in Australia coal export results in approximately twice as much the domestic emissions.
• Politicians frequently talk about the future of the economy, prosperity, and children. Unfortunately the rate and scale of global warming in the 21^st century pose serious questions on such  predictions.

Current global warming is expressed by a series of extreme events (Fig. 1) around the world, including both sharp rises in temperature as well as sharp freeze events induced by flow of ice melt water from melting ice sheets and penetration of polar fronts through a weakened Arctic Jet stream boundary. A 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warming, projected by the IPCC toward the end of the 21^stcentury, represents an absolute calamity on a geological scale, exceeding those of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) at 56 million years ago. Whereas the onset of the PETM is estimated at approximately ~10,000 years long or less, the rate of the Anthropocene global warming is more extreme, i.e. 1.5^oC over the continents in less than 250 years.

Only a global effort at down-draw (sequestering) of atmospheric carbon, if successful, may be able to arrest this trend, a measure hardly considered by the powers that be. As nations spend $trillions on armaments and war, including nuclear missiles, which are the very resources needed to protect the environment, bar lip service and non-binding agreements governments are now presiding over the demise of much of nature and human civilization.

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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Takver/flickr/cc

The Following text is the last section of

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,

by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

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Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 2019

In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this important document, which will also be available as an E-book.

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Contents 

1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11. Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty
14. The Western American Empire plays the war card
15. The US/NATO planetary war system
16. Exiting the war system of NATO

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NATO-Exit

1. While the acceleration of ongoing conflicts increases the risk of a great war that, with the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, would jeopardize the very existence of humanity and planet Earth, It is vitally important to multiply efforts to get out of the war system. This raises the question of Italy’s membership in NATO.

2. There are those who say that one can stay in NATO while preserving his autonomy of choice, meaning having the possibility to decide from time to time in the national parliament whether or not to participate in a specific initiative of the Atlantic Alliance. It’s an illusion or worse. The North-Atlantic Council has established the NATO rules in which “there is no vote or majority decision”.  “Decisions are taken unanimously and by mutual agreement”, meaning in agreement with the United States of America, which they are entitled to by the right of controlling the position of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and other key commands, including that of the Nuclear Planning Group.

3. In the great media spectacle of politics, magicians and acrobats launch appeals for a world without nuclear weapons, which is currently impossible, but they do nothing to achieve what today would be possible: a decisive political battle to free Italy from nuclear weapons, which do not serve our security but expose us to increasing risks. Taking a real step forward towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons is the only way in which Italy could really contribute to defusing the escalation that leads to nuclear war,.

4. To do this, we need to fight in the open for Italy to stop violating the non-proliferation treaty it has ratified, requiring the United States to immediately remove its nuclear weapons from our national territory. By doing so, Italy would adhere to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

5. The principles of our Constitution and our real national interests make indispensable the removal from our national territory not only nuclear weapons, but U.S. and NATO bases under US command. In other words, the Big Taboo that dominates the political and institutional world must be broken, clearly indicating the goal to be achieved: Italy’s exit from NATO and NATO from Italy in order to contribute to the dissolution of the Atlantic Alliance and  any other military alliance.  It may be an objective considered crazy by those who see the Atlantic Alliance as something sacred and untouchable and be considered dangerous by those who know that by putting themselves against NATO, they put their political careers at risk. It may also be considered impossible by those who think that a sovereign and neutral Italy cannot exist.

6. The obstacles that stand in the way of achieving this goal are enormous. The dominant power bases its strength not only on political, economic and military instruments, but on the control of minds, made possible by a pervasive media that, above all through television, leads us to believe that only what is seen exists and what is not seen does not exist. The control of minds through the dominant media apparatus allows politicans, on the one hand, to reassure public opinion by hiding real threats, and on the other to alarm it by making holograms of dangerous enemies appear, so as to justify rearmament policies, military operations and wars, justifying at the same time a military expenditure that in Italy amounts to about 70 million euros a day and, according to the commitments made in NATO, will have to rise to around 100 million euros a day. And, again as a result of mind control, there is the spectacle of those who have supported the wars that have demolished entire states (the last one in Libya) and have caused dramatic mass exodus now in the front row welcoming the victims of these same wars with open arms.

7. The vast majority, therefore, know nothing or almost nothing about the mechanisms that determine the increasingly rapid escalation of war, making the scenario of the third (and last) world war ever more real: the thermonuclear one. It is spoken of in small circles of “experts”, in “gray rooms” (with reference to the color of hair as a person ages) from which the young are largely absent. It’s about getting out of the closet, finding ways and languages to make people understand that time is running out, that it is absolutely necessary to move while we have time. What to do is in the hands of each of us.

8. In the face of impending danger, we must show that there is still an Italy that remembers, not only in words, its own Constitution; an Italy for which the word “sovereignty” is not just a term for political change; an Italy that refuses to remain caged in an alliance that under foreign command damages us and brings us to the brink of catastrophe; an Italy capable of emerging from the anti-historical vision of a West perched in defense of its supremacy; an Italy capable of playing an active role in the construction of a multipolar world in which the aspirations of peoples for freedom and social justice are based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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This text was translated from the Italian document which was distributed to participants at the April 7 Conference. It does not include sources and references.

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Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

A future without independent media leaves us with an upside down reality where according to the corporate media “NATO deserves a Nobel Peace Prize”, and where “nuclear weapons and wars make us safer”.

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If, like us, this is a future you wish to avoid, please help sustain Global Research’s activities by making a donation or taking out a membership now!

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Washington Pushes to Brink of War against Iran

By Bill Van Auken, May 15, 2019

The abrupt trip staged by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Brussels to push Washington’s hard line against Iran, combined with the deployment of still more US military assets to the Persian Gulf, point to Washington’s calculated escalation of a war crisis in the region.

Warnings of ‘Gulf of Tonkin 2.0’ as Trump Officials Blame Iran for Oil Tanker Attacks

By Jake Johnson, May 15, 2019

The military plan was reportedly crafted by Bolton, who last week used the routine deployment of a U.S. aircraft carrier and bomber task force to threaten Iran with “relentless force” if it attacks U.S. forces. Bolton did not cite any evidence indicating Iran was planning such an attack.

White House Reviews US Military Plan for 120,000 Troops for Iran War

By Jason Ditz, May 15, 2019

John Bolton ordered the Pentagon to come up with an “updated” plan for getting more American troops into the Middle East to fight a war against Iran. The plans are in now, according to officials, who say that the options envision 120,000 US ground troops in the Middle East.

The Media’s Handling of Bolton’s Iran Threats, Recalls the Run-Up to the Iraq War

By Ben Armbruster, May 14, 2019

Media-savvy U.S. government officials, political operatives, and lawmakers and their staffs from all political parties and ideological persuasions have no doubt, throughout the history of our great country, duped a fair-minded but unwitting reporter into writing a juicy story in order to get a piece of information into the public bloodstream without their fingerprints on it.

Maximum Pressure in the Strait of Hormuz: The US-Iran Standoff

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, May 14, 2019

The Iran-US standoff is finding a surge of increments, provocations and howlers.  Since the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Iran Nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) last year, Tehran has gnawed and scratched at the arrangements.

Pre-emptive Nuclear War: The Role of Israel in Triggering an Attack on Iran

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 11, 2019

The stockpiling and deployment of advanced weapons systems directed against Iran started in the immediate wake of the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq. From the outset, these war plans were led by the U.S. in liaison with NATO and Israel.

Why the U.S. Labeled Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a Terrorist Organization

By Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, May 10, 2019

It can be readily demonstrated that the proffered U.S. justifications for labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization are no more than hare-brained excuses designed to put further pressure on the Iranian people in pursuit of its long-standing policy of regime change from within.

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Featured image is from The Duran

The abrupt trip staged by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Brussels to push Washington’s hard line against Iran, combined with the deployment of still more US military assets to the Persian Gulf, point to Washington’s calculated escalation of a war crisis in the region.

Late Monday, the New York Times posted an article under the headline “White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War.” The article cited as sources “more than half a dozen national security officials” and reported that a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last week discussed a plan to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East.

The spark for an all-out conflict can come from any one of a number of staged provocations, including the alleged sabotage of two Saudi oil tankers and two other vessels off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) reported on Sunday.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih stressed that one of the Saudi tankers that was allegedly damaged was en route to pick up Saudi oil to take to the United States, a detail apparently highlighted to make the case that “US interests” were at stake in the incident.

Pompeo, national security adviser John Bolton and other US officials have repeatedly vowed to take “swift and decisive” military action in defense of US interests in the oil-rich region. They have threatened to unleash “unrelenting” force against Iran in retaliation for any action alleged to be carried out by a wide array of forces dubbed by Washington as Iranian “proxies,” ranging from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, the Houthi rebels in Yemen and various Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.

The alleged sabotage of the four vessels took place in the Gulf of Oman, east of Fujairah, a major oil port that lies approximately 85 miles south of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which passes roughly one-third of the world’s oil transported by sea.

Saudi and UAE officials indicated that there were no casualties and no oil spills resulting from the alleged sabotage. A video posted online showed a hole torn into the hull of a Norwegian-owned ship at its waterline.

The timing of the incident dovetailed neatly with the US escalation of tensions in the region. It came just days after the May 9 warning issued by the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) that commercial ships, including oil tankers, could be targeted in the growing buildup to war.

“Iran or its proxies could respond by targeting commercial vessels, including oil tankers, or US military vessels in the Red Sea, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, or the Persian Gulf,” the MARAD statement said.

Iranian officials expressed concern over the incident. Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Moussavi described the incident as “lamentable” and “worrying” and called for a thorough investigation. Moussavi also warned countries of the Persian Gulf to stay vigilant in the face of potential “adventurism by foreign players” or any “conspiracy orchestrated by ill-wishers” to undermine maritime security.

There has been no clear explanation from either the UAE or the Saudi monarchy of what exactly took place in the Gulf of Oman. The involvement of covert operations aimed at creating the pretext for war, either on the part of Washington or its two principal regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia itself, both of which have long sought to bring the US into a war with Iran, is a very real possibility.

One thing is certain. Nothing coming from the US government or its propaganda servants in the corporate media regarding the crisis in the Persian Gulf can be believed. The pretexts for war this time around will prove as fabricated as Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” or the lies about a US warship being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin that were used to justify the War in Vietnam.

The Trump administration has continued to escalate its military intervention in the region, dispatching a Patriot missile battery to the Persian Gulf along with a Navy amphibious assault ship. This follows last week’s arrival in the Red Sea of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group, as well as the landing of a bomber strike wing consisting of four B-52s at the US Al Udeid airbase in Qatar.

The Pentagon announced on Monday that the B-52s had carried out their “first mission… to defend American forces and interests in the region,” consisting of operations near Iranian airspace.

Such is the war threat that even a White House reporter questioned Trump during his Monday appearance with the far-right prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán: “Are you at war with Iran? Are you seeking regime change there?”

Trump did not deny the looming war threat, declaring:

“If they do anything, they will suffer greatly. We’ll see what happens with Iran.”

Underscoring the brazen recklessness of the US drive to war, Secretary Pompeo abruptly shifted his travel plans for the second time in a week, canceling a trip to Moscow to fly to Brussels and effectively crash a scheduled meeting of European foreign ministers called to discuss their response to the Persian Gulf crisis.

The US military buildup as well as the tightening of US sanctions described by the Trump administration as “maximum pressure” against Iran, designed to suffocate the country’s economy and drive its oil exports down to zero, have sharpened tensions between Washington and its erstwhile European allies.

Since the beginning of the month, Washington has withdrawn waivers that had allowed China, South Korea, Japan, India and Turkey to continue purchasing oil from Iran, and has imposed a new round of sanctions aimed at halting all exports of Iranian iron, steel, aluminum and copper.

The US and the major European powers have been divided since Trump unilaterally abrogated the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement reached between Iran and the US, Russia, China, Germany, the UK and France. Washington reimposed sanctions that are tantamount to a state of war. The European governments, as well as the UN nuclear inspection agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have insisted that Iran has remained in compliance with the agreement, which was supposed to combine strict limits on the Iranian nuclear program with the lifting of economic sanctions.

The issue for the Trump administration, however, has never been the nuclear deal, but rather the drive for regime-change, i.e., the restoration of a US-backed puppet dictatorship in the oil-rich country like that of the Shah.

As Bolton, one of the architects of the current military buildup, put it a year before becoming national security adviser:

“The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran… The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself.”

Pompeo’s meetings in Brussels with the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and the foreign ministers of Germany, France and the UK only underscored the transatlantic tensions over Iran. Mogherini said the European representatives had stressed that the crisis in the Persian Gulf had produced a “crucial delicate moment” in which “maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side” was necessary.

She said the European ministers “continue to fully support the nuclear deal with Iran,” meaning the normalization of trade and investment. She added that this included the “operationalization” of the so-called Instrument in Support of Trade Exchange (INSTEX), which is supposed to create a non-dollar direct payment channel with Iran to circumvent US sanctions. Transactions through this exchange, she claimed, would begin within the next few weeks.

Tehran last week put the European signatories to the accord on notice that it would resume uranium enrichment at a higher grade within 60 days unless they took measures to allow Iran to export its oil and access financial markets. European companies and banks, which had previously seen an opportunity for exploiting the country’s oil wealth, have withdrawn in the face of threats to be frozen out of the US market.

The European powers’ opposition to the US drive toward war against Iran is based not on any concern for the fate of 80 million Iranians, but rather on the pursuit of their own imperialist interests in the region. The conflict exposes fault lines that point to the danger of a new military conflict in the Persian Gulf becoming the antechamber of a third, nuclear, world war.

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Featured image: US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Suez Canal (Source: WSWS)

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.

Nakba Day, the Day of the Catastrophe, is commemorated on the 15th May, the day after the Jewish terrorist Ben Gurion unilaterally proclaimed the Israeli Declaration of Independence on a gaping fault line of delegitimisation.

1. The Balfour Declaration illegally promising to facilitate a Jewish national homeland in Palestine with the stipulation – “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” is null and void:

“Its promise to use its best endeavours to facilitate the Zionist project could be interpreted as a promise to give to the Zionists what Britain did not have to give, in violation of the established legal maxim nemo dat quod non habet(nobody can give what he does not possess).”    Might over Right, Adel Safty, p.22 (A highly recommended read.)

2. It follows then that Palestine’s independence enshrined in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which is still binding for all members states of the UN under UN Charter Article 80, remains pending. Palestine was a Class A Mandate guaranteeing self-determination:

“Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.”

3. According to eminent professor of international law, Francis Boyle, the UN had (and has) no legal power to approve or enforce partition under Resolution 181 after Britain terminated its administration of Palestine on 15 May 1948,

“The United Nations had no business offering the nation of one people to the people of many nations. Its General Assembly had neither the legal nor the legislative powers to impose such a resolution or to convey title of a territory; Articles 10, 11 and 14 of the UN Charter bestows the right on the General Assembly merely to recommend resolutions.”

4. Reasonably, Palestinians opposed the illegal partition just as any western nation would if a rogue UN gave the nod to partition it, but surely without the generosity of Azzam Pasha, the General Secretary of the Arab League, who nobly offered equality between Arab and Jew,

“We are fighting for an Arab Palestine. Whatever the outcome the Arabs will stick to their offer of equal citizenship for Jews in Arab Palestine and let them be as Jewish as they like. In areas where they predominate they will have complete autonomy.”

5. Therefore, Israel’s unilateral declaration of Independence, ‘citing Resolution 181 as constituting “recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State”’ has no legal basis:

“U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 neither legally partitioned Palestine nor conferred upon the Zionist leadership any legal authority to unilaterally declare the existence of the Jewish state of Israel. It merely recommended that the UNSCOP partition plan be accepted and implemented by the concerned parties. Naturally, to have any weight of law, the plan, like any contract, would have to have been formally agreed upon by both parties, which it was not. Nor could the General Assembly have legally partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority for the creation of Israel to the Zionist leadership, as it simply had no such authority to confer.” Jeremy Hammond

6. Today, the Israeli unilateral declaration and UN recognition of the Jewish State of Israel sets a free-for-all sovereignty precedent. It provides legal loopholes making  all nations vulnerable to spurious ancient religious/ historic claims by migrant minorities.

For example, Catholic immigrants, armed by Catholic nations, may unilaterally proclaim the USA as the State of Catholic Christendom and then initiated the New Crusades against Americans to expel and deport the Protestants, Jews etc to Canada and elsewhere. Or British Italians and modern Italians could reclaim England citing 350 years of Roman occupation.

7. The 71 years of the Palestinian Nakba since the brutal establishment of the Jewish State of Terror is a catastrophe for the Jewish colonists and their descendants: it transformed the once decent surviving victims of European antisemitism and the Holocaust into terrorists, killers, thieves, racists, and liars – into the mirror image of their Nazi persecutors. And the same perverted brush tainted the UN and Western governments as collaborators of the sickest and most sadistic society in the world.

Israel has compelled the criminalisation of Holocaust denial in Europe and elsewhere even though it has enacted domestic laws criminalising Nakba commemoration. The flaccid reaction of world governments to Israel’s galling double standards is as ethically contemptible as Israel’s effrontery to expunge an oppressed people and their lineal land.

8. Throughout the 71 years of systematic Jewish terrorism, the Jewish occupiers have been  resolutely confronted by their nemesis – Palestine, steadfast and eternal,

“I tell the Zionist usurper entity that your terrorism, your massacres, your bullets, your bulldozers, your walls and your bombs will not break the will of my children, will not kill me, for I will continue to resist, I will continue to exist, I am here to stay because this land is me. I am Palestine from the River to the Sea, from Ras In-Naqourah to Im-Ir-Rishrash. Ana Falsteen min il bahar lal nahr, min Ras In-Naqourah la Im-Ir-Rishrash.” Reham Alhelsi

9. Zionists are doomed not to live in a promised land for like all the invaders of historic Palestine, they too will pass. Palestinians, however, wherever they are scattered, live in their beloved Palestine:

“They [zionists] will never comprehend that it’s a clear-cut case, a hopeless case: it is a case of eternal love, of an unbreakable bond…. It is a case of a people, a land, an identity… it is a case of Palestine, her culture and people…. It is a case of being Palestinian. zionists and co will never comprehend that it is a hopeless case of eternal love because Palestine is us and we are Palestine.” Reham Alhelsi

10. The chimerical two state solution is dead. Ironically Israel’s rapacious settlement expansion killed it. Palestine, inevitably has come full circle; support for a one state where Palestinians and Israelis “live under the same constitution and same social contract that provides them with freedom, justice and dignity for all.” is gaining traction.

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Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters and editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of  Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

Featured image is from the author

At the front gate of the residential Al-Qamar building, which was flattened by an Israeli air strike a week ago, a Palestinian band arrives with their instruments. They sweep away small stones and building remnants as they prepare to start their concert. The concert in Gaza is being held at the same time as a similar concert was starting just 70 kilometers away in Tel Aviv’s Charles Clore park to kick off the week-long Eurovision song contest.

Holding a guitar, Mohammed Ukasheh, 28, launches into “Gaza Message” with his both of his drummers. The song calls for the Eurovision contest to be boycotted.

The band start singing lyrics of the Lebanese iconic singer Wadih al-Safi, under the destroyed building’s crumbling roof.

Oh, immigrants return… Homeland is precious
Listen to the voice of Palestine… The voice of blame is loudly

I will write your name my country
Above the sun, that does not sets
Nor my sons neither my wealth
Above your love, there is no love

May god brings back our happiness and laughter
And our home filled in smile and happiness

The seven-story building in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in the Gaza City was leveled by six Israeli missiles, when an anonymous Israeli officer gave all tenants in the building five minutes to evacuate. The building had been home to more than 40 residents and commercial tenants including a beauty salon, mini market and tire store.

For the past year, there have been grisly scenes on the Gaza-Israel border where Israel has violently put down the Great March of Return. Palestinian artists called on Eurovision song contestants to boycott the international event that Tel Aviv is hosting this week.

The Gaza Strip-based Palestinian Artists Association said on a brief statement that Israel is using the event to “perpetuate oppression, promote injustice or whitewash a brutal apartheid regime”.

Image on the right: Kamel Musallam (Photo: Mohammed Asad)

The artists cited the killing of more than 60 Palestinian demonstrators at Gaza-Israeli fence on May 14 last year, just two days after Israel won the 2018 edition of Eurovision.

“How can an international event be hosted on the ruins of the Palestinian village Sheikh Munis?,” Kamel Musallam, coordinator of the concert, asked. “Our message to Europe and the US is, both are participating in Gaza bloodshed by taking part in Eurovision,” he added.

Sabreen Juma’a al-Najjar, mother of slain paramedic Razan Al-Najjar, whose killing in June prompted international outrage, was among the dozen of attendees at the Al-Qamar building.

“Israel seeks to whitewashes its lethal acts against the Palestinians by hosting such a musical event, but having a look at one single destroyed building will erase all of Israel’s reputation for democracy and morality,” Juma’a al-Najjar told Mondoweiss. “Why won’t pop superstar Madonna hold her concert at this building, or at the place where Razan was killed near the fence?” she asked.

Image below: Sabreen Juma’a al-Najjar (Photo: Mohammed Asad)

Madonna is scheduled to perform two songs in Tel Aviv to kick Eurovision off despite calls for her to boycott the show.

“Why doesn’t Eurovision arrange an event to let the music of dead, bombed-out buildings, and for the voices of mothers of the slain to be heard?” Juma’a al-Najjar added.

Haaretz has reported that the Israeli military has deployed “extensive” Iron Dome aerial defense batteries and ordered its forces stationed by Gaza to act with greater “restraint” during the Eurovision competition, which will last until Saturday, May 18.

This follows last week’s Israeli attack on Gaza, where 25 Palestinians were killed in the attacks and 800 homes were destroyed. Four Israeli were killed by retaliatory strikes.

Tuesday is also the first anniversary of the United States Embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the bloody mass protest along the Gaza fence, when scores of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire.

Wednesday is Nakba Day, when Palestinians commemorate the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees during the hostilities surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.

A concert in the ruins of the al-Qamar building (Photo: Mohammed Asad)

Jamal abu Arar, 61, was unsure that the local concert could “deliver the message.” Abu Arar said that

“music is divided into two; romance for the rich and the killer, while the sounds of artillery and explosions are only for the poor and the victims.”

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Ahmad Kabariti is a freelance journalist based in Gaza.

Featured image: Children watch the concert in the ruins of the al-Qamar building (Photo: Mohammed Asad)

U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo visited the Russian Black Sea city of Sochi for talks with his Russian counterpart Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday after abruptly canceling the first part of his trip to Moscow on Monday in order to brief European leaders in Brussels on his country’s alleged intelligence about so-called Iranian threats in the wider Persian Gulf region.

Pompeo’s trip occurred against the backdrop of the “RussiaGate” scandal being debunked as a conspiracy theory by “deep state” coup plotters within the U.S.’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, which therefore gave President Donald Trump much more flexibility to handle bilateral affairs with Russia that he originally promised during his 2016 campaign. The American leader preached the need for what would essentially amount to a “New Detente” in order to pragmatically promote his country’s interests, believing that the Obama Administration irresponsibly ruined relations with Russia in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.

Pompeo tweeted before the meeting that “on some issues we may agree, on others we may disagree, but when it’s in our national interests, it is our responsibility to find a way forward”, which set the tone for the talks and naturally led to him reaffirming Trump’s intent to improve relations with Russia.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) offers a ball of the 2018 football World Cup to U.S. President Donald Trump during a joint press conference after a meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, July 16, 2018. /VCG Photo

The most important from a Russian perspective are the simmering crisis with Iran regarding the nuclear deal and regional attacks that the U.S. blames on its proxies, the ongoing conflict in Syria, the rolling regime change operation against Venezuela, the DPRK nuclear negotiations, Ukraine’s new president, and the possibility of a new nuclear accord with the U.S.

In other words, Russia is most interested in candidly discussing geopolitical and strategic issues to identify the most likely areas of mutual compromise between it and the U.S. as part of a comprehensive “New Detente” that could stabilize the emerging Multipolar World Order and lift the Western sanctions against Moscow.

Given how sensitive these talks are, scant details were leaked about their contents, though the overall atmosphere was visibly upbeat and the rhetoric coming from both sides was pragmatic and promising.

Therefore, observers can only speculate about the content of the “package deals” that might have been discussed concerning quid pro quos on each of these issues (ex: Russia encouraging Iran’s dignified but “phased withdrawal” from Syria in exchange for America encouraging Ukraine’s new president to abide by the Minsk Agreements), but it should not be taken for granted that some degree of progress was made behind the scenes.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during their talks in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, Russia, May 14, 2019. /VCG Photo

Russia and the U.S. are competing in many theaters all across the world, so coming to an understanding on each of these issues through mutual compromises will be beneficial not only for their own individual interests but also for the countries in which their rivalry is unfolding. Syria and Ukraine were literally torn apart because of this, though both of them might finally see a lasting and sustainable peace if these powers decide to reach a deal.

Venezuela, for its part, might be saved from the same fate if an agreement can be reached there too as part of this “New Detente”. On the global level, there’s no reason for Russia and the U.S. to enter into another costly and destabilizing arms race; hence why both parties expressed sincere interest in negotiating an extension to the new start.

Taken together, Russian-American relations can become a stabilizing force in International Affairs if a “New Detente” is eventually reached and each of them finally recognizes that they have more to gain by compromising with one another in a win-win manner than competing in a zero-sum one.

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This article was originally published on CGTN.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from CGTN

It is openly admitted that the current Right-wing Israeli government is the key driver of the Trump administration’s intention to destroy the economy of the sovereign state of Iran – one of the world’s oldest civilisations – by a strategy of compulsory implementation of global US trade sanctions which include a total embargo on Iranian oil to any NATO country or any other nation currently trading with the United States.

Since May 2018, the Trump administration has withdrawn from the JCPOA major powers agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program, re-imposed punishing sanctions on Tehran, demanded that allies choose between Iranian oil and trading with the American market, and declared the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to be a terrorist organization.

President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement and re-impose sanctions jeopardizes the landmark arms control agreement, under which Iran dismantled much of its nuclear program and international inspectors gained extensive access to monitor its compliance. The agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was a vital peace initiative for the Gulf region and the Middle East, is now dead.

Of course, the state of Israel’s huge nuclear weapons arsenals are not subject to any UN inspection or compliance with international agreements. It is the world’s only undeclared nuclear state and possesses stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction estimated to include up to 400 nuclear and/or chemical warheads.

It was reported that at a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last week, the administration published an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 American troops to the Middle East should Iran accelerate work on nuclear weapons as a consequence of US attempts to destroy its economy. It is unclear whether any Israeli troops would be involved initially but cruise missiles would be deployed from its German- supplied nuclear-armed submarine fleet and missiles from its US-built F-35i bomber squadrons.

US Secretary of State Pompeo’s efforts to recruit European countries to back the administration’s aggressive posture on Iran are being received with disdain bordering on contempt and Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, called for “maximum restraint” after meeting in Brussels with Mr. Pompeo, who is a proponent of provoking maximum pressure against Iran.

If this continues to its logical conclusion it means that there will inevitably be an attack initially by Israeli cruise missiles with nuclear warheads against Iranian targets in an attempt to demolish Iranian deep defence installations and by the US 5th Fleet in Bahrain to keep open the strategic waterway through the Strait of Hormuz.

Such a nuclear attack would signal the start of WW3 as other nuclear states such as India and Pakistan, France and Britain, China and Russia, take up opposing positions. As for the UK, as a supporter of the Netanyahu regime it will continue its bilateral trade with Israel from the safety of its distance. However, the Middle East as a whole including Israel will also suffer the catastrophic effect of ionising radiation upon food and water supplies and upon the human population. Casualties could run into hundreds of thousands on both sides as the conflict escalates and extends into Europe.

Now is the time for the EU to act urgently and decisively to divorce itself from the US-Israeli warmongering that is becoming such a dangerous threat to global peace, and the United Nations Security Council must intervene without delay to avoid a catastrophic nuclear war.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NDTV

The alleged chemical attack on Douma in April 2018 was the pretext for airstrikes on Syria by France, UK and US. The final report on the alleged attack published by the OPCW left unexplained why its Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) had made no engineering assessments during its visit to Douma in April 2018, when experts could have inspected the sites with cylinders in position, rather than six months later when inspection was no longer possible and assessments had to rely on images and measurements obtained by others. A Briefing Note by the Working Group on Syria Propaganda & Media highlighted this as an obvious anomaly.

OPCW staff members have communicated with the Working Group.

We have learned that an investigation was undertaken by an engineering sub-team of the FFM, beginning with on-site inspections in April-May 2018, followed by a detailed engineering analysis including collaboration on computer modelling studies with two European universities. The report of this investigation was excluded from the published Final Report of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission, which referred only to assessments sought from unidentified “engineering experts” commissioned in October 2018 and obtained in December 2018.

A copy of a 15-page Executive Summary of the report entitled “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident” is posted here. (Anyone who wishes to post their own link to the document is kindly requested to download the document and link from their own server, so as not to overload the Working Group’s.)

The Working Group has provided a commentary on the document: see ‘Assessment by the engineering sub-team of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission investigating the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018‘, by Paul McKeigue, David Miller and Piers Robinson.

Some of the commentary’s key points:

• As the Working Group has repeatedly emphasised, evidence can be evaluated only by comparison of competing hypotheses. A key weakness of the published FFM Final Report was that no competing hypotheses were considered. The FFM’s unpublished Engineering Assessment does not make this error: competing hypotheses are clearly set out in advance.
• The conclusion of the Engineering Assessment is unequivocal: the “alternative hypothesis” that the cylinders were placed in position is “the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene”.
• These findings establish beyond reasonable doubt that the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April 2018 was staged.
• This raises the question of where and how did the victims seen in the images recorded at location 2 die?
• The conclusion appears inescapable that the staging of the Douma incident entailed mass murder of at least 35 civilians to provide the bodies at Location 2.

Furthermore, we note that the Douma incident was the first alleged chemical attack in Syria where OPCW investigators were able to carry out an unimpeded on-site inspection. Since previous OPCW Fact-Finding Missions did not include on-site inspections, the finding that the Douma incident was staged may cast doubt on the findings of those earlier FFMs.

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Is the Trump administration attempting to concoct a false pretext to justify launching a war against Iran?

That question has become increasingly common and urgent among anti-war commentators and activists in recent days as U.S. intelligence officials—without citing any concrete evidence—blamed Iran for reported attacks on Saudi and UAE oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend.

Commentators quickly likened the accusations to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, referring to the “fabricated” event that President Lyndon Johnson used to massively escalate America’s war in Vietnam.

Be ready for Gulf of Tonkin 2.0

War is good for re-election.
And bad for America.#Iran

— Sunjeev Bery (@SunjeevBery) May 13, 2019

“Anyone who knows history of [the] 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident and U.S. escalation in Vietnam should be shocked, alarmed at what’s happening in [the] Persian Gulf, including unverified claims of boat attacks,” Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer tweeted.

Journalist Rania Khalek echoed Bunch, warning that national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “are trying to create a Gulf of Tonkin incident with Iran.”

It’s obvious that Bolton and Pompeo are trying to create a Gulf of Tonkin incident with Iran. When that happens, will media fall in line and amplify whatever false victimhood story this administration pushes to drag us into war?

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) May 14, 2019

According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. officials “didn’t offer details about what led to the assessment” that Iran carried out the attacks on the oil tankers.

“We are in grave danger of being sleepwalked into military confrontation with Iran over an incident that is blamed wrongly on Iran,” author and journalist Gareth Porter said in a statement. “Corporate media have given Bolton and his conniving to achieve such a crisis a free pass.”

As The New Yorker‘s Robin Wright wrote Monday, the United States “has a long history of provoking, instigating, or launching wars based on dubious, flimsy, or manufactured threats,” including in Iraq, Lybia, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

“Today, the question in Washington—and surely in Tehran, too—is whether President Trump is making moves that will provoke, instigate, or inadvertently drag the United States into a war with Iran,” Wright wrote. “The problem, as U.S. history proves, is that the momentum of confrontation is harder to reverse with each escalatory step.”

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trump said he’s “hearing little stories about Iran”—apparently referring to U.S. intelligence officials’ unsubstantiated claim that Iran was behind the alleged tanker attacks. Iran has denied any involvement.

“If they do anything, they will suffer greatly,” Trump said. “We’ll see what happens with Iran.”

The president’s threat came just hours before the New York Times reported late Monday that the president last week reviewed a plan to send 120,000 U.S. ground troops to the Middle East in the event that Iran launches an “attack” on American forces or moves to develop a nuclear weapon.

The military plan was reportedly crafted by Bolton, who last week used the routine deployment of a U.S. aircraft carrier and bomber task force to threaten Iran with “relentless force” if it attacks U.S. forces. Bolton did not cite any evidence indicating Iran was planning such an attack.

Observers warned that the Trump administration’s actions have moved the two nations dangerously close to an all-out military conflict, which analysts have warned could be even more devastating than the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“John Bolton is trying to provoke the Iranians to do something so that he can get the war with Iran that he’s been looking for, for more than 20 years,” Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said Tuesday in an interview on The Real News.

“He’s, of course, presenting it as an effort to scare and deter the Iranians,” Parsi said. “I don’t think that has worked at all, but it has created a scenario in which everyone is now very worried that some form of an accidental war at a minimum is very likely because you have too many U.S. forces and Iranian forces into too small of an area.”

“And then you have John Bolton in the White House, who has a track record of lying, cheating, and fabricating evidence in order to start wars,” Parsi added, referring to Bolton’s role in the invasion of Iraq.

Progressive members of Congress joined the chorus of voices speaking out against the Trump administration’s march to war with Iran.

“The one thing we learned from the last time we sent 120,000 American troops to the Middle East is don’t send 120,000 American troops to the Middle East,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 presidential candidate, warned that a war with Iran “would be an unmitigated disaster.”

“We must stop Trump and his national security advisor, John Bolton—someone who likes endless wars,” Sanders tweeted.

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For the third time in less than a year, a California jury has delivered a stinging blow to Bayer-Monsanto, finding that the company’s Roundup weedkiller caused cancer in a California couple and awarding them a staggering $2.055 billion in damages.

Today the jury in Alameda County Superior Court found that glyphosate, the signature ingredient in Roundup, was the cause of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in both Alva and Alberta Pilliod of Livermore, who have used the herbicide since the 1970s.

It is the third trial since August 2018 in which a jury found that glyphosate caused cancer. More than 13,000 similar lawsuits have been filed against the company.

“The cloud hanging over Bayer will only grow bigger and darker, as more juries hear how Monsanto manipulated its own research, colluded with regulators and intimidated scientists to keep secret the cancer risks from glyphosate,” said EWG President Ken Cook.

Bayer has seen its stock price plummet 40 percent since it purchased Monsanto last year for $63 billion. At its recent annual meeting, a shareholder revolt ensued, with more than half of the shareholders voting against absolving management for its decision to acquire the St. Louis-based seed and pesticide company.

“By now, most Bayer executives, its board and shareholders must all be questioning the decision to acquire Monsanto and its mounting liability over its cancer-causing weedkiller,” Cook said. “Bayer must also wonder if Monsanto deployed the same underhanded tactics during their courtship that courtroom disclosures have shown permeated its corporate culture: deep deception, prevarication and denial in a headlong pursuit of profit, human and environmental consequences be damned.”

Glyphosate is the most heavily used herbicide in the world. People who are not farm workers or groundskeepers are being exposed to the cancer-causing chemical.

A 2015 EWG analysis mapped the year-to-year growth in glyphosate use on American farmland from 1992 to 2012. According to the Department of Agriculture, in 2014, approximately 240 million pounds of glyphosate were sprayed in the U.S. As a result of widespread use, glyphosate has now been found to contaminate air, water and soil across vast expanses of the U.S. It also shows up in the food Americans eat every day.

Two separate rounds of laboratory tests commissioned last year by EWG found glyphosate in nearly every sample of popular oat-based cereals and other oat-based food marketed to children. The brands in which glyphosate was detected included several cereals and breakfast bars made by General Mills and Quaker. More than 236,000 consumers have signed EWG’s petition calling on General Mills and Quaker to stop using oats sprayed with glyphosate.

Joined by nearly 20 food and nutrition companies, EWG petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to sharply limit glyphosate residues allowed on oats and prohibit the pesticide’s use as a pre-harvest drying agent, which is how the cancer-causing weedkiller gets into popular oat-based breakfast cereals.

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John Bolton ordered the Pentagon to come up with an “updated” plan for getting more American troops into the Middle East to fight a war against Iran. The plans are in now, according to officials, who say that the options envision 120,000 US ground troops in the Middle East.

Incredibly, this option appears to just be the start of the war, as officials say that the 120,000 plan does not include a US ground invasion of Iran. Officials concede that the ground invasion would require far more troops.

Instead, the 120,000 is just  the next step in the ongoing US escalations toward war, and is envisioned as a response to any Iranian threat on US forces or interests, or any hint of acceleration of its nuclear program.

US officials quoted in the media about the plan are everywhere and always supportive of the idea, and the underlying narrative of an “Iranian threat.” Some argue that the fact that the Pentagon would send 120,000 troops and not even invade proves how big the threat is, while others say that the 120,000 troops would be a “scare tactic” to warn Iran off any aggressive moves.

This is quite contrary to Europe’s take on US policy, with European officials calling on the US to exercise some restraint, and expressing concern that US moves are liable to miscalculate and start a war through sheer accident.

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Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com.

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“It is hard to overstate the significance of this revelation,” tweets former British MP George Galloway of a new report by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM). “The war-machine has now been caught red-handed in a staged chemical weapons attack for the purposes of deceiving our democracies into what could have turned into a full-scale war amongst the great-powers.”

“An important #Douma #Syria ‘Assad chemical weapon attack’ development and yet more evidence to suggest the ‘attack’ was staged, as it’s now revealed that @OPCW suppressed expert engineers report that found the cylinders were likely not dropped from the air,” tweets former Scotland Yard detective and counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge.

“The engineering assessment confirms our earlier conclusion,” the excellent Moon of Alabama blog writes. “The whole scene as depicted by ‘rebels’ and propaganda organs was staged. The more than 34 dead on the scene were murdered elsewhere under unknown circumstances.”

An important #Douma #Syria ‘Assad chemical weapon attack’ development and yet more evidence to suggest the ‘attack’ was staged, as it’s now revealed that @OPCW suppressed expert engineers report that found the cylinders were likely not dropped from the airhttps://t.co/hZCP2Ujlbk

— Charles Shoebridge (@ShoebridgeC) May 13, 2019

The report has grabbed the attention of those who’ve expressed skepticism of establishment Syria narratives because it casts serious doubts on the official story we’ve been told to believe about an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April of last year. A document titled “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident” has been leaked to the WGSPM which reveals that an engineering sub-team of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) fact-finding mission in Douma came to conclusions which differ wildly from the OPCW’s official findings on the Douma incident, yet we the public were never permitted to see this assessment.

The assessment’s findings, which you can locate on pages five through eight of the document, put forward multiple hypothetical scenarios in which two gas cylinders could have wound up in the locations(Location 2 and Location 4) that they were photographed and video recorded as having been found after the alleged attack. The assessment concludes that “The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders, and the surrounding scene of the incidents, were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder being delivered from an aircraft. In each case the alternative hypothesis produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.”

The assessment says more thoroughly and technically what I argued in an article last year, that the physics of the air-dropped cylinder narrative make no sense whatsoever. This is a problem, because the reason we were given for the US, UK and France launching airstrikes on Syrian government targets in April of 2018 was that two cylinders full of poison gas had been dropped from aircraft by the Syrian air force and killed dozens of civilians.

The assessment is signed by Ian Henderson, who the WGSPM were able to verify as a longtime OPCW-trained inspection team leader. The OPCW reportedly denied that Henderson was involved in its Douma fact-finding mission, but the WGSPM counters that “This statement is false. The engineering sub-team could not have been carrying out studies in Douma at Locations 2 and 4 unless they had been notified by OPCW to the Syrian National Authority (the body that oversees compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention) as FFM inspectors: it is unlikely that Henderson arrived on a tourist visa.”

So far this is the establishment narrative management machine's only attempt at refuting the latest revelations indicating that the #Douma attack last year was staged. It basically boils down to "They're conspiracy theorists and the official narrative disagrees with them." https://t.co/04iFa24do8

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) May 13, 2019

Just as interesting as this new report has been the response of the usual establishment Syria narrative managers to it, or rather the lack thereof. NATO narrative management firm Bellingcat, which normally jumps all over these kinds of revelations in an attempt to discredit them, has been maintaining radio silence as of this writing. Its founder, Eliot Higgins, has had nothing to say on the matter other than to retweet a pathetic rebuttal by his mini-me Scott Lucas and take a few childish jabs at me for highlighting this fact.

Scott Lucas’ Facebook post on the WGSPM report remains as of this writing the only attempt from the Syria narrative management machine to address it, and it boils down to nothing more than assertions that the report contradicts the official OPCW narrative (duh) and that the WGSPM are conspiracy theorists. Lucas may have thought it a good idea to author this post believing that he had a more substantial argument than he actually had, but it was pointed out shortly after publication that his claim about Henderson refusing to consider other possible scenarios in his assessment is directly contradicted by the words that are in the assessment, and Lucas was forced to make a hasty revision.

There will be other counter-narratives released by the Syria narrative management machine, to be sure, but the fact that this report has been out for the better part of the day with nary a peep from that lot reveals a great deal about the difficulties they’re having with this one.

We are being lied to about Syria. Anyone who believes unproven assertions about governments targeted for toppling by the US-centralized empire has failed to learn the lessons of history. The Syrian government had literally nothing to gain strategically from using chemical weapons in Douma, a battle it had already won, and knew full well that doing so would provoke an attack from the empire. Douma was occupied by the Al Qaeda-linked Jaysh Al-Islam, who had at that point nothing to lose and everything to gain by staging a false flag attack in a last-ditch attempt to get NATO powers to function as its air force.

If you still believe at this point that the Syrian government dropped poison gas on Douma last year, then I’ve got some Iraqi WMDs to sell you.

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Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.

Featured image is from Medium

On May 9, a jury in US District Court for Washington, DC found a former US diplomat guilty on 14 counts of threatening me and other employees of the Arab American Institute (AAI) “because of [our] race and ethnicity” and “because of [our] efforts to encourage Arab Americans to participate in the political life in the United States”.

So read the opening of a press release issued by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).

These convictions bring to a close a 12-year long ordeal, during which time the same individual had repeatedly sent emails threatening me, my staff and the Arab-American community. He had already been convicted of the same crime in 2008 for sending threatening e-mails and making phone calls to my office. At that time, he admitted his guilt, saying that he had intended to threaten us and even apologised for his actions. Despite this admission, after serving time in prison and a period on probation, he began threatening us again between 2012 and 2017.

The renewed threats grew in intensity after several terrorist acts that occurred here in the US and abroad. The severity of the language he used caused us deep concern, especially when seen against the backdrop of the increasing frequency of mass shootings occurring here in the US.

The indictment of the defendant cited his repeated use of lines like, “the only good Arab American is a dead Arab American” or “America cleansed of Arab Americans will be America free of terror” or “America will never be safe until America is cleansed of James Zogby…” or “Death to all Arab Americans” or “the Arab American Institute is a terrorist organistion”.

The trial lasted three days, during which time members of my family, my staff and I testified on these threats he had on us, our families and on our ability to do our advocacy work on behalf of our community. After closing arguments, the jury deliberated and the next day they issued their verdict finding the culprit guilty on all of the charges against him.

The DoJ’s press release summed up the case in the following manner:

“Threats aimed at individuals because of their race and national origin have no place in our society and violate federal civil rights laws,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “The Department of Justice will continue to hold criminals accountable who commit such acts of hate so that all individuals in this country can engage in civic life and political discourse.”

“Evidence presented at trial established that from 2012 to 2017, [the charged individual] sent over 700 e-mails to AAI employees, culminating in five death threats in 2017. According to court documents, [he] previously pleaded guilty in 2008 to sending threatening emails to AAI employees. Evidence presented at trial showed that [he] used nearly identical language that he admitted were threats in 2008 as he did in 2017.

“According to testimony in court, AAI employees were frightened of [the charged individual], because he had sent them death threats in the past and continued to do so over a decade later. Additionally, according to witness testimony, many AAI employees lived in fear that [he] would follow through his threats and physically harm them. They further testified to the toll it took on them personally and their families and loved ones.”

This is not the first time we have faced threats of violence or actual violence. As I testified in court, I received my first death threat in 1970, my office was fire-bombed in 1980, my friend and colleague, Alex Odeh, was murdered at his office in 1985 and two other individuals were convicted of death threats against me and sentenced to terms in prison in the years since the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

While we, of course, know that the danger of new threats will always be with us, needless to say, we are enormously relieved by these guilty verdicts and are deeply gratified by the tireless efforts made by the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to defend our rights to engage in our advocacy work on behalf of our community and our country without fear of threats of hate-based threats of violence.

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James J. Zogby is president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute.

Arms manufacturers of old, and many of the current stable, did not care much where their products went.  The profit incentive often came before the patriotic one, and led to such dark suspicions as those voiced by the Nye Committee in the 1930s.  Known formally as the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, the US Senate Committee, chaired by US Senator Gerald Nye (R-ND) supplies a distant echo on the nature of armaments and their influence.

The Nye Committee had one pressing concern: that the United States might fall for the same mistake it did in 1917 in committing to a foreign conflict while fattening the pockets of arms manufacturers.  As Chairman Senator Nye promised,

“When the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honour and national defence, but a matter of profit for the few.”

Despite the current sophisticated state of modern weaponry, along with modern offshoots (cybertools, spyware, the use of malware), the principle of ubiquitous spread is still present.  Companies in the business of developing malware and spyware, modern merchants of disruption and harm, face charges that their products are being used for ill, a nastiness finding its way to hungry security services keen to monitor dissent and target contrarians.  While the scale of their damage may be less than those alleged by Nye’s Munitions Committee, the implications are there: products made are products used; the ethical code can be shelved. 

The NSO Group, a tech outfit based in Herzliya, a stone’s throw from Tel Aviv, specialises in producing such invasive software tools as Pegasus.  The reputation of Pegasus is considerable, supposedly able to access data on targeted phones including switching on their cameras and microphones.

NSO’s spyware merchandise has now attained a certain, viral notoriety. When Mexican investigative journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas was butchered in broad daylight on a street in Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, something reeked.  The killing on May 15, 2017 had been designated a cartel hit, an initially plausible explanation given Valdez’s avid interest in prying into the affairs of organised crime in Sinaloa.  But the smell went further.  As Mexican media outlets reported in June 2017, the government of former president Enrique Peña Nieto had purchased the good merchandise of Pegasus.  Three Mexican agencies had purchased spyware to the tune of $80 million since 2011. 

Since then, Canadian research group Citizen Lab, in collaboration with Mexican digital rights outfit R3D and freedom of expression group Article 19, have made the case that the widow of the slain journalist, Griselda Triana, became a target of Pegasus spyware within 10 days of her husband’s death in 2017.  According to the report, she was also targeted “a week after infection attempts against two of Valdez’s colleagues, Andrés Villareal and Ismael Bojórquez.”  The group behind the infection attempts, named RECKLESS-1, is alleged to have links with the Mexican government. 

Canadian-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz can also count himself amongst those targeted by Pegasus.  In 2018, he claimed that his phone was tapped by NSO-made spyware, leading to a gruesome implication: that the Saudi authorities would have had access to hundreds of messages exchanged with the doomed Saudi journalist and fellow comrade-in-dissent Jamal Khashoggi. 

In December, a suit was filed in Israel by Abdulaziz’s representatives Alaa Mahajna and Mazen Masri, alleging that the NSO Group had hacked his phone in the service of Riyadh.  In court papers, it was alleged that the dissident was harangued by the same individuals behind Khashoggi’s murder, insisting that he pack his bags and return to Saudi Arabia. 

Buried in the court documentation was the receipt of a text message purportedly tracking the shipment of a package; instead, it masked a link to the NSO Group.  Once clicked, the link installed the spyware, turning the phone into an effective agent of surveillance.  Soon after this took place, Abdulaziz’s family home in Jidda was raided by Saudi security forces.  Two brothers were subsequently detained.

Last January, Maariv, an Israeli daily, investigated reports about telephone spyware supposedly used to bug the phone of the murdered Khashoggi.  Khashoggi’s ending at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, facilitated by a death squad, was not handiwork NSO wanted to be associated with.  The group had been, according to a statement in December, “licensed for the sole use of providing governments and law enforcement agencies the ability to lawfully fight terrorism and crime”.  Misuse of products would lead to investigation and, depending on appropriate findings, a suspension or termination of the contract.   

Shalev Hulio, the company’s CEO, was clear to emphasise his humanity, before distancing himself and his company from the killing.  

“As a human being and as an Israeli, what happened to Khashoggi was a shocking murder.” 

Hulio was also adamant that “

Khashoggi was not targeted by any NSO product or technology, including listening, monitoring, location tracking and intelligence collection.” 

Could such precise denials be inadvertent confessions?

The cooperative umbrella for Israel is broadening. It seeks allies, or at least some form of accommodation with regional powers, to counter common enemies.  With Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one common foe remains a constant: Iran.  The Israeli state’s licensing of such companies as the NSO Group implicates the policy of permitting the distribution of Pegasus and such products.  License their use; license their consequences.  Molly Malekar, of Amnesty International’s Israeli office, puts it simply:

“By continuing to approve of NSO Group, the Ministry of Defence is practically admitting to knowingly cooperating with NSO Group as their software is used to commit human rights abuses.” 

Monitoring and killing dissidents and intrepid journalists tend to be nasty by-products.  They, in a sense, have become the modern merchants of death, whose clients remain unsavoury regimes.

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

Featured image is from The Unz Review

This past week the US and China failed to reach agreement on a new trade deal, despite high level China representative Lie He meeting in Washington on Thursday-Friday, May 9-10.

In the wake of the meeting, Trump and his administration mouthpieces attempt to put a positive spin on the collapsed talks, while placing blame on China for the break up.  The ‘spin’ at first was that China had reneged on a prior agreement and changed its terms when they arrived in Washington.  China had caused the breakdown, not the US. The stock markets swooned. Trump quickly jumped in and said he got a nice letter from China president, Xi, and that it wasn’t all that bad.

But make no mistake, a trade negotiations ‘rubicon’ has been reached. The real trade war may be starting.  Or, it may all be theater to make it look like both sides are acting tough and that an agreement will be reached this summer. But that scenario may now be fading. Trade wars—like hot wars—have their own dynamic. Once launched, they drive their adversaries in directions they may not have initially sought.

So who’s actually responsible for last week’s trade breakdown?

To listen to Trump and his neocons running the US foreign (and trade) policy show now, it was the Chinese. They changed the agreement at the last minute. But who really did the changes? Who set off the process? And how?

If the Chinese backtracked on some terms of the deal, it was clearly in response to the Trump-Neocon trade team initiating the backtracking. Here’s what the Trump team did:

• The US publicly declared the week before that the US would keep tariffs on even after an agreement. This violated the understanding that both sides would remove the new tariffs once an agreement was reached ($100 billion China on US; $250 billion US on China)
• Trump threatened tariffs on the remaining $300 billion of China imports
• The US signaled that China would have to not only stop technology transfer from US corporations doing business in China, but that China would have to share its tech development with the US if it wanted an agreement. That included the military-sensitive nextgen technologies like 5G, AI, and cybersecurity.
• The US demanded that China stop subsidizing its state owned enterprises (SOEs) with low interest rate loans that put US multinational corporations in an uncompetitive position in China (even as the US continued to subsidize via tax cuts, trade credits, etc.)
• The US indicated it would continue its global efforts to prevent US allies from doing business with China tech companies like Huawai, ZTE, China Mobile, etc. regardless if an agreement was reached.

If one wanted to scuttle negotiations at the last minute, this was certainly a way to do it.  And as this writer has been saying for the past year, scuttling is just what the neocon China hard-liners driving the US negotiations have wanted all along.  They don’t want a deal to reduce the US goods trade deficit with China, and they are willing to forego China’s significant concessions already made to the US in negotiations on US company access to China markets, if they can’t also stop China’s technology development—especially in the key nextgen technologies of AI, cybersecurity and 5G.

These are not only the new industries of the next decade, they are also the new technologies with major military implications. Should China reach parity or leapfrog the US in these areas, it could upset the US empire’s military dominance.

From the very beginning of negotiations with China, back in March 2018, the tech issue was central.  Neocon, China hard-liner and head of the US negotiation team, Robert Lighthizer, issued way back in August 2017 a warning report that China’s 2025 plan aimed at surpassing the US in these three tech areas. That report promised to show that China was in fact stealing US technology from US companies in those areas. Lighthizer’s March 2018 subsequent report than allegedly proved it. The US-China trade war was then launched that month.

At first it was led by Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin. He led a team to Beijing and came back indicating a deal was reached with China. As part of the deal, it was later revealed publicly, China had agreed to allow US banks and businesses a 51% or more ownership of joint venture companies in China. This was the US bankers’ main demand. China also indicated, revealed later, that it would purchase $1 trillion more of new farm, natural gas, and manufacturing goods from the US over the next five years. So much for the goods trade deficit imbalance and issue.  Both concessions were major wins for Mnuchin and the US.  But China refused apparently to budge on the major issue of nextgen tech. It suggested concessions, but, failing a final agreement, would not agree to US demands beforehand or up front.

Over the summer in 2018 the neocon faction reasserted control over the US trade negotiating team. Mnuchin’s firing of anti-China neocon, Peter Navarro, was reversed and Lighthizer put him back on the team. Over the summer Neocons deepened their influence and control of the Trump foreign policy, as Pompeo policy took charge at the State Dept., and as notorious neocon, John Bolton, took over as main Trump foreign policy adviser.  His buddies (Abrams, Miller, etc.) were given enhanced roles in the administration as well. These were the guys that gave us Iraq war in 2003 and after. And they’re on the same path again.

In the area of trade they have clearly convinced Trump that a more aggressive stance on trade negotiations will eventually produce a bigger ‘win’ for the US. They are the originators of the ‘use national security’ as an excuse to impose sanctions and use tariffs and sanctions to intimidate and force opponents (including allies) into major concessions.

We see this aggressive, high risk brinkmanship not only in trade negotiations with China. It’s behind the collapse of negotiations with North Korea on missiles and nukes. (The North Koreans offered to dismantle a number of sites if the US removed an equal number of sanctions. But the neocons refused, saying all the sites must be dismantled before the US would even consider lifting any sanctions at all.  That’s a non-starter in negotiations with anyone. If effect, it says: capitulate and then we’ll think about lifting sanctions).  It’s there in the imminent attack and invasion of Venezuela. The recent US failed coup there is only the beginning. It’s there in the refusal to stop supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen. It’s there in the escalation of military threats toward Iran. It’s even there in the current threat of sanctions on Germany if it doesn’t stop buying Russian gas and buy US gas instead. It’s everywhere in US foreign policy. And it’s there in the recent blowup of negotiations on trade with China.

The neocon, anti-China hardliners—Lighthizer, Navarro, and Bolton—don’t want an agreement with China. They want a capitulation on the tech issue. They are aligned with the US Pentagon, Military Industrial Complex, Congress right wing—faction on the US trade team.

There has been in fighting on the trade team from the beginning. The neocon faction has been contending with the US bankers-big business faction that want the 51% and the deeper control in China. China has already conceded that and in fact has begun implementing it. The farm-manufacturing-natural gas faction wants more purchases of their products. China has already agreed on that as well. But since last mid-2018 the neocon faction has Trump’s ear and they are driving the policy.

That’s why the US ‘moved the goalposts’ the week before the China delegation was to come to Washington last week to finalize a deal. They announced or leaked all the backtracking US terms well before the China team was to come: the retaining of US tariffs despite an agreement, the required sharing of tech regardless of limits on tech transfer in China, the demands that China stop subsidizing its SOEs (even as the US would continue subsidizing US corporations via massive tax cuts, export-import bank, and direct payments from the US government), and so on.

China’s reply was to send its vice-chairman and head of its negotiating team, Liu He, to Washington last week nevertheless. Their reply was they would respond in kind to US tariffs with more tariffs of their own and that China would not capitulate on matters of ‘principle’ (read technology development and its 2025 plan).

So where does it go from here? Is this a bona fide breakdown or just a hiatus, with both sides posturing to look tough?

Trump advisor, Larry Kudlow, trotted out on national syndicated talk shows on Sunday, May 12, and admitted that Trump and China president Xi would not meet until June at the next G20 meeting—maybe.  No doubt some discussions will continue next in Beijing in the interim. But it is now far less likely a deal will be made this year. But that’s what the US necons prefer, short of China capitulation.

The neocons have apparently convinced Trump a deeper trade war with China would be good politics domestically. The US economy is showing signs of slowing in key areas of business investment and household consumption.  The trade war with China has produced a sharp decline of imports from China. Lower imports translates into higher ‘net exports’, a category in US GDP calculations that raises GDP. So less imports from tariffs means higher GDP. That could offset some of the slowing US economy in 2019-20.

The neocons believe China’s economy is also slowing and that its stock market is fragile. China cannot conduct a deeper trade war over tariffs with the US. It will eventually capitulate and agree to US demands, including tech, they no doubt argue. And Trump buys it.

But there are potential economic consequences to wars, including trade wars, that the neocons and their obsession with US imperial power do not understand or else do not want to acknowledge. Maybe they think they’ll prevail before the economic negatives occur. The negatives mean a corresponding severe contraction of US stock values as well. This now appears emerging. The negatives include a sharp rise in US consumer inflation, as the higher tariffs on China imports get passed on in the US economy. That will reduce an already fragile US consumer spending and US business investing, as costs rise for both.  Both business and consumer confidence are poised for a major contraction, and the trade war may just be enough to tip the balance. And rising inflation may force a new conflict with the central bank, the Fed, as it raises interest rates again to fund an even larger US budget deficit and debt caused by the economic slowdown.

But if the worse economically happens, the neocons no doubt are whispering in Trump’s ear that he can then blame the US stock market collapse and economic recession coming on the Chinese—as well as on the Democrats.  He can resurrect his extreme ‘economic nationalism’ appeals of 2016 to his base, once again claiming it’s the ‘foreigners’ and the ‘socialists’ (e.g. everyone proposing a reversal of his war spending, tax cuts for the rich, cuts to education and social programs, etc.).

These are indeed dangerous times for the US, economically and politically.  As even Democrat Party leaders are now saying, a bona fide Constitutional Crisis is brewing in the US as Trump insists on governing for his 35% supporters and to hell with the rest of the country, and as he governs increasingly at the expense of Congress’ s constitutional rights.

It is also a dangerous time for the US economy, and the global economy as well.  We can thank the growing influence, and disastrous policies, of the neocons who are now again firmly in control of US policy as Trump is now aligned with them on almost every policy front.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Jack Rasmus.

Dr. Rasmus is author of the forthcoming ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, September 2019; and the just published ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, March 2019. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and hosts the radio show, ‘Alternative Visions’. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus.

Further evidence has emerged indicating that the alleged 2018 Douma, Syria chemical attack was staged by US-backed militants, not the Syrian government.

With the US plotting war from South America to the South China Sea, understanding how US-backed militants staged the attack, allowing the Western media to sell US military intervention to the global public based on a lie – will help guard against similarly staged attacks in the near future.

Recent revelations mean the US not only falsely accused Damascus of having carried out the attack – but launched military strikes against Syria based on an entirely false pretext. To date, the US has categorically failed to produce any convincing evidence backing their original claims.

Conversely, a subsequent investigation carried out by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) produced damning evidence suggesting a false flag event was carried out by US-backed militants. This included a chlorine gas cylinder found in a militant weapons workshop inspected by OPCW investigators closely matching the two cylinders allegedly used in the 2018 Douma attack itself.

While US-backed militants insisted two gas cylinders were dropped on Douma by government helicopters, the OPCW noted that the alleged craters caused by the cylinders’ impact matched those on nearby buildings clearly caused by high-explosive ordnance.

The final OPCW report regarding the Douma incident claimed:

The [the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria] team noted that a similar crater was present on a nearby building. 

The implication is that the cylinders may not have created the craters attributed to them by US-backed militants and the Western media supporting their version of the story. Instead, it implies that the cylinders were manually put into place near preexisting craters created by conventional ordnance.

While the final OPCW report included photographs of damage on the adjacent building, it did not elaborate further or explore the obvious implications of similar craters seen nearby explicitly.

However, more recently, a previously unpublished report by the OPCW titled, “Engineering Assessment of Two Cylinders Obsered at the Douma Incident – Executive Summary” (PDF), did elaborate (emphasis added):

Experts were consulted to assess the appearance of the crater observed at Location 2, particularly the underside. The expert view was that it was more consistent with that expected as a result of blast/energetics (for example from a HE mortar or rocket artillery round) rather than a result of impact from the falling object. This was also borne out by the observation of deformed rebar splayed out at the underside of the crater, which was not explained by the apparent non-penetration and minimal damage of the cylinder. The likelihood of the crater having been created by a mortar/artillery round or similar, was also supported by the presence of more than one crater of very similar appearance in concrete slabs on top of nearby buildings, by an (unusually elevated, but possible) fragmentation pattern on upper walls, by the indications of concrete spalling under the crater, and (whist it was observed that a fire had been created in the corner of the room ) black scorching on the crater underside and ceiling.

The engineering assessment would conclude (emphasis added):

In summary, observation at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft. 

The assessment further adds weight to what many analysts concluded at the time when the OPCW published its final, official report on the incident – that the event was staged.

At face value Damascus lacked any motivation to carry out the 2018 attack. It occurred on the eve of total victory for Syrian forces over US-backed militants dug in around the Syrian capital. Syria had used extensive conventional force to overcome militant positions and even if Damascus believed the use of chemical weapons would expedite victory, it is unlikely it would drop only 2 gas cylinders containing a negligible amount of chlorine toward that end.

Conversely – US-backed militants facing inevitable and complete defeat along with a US government in desperate need of a pretext to use military force to slow down or stop the advance of Syrian troops – had every motivation to stage the attack, blame it on Damascus, and lie about it ever since.

If political analysis of the alleged attack exploring the possible motivations of both sides in carrying out the attack weren’t conclusive enough, this recently published OPCW engineering assessment further lays the issue to rest.

Why Douma Still Matters

Washington’s propensity toward staging provocations as a pretext toward wider war is not confined to Douma, Syria alone. The lead up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq was predicated entirely on a deliberate lie built atop fabricated evidence.

And the US still seeks to provoke war in Ukraine, in Venezuela, against Iran, and likely again in Syria itself as government forces begin to retake Idlib.

Understanding how US-backed militants staged the Douma attack in 2018, how the Western media lied to the global public in the aftermath to sell subsequent Western military intervention, and how investigators exposed evidence revealing the attack as a false flag operation – will all aid in blunting the political impact of future false flag provocations.

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Tony Cartalucci is 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.

President John Bolton has put his signature on a plan to send 120,000 troops to the Middle East in a move all too reminiscent of the invasion of Iraq. The number is close to that during the invasion and destruction of Iraq. 

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Trump White House reviews military plans against Iran, including sending up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East, in echoes of Iraq War https://t.co/pDKl0rT1o4

— Eric Schmitt (@EricSchmittNYT) May 14, 2019

Meanwhile, the cigar store Indian president sits behind the big desk attacking a large array of  enemies with daily salvos of noisome tweets pounded into an overheated smartphone. He’s not in the loop on this one. Harry Truman’s buck no longer stops at the “Resolute Desk.” 

From CNN:

Citing administration officials, the Times said it is unknown whether President Donald Trump has been briefed on the plan, including the number of troops. The Times said the meeting occurred days after the Trump administration cited “specific and credible” intelligence last week that suggested Iranian forces and proxies were targeting US forces in Syria, Iraq and at sea.

President Bolton has his ducks in a row. The CIA and Pentagon have worked feverishly to stir up trouble within Iran’s ethnic minorities since the reign of Bush the Lesser. He signed off—or maybe it was President Cheney—on Operation Olympic Games, a cyber operation aimed at Iran’s centrifuges while at the same time Israel hunted down and assassinated Iran’s nuclear scientists. 

It is interesting at least four of the targets were assassinated with magnetic bombs attached to cars. It appears the “sabotage attacks”—or rather unsubstantiated attacks—near Fujairah port, just outside the Strait of Hormuz, consisted of limpet magnetic bombs (the explosions occurred below the waterline). 

“No evidence has emerged to show that Iran was involved. The affected countries are yet to assign blame,” reports the BBC. 

However, that hasn’t stopped President Bolton and his cabal of neocons from declaring Iran is the culprit—never mind the stupidity of the idea Iran would do such a thing a couple days after the US said they would—and the neocon habit of telling brazen lies to get mass murder campaigns rolling. 

It’s possible the headline grabbing maritime attack in fact did not occur. 

Global maritime news website have questioned the details surrounding the incident. The influential Lloyds List Maritime Intelligence, for example, criticised the authorities for “scant” information.

Quoting the maritime security company Dryad Global, it said: “Saudi reticence to report the incident accurately within their own media channels and the current failure to provide imagery evidence of the attack raises important questions as to the nature of the attack.”

The FleetMon website said: “What happened exactly, how bad were explosions and fire, if there were any, and what definition ‘act of sabotage’ means, how much true is indeed, the whole story, is so far anyone’s guess.”

Meanwhile, technology and conflict website The Drive said the lack of hard evidence added to the increased risk of regional conflict.

President Bolton will have his (and Bibi’s) war while the megalomanic Trump fights his “deep state” enemies, never mind the deep state operatives within his own administration. 

The real antiwar presidential candidates, meanwhile, are ignored by the corporate war propaganda media.

Trump says he doesn't want war with Iran, but that's exactly what he wants, because that's exactly what Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu, al-Qaeda, Bolton, Haley, and other NeoCons/NeoLibs want. That’s what he put first–not America. pic.twitter.com/kAPyxlKXDs

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) May 14, 2019

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

This study was originally published in 2016.

Introduction: “Something strange”

“How does the newspaper know what it knows?” The answer to this question is likely to surprise some newspaper readers: “The main source of information is stories from news agencies. The almost anonymously operating news agencies are in a way the key to world events. So what are the names of these agencies, how do they work and who finances them? To judge how well one is informed about events in East and West, one should know the answers to these questions.” (Höhne 1977, p. 11)

A Swiss media researcher points out:

“The news agencies are the most important suppliers of material to mass media. No daily media outlet can manage without them. () So the news agencies influence our image of the world; above all, we get to know what they have selected.” (Blum 1995, p. 9)

In view of their essential importance, it is all the more astonishing that these agencies are hardly known to the public:

“A large part of society is unaware that news agencies exist at all … In fact, they play an enormously important role in the media market. But despite this great importance, little attention has been paid to them in the past.” (Schulten-Jaspers 2013, p. 13)

Even the head of a news agency noted:

“There is something strange about news agencies. They are little known to the public. Unlike a newspaper, their activity is not so much in the spotlight, yet they can always be found at the source of the story.” (Segbers 2007, p. 9)

“The Invisible Nerve Center of the Media System”

So what are the names of these agencies that are “always at the source of the story”? There are now only three global agencies left:

1. The American Associated Press (AP) with over 4000 employees worldwide. The AP belongs to US media companies and has its main editorial office in New York. AP news is used by around 12,000 international media outlets, reaching more than half of the world’s population every day.
2. The quasi-governmental French Agence France-Presse (AFP) based in Paris and with around 4000 employees. The AFP sends over 3000 stories and photos every day to media all over the world.
3. The British agency Reuters in London, which is privately owned and employs just over 3000 people. Reuters was acquired in 2008 by Canadian media entrepreneur Thomson – one of the 25 richest people in the world – and merged into Thomson Reuters, headquartered in New York.

In addition, many countries run their own news agencies. However, when it comes to international news, these usually rely on the three global agencies and simply copy and translate their reports.

The three global news agencies Reuters, AFP and AP, and the three national agencies of the German-speaking countries of Austria (APA), Germany (DPA) and Switzerland (SDA).

Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of the Austrian APA, described the key role of news agencies with these words:

“News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system.” (Segbers 2007, p.10)

Small abbreviation, great effect

However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: “Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines.” (Blum 1995, P. 9)

The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven’t researched most of their contributions themselves.

The following figure shows some examples of source tagging in popular German-language newspapers. Next to the agency abbreviations we find the initials of editors who have edited the respective agency report.

News agencies as sources in newspaper articles

Occasionally, newspapers use agency material but do not label it at all. A study in 2011 from the Swiss Research Institute for the Public Sphere and Society at the University of Zurich came to the following conclusions (FOEG 2011):

“Agency contributions are exploited integrally without labeling them, or they are partially rewritten to make them appear as an editorial contribution. In addition, there is a practice of ’spicing up‘ agency reports with little effort; for example, visualization techniques are used: unpublished agency reports are enriched with images and graphics and presented as comprehensive reports.”

The agencies play a prominent role not only in the press, but also in private and public broadcasting. This is confirmed by Volker Braeutigam, who worked for the German state broadcaster ARD for ten years and views the dominance of these agencies critically:

“One fundamental problem is that the newsroom at ARD sources its information mainly from three sources: the news agencies DPA/AP, Reuters and AFP: one German/American, one British and one French. () The editor working on a news topic only needs to select a few text passages on the screen that he considers essential, rearrange them and glue them together with a few flourishes.”

Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), too, largely bases itself on reports from these agencies. Asked by viewers why a peace march in Ukraine was not reported, the editors said: “To date, we have not received a single report of this march from the independent agencies Reuters, AP and AFP.”

In fact, not only the text, but also the images, sound and video recordings that we encounter in our media every day, are mostly from the very same agencies. What the uninitiated audience might think of as contributions from their local newspaper or TV station, are actually copied reports from New York, London and Paris.

Some media have even gone a step further and have, for lack of resources, outsourced their entire foreign editorial office to an agency. Moreover, it is well known that many news portals on the internet mostly publish agency reports (see e.g., Paterson 2007, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013).

In the end, this dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases – a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with »controlled media« in authoritarian states.

The following graphic shows some examples from German and international publications. As you can see, despite the claimed objectivity, a slight (geo-)political bias sometimes creeps in.

“Putin threatens”, “Iran provokes”, “NATO concerned”, “Assad stronghold”: Similarities in content and wording due to reports by global news agencies.

The role of correspondents

Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries, for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public broadcasters.

First of all, the size ratios should be kept in mind: while the global agencies have several thousand employees worldwide, even the Swiss newspaper NZZ, known for its international reporting, maintains only 35 foreign correspondents (including their business correspondents). In huge countries such as China or India, only one correspondent is stationed; all of South America is covered by only two journalists, while in even larger Africa no-one is on the ground permanently.

Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example, many journalists “reported” from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media.

How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the “news” is in their region of the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they depend on the world agencies in his book “People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East”:

“I’d imagined correspondents to be historians-of-the-moment. When something important happened, they’d go after it, find out what was going on, and report on it. But I didn’t go off to find out what was going on; that had been done long before. I went along to present an on-the-spot report. ()

The editors in the Netherlands called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the press releases, and I’d retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an article for the newspaper. This was the reason my editors found it more important that I could be reached in the place itself than that I knew what was going on. The news agencies provided enough information for you to be able to write or talk you way through any crisis or summit meeting.

That’s why you often come across the same images and stories if you leaf through a few different newspapers or click the news channels.

Our men and women in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington bureaus – all thought that wrong topics were dominating the news and that we were following the standards of the news agencies too slavishly. ()

The common idea about correspondents is that they ‘have the story’, () but the reality is that the news is a conveyor belt in a bread factory. The correspondents stand at the end of the conveyor belt, pretending we’ve baked that white loaf ourselves, while in fact all we’ve done is put it in its wrapping. ()

Afterwards, a friend asked me how I’d managed to answer all the questions during those cross-talks, every hour and without hesitation. When I told him that, like on the TV-news, you knew all the questions in advance, his e-mailed response came packed with expletives. My friend had relalized that, for decades, what he’d been watching and listening to on the news was pure theatre.” (Luyendjik 2009, p. 20-22, 76, 189)

In other words, the typical correspondent is in general not able to do independent research, but rather deals with and reinforces those topics that are already prescribed by the news agencies – the notorious “mainstream effect”.

In addition, for cost-saving reasons many media outlets nowadays have to share their few foreign correspondents, and within individual media groups, foreign reports are often used by several publications – none of which contributes to diversity in reporting.

“What the agency does not report, does not take place”

The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” – a dubious one-man organization based in London –  featured prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this “Observatory”, as its operator was in fact difficult to reach, even for journalists.

Rather, the “Observatory” delivered its stories to global agencies, which then forwarded them to thousands of media outlets, which in turn “informed” hundreds of millions of readers and viewers worldwide. The reason why the agencies, of all places, referred to this strange “Observatory” in their reporting – and who really financed it – is a question that was rarely asked.

The former chief editor of the German news agency DPA, Manfred Steffens, therefore states in his book “The Business of News”:

“A news story does not become more correct simply because one is able to provide a source for it. It is indeed rather questionable to trust a news story more just because a source is cited. () Behind the protective shield such a ’source‘ means for a news story, some people are quite inclined to spread rather adventurous things, even if they themselves have legitimate doubts about their correctness; the responsibility, at least morally, can always be attributed to the cited source.” (Steffens 1969, p. 106)

Dependence on global agencies is also a major reason why media coverage of geopolitical conflicts is often superficial and erratic, while historic relationships and background are fragmented or altogether absent. As put by Steffens:

“News agencies receive their impulses almost exclusively from current events and are therefore by their very nature ahistoric. They are reluctant to add any more context than is strictly required.” (Steffens 1969, p. 32)

Finally, the dominance of global agencies explains why certain geopolitical issues and events – which often do not fit very well into the US/NATO narrative or are too “unimportant” – are not mentioned in our media at all: if the agencies do not report on something, then most Western media will not be aware of it. As pointed out on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German DPA: “What the agency does not report, does not take place.” (Wilke 2000, p. 1)

“Adding questionable stories“

While some topics do not appear at all in our media, other topics are very prominent – even though they shouldn’t actually be: “Often the mass media do not report on reality, but on a constructed or staged reality. () Several studies have shown that the mass media are predominantly determined by PR activities and that passive, receptive attitudes outweigh active-researching ones.” (Blum 1995, p. 16)

In fact, due to the rather low journalistic performance of our media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience. DPA editor Steffens warned of this danger:

“The critical sense gets more lulled the more respected the news agency or newspaper is. Someone who wants to introduce a questionable story into the world press only needs to try to put his story in a reasonably reputable agency, to be sure that it then appears a little later in the others. Sometimes it happens that a hoax passes from agency to agency and becomes ever more credible.” (Steffens 1969, p. 234)

Among the most active actors in “injecting” questionable geopolitical news are the military and defense ministries. For example, in 2009, the head of the American news agency AP, Tom Curley, made public that the Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists who, with a budget of nearly $ 5 billion a year, are working the media and circulating targeted manipulations. In addition, high-ranking US generals had threatened that they would “ruin” the AP and him if the journalists reported too critically on the US military.

Despite – or because of? – such threats our media regularly publish dubious stories sourced to some unnamed  “informants” from “US defense circles”.

Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played by the media:

“With the help of the media, the military determine the public perception and use it for their plans. They manage to stir expectations and spread scenarios and deceptions. In this new kind of war, the PR strategists of the US administration fulfill a similar function as the bomber pilots. The special departments for public relations in the Pentagon and in the secret services have become combatants in the information war. () The US military specifically uses the lack of transparency in media coverage for their deception maneuvers. The way they spread information, which is then picked up and distributed by newspapers and broadcasters, makes it impossible for readers, listeners or viewers to trace the original source. Thus, the audience will fail to recognize the actual intention of the military.” (Tilgner 2003, p. 132)

What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a remarkable  report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:

Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Stockwell said of his work in the Angolan war,

“The basic theme was to make it look like an [enemy] aggression in Angola. So any kind of story that you could write and get into the media anywhere in the world, that pushed that line, we did. One third of my staff in this task force were covert action, were propagandists, whose professional career job was to make up stories and finding ways of getting them into the press. () The editors in most Western newspapers are not too skeptical of messages that conform to general views and prejudices. () So we came up with another story, and it was kept going for weeks. () [But] it was all fiction.”

Fred Bridgland looked back on his work as a war correspondent for the Reuters agency: “We based our reports on official communications. It was not until years later that I learned a little CIA disinformation expert had sat in the US embassy, in Lusaka and composed that communiqué, and it bore no relation at all to truth. () Basically, and to put it very crudely, you can publish any old crap and it will get newspaper room.”

And former CIA analyst David MacMichael described his work in the Contra War in Nicaragua with these words:

“They said our intelligence of Nicaragua was so good that we could even register when someone flushed a toilet. But I had the feeling that the stories we were giving to the press came straight out of the toilet.” (Hird 1985)

Of course, the intelligence services also have a large number of direct contacts in our media, which can be “leaked” information to if necessary. But without the central role of the global news agencies, the worldwide synchronization of propaganda and disinformation would never be so efficient.

Through this “propaganda multiplier”, dubious stories from PR experts working for governments, military and intelligence services reach the general public more or less unchecked and unfiltered. The journalists refer to the news agencies and the news agencies refer to their sources. Although they often attempt to point out uncertainties with terms such as “apparent”, “alleged” and the like – by then the rumor has long been spread to the world and its effect taken place.

The Propaganda Multiplier: Governments, military and intelligence services using global news agencies to disseminate their messages to a worldwide audience.

As the New York Times reported …

In addition to global news agencies, there is another source that is often used by media outlets around the world to report on geopolitical conflicts, namely the major publications in Great Britain and the US.

For example, news outlets like the New York Times or BBC have up to 100 foreign correspondents and other external employees. However, Middle East correspondent Luyendijk points out:

“Dutch news teams, me included, fed on the selection of news made by quality media like CNN,the BBC, and the New York Times. We did that on the assumption that their correspondents understood the Arab world and commanded a view of it – but many of them turned out not to speak Arabic, or at least not enough to be able to have a conversation in it or to follow the local media. Many of the top dogs at CNN, the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the NYT were more often than not dependent on assistants and translators.” (Luyendijk p. 47)

In addition, the sources of these media outlets are often not easy to verify (“military circles”, “anonymous government officials”, “intelligence officials” and the like) and can therefore also be used for the dissemination of propaganda. In any case, the widespread orientation towards the Anglo-Saxon publications leads to a further convergence in the geopolitical coverage in our media.

The following figure shows some examples of such citation based on the Syria coverage of the largest daily newspaper in Switzerland, Tages-Anzeiger. The articles are all from the first days of October 2015, when Russia for the first time intervened directly in the Syrian war (US/UK sources are highlighted):

Frequent citation of British and US media, exemplified by the Syria war coverage of Swiss daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in October 2015.

The desired narrative

But why do journalists in our media not simply try to research and report independently of the global agencies and the Anglo-Saxon media? Middle East correspondent Luyendijk describes his experiences:

“You might suggest that I should have looked for sources I could trust. I did try, but whenever I wanted to write a story without using news agencies, the main Anglo-Saxon media, or talking heads, it fell apart. () Obviously I, as a correspondent, could tell very different stories about one and the same situation. But the media could only present one of them, and often enough, that was exactly the story that confirmed the prevailing image.” (Luyendijk p.54ff)

Media researcher Noam Chomsky has described this effect in his essay “What makes the mainstream media mainstream” as follows: “If you leave the official line, if you produce dissenting reports, then you will soon feel this. () There are many ways to get you back in line quickly. If you don’t follow the guidelines, you will not keep your job long. This system works pretty well, and it reflects established power structures.” (Chomsky 1997)

Nevertheless, some of the leading journalists continue to believe that nobody can tell them what to write. How does this add up? Media researcher Chomsky clarifies the apparent contradiction:

“[T]he point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. () They have been through the socialization system.” (Chomsky 1997)

Ultimately, this “socialization process” leads to a journalism that generally no longer independently researches and critically reports on geopolitical conflicts (and some other topics), but seeks to consolidate the desired narrative through appropriate editorials, commentary, and interviewees.

Conclusion: The “First Law of Journalism”

Former AP journalist Herbert Altschull called it the First Law of Journalism:

“In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power.” (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298)

In that sense, it is logical that our traditional media – which are predominantly financed by advertising or the state – represent the geopolitical interests of the transatlantic alliance, given that both the advertising corporations as well as the states themselves are dependent on the US dominated transatlantic economic and security architecture.

In addition, our leading media and their key people are – in the spirit of Chomsky’s “socialization” –  often themselves part of the networks of the transatlantic elite. Some of the most important institutions in this regard include the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission (see in-depth study of these networks).

Indeed, most well-known publications basically may be seen as “establishment media”. This is because, in the past, the freedom of the press was rather theoretical, given significant entry barriers such as broadcasting licenses, frequency slots, requirements for financing and technical infrastructure, limited sales channels, dependence on advertising, and other restrictions.

It was only due to the Internet that Altschull’s First Law has been broken to some extent. Thus, in recent years a high-quality, reader-funded journalism has emerged, often outperforming traditional media in terms of critical reporting. Some of these “alternative” publications already reach a very large audience, showing that the „mass“ does not have to be a problem for the quality of a media outlet.

Nevertheless, up to now the traditional media has been able to attract a solid majority of online visitors, too. This, in turn, is closely linked to the hidden role of news agencies, whose up-to-the-minute reports form the backbone of most news portals.

Will “political and economic power”, according to Altschull’s Law, retain control over the news, or will “uncontrolled” news change the political and economic power structure? The coming years will show.

Case study: Syria war coverage

As part of a case study, the Syria war coverage of nine leading daily newspapers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland were examined for plurality of viewpoints and reliance on news agencies. The following newspapers were selected:

• For Germany: Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
• For Switzerland: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Tagesanzeiger (TA), and Basler Zeitung (BaZ)
• For Austria: Standard, Kurier, and Die Presse

The investigation period was defined as October 1 to 15, 2015, i.e. the first two weeks after Russia’s direct intervention in the Syrian conflict. The entire print and online coverage of these newspapers was taken into account. Any Sunday editions were not taken into account, as not all of the newspapers examined have such. In total, 381 newspaper articles met the stated criteria.

In a first step, the articles were classified according to their properties into the following groups:

1. Agencies: Reports from news agencies (with agency code)
2. Mixed: Simple reports (with author names) that are based in whole or in part on agency reports
3. Reports: Editorial background reports and analyzes
4. Opinions/Comments: Opinions and guest comments
5. Interviews: interviews with experts, politicians etc.
6. Investigative: Investigative research that reveals new information or context

The following Figure 1 shows the composition of the articles for the nine newspapers analyzed in total. As can be seen, 55% of articles were news agency reports; 23% editorial reports based on agency material; 9% background reports; 10% opinions and guest comments; 2% interviews; and 0% based on investigative research.

Figure 1: Types of articles (total; n=381)

The pure agency texts – from short notices to the detailed reports – were mostly on the Internet pages of the daily newspapers: on the one hand, the pressure for breaking news is higher than in the printed edition, on the other hand, there are no space restrictions. Most other types of articles were found in both the online and printed editions; some exclusive interviews and background reports were found only in the printed editions. All items were collected only once for the investigation.

The following Figure 2 shows the same classification on a per newspaper basis. During the observation period (two weeks), most newspapers published between 40 and 50 articles on the Syrian conflict (print and online). In the German newspaper Die Welt there were more (58), in the Basler Zeitung and the Austrian Kurier, however, significantly less (29 or 33).

Depending on which newspaper, the share of agency reports is almost 50% (Welt, Süddeutsche, NZZ, Basler Zeitung), just under 60% (FAZ, Tagesanzeiger), and 60 to 70% (Presse, Standard, Kurier). Together with the agency-based reports, the proportion in most newspapers is between approx. 70% and 80%. These proportions are consistent with previous media studies (e.g., Blum 1995, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013, Paterson 2007).

In the background reports, the Swiss newspapers were leading (five to six pieces), followed by Welt, Süddeutsche and Standard (four each) and the other newspapers (one to three). The background reports and analyzes were in particular devoted to the situation and development in the Middle East, as well as to the motives and interests of individual actors (for example Russia, Turkey, the Islamic State).

However, most of the commentaries were to be found in the German newspapers (seven comments each), followed by Standard (five), NZZ and Tagesanzeiger (four each). Basler Zeitung did not publish any commentaries during the observation period, but two interviews. Other interviews were conducted by Standard (three) and Kurier and Presse (one each). Investigative research, however, could not be found in any of the newspapers.

In particular, in the case of the three German newspapers, a journalistically problematic blending of opinion pieces and reports was noted. Reports contained strong expressions of opinion even though they were not marked as commentary. The present study was in any case based on the article labeling by the newspaper.

Figure 2: Types of articles per newspaper

The following Figure 3 shows the breakdown of agency stories (by agency abbreviation) for each news agency, in total and per country. The 211 agency reports carried a total of 277 agency codes (a story may consist of material from more than one agency). In total, 24% of agency reports came from the AFP; about 20% each by the DPA, APA and Reuters; 9% of the SDA; 6% of the AP; and 11% were unknown (no labeling or blanket term “agencies”).

In Germany, the DPA, AFP and Reuters each have a share of about one third of the news stories. In Switzerland, the SDA and the AFP are in the lead, and in Austria, the APA and Reuters.

In fact, the shares of the global agencies AFP, AP and Reuters are likely to be even higher, as the Swiss SDA and the Austrian APA obtain their international reports mainly from the global agencies and the German DPA cooperates closely with the American AP.

It should also be noted that, for historical reasons, the global agencies are represented differently in different regions of the world. For events in Asia, Ukraine or Africa, the share of each agency will therefore be different than from events in the Middle East.

Figure 3: Share of news agencies, total (n=277) and per country

In the next step, central statements were used to rate the orientation of editorial opinions (28), guest comments (10) and interview partners (7) (a total of 45 articles). As Figure 4 shows, 82% of the contributions were generally US/NATO friendly, 16% neutral or balanced, and 2% predominantly US/NATO critical.

The only predominantly US/NATO-critical contribution was an op-ed in the Austrian Standard on October 2, 2015, titled: “The strategy of regime change has failed. A distinction between ‚good‘ and ‚bad‘ terrorist groups in Syria makes the Western policy untrustworthy.”

Figure 4: Orientation of editorial opinions, guest comments, and interviewees (total; n=45).

The following Figure 5  shows the orientation of the contributions, guest comments and interviewees, in turn broken down by individual newspapers. As can be seen, Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ, Zürcher Tagesanzeiger and the Austrian newspaper Kurier presented exclusively US/NATO-friendly opinion and guest contributions; this goes for FAZ too, with the exception of one neutral/balanced contribution. The Standard brought four US/NATO friendly, three balanced/neutral, as well as the already mentioned US/NATO critical opinion contributions.

Presse was the only one of the examined newspapers to predominantly publish neutral/balanced opinions and guest contributions. The Basler Zeitung published one US/NATO-friendly and one balanced contribution. Shortly after the observation period (October 16, 2015), Basler Zeitung also published an interview with the President of the Russian Parliament. This would of course have been counted as a contribution critical of the US/NATO.

Figure 5: Basic orientation of opinion pieces and interviewees per newspaper

In a further analysis, a full-text keyword search for “propaganda” (and word combinations thereof) was used to investigate in which cases the newspapers themselves identified propaganda in one of the two geopolitical conflict sides, USA/NATO or Russia (the participant “IS/ISIS” was not considered). In total, twenty such cases were identified. Figure 6 shows the result: in 85% of the cases, propaganda was identified on the Russian side of the conflict, in 15% the identification was neutral or unstated, and in 0% of the cases propaganda was identified on the USA/NATO side of the conflict.

It should be noted that about half of the cases (nine) were in the Swiss NZZ, which spoke of Russian propaganda quite frequently (“Kremlin propaganda”, “Moscow propaganda machine”, “propaganda stories”, “Russian propaganda apparatus” etc.), followed by German FAZ (three), Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung (two each) and the Austrian newspaper Kurier (one). The other newspapers did not mention propaganda, or only in a neutral context (or in the context of IS).

Figure 6: Attribution of propaganda to conflict parties (total; n=20).

Conclusion

In this case study, the geopolitical coverage in nine leading daily newspapers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland was examined for diversity and journalistic performance using the example of the Syrian war.

The results confirm the high dependence on the global news agencies (63 to 90%, excluding commentaries and interviews) and the lack of own investigative research, as well as the rather biased commenting on events in favor of the US/NATO side (82% positive; 2% negative), whose stories were not checked by the newspapers for any propaganda.

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English translation provided by Terje Maloy.

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Featured image is from UK Column

U.S. President Donald Trump has come up with what he calls the “Deal of the Century,” the sole purpose of which is to finally remove Palestine from the world stage and put an end to the existence of the state.

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U.S. President Donald Trump has come up with what he calls the “Deal of the Century,” the sole purpose of which is to finally remove Palestine from the world stage and put an end to the existence of the state.

With great fanfare, the tycoon-come-president, using several of his advisors, intends to deceive the world with a formula to fully favor Israel and deny territory and freedom for the Arab population.

According to a document leaked in Tel Aviv, the deal would be a “tripartite agreement” signed between Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Hamas to establish a so-called “New Palestine” in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but this would exclude Israel’s illegally built settlements, which will remain in the hands of the Zionist government.

Jerusalem would remain under Israeli control, and the Arab population that lives there would be citizens of the New Palestine. The deal represents a coup de grâce to the Palestinian right to East Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine, recognized by the UN and other international bodies.

According to the leak, “New Palestine” would not have an army, just a police force. A protection treaty would be signed with Israel, with Palestine having to pay for its services to defend it from any external attack. Hamas would hand all its weapons, including personal weapons, to Egyptian authorities.

I do not think it necessary to write any more on the matter to know that this so-called “Deal of the Century,” conceived by Trump, is doomed to failure.

In recent days, the Israeli army has killed more than a dozen Palestinians in Gaza, in an attack that the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has described as a “prelude” to the Deal of the Century.

The PNA also stated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to further Israeli and U.S. interests by consolidating the division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sputnik cites Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who notes that any deal to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a road to nowhere if the principle of two States, one Arab-Palestinian and one Jewish, is ignored.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said that those who believe that PLO will be pressured by the United States are mistaken.

“We say no and 1,000 no’s to any initiative that does not meet the minimum demands of the Palestinian people,” he stressed.

And since everything that comes from Trump ultimately carries with it a threat, this time Washington has warned that if the PLO and Hamas reject the agreement, the United States will cancel all its financial support to the Palestinians.

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Featured image is from Voice of the Cape

Last year, TruePublica published an article about how the British government were now going ‘full Orwellian‘ in their attempt to build a national biometric database. The opening line to the article was – “We said that the government would eventually take the biometric data of every single citizen living in Britain and use it for nefarious reasons.  DNA, fingerprint, face, and even voice data will be included. But that’s not all.” 

And so it came to pass. The government has indeed been building a biometric database – the equivalent of a digital ID card for every UK citizen and it is illegal. But the legality of the creation of a centralised biometric database will not stop a government who have been repeatedly caught breaking the law when it comes to privacy and data collection.

Police, immigration, and passport agencies already collect DNA, face, and fingerprint data. On the latter, police forces across Britain now have fingerprint scanners on the streets of Britain with officers providing no more than a promise that fingerprint data taken will be erased if the person stopped is innocent of any crime.

The government’s face database already has 12.5 million people – or so it has admitted to. The Home Office, embroiled in all sorts of privacy and surveillance legal cases caused a scandal last April when an official said it would simply be too expensive to remove innocent people from its criminal face databases of mugshots.

A health database is being added along with other data collected by one of the 23 official government department’s involved – and that even includes the creation of a voiceprint database.

In June 2018, TruePublica published a Big Brother Watch investigation, which revealed that HM Revenue and Customs had accumulated a little-known database of 5.1 million taxpayers’ voiceprints from callers to the helplines without their consent. The Government scheme not only broke taxpayers’ trust, but it also breached their data protection and privacy rights. HMRC was building a biometric ID database by the backdoor – the largest state-held voice database in the world.

Big Brother Watch handed their findings to the Information Commissioner and formally requested that the ICO conduct an investigation. An investigation subsequently began.

In January 2019, BBW conducted a six-month review using Freedom of Information requests. They found that HMRC had updated their system so that callers who had previously been railroaded into the ID scheme were offered the option to delete their voiceprint. We also found that the shady scheme had suffered a huge backlash and, within months, 160,000 people had utilised the option to delete their voice record from the Government database.

BBW cautioned that this change was not enough. Their director, Silkie Carlo, said:

“Now it is down to the ICO to take robust action and show that the Government isn’t above the law. HMRC took millions of Voice IDs without taxpayers’ legal consent – the only satisfactory outcome is for those millions of Voice IDs to be deleted.”

Following the investigation and BBW’s report to the Information Commissioner’s Office, HMRC has now been told by the ICO to delete 5 million of these records which were obtained unlawfully, without people’s consent.

The announcement marks one of the most robust enforcement actions the ICO has taken against a Government department. It is the biggest ever deletion of biometric data from a state-held database in the UK.

Director of Big Brother Watch Silkie Carlo, said:

“This is a massive success for Big Brother Watch, restoring data rights for millions of ordinary people around the country. To our knowledge, this is the biggest ever deletion of biometric IDs from a state-held database.

This sets a vital precedent for biometrics collection and the database state, showing that campaigners and the ICO have real teeth and no Government department is above the law.”

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Featured image is from TP

Self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaido has ordered the setting up of a meeting with the US Armed Forces to discuss “cooperation” in his efforts to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

During a gathering of supporters in the upper middle class Caracas district of Las Mercedes on Saturday, Guaido informed that he was instructing his representative in the United States, Carlos Vecchio, to establish a “direct relationship” with the US Southern Command (SouthCom), which plans, oversees, and controls all US overt and covert military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The initiative by Guaido stokes increasing fears that he looks to oust Maduro using a foreign-led intervention. Italian newspaper La Stampa published an interview with Guaido Friday, in which the opposition leader explained that “If the North Americans proposed a military intervention, I would probably accept it.”

In a letter to US SouthCom chief Admiral Craig Faller Monday, Vecchio requested a meeting to discuss “strategic and operational” cooperation, alongside concerns over what he describes as “the [existing] presence of un-invited foreign forces” in Venezuela. No evidence for this claim was provided by Vecchio.

#Venezuela: following instructions of Interim President @jguaido, we officially requested the @Southcom a meeting with a technical delegation to advance in strategic and operational planning with the priority goal of stopping our people's suffering and restoring democracy. pic.twitter.com/x3ckEn39cM

— CARLOS VECCHIO (@carlosvecchio) May 13, 2019

Venezuelan authorities were quick to respond to the opposition’s move, with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez qualifying it as “repulsive” and “doomed to fail.” Recent polls suggest that over 86 percent of Venezuelans oppose a foreign-led military incursion into the country.

While SouthCom are yet to confirm if they will meet Guaido’s team, Faller had earlier tweeted that he looked forward to discussing how to “restore [the] constitutional order” in Venezuela and that his forces stood “ready.”

When invited by @jguaido & the legitimate gov't of #Venezuela, I look forward to discussing how we can support the future role of those @ArmadaFANB leaders who make the right decision, put the Venezuela people first & restore constitutional order. We stand ready! #EstamosUnidosVE pic.twitter.com/F6ib7mfO47

— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) May 9, 2019

Guaido and US officials have repeatedly stated that all options, including a military intervention, are “on the table.” However, other countries that have voiced support for Guaido have publicly rejected the possibility of intervention, including Chile, Peru, Colombia, Spain and Canada.

The overtures to the US SouthCom come on the heels of a failed military putsch on April 30 and numerous unheeded calls by Guaido for the Venezuelan armed forces to support him.

After swearing himself in as “interim president” on January 23, the National Assembly president received the backing of roughly 25 percent of the world’s governments. His unsuccessful efforts to remove the Maduro government, which included a humanitarian aid “showdown” on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, have seen his support dwindle in numbers.

More sanctions from Washington

Guaido’s call for cooperation with the US military came as Washington unveiled a new set of sanctions against Venezuela on Friday.

The latest measures added two private oil shipping firms, Monsoon Navigation Corporation and Serenity Maritime Limited based in the Marshall Islands and Liberia respectively, to the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blacklist. Two Panamanian oil tankers associated with these firms, the Leon Dias Chemical and Ocean Elegance, were also named.

According to the Treasury Department, the firms and tankers have delivered crude oil from Venezuela to Cuba since late 2018. Venezuela delivers around 50,000 barrels per day of crude to Cuba as part of wide ranging cooperation agreements which include the presence of roughly 20,000 Cuban medical and agricultural technicians in Venezuela.

The sanctions follow similar measures announced in April, while the Venezuelan economy has recently seen restrictions imposed on its banking and mining sectors, as well as a de facto oil embargo.

Similarly, Guaido also called on those European countries which recognise him as the “legitimate” president to “amplify” economic sanctions against Caracas this weekend, as well as urging assistance in international courts to oust Maduro.

Sanctions have repeatedly been declared illegal by independent multilateral agencies. Recent comments from the UN Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy argued that the sanctions also violate human rights, while an April report from the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) indicated that US economic sanctions have directly caused over 40,000 deaths in Venezuela since 2017.

Apart from calling for more sanctions, Guaido also urged European governments to grant “maximum legitimacy” to his appointed representatives. European governments largely continue to have complete or partial diplomatic relations with the ambassadors named by the Maduro administration.

Efforts by Guaido’s representative in the US, Carlos Vecchio, to take over the vacated embassy building in Washington also continue to be frustrated by a group of US solidarity movements who have been occupying the building, with the permission of the Venezuelan government, since April 12.

US coast guard vessel penetrates Venezuelan waters

Amidst discussions of military “cooperation,” tensions remained high following the incursion of an armed US Coast Guard patrol vessel into Venezuelan waters on Thursday.

Action was taken by the Venezuelan Navy and Air Force when the USCG James approached a distance of 13 nautical miles (15 miles) off Venezuela’s northern coast. The vessel changed course away from Venezuela’s coastline following a radio request to do so.

According to US Southern Command spokesperson Colonel Amanda Azubuike, the vessel was carrying out “a mission to intercept drugs.”

“I don’t know if other Republics would accept actions like these in their maritime jurisdiction, but we won’t,” Venezuelan Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez stated Saturday, describing the incident as a “provocation.”

US Coast Guard James 754 (@rocaLaMolesta / Twitter)

“All operations of law enforcement in this place where the US vessel was correspond to Venezuela by international law. This was an armed coast guard patrolling these waters,” he went on to state.

The USCG James was detected in the so-called contiguous zone of Venezuelan waters which covers 12-24 miles from the coastline. In this maritime band and according to international law, the free passage of foreign ships is allowed, but Caracas has full sovereignty in political, migratory, border, sanitary, and fiscal matters, including law enforcement and “intercepting drugs.”

According to the US Navy website, the USCG James (WMSL 754) is one of the most advanced patrol vessels in its fleet, carrying modern surveillance and reconnaissance equipment, as well as being able to serve as a command post for “complex law enforcement and national security missions involving the Coast Guard and numerous partner agencies.”

The border incursion comes as Caracas reopened its borders with Brazil and the Dutch island of Aruba on Friday, in efforts to boost border trade. The borders had been closed for over three months since Guaido’s failed attempt to force humanitarian “aid” into the country on February 23.

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Featured image: Opposition leader Juan Guaido has requested “cooperation” from the US Southern Command. (US Navy Flickr)

Would it surprise you to learn that Canada’s minister of defence is an arms pusher?

Last Friday members of Mouvement Québécois pour la Paix interrupted a $135-a-plate luncheon to confront defence minister Harjit Sajjan. At an event sponsored by SNC Lavalin, Bombardier, Rio Tinto, etc., we called for cutting military spending, for Canada to withdraw from NATO and an end to weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

While Sajjan’s responsibility for NATO and military spending are straightforward, his role in fueling the Saudi led war in Yemen is less obvious. But, the Department of National Defence (DND) plays a substantial role in Canadian arms exports to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

As he did the last three years, Sajjan is set to speak at the CANSEC arms bazar in Ottawa later this month. For more than two decades the annual Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI) conference has brought together representatives of arms companies, DND, Canadian Forces (CF), various other arms of the federal government and dozens of foreign governments. In 2018 more than 11,000 people attended the two-day conference, including 16 MPs and senators and many generals and admirals.

The corporation supplying Saudi Arabia with more than $10 billion in Light Armoured Vehicles produces the same LAVs for the CF. In a 2012 Canadian Military History article Frank Maas writes, “the CF has continued to purchase LAVs because they have been successful in the field, and they support a domestic producer, General Dynamics Land Systems Canada (GDLS-C), that cooperates closely with the military.” GDLS’ London, Ontario, operations exist largely because of interventionist military industrial policy. A 2013 Federal government report on “Leveraging Defence Procurement Through Key Industrial Capabilities” lists GDLS as one of three “Canadian Defence Industry Success Stories.”

Beyond contracts, subsidies and various other forms of support to Canadian weapons makers, DND has long promoted arms exports. Its website highlights different forms of support to arms exporters. “Learn how the Department of National Defence can assist in connecting Canadian industry to foreign markets”, explains one section. Another notes: “Learn how the Department of National Defence keeps Canadian companies informed of business opportunities at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).”

Based in 30 diplomatic posts around the world (with cross-accreditation to many neighbouring countries), Canadian Defence Attachés promote military exports. According to DND’s website, Defence Attachés assist “Canadian defencemanufacturers in understanding and accessing foreign defence markets … facilitate Canadian industry access to relevant officials within the Ministries of Defence of accredited countries … support Canadian industry at key defence industry events in accredited countries … raise awareness in accredited countries of Canadian defence industrial capabilities … provide reports on accredited country defence budget information, items of interest, and trade issues to Canadian industry.”

Representatives of DND often talk up Canadian military equipment as part of delegations to international arms fairs such as the UK’s Defence Security and Equipment International exhibition. According to a FrontLine Defence story titled “Representing Canada in the UAE IDEX”, representatives of DND helped 50 Canadian arms companies flog their wares at the Abu Dhabi-based International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) in February. To help the companies move their wares at the largest arms fair in the Middle East, Commander of the Bahrain-based Combined Task Force 150, Commodore Darren Garnier, led a Canadian military delegation to IDEX.

International ports visits by naval frigates are sometimes designed to spur arms sales. Lieutenant Bruce Fenton writes, “Canadian warships can serve as venues for trade initiatives, as examples of Canadian technology, and as visible symbols of Canadian interest in a country or region. In countries where relationships are built over time, as is the case with many Asian and Middle Eastern countries, a visit by a Canadian warship can be an important part of a dialogue that can lead to commercial opportunities for Canadian industry.”

To get a sense of the interaction between the various components of the military industrial complex, the FrontLine Defence story detailing Canada’s participation in IDEX was written by Brett Boudreau. His byline notes that he “is a retiredCAF Colonel, a Fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and former Director of Marketing and Communications at CADSI.” Boudreau’s trajectory — from the CF, to arms industry spokesperson, to militarist think tank, to writing for a militarist publication — is a stark example of one individual moving through the various components of the military industrial complex. But Boudreau is not unique. It is common for retired CF and DND officials to take up arms industry posts, including senior positions. It wouldn’t be surprising if Sajjan ended up on the board of an arms company after he leaves politics.

Harjit Sajjan heads a ministry intimately tied to a globally oriented corporate weapons industry that profits from war. Is this something Canadians understand and support? Or would the majority of us be upset to learn their Minister of Defence is an arms pusher, promoting sales to anti-democratic, repressive regimes?

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Featured image: Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan (Source: Yves Engler)

The Australian political economist and author Professor, Tim Anderson, has emphasized that the Zionist entity is afraid of the unrelenting Palestinian resistance, of Syria’s looming victory and of an enhanced Axis of Resistance facing the occupied parts of Lebanon and Syria.

“Tel Aviv has looked to Trump for reassurance, but the US leader’s gestures over Jerusalem and the occupied Golan have no force in international law,” the professor told the Syria Times e-newspaper

He went on to say:

“Given that Washington (whether under Bush, Obama or Trump) has done nothing to restrain the extended colonization and attempted ethnic cleansing on the West Bank, it is hard to imagine that The Kushner Plan (given a name which sounds like a TV game show) could do much more than throw some money around; all the more humiliating that this seems likely to be Arab (Saudi) money and perhaps a little Arab (Egyptian) land.”

The professor believes that all the recent statements from the Trump regime (on Jerusalem, on the occupied Syrian Golan and on some new yet-to-be-explained promises over Palestine) run in parallel to the violent expeditions by the Netanyahu regime.

Asked about the purpose of the Zionist entity’s recent intensive strikes on Gaza strip in the occupied Palestine, prof. Anderson said:

“The Zionists seem to believe, as do most fascist regimes, that an extremely vicious response to what they regard as the slightest provocation will act to terrorize the population and so repress all forms of resistance. While there are constant acts of resistance within occupied Palestine, the series of Israeli massacres in Gaza have demonstrated extreme and disproportional brutality. “

“Ruthless Reprisal”

He underlined that civilian casualties amongst Palestinians are, by all accounts, the great majority of Israel’s victims.
“The United Nations reported that “at least” 1,483 (67%) of the 2,205 Palestinians killed in Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza were civilians, while only 4 (6%) of the 71 Israelis killed were civilians. (See this). So, contrary to much of the western media hype, the Palestinian resistance uses far more targeted violence compared to that of the Zionist forces. Notice though that the Zionist kill ratio in 2014 was more than 30 to one,” the professor clarified.

He referred to the fact that the Netanyahu regime since then has enhanced its policy of ruthless reprisal.
“In March the Zionist intelligence site Debka reported (see this) that “a new IDF policy had gone into force for hitting back at all manifestations of Palestinian terror”. This has resulted in immediate attacks “even though there were no Israeli casualties”. The same site noted multiple small acts of resistance, and that “thousands of convicted terrorists in Israeli jails [were] restive over cutbacks in their privileges”.

Prof. Anderson added that the increase in Palestinian resistance’s military capacity, with Gaza rockets reaching Tel Aviv for the first time, in March 2019, might help explain the relatively short punitive assault on Gaza in May.

“The Israeli regime has been notoriously insensitive to the killing of Palestinians, but remains highly sensitive to casualties on its own side,” he affirmed, explaining why the UN had not held an emergency meeting to discuss the Israeli aggression on Gaza.

“As everyone knows, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have launched multiple wars against the peoples of the region, precisely to divide the resistance to Zionism and imperialism, seeking to embed a controlling role for the Zionist colony in Palestine. Fortunately, in recent years, Russia and to a lesser extent China, have begun to exert a counter-veiling force. However this simply renders the Security Council ineffective. Elsewhere in the UN there are some useful initiatives, for example the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures. This is, of course, mainly aimed at US economic aggression. Such initiatives can help mobilise peoples against the economic and propaganda arms of today’s hybrid wars.”

The multiple 21st century wars

Moreover, the professor doubts that Washington is stupid enough to go to war with Iran, despite the threats.

“Declaring economic war on half the world will not help, in the medium term. The ‘Americans’ have not failed to notice that their game plan in Syria has failed badly; they just have great trouble admitting it,” he said, pointing out that both Tel Aviv and Washington fear the rising influence of the largest independent state in the region, and they fear Iran’s deeper integration with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.

“Their great fear is what they call an ‘Iranian land bridge’ from Tehran to Beirut. Of course, such economic, transport, communicational and cultural integration would be of enormous benefit to the peoples of the region, helping lift them out of an under-development enforced by fragmentation and neocolonial division. But this is the last thing Tel Aviv and Washington want,” Prof. Anderson asserted.

He concluded by saying:

“The wars against Iraq and Syria must be defeated and consolidated by a united front across the region. That would be the definitive answer to the multiple 21st century wars launched by Washington against the peoples of the region. Internal cohesion of the resistance within Palestine is also essential.  Only then can sufficient pressure be brought to bear on the Zionist entity to democratize what has become an apartheid state.”

It is worth mentioning that Dr. Tim Anderson is Director of the Center for Counter Hegemonic Studies in Sydney. He worked and taught at several Australian Universities for more than 30 years.

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Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His latest books  are Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2015), and The Dirty War on Syria, Global Research, Montreal, 2016. (see below).

The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.

The popular myths of this dirty war – that it is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or a sectarian conflict – hide a murderous spree of ‘regime change’ across the region. The attack on Syria was a necessary consequence of Washington’s ambition, stated openly in 2006, to create a ‘New Middle East’. After the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Syria was next in line.

The Dirty War on Syria

by Professor Tim Anderson

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-8-4

Year: 2016

Pages: 240

Author: Tim Anderson

List Price: $23.95

Special Price: $15.00

click to purchase, directly from Global Research Publishers

The Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations (CDAC) opens in Beijing on Wednesday and will be graced by a keynote speech from President Xi about the importance of civilizational harmony. China envisages a community of shared destiny where the world’s diverse civilizations are connected through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of this global series of infrastructure investments and is correspondingly slated to play a crucial role in China’s inter-civilizational development.

Pakistan sits at the nexus of Chinese, Russian, Persian, Turkish, Arab, Central Asian, South Asian and Southeast Asian civilizations and is therefore perfectly positioned to serve as their point of convergence through the CPEC, seeing as how each of them will likely participate in conducting business with China through this overland corridor and therefore interacting with one another.

Pakistan is already a very diverse country as it is but it retains its national unity through the concept of Pakistaniat, or “Pakistan-ness,” which preaches harmony between its many different people so that the country as a whole becomes stronger through its individual parts. This principle is applicable to China’s BRI vision as well and perfectly complements the message that Beijing is promoting through the CDAC.

Globalization is inevitable in the economic sense and there’s no going back to the previous paradigm where countries could isolate themselves from global processes. This inevitably has socio-cultural and political consequences because the governments of many homogeneous countries oftentimes receive different degrees of pushback from some of their citizens whenever foreign influences enter their country through the aforesaid economic globalization process. Even some historically heterogeneous countries also feel challenged by this foreign influx.

The first international freight train between Lanzhou and Islamabad opened on October 23, 2018. /VCG Photo

Regrettably, radicalized fringe forces sometimes exploit society’s fears in an attempt to justify acts of violence against the people that they associate with these foreign influences, which sometimes even results in terrorist attacks. This is very dangerous not only in the obvious humanitarian sense, but also in the geostrategic one since hostile third-party actors could weaponize this process through their intelligence services in order to destabilize some of China’s partners through the Hybrid War on the BRI.

That’s why it’s so important for people all across the world to receive education about the benefits of inter-civilizational partnerships and the fruits that these mutually beneficial interactions can bring in order to proactively combat the information warfare narrative about a supposedly impending “Clash of Civilizations.”

Samuel Huntington is credited with popularizing that paradigm in his seminal work of the same name, which nowadays serves as the blueprint for dividing and ruling the Eastern Hemisphere in the 21st century. Asia’s many diverse civilizations must therefore resist the concerted efforts presently underway to pull them apart and pit them against one another, which is why the forthcoming CDAC is so important and the reason why the CPEC must be upheld as the Convergence of Civilizations.

The Press Center of the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations on May 12, 2019. /VCG Photo

There’s no better proof that civilizations can co-exist in harmony and engage in win-win exchanges than the example of Pakistan and its role in the BRI. In fact, not only can Pakistan serve as the convergence point of Asia’s many civilizations, but its branch corridors (CPEC+) could even extend to Africa and Europe, thereby connecting the entire Eastern Hemisphere and powerfully counteracting the so-called “Clash of Civilizations.”

It’s important that the rest of the world is made aware of these inter-civilizational plans and the integrative role that the BRI is playing in bringing them about, especially through the CPEC, which is exactly what the CDAC aims to achieve.

The concept of Pakistaniat is pivotal to showing the world’s people that diversity is strength and that cosmopolitan societies can retain their unique sense of national identity even while being at the forefront of economic globalization processes, which contradicts the fear-mongering narratives being spread by some radicalized fringe forces that could be exploited by hostile third-party actors for waging the Hybrid War on the BRI.

Altogether, it’s clear to see that China’s many development visions are finally coming together through the BRI, CPEC and CDAC in creating the community with a shared future for humankind after the Convergence of Civilizations is complete.

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This article was originally published on CGTN.

Featured image is from CGTN

Despite almost two decades of criticizing the Bush-era missile defense shield plans for threatening to disrupt the sensitive strategic balance between the US and Russia, Putin now wants his country to be the world leader in hypersonic missile defense technology in order to retain its global dominance in this field, essentially embodying the exact same principle that he previously railed against for years.

Putin tried to pull a fast one on the world earlier this week when he thought that nobody would notice the hypocrisy of him calling for Russia to deploy a hypersonic missile defense shield before its rivals catch up to it and develop hypersonic armaments too. RT quoted the Russian President as saying that

“we also have a perfect understanding that the world’s leading nations will develop such weapons sooner or later(, therefore) we must obtain the means of protection against such systems, before hypersonic weapons are put in service by the [foreign] militaries.”

In other words, Russia wants to retain its global dominance in the field of hypersonic missiles by being the first state to deploy both offensive and defensive systems related to this technology, the first of which provides it with a credible nuclear second-strike capability that can pierce through the US’ missile defense shield while the second ensures that it can thwart others’ efforts to do the same against it.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the Bush-era missile defense shield plans have been fiercely criticized by almost all of Russia’s state representatives over nearly the past two decades since they were announced, with none other than President Putin regularly railing against them for disrupting the sensitive strategic balance between the US and his country. His government was entirely right in pointing out that the US aimed to undercut Russia’s nuclear second-strike capabilities in order to eventually place it in a position of nuclear blackmail, ergo why Moscow made the decision to urgently prioritize the research and development of hypersonic missile technology in the first place. Now that it’s the world leader in this field, it doesn’t want to risk losing its position by being unprepared for the eventual deployment of these armaments by its rivals and unable to defend itself from them in the same way that the US isn’t able to do at this moment.

In other words, the Neo-Realist theory of International Relations is especially apt in explaining what’s happening here because Russia and its rivals seem to be trapped in the so-called “security dilemma” whereby outwardly defensive moves by one state (such as Russia’s development of hypersonic missiles and shields) are interpreted by others as offensive ones because they’re seen as occurring at the zero-sum expense of their own security since they don’t trust that the leading state won’t abuse its dominant position. Interestingly, this is very similar to what happened back during the Bush Administration when the US originally sought to roll out conventional missile defense technology all across the world in order to preserve its dominant position in that sphere, which in turn provoked Russia into making rapid advancements in hypersonic missile technology to offset the expected disadvantages that the success of the US’ plans would have for its security.

Therefore, in terms of the Neo-Realist theory of International Relations, there’s no difference between the US and Russia in this respect, unless one incorporates the Constructivist theory of (changing) perceptions and begins to differentiate the grand strategic intent being pursued by both Great Powers.

Whether objectively the case or only subjectively so, there’s a prevailing notion that the US wanted to deploy its conventional missile defense shield for aggressive reasons related to preserving its unipolar hegemony across the world, while Russia is doing this in the hypersonic sense in order to maintain the strategic balance that it restored through this technology. In any case, there’s no avoiding the uncomfortable optics that Putin just pulled a Bush on missile defense, so Russia should launch a supportive information campaign in parallel with the development of its hypersonic missile defense shield in order to explain to the world how its intentions differ from the US’.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

On the eve of the May 15th 5G Day of Action, the first national campaign to push back against the unchecked deployment of 5G-ready small cell infrastructure, the New York Times has published a shameful and wildly inaccurate hit piece asserting that opponents of 5G are being unwittingly manipulated by Russia.

The article, “Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise,” focuses exclusively on a television network most people have never heard of – RT America – and argues that the tiny network, controlled by the Russian government, is the sole driving force behind the growing public opposition to 5G.

The Times cleverly conflates 5G-enabled smart phones with 5G small cell antennas, and fails to note that RT America is just one of many media outlets that are covering the controversy over 5G antenna deployment, including Fox News and CNN.

It also neglects to mention the hundreds of recently published, peer-reviewed, independent scientific studies from highly credible academic institutions and our own National Institutes of Health that demonstrate biological harm, including cancer, from exposure to RF microwave radiation. A listing of some of the most recent studies is located here.

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg welcomes New York Times CEO Mark Thompson at a recent announcement of their 5G joint venture.

Although the Times acknowledges its investment in a 5G joint venture with the telecom giant Verizon, it fails to mention another clear conflict of interest: the pages of the Times are filled with full-page color ads for wireless companies like Verizon which stand to make billions from new services made possible by the deployment of 5G-enabled small cell antennas on virtually every block of every street in America.

In the article, the Times attempts to disparage a highly credible academic researcher and medical professional with no financial stake in the debate, while quoting so-called “experts” with ties to industry but no credentials or experience in public health. Without any evidence, the Times smugly concludes that there is absolutely no risk related to 5G.

Based on the science, we are certain of the risk, and believe that widespread exposure to wireless radiation will soon become a national public health issue. We are particularly concerned for children, who, notwithstanding the casual assertion of the Times to the contrary, are more vulnerable than adults to environmental exposures of all kinds.

The Times owes an apology to its readers for failing to disclose its own economic stake in the successful deployment of 5G, and for publishing this transparent attempt to stifle legitimate concerns about an exposure that has been proven harmful.

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In the aftermaths of both the First and Second World Wars national borders were readjusted to suit the victors and entirely new countries were created from the ruins of the empires that had collapsed as a result of the conflict. The process continued with the end of the Soviet Union but the new states were constituted within an already existing ethnic and linguistic framework.

More recently, the United States has engaged in imperialism-lite, with “regime change” programs seeking to lop off the governments of existing nations by coercion or through military invasion, replacing them with Quislings supportive of Washington’s continuing dominance exercised from “over the horizon.”

But regime change too is falling out of favor, even if it is currently being pursued in both Venezuela and Iran, eschewing using armed force in favor of “economic warfare” intended to make life so miserable for the inhabitants of the targeted country that they will rise up in revolt and remove their leaders. So far regime-change policies have been a disappointment, with major failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya that relied on military interventions that converted stable countries into hotbeds of insurgency and unrest.

Given all of that, it is extremely audacious for the White House to consider going back to the old Sykes-Picot model of 1916 and seeking to impose a peace plan that will include reordering borders for Israel/Palestine, something that has been tried before in various forms by presidents named Carter and Clinton without any success. The new plan, which is already being touted as the “Deal of the Century,” has been the product of a group of Orthodox Jews working for senior advisor and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, together with representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt and the U.S. (sic) Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

There are no Arabs or Muslims (or Christians) on the team but there have been numerous discussions with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and, of course, Israel. Israel has clearly been allowed to see the nearly complete report and has likely participated in drafts as it moved along, but it is not clear what access the Arabs had to it. The Palestinians, of course, played no real part in the process and the Lebanese, a frontline state confronting Israel, also was not a party to the deliberations.

All of the Kushner team supports Israel’s settlements, which are illegal under international law and contrary to long-standing American government policy, which rather suggests that an open consideration of all the complex issues involved was unlikely to have taken place. Whether there are any actual American interests involved in the plan is unknown, but, given the make-up of Trump team, it is likely that there was an assumption that what is good for Israel is also good for the United States. Donald Trump has announced that the plan, which is apparently complete but for some minor tinkering, will be unveiled in June.

Those who follow the so-called peace process are likely aware that a document in Hebrew purporting to be the Deal of the Century plan has been recently leaked by an Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom that is owned by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and which also has been linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson, as the major donor to the Republican Party in the U.S., is somewhat of a bridge between Netanyahu and Trump and the document would not have appeared without foreknowledge by Adelson himself as well as the prime minister and president. The authenticity of the document has been debated, however, and the White House has claimed it was both “speculative” and “inaccurate,” but, in its defense, it is very close to what Jared Kushner revealed in comments made a month ago.

There has been considerable speculation regarding what the document and the peace plan it proposes actually mean. Though it forces both sides to make some concessions, including the creation of a Palestinian capital in part of Jerusalem, it is heavily favorable to Israel and to Netanyahu’s vision for Jerusalem and the West Bank. Even the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem would, for example, be under Israeli municipal control.

Signatories to the deal outlined in the document would be Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority with the United States serving as the guarantor of the agreement. It would create a Palestinian state called “New Palestine,” which would consist of the Gaza Strip and those parts of the West Bank that do not have Israeli settlements. Arab residents of Jerusalem, even if they live in the Jewish area, would be citizens of New Palestine, not of Israel. To maintain the status quo created by the division of Jerusalem, no Arab or Jew would subsequently be able to buy a home in the region controlled by the other community. New Palestine would have an airport on land currently in Sinai leased to it by Egypt and there would be a seaport in Gaza. New Palestine and Gaza would be linked by a road running through Israel and controlled by it to guarantee “security.”

To make the deal palatable to Palestinians, there would be $30 billion in economic investment over the first five years, coming from the United States, European Union, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. New Palestine will have police to suppress potential trouble makers but no armed forces. Israel will control the Jordan River valley but New Palestine will have two crossing points into Jordan. The U.S., as the enforcer of the deal, will cut off all aid to any party that refuses to sign the agreement. It threatens to use its control over the Swift dollar denominated international banking system to block all money transfers from any source to the Palestinians if they do not sign, similar to the squeezing that is currently being applied to Venezuela and Iran.

It is quite plausible that Netanyahu leaked the document to create controversy that would lead to Kushner having to go back to the drawing boards. The wily and unscrupulous prime minister likely sees no gain in the agreement as he is obtaining most of what he wants from Trump incrementally without conceding anything at all to the Palestinians. And he has already committed himself to virtually complete annexation of the West Bank, meaning that the creation of any kind of legitimate quasi-independent Palestinian state would be an obstacle to achieving that goal.

Even if Bibi were to go along with the plan, it would be a bad deal for the Palestinians. Without a military or control of its own borders it would be a state without any real sovereignty and, if all the Israeli settlements were to be excluded from the new nation, it would have control over only 12% of historic Palestine. The Kushner plan would mean a green light from Washington for a Greater Israel that would include 88% of the land regarded as Palestinian when Israel was created and stolen since that time. The New Palestine 12% would also be broken into smaller bantustans-like entities surrounded by Israeli roads and settlements and Israel will also be certain to obtain control of the region’s water resources.

If the Palestinians object to the way they are being treated, the United States as guarantor, as noted above, could step in and work with Israel to cut off their money, just as takes place currently, to punish them when they do not toe the line. It is, meanwhile, difficult to imagine that any circumstances might arise that would impel Washington to cut money going to Israel.

One of the more interesting details of the alleged plan is the demand that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad disarm completely, surrendering their weapons to Egypt. If they refuse, the White House would endorse and support Israel’s personal attacks directed against the groups’ leadership through the use of extrajudicial assassinations.

The leaked “peace” plan is so one-sided, harsh, and catastrophic with respect to any possible viable Palestinian state that it must be true. It is a Netanyahu dream document but for the fact that the Israeli leader would prefer to achieve what it outlines by stealth without giving anything as a sop to the Palestinians. If it fails to convince its audience, which includes a number of Arab states required to donate tens of billions to the cause, it will be back to square one with Israel continuing its creeping annexation of Palestinian land with the United States looking the other way. And speaking of the United States, what’s in it for the American people? Nada. Zilch. Nothing at all. So much for Make America Great Again.

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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].

Among European populations, it is little known that there are today scores of US nuclear weapons still stationed on the continent. Much of the reason for this broad lack of awareness regarding the sinister presence of nuclear bombs, is that the subject is barely discussed in establishment and mainstream dialogue.

The ongoing political and media silence regarding nuclear weapons almost defies belief, as humanity has enjoyed large slices of luck in escaping a nuclear holocaust.

In Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, twenty American B61 nuclear bombs continue to be stationed in idyllic wooded surroundings at Büchel Air Base, in the country’s far-western reaches. This military complex hosts personnel belonging to the US Air Force, and the critical orders relayed at Büchel surely emanate from Washington.

B61-12 Tactical Nuclear Bomb

A B61 nuclear bomb, at its highest yield (400 kilotons), is over 25 times more powerful than the atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima (15 kilotons) in August 1945. Up to 100,000 people in Hiroshima were killed within seconds of the blast and resulting firestorm, after a US Superfortress bomber dumped its load in the morning of 6 August. The final death toll soared above 120,000, the majority of whom were civilians.

Half of the B61’s maximum explosive force, 200 kilotons, would be capable still of annihilating a sizeable city containing one million people. Such an attack would inevitably be followed by the unleashing of further nuclear bombs, some in retaliation, precipitating the doomsday phenomenon of nuclear winter.

Worryingly, Büchel Air Base and its nuclear cache is positioned less than 75 miles from Cologne, Germany’s fourth most populous city comprising one million people.

Just over 100 miles from Büchel is Frankfurt, the fifth largest city in Germany home to 730,000 citizens – while less than 200 miles to the south lies Stuttgart, the Germans’ sixth biggest urban zone with more than 600,000 people.

Büchel’s location is of great significance, as this region of western Germany most likely constitutes high priority scope for Russian nuclear war planning. Moscow has no other alternative but to hold contingencies in place relating to potential nuclear conflict; as the Soviet Union, and later Russia, have been the principal priority of wide-scale US nuclear attack programs dating to World War II.

In September 1945, a few weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were desolated, the Pentagon outlined schemes to destroy 66 Soviet cities with over 200 atomic bombs – for example 18 bombs were categorized, six each, to obliterate Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, while five atomic weapons were listed to wipe out Stalingrad. These diabolical plans would have taken many months to devise, and so were being formulated long before the assaults on Japan.

Into the 21st century, the presence of American nuclear bombs on German soil is solely with Moscow in mind, something that the Kremlin is no doubt aware of. Chancellor Angela Merkel – an elite and media darling for 13 years who supported the Iraq invasion as opposition leader – has publicly backed the placement of American nuclear warheads in Germany, saying in 2009 that it grants Berlin “influence in the defence alliance [NATO], including in this highly sensitive area”.

Merkel has for years been an advocate of NATO’s “nuclear sharing policy”; which is a key component binding the US-led military organization, strategies increasing the possibility of nuclear war, allied to other policies like NATO enlargement to Russia’s boundaries. As a consequence of Merkel’s decision to accept US nuclear weapons, which represent a huge violation of German statehood, some of that nation’s biggest cities have been put in stark and unnecessary danger.

Germany is a de facto nuclear power. The Büchel Air Base jointly hosts squadrons of the German and US air forces, while pilots of German nationality come into contact with B61 warheads, even carrying the weapons in their Tornado fighter jets. One can but imagine what would unfold, if an aircraft carrying a nuclear device malfunctioned or suffered an accident. Over recent years Tornado jets have been involved in different incidents, including two RAF Tornado GR4s that collided in Scotland during summer 2012, resulting in the deaths of three airmen.

Nor are the nuclear weapons at Büchel endangering German citizens alone; neighbouring states like France and Luxembourg are also at risk. The ancient French city of Strasbourg is 170 miles from Büchel Air Base, while the capital Paris with its two million inhabitants is surprisingly close at 300 miles away. Luxembourg City is a mere 75 miles from Büchel. Many millions would be in harm’s way from fallout as a result of a nuclear exchange, or an unanticipated catastrophe with a nuclear weapon.

Germany also borders the Netherlands and Belgium to the west and north-west, two further countries stationing American B61 nuclear weapons on their territories. It is almost surreal that the Netherlands and Belgium, nations with a history of neutrality in both world wars, would agree to acceptance of nuclear bombs. Such are the decisions their governments have implemented; which puts the unsuspecting Dutch and Belgian peoples in undoubted danger. It is the price these countries have paid, in effect nuclear states, for acceding to NATO upon its formulation in 1949.

The American-born historian Gabriel Kolko, who lived out his final days in the Netherlands, wrote that organizations like NATO “have been a major cause of wars throughout modern history… The dissolution of all alliances is a crucial precondition of a world without wars”.

In the south of Netherlands, there are about twenty US B61 nuclear bombs located at the American-controlled Volkel Air Base. A mere village itself, Volkel and its warheads are situated less than 70 miles from the Netherlands’ two largest cities, capital Amsterdam (820,000 people) and Rotterdam (620,000 people). Consequently, vast urban areas are again placed at risk.

The danger that nuclear weapons pose to Dutch cities is far from a recent reality, as US nuclear weapons have been stored at Volkel for over half a century, dating to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reflecting on developments, Harry van Bommel, a Dutch Socialist Party member for almost 20 years, said that

“The nuclear strategy of NATO has not changed since the Cold War”.

Once more, Russian nuclear war planners have no choice but to take into account the ongoing presence of nuclear bombs at Volkel, which are in place solely with Moscow in mind.

Demonstration of a B61 nuclear bomb disarming procedure on a “dummy” in an underground Weapons Security and Storage System (WS3) vault at Volkel Air Base (Source: Public Domain)

Volkel Air Base is also perilously close to important metropolitan centres in nearby Germany: This military complex is 75 miles from Düsseldorf, while it is less than 100 miles distance from Dortmund and Cologne, three cities with a combined population of over two million.

In neighbouring Belgium to the south, there are a further twenty American B61 nuclear bombs present at Kleine Brogel Air Base – which takes crucial instructions from the Pentagon, and is home to members of the US Air Force.

Positioned just 64 miles from Kleine Brogel is the capital Brussels, with a population of 1.2 million; while Antwerp, Belgium’s second largest city, is just 52 miles from the base. Were an unexpected accident to occur at Kleine Brogel, or worst case scenario a nuclear exchange, it would have devastating consequences for the Belgian state, and indeed others.

As with Volkel, Kleine Brogel Air Base is situated remarkably close to notable cities in western Germany, being 65 miles from Düsseldorf and less than 100 miles from both Cologne and Dortmund. These regions of western Europe are under a great degree of threat, which is all on account of NATO’s enduring existence.

The range of US nuclear weapons stretches further southwards to NATO member Italy, a nation with a history dating thousands of years to pre-Roman times. In north-eastern Italy, there are dozens of B61 nuclear bombs placed at two US-controlled military compounds, in the Aviano and Ghedi air bases.

The Aviano Air Base, which is over a century old and contains a considerable fifty B61 warheads, is less than 60 miles from Venice, one of the world’s most famous cities. It is likely there are not too many Venetians, or indeed among the millions of tourists visiting the city, who are privy to the hefty stash of US nuclear weapons comfortably within driving distance of Venice – a cache of warheads with the overall power to blow up the world. Aviano Air Base is also located just over five miles from the province of Pordenone, which contains over 300,000 people.

Ghedi Air Base, 160 miles west of Aviano in northern Italy, is estimated to hold at least twenty US B61 bombs. This base is situated just 65 miles from Milan and 160 miles from Turin, Italy’s second and fourth largest urban populations, consisting of more than two million people in total. As with the others, Italy is taking a serious gamble for continuing membership of NATO.

Far eastwards of Italy, NATO state Turkey stores fifty US B61 bombs, despite current shambolic relations between the two countries. The fifty warheads are lying at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, built by US engineers in the early 1950s, and which is today under the auspices of America’s military. There are thousands of US personnel present at Incirlik Air Base throughout the year.

Incirlik is located just five miles from Adana, Turkey’s fifth largest metropolis home to over 1.7 million people. Should an unplanned incident with a nuclear device occur at Incirlik, it would once more have terrible consequences.
Moreover, Incirlik’s B61s are dangerously close to Syria’s northern border. Incirlik is little more than 150 miles from the city of Idlib, which is riddled with hundreds of terrorists linked to ISIS, Al Qaeda and the likes. However remote, there has been a possibility for years of extremist groups placing their hands upon a nuclear weapon.

The US nuclear bombs in Turkey are, as is well known, pointed northwards in the direction of Russia. Incirlik itself is about 800 miles from Russia’s south-western frontier, and within easy flying range.

Russia continues to be under massive threat, despite the fact that the Russian psychological makeup is largely that of a defensive nature. Though routinely overlooked in Western media, Russia has endured some of the biggest invasions in world history which have forged deep scars upon the national psyche. What’s more, almost all of the Soviet and Russian interventions have been initiated against states it shared a direct border with (Korea, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Georgia). There are no Russian incursions to be witnessed in the opposite hemisphere.

Briefly above-mentioned, over the past 75 years American nuclear strategies were compiled mainly with Russia in the cross hairs, as was known within the highest level of Kremlin circles. Due to Soviet intelligence operations, Stalin was himself likely aware as early as September 1941 relating to American proposals in constructing an atomic bomb. Critically, in April 1942 the Soviet dictator received a letter of warning from a young Russian physicist, Georgy Flyorov, regarding most unusual American and British behaviour on the nuclear subject.

Flyorov, who in 1940 unearthed spontaneous fission with Konstantin Petrzhak, urged Stalin that “we must build the uranium bomb without delay”. Stalin – a brutal and cunning operator – would quite likely have placed great store in Flyorov’s personal note to him, as he held an ingrained mistrust of the Western powers (not without reason). In 1942, Stalin did not designate as top priority Soviet creation of the atomic bomb, due to the struggle with Nazi Germany which was then undecided.

In March 1944 US General Leslie Groves, overseeing America’s atomic weapon project, confirmed that “the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets”. This was at a time when Soviet Russia was a vital wartime ally of the West. By late summer 1949, the Soviets would successfully detonate their own atomic device in reply, leading humankind on to its present course.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is CC BY-SA 3.0

The Following text is Section 15 of 16

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,

by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

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Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 2019

In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this important document, which will also be available as an E-book.

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Contents 

1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11. Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty
14. The Western American Empire plays the war card
15. The US/NATO planetary war system
16. Exiting the war system of NATO

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1. In the “geography” of the Pentagon, the world is divided into “areas of responsibility”, each entrusted to one of the United States Unified Combatant Command: the Northern Command covers North America; the Southern Command, Central and South America; the European Command, the region comprising Europe and the whole of Russia; the African Command, the African continent (except Egypt which falls within the Central Command area); the Central Command, the Middle East and Central Asia; the Pacific Command, the Asia/Pacific region.

2. Each unified command is composed of the commands of the different components of the US Armed Forces in that area. For example, the US European Command consists of: US Army in Europe, US Air Forces in Europe, US  Naval Forces in Europe, US Marine Forces in Europe and US  Special Operations Command in Europe. The command of each force is in turn articulated in a series of sub-commands and units. For example, the US Army in Europe has 22 sub-commands and units.

3. To the six geographical commands, three are added on a global scale: the Strategic Command, responsible for the terrestrial, air and naval nuclear forces, the military operations in space and cyberspace, the global attack, electronic warfare and missile defense; the Special Operations Command, with a specific command in each of the six areas plus one in Korea, responsible for non-conventional warfare, counter-insurgency operations, psychological operations and any other mission ordered by the President or Secretary of Defense; the Transport Command, responsible for the mobility of soldiers and armaments by land, air and sea worldwide.

4. The United States of America is the only country to have a military presence on a global scale in every continent and region of the world. The Pentagon is the direct owner of over 4,800 bases and other military installations, both domestically and abroad, including over 560,000 buildings and structures (such as railways, oil pipelines and airport runways). According to official Pentagon data, the United States has around 800 bases and other military installations in over 70 countries, especially around Russia and China, plus many others in use or classified. These bases are used for a continuous rotation of forces, which rapidly increase together with those transferred from the bases in the United States in certain war theaters. There are more than 170 countries where US troops are deployed, including those where the U.S. has no military bases. In terms of comparison, Russia has only a dozen military bases abroad in the former Soviet republics and in Syria; China has one in Djibouti, where its military and civilian ships call.

5. In the wake of the United States’ moves, NATO, the alliance under US command, now has no more borders. In Europe – after having extended into the area of the former Warsaw Pact, the former USSR and the former Yugoslavia – it is actually incorporating Ukraine. In Central Asia, NATO is incorporating Georgia, which already integrated in its operations. It is a candidate to become a full member of the Alliance. NATO also continues to “deepen cooperation” with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, to counter the Eurasian Economic Union (which includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan). It also remains engaged in Afghanistan – a country of great geostrategic importance to Russia and China.

6. In Western Asia, NATO continues military operations against Syria and is preparing others (Iran is still in the crosshairs). At the same time, it is strengthening its partnership (tested in the war against Libya) with four Gulf monarchies – Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar – and military cooperation with Saudi Arabia that is killing Yemen with cluster bombs provided by the US. In East Asia, NATO has concluded with Japan a strategic agreement that “broadens and deepens the long partnership”, which is joined by a similar agreement with Australia, with an anti-Chinese and anti-Russian function. For the same purpose, the major NATO countries (including Italy) participate every two years in the Pacific in what the US Fleet command calls “the greatest maritime exercise in the world”.

7. In Africa, after destroying Libya, NATO is enhancing military assistance to the African Union, which it also provides “naval planning and transportation” in the strategic framework of the United States Africa Command. In Latin America, NATO has signed a “Security Agreement” with Colombia, which has already engaged in Alliance military programs (including the formation of special forces) and has become “NATO’s first partner in Latin America”. NATO, therefore, now has its hands on a subversive plan against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

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Section 16 of the 70 Years of NATO, From War to War, forthcoming on Global Research

This text was translated from the Italian document which was distributed to participants at the April 7 Conference. It does not include sources and references.

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Media-savvy U.S. government officials, political operatives, and lawmakers and their staffs from all political parties and ideological persuasions have no doubt, throughout the history of our great country, duped a fair-minded but unwitting reporter into writing a juicy story in order to get a piece of information into the public bloodstream without their fingerprints on it.

This is, in large part, how the Bush administration sold the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the American people: Feeding knowingly bogus or unsubstantiated intelligence on Iraq’s (nonexistent) WMD programs to reporters, who then published it as fact, without much in the way of critical scrutiny.

Despite the lessons we’ve learned from that debacle, it’s happening again with regard to the Trump administration’s march toward war with Iran.

In one now infamous incident during the months leading up to the start of the Iraq war, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on NBC’s Meet the Press and issued a dire warning. Saddam Hussein was trying “through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs. … specifically aluminum tubes.”

But Cheney made sure to point out that he wasn’t just making this assertion out of thin air (or passing on classified material), but that, in fact, the claim came from the paper of record, The New York Times.

The Times story was even the catalyst for then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s infamous assertion:

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

We have since learned, of course, that Bush administration officials deliberately leaked the story to Times reporter Judith Miller — who co-wrote the big front page scoop with her colleague Michael Gordon — to build the case that that Saddam was building nuclear bombs. The Times later walked back the reporting, saying there was some internal disagreement about what the tubes were actually for (and in truth, it turned out, the tubes were actually not made for nuclear weapons). [For more on the provenance and use by Cheney, his colleagues, and neoconservatives of the Saddam-is-on-the-verge-of-obtaining-nuclear-weapons fabrication, see this 2005 account by Jim Lobe in TomDispatch.com.]

We saw a similar dynamic play out this week, albeit on a smaller scale, after Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton issued an unusual statement on Sunday evening announcing that the U.S. was sending a carrier and bomber group to the Middle East to counter unspecified Iranian threats.

Source: White House

Instead of expressing skepticism about such a statement from someone who’s been gunning for war with Iran for nearly two decades, and from an administration that has been doing the same for the past two and a half years, reports from U.S. mainstream media outlets basically served as a public relations service, simply repeating Bolton’s statement with little scrutiny across multiple mediums. For example, this was a headline from CNN the next day:

“US deploying carrier and bomber task force in response to ‘troubling’ Iran actions.”

Much of the piece then repeated almost verbatim administration claims about the supposed Iranian threat. And it wasn’t until the 24th paragraph that the story noted that such deployments are “routine” and that the carrier group in question, the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, had already been deployed to “the Central Command region,” as Bolton put it in his statement.

If the Lincoln group had already been deployed, was Bolton — again, who has made it no secret that he’s wanted war with Iran for some time — simply using this routine matter to goad Iran into some kind of conflict? CNN asked no such questions.

Then there was the question of the intelligence itself. Was it accurate? Was John Bolton — who also has a well-documented history of manipulating intelligence for his own policy preferences — playing fast and loose with the facts?

Here again, U.S. reporters simply just repeated Trump administration claims of this alleged dire Iranian threat. For example, this is what CNN’s Barbara Starr tweeted the following day:

“Just In: US officials tell me the threats from Iran included ‘specific and credible’ intelligence that Iranian forces and proxies were targeting US forces in Syria, Iraq and at sea. There were multiple threads of intelligence about multiple locations, the officials said. #Iran.”

But that turned out to be false, or misleading at best. Subsequent news stories reported that the intelligence Bolton was working from was “unclear.” Other reports referred to unnamed U.S. officials citing “potential preparations,” intel that “may indicate possible attacks,” and that the U.S. “was not expecting any imminent Iranian attack.” So in other words, nothing concrete, specific, or severe enough to merit an entire carrier group and B-52 bombers being sent to the Middle East.

Later in the week, Starr (like many, many other reporters) was duped again, reporting — based on unnamed sources — that “[i]ntelligence showing that Iran is likely moving short-range ballistic missiles aboard boats in the Persian Gulf was one of the critical reasons the US decided to move an aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers into the region.” But a subsequent NBC report downplayed this claim, noting that U.S. officials have actually “accused Iran of moving missiles and missile components through the region’s waterways for years.”

However, that NBC story too was guilty of uncritically repeating unnamed officials’ claims about intelligence on Iran, asserting that the actual reason for the increased U.S. military posture in the region was “a call [by Iran’s leaders] to awaken and activate” Iranian proxies in Iraq.

But what does that even mean? Does this kind of “threat” necessitate such a gargantuan military response? And isn’t it possible that the Trump administration’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign toward Iran and ramping up threats (like designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps a terror group) might have caused the Iranians themselves to shift to high alert?

Here again though, buried at the end of the NBC story, we are provided with a take from a Democratic congressional source who has seen the same intelligence, saying Trump and Bolton’s response to it “seems wildly out of proportion.” Even so, we should think a reporter would be able to conclude that the threat was overblown on his or her own (is a call to a proxy really cause for such a drastic military response?).

And that’s exactly what this intelligence is: overblown. The Daily Beast reported this week that  that “multiple sources close to the situation” said Bolton and Team Trump blew the intelligence on Iran “out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.”

Unfortunately, the damage has already most likely been done. The Trump administration’s claims about this supposed Iranian threat has been repeated by credulous reporters and TV news programs far and wide. And after all, that was the goal. Bolton and Co. knew the media would take the bait for a few days (war and conflict sell after all) and that, by the time the truth about what they were up to was eventually uncovered, the narrative about dire and nefarious Iranian threats — which is already baked into the American psyche anyway — would, in the saying often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill or Mark Twain, have “travel[ed] halfway around the world while the truth was still putting on its shoes.”

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Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress.

Featured image is from The Transnational

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

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Drivers Beware: The Deadly Perils of Traffic Stops in the American Police State

By John W. Whitehead, May 14, 2019

Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.

Cuba’s Earthy Traditions, and Jean Vanier

By Prof Susan Babbitt, May 14, 2019

Jean Vanier, dead last week, was philanthropist and Christian, founder of L’Arche, a remarkable organization for developmentally disabled.  Vanier was also a philosopher who left Academia for society’s vulnerable.  I used his Becoming Human, in class after philosophy class, to explain 20th century Marxist philosopher, Che Guevara.

We Take to the Streets of Tel Aviv to Demand an End to the Siege on Gaza

By Gush Shalom, May 14, 2019

Today Tuesday, 14 May, marking one year after 64 protestors were shot dead during the Great March of Return Protests in Gaza, we will take to the streets to demand an end to the siege on Gaza and a better future for all of us. We will meet Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7 PM in Habima square, Tel Aviv.

Serbia and NATO’s Shameful Legacy

By Živadin Jovanović and Maurizio Vezzosi, May 14, 2019

NATO is responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people in Serbia, including children, for the use of depleted uranium ammunition and other means of massive destruction. It is also responsible for the war damage valued at about 100 billion USD.

Face to Face with the Truth. The War against Syria and its People

By Mark Taliano, May 14, 2019

Everybody who has been paying attention knows that the war on Syria is not a civil war, that it was and is externally-orchestrated, perpetrated, and sustained, and that the on-going catastrophe was avoidable.

The “Swedish Allegations” Concerning Julian Assange

By Justice for Assange, May 13, 2019

Assange was always willing to answer any questions from the Swedish authorities and repeatedly offered to do so, over six years. The widespread media assertion that Assange “evaded” Swedish questioning is false.

How Madeleine Albright Got the War the U.S. Wanted

By Gregory Elich, May 13, 2019

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government or opposed separatism.

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The Nation. The framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, “The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official“

We’ve all been there before.

You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.

You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.

For better or worse, from the moment you’re pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

This is what I call “blank check policing,” in which the police get to call all of the shots.

So if you’re nervous about traffic stops, you have every reason to be.

Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.

Try to assert your right to merely ask a question during a traffic stop and see how far it gets you.

Zachary Noel was tasered by police and charged with resisting arrest after he questioned why he was being ordered out of his truck during a traffic stop. “Because I’m telling you to,” the officer replied before repeating his order for Noel to get out of the vehicle and then, without warning, shooting him with a taser through the open window.

Unfortunately, as Gregory Tucker learned the hard way, there are no longer any fail-safe rules of engagement for interacting with the police.

It was in the early morning hours of Dec. 1, 2016, when Tucker, a young African-American man, was pulled over by Louisiana police for a broken taillight. Because he did not feel safe stopping immediately, Tucker drove calmly and slowly to a safe, well-lit area a few minutes away before stopping in front of his cousin’s house.

That’s when what should have been a routine traffic stop became yet another example of police brutality in America and another reason why Americans are justified in their fear of cops.

According to the lawsuit that was filed in federal court by The Rutherford Institute, police ordered Tucker out of his vehicle, and after he had stepped out, immediately placed him under arrest for “resisting” (in this case, not immediately stopping) and searched his person and his vehicle. Tucker was then ordered to move to the front of the police vehicle and place his hands on its hood.

Two more police officers arrived on the scene, walked up behind Tucker, and grabbed his arms to restrain and handcuffed him.

Then the fourth police officer arrived on the scene. According to police dash cam footage, Tucker was thrown to the ground and punched numerous times in the head and body. The police also yelled repeatedly at Tucker to “quit resisting.” Tucker, bleeding with injuries to his face, head and arm, was then placed into the back of a police vehicle and EMTs were called to treat him. He was eventually taken to the hospital for severe injuries to his face and arm.

Mind you, this young man complied with police. He just didn’t do it fast enough to suit their purposes.

This young man submitted to police. He didn’t challenge police authority when they frisked him, searched his car, handcuffed him, and beat him to a pulp.

If this young man is “guilty” of anything, he’s guilty of ticking off the cops by being cautious, concerned for his safety, and all too aware of the dangers faced by young black men during encounters with the police.

Frankly, you don’t even have to be young or black or a man to fear for your life during an encounter with the police.

Just consider the growing numbers of unarmed people are who being shot and killed just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

At a time when police can do no wrong—at least in the eyes of the courts, police unions and politicians dependent on their votes—and a “fear” for officer safety is used to justify all manner of police misconduct, “we the people” are at a severe disadvantage.

Add a traffic stop to the mix, and that disadvantage increases dramatically.

According to the Justice Department, the most common reason for a citizen to come into contact with the police is being a driver in a traffic stop.

On average, one in 10 Americans gets pulled over by police.

Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers, or about 23 percent more likely than Hispanic drivers. As the Washington Post concludes, “‘Driving while black’ is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon.”

Indeed, police officers have been given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons.

This free-handed approach to traffic stops has resulted in drivers being stopped for windows that are too heavily tinted, for driving too fast, driving too slow, failing to maintain speed, following too closely, improper lane changes, distracted driving, screeching a car’s tires, and leaving a parked car door open for too long.

Motorists can also be stopped by police for driving near a bar or on a road that has large amounts of drunk driving, driving a certain make of car (Mercedes, Grand Prix and Hummers are among the most ticketed vehicles), having anything dangling from the rearview mirror (air fresheners, handicap parking permits, troll transponders or rosaries), and displaying pro-police bumper stickers.

Incredibly, a federal appeals court actually ruled unanimously in 2014 that acne scars and driving with a stiff upright posture are reasonable grounds for being pulled over. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that driving a vehicle that has a couple air fresheners, rosaries and pro-police bumper stickers at 2 MPH over the speed limit is suspicious, meriting a traffic stop.

Equally appalling, in Heien v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court—which has largely paved the way for the police and other government agents to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance—allowed police officers to stop drivers who appear nervous, provided they provide a palatable pretext for doing so.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone objector in the case. Dissenting in Heien, Sotomayor warned,

“Giving officers license to effect seizures so long as they can attach to their reasonable view of the facts some reasonable legal interpretation (or misinterpretation) that suggests a law has been violated significantly expands this authority… One wonders how a citizen seeking to be law-abiding and to structure his or her behavior to avoid these invasive, frightening, and humiliating encounters could do so.”

In other words, drivers beware.

Traffic stops aren’t just dangerous. They can be downright deadly.

Remember Walter L. Scott? Reportedly pulled over for a broken taillight, Scott—unarmed—ran away from the police officer, who pursued and shot him from behind, first with a Taser, then with a gun. Scott was struck five times, “three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart.”

Samuel Dubose, also unarmed, was pulled over for a missing front license plate. He was reportedly shot in the head after a brief struggle in which his car began rolling forward.

Levar Jones was stopped for a seatbelt offense, just as he was getting out of his car to enter a convenience store. Directed to show his license, Jones leaned into his car to get his wallet, only to be shot four times by the “fearful” officer. Jones was also unarmed.

Bobby Canipe was pulled over for having an expired registration. When the 70-year-old reached into the back of his truck for his walking cane, the officer fired several shots at him, hitting him once in the abdomen.

Dontrell Stevens was stopped “for not bicycling properly.” The officer pursuing him “thought the way Stephens rode his bike was suspicious. He thought the way Stephens got off his bike was suspicious.” Four seconds later, sheriff’s deputy Adams Lin shot Stephens four times as he pulled out a black object from his waistband. The object was his cell phone. Stephens was unarmed.

Sandra Bland, pulled over for allegedly failing to use her turn signal, was arrested after refusing to comply with the police officer’s order to extinguish her cigarette and exit her vehicle. The encounter escalated, with the officer threatening to “light” Bland up with his taser. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her jail cell. “You’re doing all of this for a failure to signal?” Bland asked as she got out of her car, after having been yelled at and threatened repeatedly.

Keep in mind, from the moment those lights start flashing and that siren goes off, we’re all in the same boat. However, it’s what happens after you’ve been pulled over that’s critical.

Survival is key.

Technically, you have the right to remain silent (beyond the basic requirement to identify yourself and show your registration). You have the right to refuse to have your vehicle searched. You have the right to film your interaction with police. You have the right to ask to leave. You also have the right to resist an unlawful order such as a police officer directing you to extinguish your cigarette, put away your phone or stop recording them.

However, there is a price for asserting one’s rights. That price grows more costly with every passing day.

If you ask cops and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with police, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings.

The problem, of course, is what to do when compliance is not enough.

After all, every day we hear about situations in which unarmed Americans complied and still died during an encounter with police simply because they appeared to be standing in a “shooting stance” or held a cell phone or a garden hose or carried around a baseball bat or answered the front door or held a spoon in a threatening manner or ran in an aggressive manner holding a tree branch or wandered around naked or hunched over in a defensive posture or made the mistake of wearing the same clothes as a carjacking suspect (dark pants and a basketball jersey) or dared to leave an area at the same time that a police officer showed up or had a car break down by the side of the road or were deaf or homeless or old.

Now you can make all kinds of excuses to justify these shootings, and in fact that’s exactly what you’ll hear from politicians, police unions, law enforcement officials and individuals who are more than happy to march in lockstep with the police.

However, to suggest that a good citizen is a compliant citizen and that obedience will save us from the police state is not only recklessly irresponsible, but it is also deluded and out of touch with reality.

To begin with, and most importantly, Americans need to know their rights when it comes to interactions with the police, bearing in mind that many law enforcement officials are largely ignorant of the law themselves.

In a nutshell, the following are your basic rights when it comes to interactions with the police as outlined in the Bill of Rights:

You have the right under the First Amendment to ask questions and express yourself. You have the right under the Fourth Amendment to not have your person or your property searched by police or any government agent unless they have a search warrant authorizing them to do so.  You have the right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent, to not incriminate yourself and to request an attorney. Depending on which state you live in and whether your encounter with police is consensual as opposed to your being temporarily detained or arrested, you may have the right to refuse to identify yourself. Presently, 26 states do not require citizens to show their ID to an officer (drivers in all states must do so, however).

Knowing your rights is only part of the battle, unfortunately.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the hard part comes in when you have to exercise those rights in order to hold government officials accountable to respecting those rights.

As a rule of thumb, you should always be sure to clarify in any police encounter whether or not you are being detained, i.e., whether you have the right to walk away. That holds true whether it’s a casual “show your ID” request on a boardwalk, a stop-and-frisk search on a city street, or a traffic stop for speeding or just to check your insurance. If you feel like you can’t walk away from a police encounter of your own volition—and more often than not you can’t, especially when you’re being confronted by someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear—then for all intents and purposes, you’re essentially under arrest from the moment a cop stops you. Still, it doesn’t hurt to clarify that distinction.

While technology is always going to be a double-edged sword, with the gadgets that are the most useful to us in our daily lives—GPS devices, cell phones, the internet—being the very tools used by the government to track us, monitor our activities, and generally spy on us, cell phones are particularly useful for recording encounters with the police and have proven to be increasingly powerful reminders to police that they are not all powerful.

A good resource is The Rutherford Institute’s “Constitutional Q&A: Rules of Engagement for Interacting with Police.”

Clearly, in the American police state, compliance is no guarantee that you will survive an encounter with the police with your life and liberties intact.

So if you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated and fearful for your life and the lives of your loved ones, you should be.

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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].

Jean Vanier, dead last week, was philanthropist and Christian, founder of L’Arche, a remarkable organization for developmentally disabled.  Vanier was also a philosopher who left Academia for society’s vulnerable.  I used his Becoming Human, in class after philosophy class, to explain 20th century Marxist philosopher, Che Guevara.

The connection surprises some. They don’t know Cuba’s earthy traditions. “Earthy” is the word used by Cuban philosopher, Cintio Vitier, to link early 19th century Cuban priests – reformists – to the radical vision of independence leader, José Martí, and the eventual Cuban Revolution.[i]

It has to do with feelings. More specifically, it has to do with energy arising when we do the right thing, where “right thing” is not necessarily moral but useful. It’s creative mental energy, making imaginable what was not imaginable previously. Ancients called it “faith”.

It’s confidence, not intellectual but felt, explained by laws of nature, cause and effect, mind/body connection.

When you know you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, you gain, even if your actions fail. It’s a kind of dynamic reciprocity. Earthy. Che Guevara’s “hombre nuevo” is in this line. It’s not a new being, as critics claim.  It’s people aware – in a felt, experiential sense – of shared humanity.

It’s what Vanier explained. He left a life of privilege to live with disabled folk, saying it made him more human. It was about truth, not morality. He identified a paradox: We seek community to avoid loneliness. But loneliness is the natural state of reflective human beings, aware of vulnerability.

We escape our condition through community, but loneliness, being universally shared, provides grounds for human community: between people as people. “Reality is the first principle of truth”, and the reality of human existence is insecurity. Loneliness “can only be covered over, it can never actually go away”.

His point is how to discover community. It was Guevara’s point, but it goes back further in Cuba. It was raised by priests who wanted independence from Spain, the US, the UK and slavery. It was a time when ideas from Europe persuaded young people “it’s all good”, if it feels right.

José de la Luz y Caballero, who could have been a rich lawyer, taught Philosophy because of slavery, a social cancer. Privileged progressives criticized Spanish colonialism, resisted US annexation, and decried social vices, but could not imagine living without slaves.  Slavery was an expectation.

José Antonio Saco, who preceded Luz at the institute founded by Félix Varela (1811), could not imagine abolition. Precisely because slavery was so taken for granted, consistent with opposition to almost all other wrongs, Luz dedicated himself to educating privileged youth about how to know justice when injustice is part of who you are.

Luz was a Christian, of Vanier’s sort.  He cared about truth.  He was a scientist who knew how understanding works. It depends on expectations, rooted in habit patterns. We identify with them and they must be broken, occasionally. A remarkable national debate (1836-8), the Cuban Philosophical Polemic, was about thinking. It anticipates late 20^thcentury philosophy of science, in North America.

But North American philosophers don’t accept “earthy” thinking.

It involves loss. Vanier wrote about “brokenness”.  It is how we know the invisible, the “discarded”:

“Why are we unable to look Lazarus straight in the eye and listen to him? … [W]e will discover that he is a human being … That is why it is dangerous to enter into a relationship with the Lazaruses of the world”.

We risk being changed. Loss.

It’s also about gain. According to Vitier, the leaders of Cuba’s agonizingly long struggle for independence shared an idea: Freedom requires raising the most vulnerable. Piero Gleijeses says it’s why Cuba went to Africa in the 70s, defying the Soviets. The CIA knew it: Cuba sided with the poor and non-White. The USSR was rich and white. The division between North and South was the major fault line.[ii]

This is the “earthy” thinking that Vitier refers to: formation of people through bold, sacrificial resistance to deep-seated, dehumanizing lies.

Vanier’s brokenness defies a lie of that sort: part of the social fabric. A useful, compassionate new book on dementia, The Last Ocean,[iii] argues that the tragedy of dementia is loss of a coherent self. We spend entire lifetimes building a “vast rich palace of the self”, which falls away. US philosopher Ronald Dworkin says that without a sense of self – different from a self — suicide is rational.

Yet that “palace” is a myth. And seeking it – a sense of self as opposed to a self – is counterproductive. You seek to escape insecurity, fabricating an identity – a ‘narrative self” – and you deny in the process what is really shared: insecurity.

Guevara called it an “invisible cage” or the “bourgeois myth of the self-made man”. Patrick Modiano (Nobel Prize 2014) shows why. [iv] He tries “to impose some order on my memories. But many are missing, and most of them remain isolated.” He can’t do it, and yet the stories he wants to forget “rise to the surface like a drowned man”.

“Real encounters” are more interesting. They might “drag you in their wake when they disappear”. But they’re real, unlike the “coherent self” of memories, made of “bits of sentences spoken by anonymous voices”.

We don’t accept illness and we don’t admit death. We suffer for that. But in arguing that we are diminished by dismissing the vulnerable, The Last Ocean nonetheless maintains the myth that prevents seeing those vulnerable as people: a secure place that doesn’t exist, not just for those with dementia, but for anyone.

So argues Vanier, and Guevara, and earthy thinkers for millennia.

Some are Lazaruses. Looking them in the eye and hearing their story involves loss: of lies, unimaginable to give up, like liberalism and “development”. But there’s also gain. Vanier’s life was all about that.

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Notes

[i] Ese sol del mundo moral (Havana 1996) 14-15

[ii] Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa 1959-76(2002) 377

[iii] Nicci Gerrard, Penquin Press (2019).

[iv] Sleep of Memory(Yale University Press, 2018)

Like many people who have struggled to understand why human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which now threatens imminent human extinction as well, over many decades I have explored the research and efforts of a great many activists and scholars to secure this understanding. However, with many competing ideas from the fields of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, among others, this understanding has proved elusive. Nevertheless, I have reached an understanding that I find compelling: Human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history because of the disintegrated nature of the human mind.

While the expression ‘mental disintegration’ has been used in a number of contexts previously, for the purpose of my discussion in this article I am going to redefine it, explain how it originates, describe several ways in which it manifests behaviorally and the profoundly dysfunctional outcomes this generates, and suggest what we can do about it.

Given that the expression, as I am using it, describes a shocking psychological state but also one that is so widespread it afflicts virtually everyone, it can be described as posing the greatest threat to human survival on Earth. Why? Simply because it caused – and now prevents virtually everyone from thinking, feeling, planning and behaving functionally in response to – the multifaceted threats to humanity and the biosphere.

So, for the purpose of this article: Mental disintegration describes a state in which the various parts of the human mind are no longer capable of working as an integrated unit. That is, each part of the mind – such as memory, thoughts, feelings, sensing capacities (sight, hearing…), ‘truth register’, conscience – function largely independently of each other, rather than as an integrated whole. The immediate outcome of this dysfunction is that human behaviour lacks consideration, conviction, courage and strategy, and is simply driven compulsively by the predominant fear in each context.

The reason this issue first attracted my attention was because, on many occasions, I observed individuals (ranging from people I knew, to politicians) behaving in ways that seemed outrageous but it was also immediately apparent that the individual was completely unaware of the outrageous nature of their behaviour. On the contrary, it seemed perfectly appropriate to them. With the passage of time, however, I have observed this dysfunctionality in an enormously wide variety of more subtle and common forms, making me realise just how widespread it is even if it goes largely unrecognized. After all, if virtually everyone does it in particular contexts, then why should it be considered ‘abnormal’?

One version of this mental disintegration is the version usually known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. The widely accepted definition of this state, based on Leon Festinger’s research in the 1950s, goes something like this: Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all of our attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior in harmony and to avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency. When there is an inconsistency between attitudes, beliefs and/or values on the one hand and behaviors on the other (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.

The problem with this approach to the issue is that it assumes awareness of the inconsistency on the part of the individual impacted and also assumes (based on Festinger’s research) that there is some inclination to seek consistency. But my own observations of a vast number of people in a substantial variety of contexts over several decades have clearly revealed that, in very many contexts, individuals have no awareness of any discrepancy and, hence, have no inclination to seek consistency between their attitude, belief and/or value and their behavior. Moreover, even if they do have some awareness of the inconsistency, most people simply act on the basis of their predominant emotion – usually fear – in the context and pass it off with a rationalization. For example, that their particular work/role is so important that it justifies their excessive consumption on a planet of limited and unequally shared resources.

Consequently, to choose an obvious example, most climate, environmental, anti-nuclear and anti-war activists fail to grapple meaningfully with the obvious contradiction between their own over-consumption of fossil fuels and resources generally and the role that consumption of these resources plays in driving the climate and environmental catastrophes as well as war. The idea of reducing their own personal consumption is beyond serious contemplation (let alone action). And, of course, it goes without saying that the global elite suffers this disintegration of the mind by failing to connect their endless acquisition of power, profit and privilege at the expense of all others and the Earth, with the accelerating and multifaceted threats to human survival including the future of their own children. But the examples are endless.

In any case, leaving aside ‘cognitive dissonance’, there are several types of mental disintegration as I define it in this article. Let me briefly give you five examples of mental disintegration before explaining why it occurs.

1. Denial is an unconscious mental state in which an individual, having been given certain information about themselves, others they know or the state of the world, deny the information because it frightens them. This is what happens for a ‘climate denier’, for example. For a fuller explanation, see ‘The Psychology of Denial’.
2. The ‘Magic Rat’ is an unconscious mental state in which a person’s fear makes them incapable of grappling with certain information, even to deny it, so they completely suppress their awareness of the information immediately they receive it. For four examples of this psychological phenomenon, which President Trump exemplifies superbly, see ‘You Cannot Trap the “Magic Rat”: Trump, Congress and Geopolitics’.
3. Delusion is an unconscious mental state in which a person is very frightened by certain information but the nature of the circumstances make it impossible to either deny or suppress awareness of the information so they are compelled to construct a delusion in relation to that particular reality in order to feel safe. For a fuller explanation, see ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”’.
4. Projection is an unconscious mental state in which a person is very frightened of knowing a terrifying truth so they ‘defend’ themselves against becoming aware of this truth by (unconsciously) identifying a more palatable cause for their fear and then ‘defending’ themselves against this imagined ‘threat’. Political leaders in Israel do this chronically in relation to the Palestinians, for example. But the US elite also does this chronically in relation to any competing ideas in relation to political and economic organization in other countries. See ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.
5. Lies arise from a conscious or unconscious mental state in which a person fears blame and/or punishment for telling an unpalatable truth (such as one that will self-incriminate) so they unconsciously employ tactics, including lying, to avoid this blame and punishment (and thus project the blame onto others). When people lie unconsciously, it means they are lying to themself as well; that is, constructing a lie without awareness that they are doing so. For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Do People Lie? And Why Do Other People Believe Them?’

So why does this mental disintegration – this disintegration of the mind so that its many components are essentially unaware of the others – happen? In brief, it happens because, throughout childhood, each individual is endlessly bombarded with ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence in the name of socialization, which is more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. This is done to ensure that the child is obedient despite the fact that obedience has no evolutionary functionality whatsoever. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

A primary outcome of this terrorization in materialist cultures is that the child learns to suppress their awareness of how they feel by using food and material items to distract themselves. By doing this, the child rapidly loses self-awareness and learns to consume as the substitute for this awareness. Clearly, this has catastrophic consequences for the child, their society and for nature (although it is immensely profitable for elites and their agents). For a fuller explanation, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

Beyond this, however, this terrorization ensures that the human mind is so disintegrated that virtually all humans have no problem living in denial, delusion and projection and using ‘magic rats’ and lies on a vast range of issues because they simply have no awareness of reality in that context. Different parts of their disintegrated mind simply hold one element of their mind separately from all others (thus obscuring any denial, delusion and projection and the use of ‘magic rats’ and lies), consequently precluding any tendency to restore integrity from arising.

This is why, for example, most people can lie ‘outrageously’, including under oath, without the slightest awareness that they are doing so and which, as an aside, is why oaths to tell the truth in court, and even lie detector tests, are utterly meaningless. If the person themself is unaware they are lying, it is virtually impossible for anyone else – unless extraordinarily self-aware – to detect it. And, of course, judges and juries cannot be self-aware or they would not agree to perform their respective roles in the extraordinarily dysfunctional and violent legal system. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

In essence then, the process of ‘socializing’ (terrorizing) a child into obedience so that they will ‘fit into’ their particular society has the outcome of scaring them into suppressing their awareness of reality, including their awareness of themself. In this circumstance, the individual that now ‘survives’ does so as the ‘socially-constructed delusional identity’ (that is, obedient and, preferably, submissive individual) that the significant adults in their childhood terrorized them into becoming.

To reiterate: Because social terrorization destroys the emergence of an integrated mind that would enable memory, sensing capacities, thoughts, feelings, conscience, attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviours to act in concert, the typical individual will now invariably act in accord with the unconscious fear that drives every aspect of their behavior (and ‘requires’ them to endlessly seek approval to avoid the punishment threatened for disobedience when they were a child).

Moreover, this disintegrated mind has little or no capacity to ‘observe reality’ in any case, such as seek out genuine news sources – like the one you are reading now – that accurately report the biodiversity, climate, environmental, military and nuclear catastrophes and, having done so, to be truly aware of this news in the sense of deeply comprehending its meaning and implications for their own behaviour.

So, to elaborate one of the examples cited above, even most individuals who self-identify as climate, environmental, anti-nuclear and/or anti-war ‘activists’ go on over-consuming (which is highly socially approved in industrialized societies) without any genuine re-evaluation of their own behaviour in light of what should be the observed reality about these crises (or, if their mind allows a ‘re-evaluation’ to commence, to dismiss it quickly with a rationalization that their over-consumption is somehow justified).

One obvious outcome of this is that elite-controlled corporations and their governments can largely ignore ‘activist’ entreaties for change because activist (and widespread) over-consumption constitutes financial endorsement of the elite’s violent and exploitative economy. In other words: If people are buying the products (such as fossil fuels for their car and air travel, and hi-tech devices), made possible by fighting the wars and exploiting the people in countries where the raw materials for this production are secured, then why pay attention to calls for change? Dollars speak louder than words.

So what can we do?

Well, given that the above describes just a small proportion of the psychological dysfunctionality of most humans, which is why we remain on the fast track to extinction despite overwhelming evidence of the profound changes that need to occur – see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ – I encourage you to seriously consider incorporating strategies to address this dysfunctionality into any effort you make to improve our world.

For most people, this will include starting with yourself. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

For virtually everyone, it will include reviewing your relationship with children and, ideally, making ‘My Promise to Children’.

For those who feel readily able to deal with reality, consider campaigning strategically to achieve the outcomes we need. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The global elite is deeply entrenched – fighting its wars, exploiting people, destroying the biosphere – and not about to give way without a concerted effort by many of us campaigning strategically on several key fronts.

If you recognize the pervasiveness of the fear-driven violence in our world, consider joining the global network of people resisting it by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

But, most fundamentally of all, if you understand the simple point that Earth’s biosphere cannot sustain a human population of this magnitude of which more than half endlessly over-consume, then consider accelerated participation in the strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Or, if this feels 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 not travel by plane
2. I will not travel by car
3. I will not eat meat and fish
4. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
5. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
6. I will not buy rainforest timber
7. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
8. I will not use banks that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
9. 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 the destruction of the biosphere
10. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Facebook…)
11. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
12. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

There is a vast array of ‘professional help’, literature, video material, lecturers and other ‘resources’ from a wide range of perspectives that advocate and ‘teach’ one or a variety of ways that people can use to change their behaviour to get improved outcomes in their lives (whether from a personal, economic, business, political or other perspective). Virtually all of these constitute nothing more than psychological ‘tricks’ to achieve a short-term outcome by ‘working around’ the fundamental truth: As a result of terrorization during childhood, virtually all humans are unconsciously terrified and this makes their behaviour utterly dysfunctional.

The point is this: there is no trick that can get us out of the catastrophic mess in which we now find ourselves. Only the truth can do that. Psychological and behavioural dysfunctionalities notwithstanding, if we do not address this fear as part of our overall strategy, then this fear will destroy us in the end. And the evidence of that lies simply in the fact that the daily updates on the already decades-long but ongoing horrific biodiversity, climate, environmental, nuclear, war and humanitarian crises are testament to our ongoing failure to respond appropriately and powerfully. Because our (usually unconscious) fear prevents us from doing so.

So if you believe that human beings are going to get out of our interrelated social, political, economic, military, nuclear and ecological crises with a largely psychologically dysfunctional population, I encourage you to re-evaluate that belief (paying attention, if you can, to how your disintegrated mind intervenes to prevent you doing so). And I encourage you to ask yourself if the value we get out of improving the psychological functionality of our species might not be worth considerable effort as part of our overall strategy to avert human extinction.

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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.

We would think the U.S. state would be embarrassed.

All three of Venezuelan neo-fascist Juan Guaido’s coup attempts have failed. Donald Trump appears to be raising questions regarding the effectiveness of National Security Advisor John Bolton‘s pro-coup strategies in Venezuela.

Yet the assault on the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., continues unabated.

The electricity and water were turned off this week in an attempt to smoke the Embassy Protection Collective out of the building in the upscale Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown.

The state still appears to be hot to blame Russia for its ills. Journalist Anya Parampil tweeted a Secret Service officer said anti-interventionists are “paid by Russia or whatever.”

Was just in position to hear @SecretService shift change at Venezuela embassy.

Quote from senior officer: “on this side of the street are the pro-Guaidó people. They’re essentially US gov. On the other side of the street are the anti-war protestors, paid by Russia or whatever.”

— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) May 10, 2019

This is a curious statement: “… paid by Russia or whatever.”

It not only shows the U.S. state is still scapegoating Russia after the Mueller report demonstrated Russia did not meddle in the 2016 U.S. election.

Embedded in that statement is the assumption that forms the foundation of U.S. mythology: That in order to be good, one must be aligned with the white supremacist imperialist project. Those who are not white and/or not in alignment with that project are otherized.

As African/Black internationalists, we reject that position and continue to stand with the colonized peoples of the world. (Check out BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman breaking down the connection between Pan-Africanism and liberation movements throughout the world in an interview with Eleanor Goldfield of Act Out.) That is why our folks have consistently shown up at the Venezuelan embassy. We understand what it’s like to be under siege by militarized forces, to be deprived of our basic needs, our human rights violated, and demonized by the First World imperialists right here in the belly of the beast. We released an official statement on the matter.

Below, you can see Garrett Harris and Toby Robert of Pan-African Community Action, a BAP member organization, alongside Maurice Carney of BAP member organization Friends of the Congo, and BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley—all willing to stand in the rain for hours yesterday, across the street from the embassy.

Source: BAP

The Real News Network interviewed Garrett on the scene last week, when neo-fascist forces first swarmed the scene with their violence.

Now we must ask you to take action to help restore water and electricity at the Venezuelan embassy, and end the neo-fascist siege on the building. Copy and paste the letter below and send it to the following email addresses for Washington, D.C., officials and agencies:

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Please restore water and electricity to 1099 30th Street NW, Washington, D.C., aka the Venezuelan embassy. It is a human rights violation to cut off water and electricity. Your top officials can be sued and hauled off to jail.

An embassy is considered a sovereign country inside the United States. You are obligated per Article 25 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to provide resources so that a diplomatic building can function. You are obligated per Article 22 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to protect the building from the neo-fascist siege currently underway.

The people inside the building are lawful tenants, having met the 14-day threshold of D.C. tenancy. They are also skilled attorneys. When you are sued, the people of D.C. will blame you for being complicit with U.S. gangsterism, the same gangsterism that the United States demonstrates around the world, cutting off access to resources, bombing people of color all over.

These neo-fascists are the same type of people who last year burned an Afro-Venezuelan man alive.

It is unprecedented for the U.S. government to cut off water and electricity to an embassy and allow neo-fascist thugs to damage the outside of an embassy. This siege will have a ripple effect on international relations. Even during wartime, embassies are hands-off zones. Now, how can other embassies expect their buildings to be protected and fully functioning in D.C.? Why wouldn’t another country attack a U.S. embassy abroad after what you have allowed?

Secret Service and Metropolitan Police Department only stand by, watching the thuggery and arresting peaceful people who are being assaulted.

It is in the best interests of PEPCO, D.C. Water and the District of Columbia to stay out of the war the United States is waging on the majority Black and Brown country of Venezuela and its embassy. Immediately restore water and electricity to the lawful tenants of the Venezuelan embassy. Then end the neo-fascist siege on the embassy.

Sincerely,
[Your name]
[City, state, country]

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Today Tuesday, 14 May, marking one year after 64 protestors were shot dead during the Great March of Return Protests in Gaza, we will take to the streets to demand an end to the siege on Gaza and a better future for all of us. We will meet Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7 PM in Habima square, Tel Aviv.

Buses will leave Jerusalem (Bell Park), Beer Sheva (Teachers Center Parking Lot), Haifa (Romema stadium).

Read details about the event here.

One year ago, as hospitals in Gaza were overflowing with wounded protesters, the masses in Tel Aviv celebrated Netta Barzilai’s Eurovision victory. This year we will not take part in this absurd and cynical performance. We refuse to continue “business as usual”, while less than 100km away, millions of people on both sides of the fence pay the price of our apathy. On 14 May, marking one year after 64 protestors were shot dead during the Great March of Return Protests in Gaza, we will take to the streets to demand an end to the siege on Gaza and a better future for all of us.

The consequences of the past year’s events are devastating: over 250 Palestinians are dead and tens of thousands wounded, the entire region is under constant threat of escalation, and residents of southern Israel are subject to frequent attacks. The pressing need for a courageous decision is clear – we must put an end to the cycle of violence. Sporadic “relief efforts” are not a solution. A life of dignity for all the people in the region is not optional – it’s a demand that cannot be ignored.

Israel’s new government must change its policy concerning Gaza. It must recognize its responsibility and obligations towards the civilian population, remove the blockade and respect the rights of the people of Gaza: freedom of movement, freedom of profession, the right to protest, the right to health and above all, the right to live in dignity.

The hackneyed claim that the Great March of Return Protests are a threat initiated by Hamas overlooks the democratic character of the demonstrations and the greater context they are taking place in: the ongoing Israeli blockade and the ensuing humanitarian crisis, within a history of over fifty years of military occupation and over seventy years of displacement and exile.

The crisis in Gaza as well as the price paid by citizens of southern Israel is neither decreed by fate nor a natural phenomenon. It is time to end the siege on Gaza. It is time to bring back the hope that a just solution can and must be reached – for all our sakes.

We will meet at HaBima Square at 19:00 and then we will march together to Meir Garden, where activists from Gaza and the south will speak.

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Featured image is from Gush Shalom

Hegemons are never going to sound too sensible when they lock horns or joust in spats of childish anger.  Power corrupts, not merely in terms of perspective but language, and making sense about the next move, the next statement, is bound to be challenging.  Otherwise justified behaviour can be read as provocative; retaliatory moves duly rattle and disturb.

The Iran-US standoff is finding a surge of increments, provocations and howlers.  Since the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Iran Nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) last year, Tehran has gnawed and scratched at the arrangements.  Threats to close the Strait of Hormuz as a retaliation for frustrating Iranian oil sales have been made.  President Hassan Rouhani last week made it clear that the Islamic republic would scale back on certain JCPOA commitments.  Limits on building up stockpiles of low-enriched uranium and heavy water would be abandoned.  A 60-day period has been stipulated in the hope that the E3 (Britain, France and Germany), China and Russia provide relief for the Iranian oil and banking sector.  More suspensions of compliance orders threaten to follow if the powers do not muck in.

Despite not being part of the JCPOA anymore, the Trump administration persists in sticking its oar in the matter.  In May 3, the State Department explicitly warned it would sanction individuals and entities involved in swapping permitted uranium (enriched or natural) with Iran.  Nor would excess heavy water limits be permitted.

With such moves to strangle Iran’s economic feelers, it is little wonder that Rouhani has called on “surgery” to be performed on the JCPOA, one far more effectual than “the painkiller pills of the last year”.  Such a process, he promised, was “for saving the deal, not destroying it.”

News this week that Saudi Arabian oil tankers had been sabotaged near the Strait of Hormuz had its effect, even if the Trump administration has yet to pin its colours to the claim that Iran is responsible.  Give it time, and not much at that.  As the Wall Street Journal put it,

“The assessment, while not conclusive, was the first suggestion by any nation that Iran was responsible for the attack”.

To reporters in the Oval Office, Trump was keen to make his usual remarks about happiness, or its absence, if things turned out to be darker than he thought.  “It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that.”  What, pressed reporters, did the president mean by a “bad problem”?  “You can figure it out for yourself.  They know what I mean by it.”

Brian Hook, the US State Department’s special envoy on Iran, has been doing the circuit in Europe with Washington’s allies, hoping to stir some action against the meddling mullahs in a campaign of “maximum pressure”.  “Everything we are doing,” Hook tried to reason with the Sunday Times, “is defensive.”  Secretary of State Mark Pompeo also journeyed to Brussels to stir the matter.  According to Hook,

“The secretary shared information and intelligence with allies and discussed the multiple plot vectors emerging from Iran.”

What a boon Iran is proving to be for the parched hawks, an endless well of threat, much of it imaginary, to draw upon in the hope of actual military engagement.

National Security Advisor John Bolton is making do with the situation, creating much mischief, turning the furniture and belongings of the entire diplomatic stable inside out like a brat in search of attention.  He blames Iran, naturally, for “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings”.  As is the manner with all chicken hawks, he craves the blood of others and is not shy pushing it.  The problem with this attitude is that having a playmate such as Iran is bound to get you, and your fellow playmates, hurt on the way.  The school mistress should intervene, but her sense, and sensibility, is yet to be found.

Washington is certainly keen to make it a bad problem, a habit it has fallen into during stretches of its violent and imperial history.  At Bolton’s instigation, an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers are being deployed to the Persian Gulf on the supposedly clear grounds that Iran and its proxies are readying themselves for a strike on US forces in the region, bringing to mind similar provocations sought to stoke a potential conflict.

The planning of Operation Prairie Fire was one such ignominious example, designed to provoke Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya into a military incident in 1986.  In what seemed to be a true overegging of the pudding, US Navy Task Force 60 involved three aircraft carriers operating in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast.  They were involved in exercises falling within that most stretched of terms: freedom-of-navigation.  Prairie Fire turned out to be a bellicose affair, with Task Force 60 put on essentially a wartime footing.  Military exercises were duly conducted to stir the beast; patrols along the coast were conducted.  The beast responded with some six surface-to-air missiles.  A Libyan patrol boat was duly obliterated with some satisfaction, along with two more naval vessels and a missile site in Sirte.

“We now consider all approaching Libyan forces,” claimed the White House note with some smugness, “to have hostile intent.”

US-Iran encounters in the Strait of Hormuz are also not new: the Iran-Iraq War, one which saw the US throw in its lot with Saddam Hussein’s invading armies against the Iranian Republic, featured a fair share of attacks on merchant shipping.  The importance of the Strait to shipping and international traffic is again coming into play.

Trump has remained inflexible and obstinate regarding Iran. (In his wheeler-dealer world, every crook with a silver lining must be matched by a Lucifer who will be given no quarter.)  In these calculations, the silver lining of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un shines far brighter than any the Islamic Republic of Iran might have.  But by any referee’s estimate of recent conduct by Trump and company, Washington must be seen as responsible for the most aggravating fouls.

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

An interview with Živadin Jovanović, distinguished author and former Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1998-2000), President of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals

Maurizio Vezzosi: Remembering the 1999’s bombing over Belgrade, some days ago Serbian president Vucic stressed that Serbia isn’t going to join Nato. How do you comment it?

Živadin Jovanović: Serbia is a peace loving country, never belonged to any military block, never sought other countries’ territories or resources. So, I believe that active neutrality, openness, balanced foreign policy and win win cooperation is the best option for Serbia, particularly now in the era of profound global changes.

NATO is responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people in Serbia, including children, for the use of depleted uranium ammunition and other means of massive destruction. It is also responsible for the war damage valued at about 100 billion USD. Therefore, joining NATO would be tantamount to humiliating the victims and to amnesty of those responsible for the crimes against peace and humanity.

MV: How do you describe the legacy of the Atlantic Alliance’s bombing over former-Yugoslavia?

ZJ: It is a shameful legacy. From defensive NATO became aggressive alliance, braking UN Charter, Helsinki Final Document, Founding Act (1949), member countries’ national constitutions, the role of UN SC. But it is also shameful for member countries which participated in the 1999 illegal aggression. This profound stein on their faces could be removed only by reevaluating immoral and disastrous Clinton/Albright/Blair policy. NATO aggression was not a “little Kosovo war” but a turning point in the global relations, it was decisive step towards destruction of the World Order established on the outcome of the Second WW.

What has followed after were – more wars, millions of killed, wounded and refugees, more military bases, frightening global and national divisions, mistrust, confrontations, spreading of terrorism and separatism – uncertain future of the civilization. Is this what we have expected and hoped for after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Twenty years later,  most of the countries in the Balkans, are puppet states servicing NATO and western multinational corporations. The nations are more divided, the region is underdeveloped and full of tensions. What used to be state or socially owned companies, industry, banks, food production, services – in the course of criminal privatization became property of the western multinational corporations and a few national tycoons.

From the year 2000. about 40 billion of USD have been sucked from Serbia only by the western banks. Hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons still live in misery in central Serbia without chances for free and safe return to their homes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and Metohija. This is the real face of the western democracy and humanism.

MV: What are the prospects for the Kosovo and Metohija’s problem?

ZJ: Perspectives for the balanced, just and sustainable solution will be real only if the West recognizes its own mistakes such as decades of  support, financing, training and arming separatist and terrorist groups in Kosovo and Metohija.

Who can claim, for instance, that Germany’s two decades long hospitality and support to the “Kosovo Government in exile” of Buiar Bukoshi (1980-2000) was the policy of legally based relations, peace and stability!? Or, could there be proclamation of illegal secession in 2008, if there hadn’t been the 1999 NATO aggression, in alliance with the terrorist OBK [KLA] and subsequent occupation of this Serbia’s province?

For the peaceful, balanced and lasting solution there is need for political will to respect the basic principles of the international law, the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Document and UN SC resolution 1244 (1999). This decision approved by all permanent UN SC members (USA, Russia, China, GB, France) guaranties wide autonomy for the Province within sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, i.e. Serbia.

It authorizes also return to the Province of agreed contingents of Serbia’s military and police, free and safe return of all refugees and displaced persons, including about 250.000 of Serbs and other non-Albanians to their homes. None of these provisions have been complied with, as yet.

The problem is that the western powers (NATO) have been trying to impose a “deal” according to which Serbia would recognize illegal unilateral secession and membership of Kosovo to the United Nations, now, in exchange for the promises to become EU member sometime in the future. Such a “deal” does not take into consideration any principles, laws or UN SC decisions. What the leading western powers are interested in is “solution” tailored to please western geopolitical interests – expansion toward East and confrontation with Russia.

Germany and France, want that Serbia pays for a return of the EU unity on Kosovo. Once they persuade Serbia to sign the “comprehensive legally binding document” then illegal and unilateral secession of Kosovo would become virtually legal. Subsequently the five EU member states opposing recognition (Spain, Slovakia, Rumania, Greece and Cyprus) would be relieved of the fear of this precedent.

Of course, those hopes are in vain. Not only that Serbia will not enter a dishonest “deal”, but I should like to see Serbia’s diplomacy working hard to further expand the number of EU member countries withdrawing their hastily recognitions [of Kosovo as a nation state] undertaken on Washington’s “advice”, contrary to the international law, peace and stability in Europe.

MV: What is your opinion on the Brussels negotiations on Kosovo under EU umbrella?

ZJ: The Brussels format of negotiations on Kosovo and Metohija is an inappropriate formula without chances to deliver a balanced and sustainable solution. It is so because the Brussels process includes only the countries and institutions which have continuously and relentlessly supported secession and terrorism in Kosovo and Metohija, even by military aggression, and excludes all countries and organizations including the UN, which support sovereignty and integrity of Serbia as well as compliance with the norms of international law.

Russia and China which participated actively in ending NATO aggression and in adopting UNSC resolution 1244 in 1999 cannot be excluded from the conclusion implementation [of these procedures] in 2019.

As for “Kosovo precedent”, it is already working. Catalonia is just the most visible proof. The others, unfortunately, are “in the pipeline” awaiting their turn.

MV: With a new name – north – Macedonia, Macedonia is joining the Atlantic Alliance. What will be the impacts of this for the Balkans region?

ZJ: Everybody should be free to choose (i.e. its own options) – alliances or neutrality. With regard to the separatist tendency and ideas regarding the creation of Greater Albania, I suppose, the Government in Skopje is hoping that formal membership in NATO will guarantee sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country. There is also expectation that this may help in speeding up the process of getting EU membership.

Serbia maintains the policy of openness, good neighborliness and mutually beneficial cooperation with North Macedonia. Overall relations are traditionally good, supported from both sides and I believe that this will continue after the country formally becomes a NATO member. Newly elected president Stevo Pendarovski and Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic have just exchanged messages expressing their support for further strengthening of good neighborly relations.

MV: How do doctrines and groups close to radical Islam influence the region’s equilibrium?

ZJ: Muslim radicalism in the Balkans is a part of the heritage of the civil war in Bosnia and Hercegovina (1992-5).

During that period, several western power centers which supported Muslim side, were involved in bringing  in from the Middle East, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Africa and other places, thousands of mujahidin to strengthen forces of Alija Izetbegovic. [They also armed these foreign fighters]

Many of them not only remained in the region in the wake of the war, they were also actively engaged in spreading extremist indoctrination and adoption of elements of sharia law, up to the present. Thus places like Gornja Maoca, Stijena and some others in Bosnia and Herzegovina are controlled by wahhabists.

Extremism financed from outside, is growing.

Kosovo and Metohija and Bosnia and Herzegovina are the places of recruitment of hundreds of ISIS mujahidin.

MV: As Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina shows itself as one of the most problematic point of whole Balkans area. What are the prospects. Is there the possibility of a new conflict?

ZJ: Perspectives of peace and stability in the Balkans are closely related to changes and processes in Europe as well as globally.

Europe is divided on many lines and caught in confrontation. Terrorism is continuously affecting everyday life. There are more foreign military bases and armament in Europe now then at the time of cold war confrontation.

Geopolitical games and the struggle for spheres of influence are being intensified not only on the global level but within western alliances, too. All this is negatively affecting the Balkans still far from recovery of the recent conflicts. Naturally, that growing tensions, extremisms, revival of neo-fascism, revision of history, double standard policy cause uncertainty and fear of new conflicts.

In such conditions, Albanian separatism [in Kosovo] and the concept of Greater Albania supported by certain power centers are the main source of instability and uncertainty in the Balkans. The other source is enlargement of the Muslim extremism particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina but also in other Balkan countries and regions including in the Province of Kosovo and Metohija.

According to mass media reports, a lot of money from certain Gulf countries is being invested in the spreading and strengthening of the Wahhabi movement. The problem of massive migration from the Middle East and North Africa is also being used [by these power centres] to foment the growth of extremism.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina the basic problem is to revise the Dayton Peace Agreement (1995) guaranteeing constitutional order based on the equality of the two entities – Republic of Srpska and Federation of B&H, i.e. three constituent peoples – Serbs, Bosniaks (Muslims) and Croats. There is a clear intention of the western power centers to establish unitary state dominated by the Bosnians in spite of the fact that Alija Izetbegovic’s attempt to impose “Bosnian domination” was the cause of the bloody civil war 1992-1995.

To be able to approach the Balkans in a normal, objective and balanced way, to be able to act efficiently and constructively, Europe needs to undergo open and profound re-examination of its own policies during the whole period extending from the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the present, including its involvement in the so called Yugoslav crisis (1991-95), NATO aggression on Yugoslavia (1999) and the hasty recognition of Kosovo in 2008.

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Minor editing of interview transcript by Global Research.

Zivadin Jovanovic, Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs of FR of Yugoslavia (1998-2000), President of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals

Inimitable to a fault, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating had been fairly quiet on his party’s policies till an impromptu press intervention last week.  Catching two journalists of the ABC off-guard, Keating took little time to land a few blows against Australia’s foreign and domestic intelligence security officers.  They had, in Keating’s view, “lost their strategic bearings”.  The security agencies were effectively “running foreign policy”; when such matters eventuate, only one conclusion can be reached: “the nutters are in charge.”

For the former Labor prime minister, the China Syndrome had clotted the grey cells of the security wonks, blocking perception and clarity.  Security chiefs were knocking on the doors of Parliamentarians; prejudices were doing the rounds.  Australia, the United States and other likeminded powers had been in denial about the Middle Kingdom and its aspirations, seeing them as defence and security threats in various guises.  They had to “recognise the legitimacy of China”; it had to be respected for rising from poverty even if that particular story did not sit well with the United States. 

Keating took a particularly sharp interest in John Garnaut, foreign correspondent and former national security advisor to former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.  That particular China hand written in August 2018 that any spirit of democratisation worth its salt died with the protestors at Tiananmen Square in 1989.  “Belatedly, and quite suddenly, political leaders, policy makers and civil society actors in a dozen nations around the world are scrambling to come to terms with a form of China’s extraterritorial influence described variously as ‘sharp power’, ‘United Front work’ and ‘influence operations’.”  In Garnaut’s view, the world’s many eyes were upon Australia to set an example. 

Keating advocated a cleaning operation, a large broom applied with swiftness removing the likes of Garnaut and the carriers of paranoid whispers.  “Once that Garnaut guy came back from China and Turnbull gave him the ticket to go and hop into the security services, they’ve all gone berko ever since.”

On some level, Keating’s comments are bound to be relevant, even if they put the noses of such types as Peter Jennings at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute out of joint.  (No, especially if they do.)  Security chiefs and their cronies can get long in the tooth and worn in thinking.  Wrinkled and crusted, a clear-out is far from undesirable.  A salient reminder from Napoleon comes to mind: move your bureaucrats around once every five years; sedentary practices often result in unhealthy concentrations of power. 

Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten was far more diplomatic, suggesting that his party had a good working relationship with the current chiefs, claiming respect and a co-operative working interest.  The potential prime minister is mindful who he will have to work with. 

“The three Bs are the biggest threat to Bill Shorten once he’s in office: boats, bombs and bytes,” came an opinion from a senior official to the ABC.

A chance of sorts had been presented to the Liberal National government.  Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, generally quiet in this election, smelled an opportunity to use the Keating intervention. 

“Since September 2014, Australia’s law enforcement agencies have disrupted 15 major terrorist attack plots and conducted 41 counter-terrorism operations, with 93 people charged.” 

Such a statement reads like the body-count figures from the US effort in Vietnam: they are units of poor measure rather than attributes of effect.  But Dutton, like many a plodding police officer, misses the picture in favour of the stabbing daub. 

Another effort was made by campaign spokesperson and Trade minister Simon Birmingham, speaking in a debate held in Adelaide.  Keating, he claimed, had insulted “the heads of our intelligence services”.  He did note that “Labor have distanced themselves from the remarks by Paul Keating” but found it hard to resist the point that the former PM “is not an isolated figure in terms of… Bob Carr and others who sit within the (Labor) ranks.” 

Did the Coalition government have a better approach?  “We make sure we maintain a firm and consistent approach (towards China) and in doing so make sure we keep Australia’s economic interests strong (and) our national security interests strong too.”  Suitably weasel-like, in other words. 

Labor’s Senator Penny Wong, also at the same event, expressed a degree of disgust (“really desperate,” she fumed), though it should only be treated in the context of her desire to be Australia’s next foreign affairs minister.  The China psychosis in Australian political thinking can be unpredictable, swaying between a “come and buy my coal” to “stay out of my backyard, Huawei”.  Seeing the prospect of having to deal with the foot soldiers of the Middle Kingdom in a new government, Wong is attempting to play that Janus-faced game Australian politicians have proven rather bad at, whatever the likes of Garnaut and Jennings might think. 

Not wishing to be either pleasing harlots or submissive doormats, yet wishing to keep a hand in the voracious Chinese market (Cathay, I hear you say!), the Australian political class has had to tailor, trim and modify their traditional fears of the Yellow Peril while still shouting from the roof tops about it.  Only the likes of mining magnate Clive Palmer can express unvarnished dislike for people he sees as his business competitors and hungry beyond satiation.  The rest, notably those wallahs buried in the security establishment, can rest easy that Keating’s eminently sensible suggestion will not come to pass.

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

No kidding – this is not our headline, but Newsweek’s: “US Special Forces School Publishes New Guide For Overthrowing Foreign Governments” – and as far as we can tell they are the only major mainstream outlet to have picked up on the fact that the US military is now essentially openly bragging on past and future capabilities to foster covert regime change operations. 

The 250-page study entitled “Support to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effectiveness” was put out by the Joint Special Operations University under US Special Operations Command, which is the Army’s official unified command center which overseas all joint covert and clandestine missions out of MacDill AFB, Florida.

“This work will serve as a benchmark reference on resistance movements for the benefit of the special operations community and its civilian leadership,” the report introduces.

The study examines 47 instances of US special forces trying to intervene in various countries from 1941-2003, thus special attention is given to the Cold War, but it doesn’t include coups which lacked “legitimate resistance movements” — such as the case of ‘Operation AJAX’ in 1953 which overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Though infamous disasters such the abortive CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba are highlighted, the US military report (perhaps predictably) finds that among those nearly fifty covert interventions surveyed, most interventions were “successful”.

“One thing common to all 47 cases reviewed in this study is the fact that the targeted state was ruled either by an unfriendly occupying force or by a repressive authoritarian regime,” the author, Army Special Forces veteran Will Irwin wrote. The study focuses on historical regime change operations but in parts hints at the future, saying, “Russia and China have boldly demonstrated expansionist tendencies.”

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Success vs. Failure data from the new US military study published earlier this week entitled Support to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effectiveness

It also asserts that unrest across the Middle East since the fall of the Soviet Union should ultimately be blamed on the legacy of past Soviet policy and failures, rather than on the United States.

Newsweek summarizes of the study’s conclusions:

Of the 47 cases analyzed, 23 were deemed “successful,” 20 were designated “failures,” two were classified as “partially successful” and two more—both during World War II—were called “inconclusive” as the broader conflict led to an Allied victory anyway. Coercion was the most successful method at a three-quarters rate of success or partial success, while disruption worked just over half the time and regime change only yielded the desired result in 29 percent of the cases reviewed.

And further another interesting element involved the failure of operations which intervened in countries “under peacetime conditions”:

Other major findings included observations that most operations “were carried out under wartime conditions, with those being nearly twice as successful as cases conducted under peacetime conditions” and “support to nonviolent civil resistance seems to be more likely to succeed than support to armed resistance.” At the same time, they were also “most effective when conducted in direct support of a military campaign rather than as an independent or main effort operation.”

The report identifies about half a dozen governments from Indonesia to Afghanistan to Serbia to Iraq that were “successfully” overthrown by US operations, but in many more cases identifies covert “disrupt” operations for a desired outcome.

The study did not include within its scope current US involved proxy wars which have unfolded in the past decade, such in Syria or Libya or Ukraine, but only mentions these in passing.

In concluding remarks the author acknowledges that the study could help “explore ways the timely application of SOF capabilities” can influence “resistance movements” which are becoming increasingly violent, “thereby possibly helping to prevent the next Syria”.

Whether this means swifter action would have resulted in quick regime change in Syria or if the study author believes US support to the “rebels” was doomed from the beginning remains unexplored.

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All images in this article are from ZH

Everybody who has been paying attention knows that the war on Syria is not a civil war, that it was and is externally-orchestrated, perpetrated, and sustained, and that the on-going catastrophe was avoidable.

The U.S Empire and its NATO accomplices, including Canada, are entirely responsible for the carnage and the on-going holocaust. Western open sources acknowledge all of this.

What people may not realize is that the War against Syria and its peoples started well before the violence erupted.  Regime-Change Wars, which are Supreme International War Crimes, do not just “happen”.  (Just as preparations for the war against Afghanistan, the first country to be attacked post-9/11, occurred well in advance of 9/11).

In the following episode of Janice Kortkamp’s “Face To Face”, she walks us through a timeline[1] of war preparations that Washington, its allies, and their agencies – the real “brutal dictators”– engaged in to prepare the ground for their overt war crimes and terrorism against non-belligerent, sovereign, Syria.

Notice that Empire is using similar strategies in its war-making against Venezuela, Iran, and beyond. It is vilifying the respective governments’ leadership, it is waging economic warfare against them, and it is preparing proxy terrorist forces for ground invasions.

In Iran, as with Syria, the same terrorists that the West supports – including ISIS and al Qaeda[2] – will be used as pretexts for invasion, as forces for destroying Iran, and as pretexts to justify enlargements to the domestic police/surveillance state apparatus in North America.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

[1] Janice Kortkamp, “Timeline leading up to the US war against Syria.” Syria Resources Archive,

18 December, 2016. (https://www.syriaresources.com/timeline-leading-up-to-the-us-war-against-syria/?fbclid=IwAR3wk45aYQe2EyEQTbqSOglioBS-WQw0eQB4hb2bCFm7C5HWwPm-IOhR5P0) Accessed 21 May, 2019.

[2] Garikai Chengu, “America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group.” 08 March, 2019. 19 September, 2014. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-created-al-qaeda-and-the-isis-terror-group/5402881) Accessed 12 May, 2019.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

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Author: Mark Taliano

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Is it just a coincidence that TV networks are re-running old ‘Dirty Harry’ films just as a powerful US Naval armada and Air Force B-52 bombers are headed for what could be a clash with Iran? Here we go again with the ‘good guys’ versus the ‘bad guys,’ and ‘make my day.’

Maybe it’s more bluffing? The current US military deployment was scheduled before the latest flare-up with Iran, but the bellicose threats of White House neocon crusaders like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo certainly create the impression that the US wants war.

Adding to the warlike excitement, President Trump just ordered seizure of a large North Korean bulk cargo ship. This was clearly a brazen act of war and violation of international law. More dangerous brinkmanship by administration war-mongers who increasingly appear besotted by power and hubris.

So much for the president who vowed to avoid foreign wars – and so much for the millions of anti-war voters who believed him.

Why does Trump let his two horsemen of the apocalypse get away with this?

I’m following this latest gunboat diplomacy with particular interest because I had the privilege in 1994 of going to sea on the very same aircraft carrier, “CVN-72 USS Abraham Lincoln” that is now reportedly steaming towards Iran’s coast. With it are a nuclear submarine, a cruiser and a group of destroyers, all equipped with land-attack missiles.

As a former soldier and war correspondent, I was deeply impressed by the ‘Lincoln’ and her youthful crew. They were efficient, motivated and superbly well-organized. In our lifetime, no other navy will ever equal the skills of the US carrier fleet. The only real threat to America’s huge carriers is the growing power and accuracy of Russian, Chinese and Indian heavy anti-ship missiles.

The Navy task force is backed up by B-52 nuclear-capable heavy bombers now stationed in Qatar, and US warplanes from other bases in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, Jordan, and Pakistan that effectively surround Iran. The carriers are just for show and threat.

Israel, which is eager to see the US attack Iran, has helpfully provided ‘intelligence’ allegedly showing that Iran is planning to attack certain US installations in the Mideast. Interestingly, Israel and its American supporters did the same thing in 2001 and 2003, pushing the US to attack its foe Iraq. Washington largely relied on Israeli intelligence about Iraq since its own resources were so weak – and senior Bush administration neocons kept touting the claims from Israel.

President Trump sees himself as an emperor besieged by Washington Lilliputians. There’s nothing like a jolly little war to shut up all his critics and garner media support. Even better, the ‘bad guys’ in this case are ‘Eye-ranian’ Muslims. Trump’s religious base would thrill at the prospect of pounding the Islamic Republic. During the Bush administration years, over 80% of so-called ‘born again’ Christians backed war against Iraq. What happened to ‘turn the other cheek?’

This administration’s neocons have made it their life’s work to destroy Iran, which is considered Israel’s only serious enemy and a champion of the Palestinian cause.

The Trump administration has largely fallen under the influence of Israel’s hard right in foreign and military affairs. So Bolton and Pompeo are clearly trying to engineer an incident that would spark war.

Not full-scale war, but an excuse for the US and Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, key military sites and communications infrastructure as was done with Iraq. It won’t be back all the way to the Stone Age, but half way, so that Iran’s development is set back by a decade.

Israel will then use its control over the US Congress to keep Iran under a very tight embargo. The Pentagon’s original plan to punish Iran called for some 2,300 air strikes on Day 1 alone.

Washington’s hope, as usual, is that growing misery and hardship in Iran will provoke a revolt to oust the Islamic government, allowing the US to install the exiled Iranian royalists it has waiting in Southern California. This was the pattern in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Venezuela. It’s not diplomacy, just brute force.

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After last week’s US-backed coup failed to install Juan Guaido in power in Venezuela, Guaido remains keen to be supported by the US, and told Italian newspaper La Stampa that he would “probably accept” a US offer to invade.

Though the Trump Administration has constantly threatened to invade Venezuela in recent months, it appears they have yet to explicitly make an offer to Guaido to do so. Clearly the US would want to use such an acceptance as cover for a unilateral invasion.

Yet the Trump Administration has so long taken the liberty of speaking for Guaido in the international community, it probably feels his imprimatur is less about what Guaido says, and more about what the administration can claim he’d want.

The US has hoped that threatening the existing Venezuelan government and the international community would eventually see the regime change happen. As that continues to fail to work, however, hawks in the administration have been pushing for a direct US military involvement.

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Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com.

The Facts

There is widespread media misreporting about allegations made against Julian Assange in Sweden in 2010. Here are the facts:

First, Assange was always willing to answer any questions from the Swedish authorities and repeatedly offered to do so, over six years. The widespread media assertion that Assange “evaded” Swedish questioning is false. It was the Swedish prosecutor who for years refused to question Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy: they only did so, in November 2016, after the Swedish courts forced the prosecutor to travel to London. Sweden dropped the investigation six months later, in May 2017.

Second, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to avoid onward extradition to the US – not to avoid extradition to Sweden or to refuse to face the Swedish allegations. Assange would have accepted extradition to Sweden had it provided an assurance against onward extradition to the US (as Amnesty International also urged at the time) – but both Sweden and the UK refused to provide an assurance that he would not be extradited to the US.

Third, Sweden wanted to drop its arrest warrant for Assange in 2013. It was the British government that insisted that the case against him continue. This is confirmed in emails released under a tribunal challenge following a Freedom of Information Act request. UK prosecutors admitted to deleting key emails and engaged in elaborate attempts to keep correspondence from the public record. Indeed, the lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service advised the Swedes in January 2011 not to visit London to interview Assange. An interview at that time could have prevented the long-running embassy standoff.

Fourth, despite widespread false reporting, Assange was never charged with anything related to the Swedish allegations. These only reached the level of a “preliminary investigation”. The Swedish prosecution questioned Assange on two separate occasions, in 2010 and 2016. He has consistentlyprofessed his innocence.

Fifth, almost entirely omitted from current media reporting is that the initial Swedish preliminary investigation in 2010 was dropped after the chief prosecutor of Stockholm concluded that “the evidence did not disclose any evidence of rape” and that “no crime at all” had been committed. Text messages between the two women, which were later revealed, do not complain of rape. Rather, they show that the women “did not want to put any charges on JA but that the police were keen on getting a grip on him” and that they “only wanted him to take a test”. One wrote that “it was the police who made up the charges” and told a friend that she felt that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her”.

Sixth, Assange left Sweden after the prosecutor told him that he was free to leave as he was not wanted for questioning. Assange had stayed in Sweden for five weeks. After he left, Interpol bizarrely issued a Red Notice for Assange, usually reserved for terrorists and dangerous criminals – raising concerns that this was not just about sexual accusations.

Seventh, Sweden’s investigation is now entirely closed. It was shelved for six years during the period 2010-2016 while the Swedish prosecutor refused to question Assange in London. Sweden’s Court of Appeal ruled that that the prosecutor had breached her duty because a preliminary investigation either has to be open and active leading to a charge, or closed—there is no intermediate phase. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also concluded that the prosecutor’s inaction had resulted in Sweden and the UK violating international obligations.

Eighth, there was no technical impediment for the prosecutor to proceed to charge Assange after he was questioned in the Ecuadorian embassy. In early 2017, Assange’s lawyers asked a Swedish court to force the prosecutor to either charge Assange or drop the arrest warrant. The prosecutor closed the investigation in May 2017 without attempting to charge him.

Since his arrest on 11 April 2019, there has been considerable political pressure on Sweden to reopen the investigation. Theoretically any closed investigation can be reopened until the statute of limitations expires—August 2020 in this case. Such calls serve to displace the critical issue of Assange’s impending US extradition over WikiLeaks publications (whether from UK or Sweden). They also obfuscate critical facts, such as the fact that the UK and Swedish authorities had actively prevented Assange from responding to the allegations, which is contrary to basic principles of due process.

It is critical to note that the re-opened Swedish allegations in September 2010 occurred after WikiLeaks published the Iraq “Collateral Murder” video in April 2010 and the Afghanistan war logs in July 2010. In fact, US grand jury proceedings already began against Assange in June 2010 and by July, the US was publicly describing WikiLeaks as a “very real and potential threat”. The Intercept’s Charles Glass has reported that “Sources in Swedish intelligence told me at the time that they believed the U.S. had encouraged Sweden to pursue the case.” Other reports from just days before the Swedish allegations were initiated show that the U.S. State Department was encouraging allied statesto initiate prosecutions against Assange. To ignore all this, as much media reporting does, is to ignore vital further context.

In December 2018, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, together with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, reiterated their finding from 2016 and urged Assange’s freedom to be restored. UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture are currently investigation Assange’s case.

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This article was first crossposted in May 2013.

In February the Guardian and BBC Arabic unveiled a documentary exploring the role of retired Colonel James Steele in the recruitment, training and initial deployments of the CIA advised and funded Special Police Commandos in Iraq.

Israel has arrested more than 50,000 Palestinian children since it began its occupation of the West Bank more than 50 years ago, new research has revealed.

According to data released by the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, more than 50,000 arrest cases among Palestinian minors were documented in the occupied West Bank since 1967, including 16,655 cases of child arrests since the Second Intifada which broke out in 2000.

Head of research in the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, Abdel Nasser Farawneh released the figures whilst speaking in the two-day fifth European conference on Palestinian prisoners.

The conference took place in Brussels on Saturday and addresses Israel’s systematic use of prisons as a part of its brutal occupation of Palestine.

Farawneh added arrests of children are part of Israel’s methodical policy to diminish any chance Palestinian children may have of living a normal childhood.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. More than 600,000 Israelis live in settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

All Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank are classed as illegal under international law, particularly Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which asserts that “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.

Israeli forces and settlers routinely attack Palestinians in the occupied territories, demolishing their homes, poisoning their livestock and vandalising their properties.

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Featured image is by Nurphoto