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.

Sources

Altschull, Herbert J. (1984/1995): Agents of power. The media and public policy. Longman, New York.

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Steffens, Manfred [Ziegler, Stefan] (1969): Das Geschäft mit der Nachricht. Agenturen, Redaktionen, Journalisten. Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg.

Tilgner, Ulrich (2003): Der inszenierte Krieg – Täuschung und Wahrheit beim Sturz Saddam Husseins. Rowohlt, Reinbek.

Wilke, Jürgen (Hrsg.) (2000): Von der Agentur zur Redaktion. Böhlau, Köln.

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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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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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

List Price: $22.95

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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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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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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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

Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war.

The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch, and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky. All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.

Ibrahim Rugova, an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani, a fellow member of Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo.

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. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization’s vision of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:

“The independence of Kosovo is the only solution…We cannot live together. That is excluded.” [i]

Source: Independent Balkan News Agency

Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,

“With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears instead of Rugova. A beast.” [ii]

There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.

The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo’s major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation. Faik Jashari, one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia’s government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation’s Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic Muslim members.

U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as “the Serbs,” even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.

After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]

Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.

“We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy.” [v]

It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private.

Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.

“She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn’t say anything to her. She didn’t want to talk with us and didn’t want to listen to our arguments.” [vi]

One day it was Koka’s birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators, inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.

“It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing,” Koka recalled. “I remember Madeleine Albright saying: ‘I really like partisan songs. But if you don’t accept this, the bombs will fall.’” [vii]

According to delegation member Nikola Šainović,

“Madeleine Albright told us all the time: ‘If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.’” Šainović added, “We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo,” but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]

From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill “decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter.” [ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.

As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group’s fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group’s political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.

On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,

“Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained.”

Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]

When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them. Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, “Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting.” The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]

At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation’s decision by 1:00 PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.

Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo’s abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states:

“The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.”

Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall “ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources.” [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.

The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate, as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair’s wishes.

The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to “recommend” the “removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo.” If the Chair’s command was not obeyed “in the time requested, the Joint Commission may decide to take the recommended action,” and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The Chair was also authorized to order the “curtailment of operations of existing institutions.” [xv]Any organization that failed to bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.

Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to “invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force” in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to “invite” NATO to take over the province of Kosovo or suffer the consequences.

Yugoslavia was required “to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required” by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]

The plan granted NATO “unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum” to “communicate.” Although the document indicated NATO would make “reasonable efforts to coordinate,” there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, “upon simple request,” would be required to grant NATO “all telecommunication services, including broadcast services…free of cost.” [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.

The plan did not restrict NATO’s presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its “vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia].” [xxi] NATO would be “granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges.” [xxii]

The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have “complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout Kosovo.” Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held “liable for any damages to public or private property.” [xxiii] NATO as a whole would also be “immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal,” regardless of its actions anywhere on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]

Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.

There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an “international” (meaning, Western-led) meeting to be held after three years “to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo.”[xxvi] It was no mystery to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia’s borders to further break apart the nation.

U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.

“We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept,” Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, “because they needed a little bombing.” [xxvii]

At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:

“A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations.” [xxviii]

Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had “proposed solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities.” But “agreement was not what they were after.” Instead, Western officials engaged in “open aggression,” and this was a game “about troops and troops alone.” [xxix]

While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to unquestioningly repeat the government’s line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation when he said,

“We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don’t sign up to these texts, it’s extremely difficult to see how NATO could then take action against Belgrade.” [xxx]

Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long as it was concealed. [xxxi]

Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him:

“If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in. You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves.” [xxxii]

That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation. When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded:

“If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me.” [xxxiii]

This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.

Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark, who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaçi’s mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.

“Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade,” a senior U.S. official said. “But it went off the rails because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians.” [xxxv]

On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage the Albanians to sign.

So-called “negotiations” reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was “incomprehensible” that “no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated.” In response to the Yugoslavs’ proposal for modifications to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]

The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that “first one needs to determine what is to be implemented, and only then to determine the methods of implementation.” [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about regarding implementation “when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything.” U.S. officials responded that the Yugoslav delegation “cannot negotiate,” adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]

From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation’s signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext for war.

On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy, condemning the Paris meeting as “a kind of show,” which was meant “to deceive public opinion in the whole world.” [xxxix]

While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already been made. “In fact,” Pangalos reported, “she told me to ‘desist, you’re just being a nuisance.’” [xl] In a final act of desperation to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]

Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.

In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations.

Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to member nations.

Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO’s claim that it is “committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes,” the record shows otherwise.

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Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org. Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich

Notes

[i] “Albanian Rebels Say Kosovo Independence Vital,” Reuters, October 27, 1998.

[ii] “Recollections of Failed Negotiations in Rambouillet: Could the Bombing Have Been Avoided?” Nedeljnik, February 6, 2019.

[iii] Interview with Faik Jashari and other Kosovo Albanians, by delegation that included author, Belgrade, August 9, 1999.

[iv] Bogoljub Janićević, “Preparing for Bombing in Rambouillet,” Večernje Novosti, March 19, 2018.

[v] “Recollections of Failed Negotiations in Rambouillet: Could the Bombing Have Been Avoided?” Nedeljnik, February 6, 2019.

[vi] Interview with Faik Jashari and other Kosovo Albanians, by delegation that included author, Belgrade, August 9, 1999.

[vii] “Recollections of Failed Negotiations in Rambouillet: Could the Bombing Have Been Avoided?” Nedeljnik, February 6, 2019.

[viii] “Nikola Šainović for Courier Reveals the Secret of the Last Paper from Rambouillet,” Socialist Party of Serbia, February 12, 2019.

[ix] Christopher Hill, Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, a Memoir, Simon and Schuster, 2014, p 149.

[x] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[xi] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[xii] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[xiii] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 4a, Article I, February 23, 1999.

[xiv] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 5, Article I, section 3, February 23, 1999.

[xv] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 5, Article IV, section 5, February 23, 1999.

[xvi] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article I, section 1a, February 23, 1999.

[xvii] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article I, section 1c, February 23, 1999.

[xviii] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article IV, section 2, February 23, 1999.

[xix] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article VIII, section 5b, February 23, 1999.

[xx] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article VIII, section 5b, February 23, 1999.

[xxi] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 8, February 23, 1999.

[xxii] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 11, February 23, 1999.

[xxiii] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 15, February 23, 1999.

[xxiv] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 6, February 23, 1999.

[xxv] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 7, February 23, 1999.

[xxvi] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 8, Article I, section 3, February 23, 1999.

[xxvii] “Albright: They Need a Little Bombing,” Workers World News Service, June 10, 1999.

George Kenney, “Rolling Thunder: the Rerun,” The Nation, June 14, 1999. In the Nation article, the quote is attributed to “a senior State Department official.” In the Workers World report, further detail is provided: “On the Pacifica program ‘Democracy Now’ on June 2, Kenney confirmed that the high official was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.”

[xxviii] Broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, 9:15 AM, March 23, 1999.

[xxix] Transcript, Press Conference by Milan Milutinović, Tanjug, February 23, 1999.

[xxx] “Cook Warns Kosovo Albanians Over Air Strikes,” Reuters, February 21, 1999.

[xxxi] Peter Dejaegher, “Serbs Feel Cheated,” De Standaard (Groot-Bijgaarden), March 31, 1999.

[xxxii] Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary, Harper Collins, 2013, p 406.

[xxxiii] Christopher Hill, Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, a Memoir, Simon and Schuster, 2014, p 153.

[xxxiv] Jane Perlez, “Talks on Kosovo Near Breakdown; Deadline is Tuesday,” New York Times, February 23, 1999.

[xxxv] R. Jeffrey Smith, “Albanian Intransigence Stymied Accord,” Washington Post, February 24, 1999.

[xxxvi] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[xxxvii] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[xxxviii] “Nikola Šainović for Courier Reveals the Secret of the Last Paper from Rambouillet,” Socialist Party of Serbia, February 12, 2019.

[xxxix] “Press Conference Held by the President of Serbia,” Politika, March 19, 1999.

[xl] “Ex-Minister Claims ‘Meddling’ in Kosovo Prompted Sacking,” Athens News, December 1, 2001.

[xli] S.J. Matić, R. Dragović, “20 Years Since the Start of Negotiations in Rambouillet: Occupation Has Been Avoided,” Večernje Novosti, February 6, 2019.

“We welcome the positive role of Russia, China, and any other country in the Afghan peace process”, a U.S. State Department official said on Friday, an unexpected announcement considering the increased trade tensions between the U.S. and China after Washington’s unilateral imposition of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs on Chinese imports.

Some might be struggling to make sense of why President Donald Trump would condemn China on trade while one of his diplomats praised it for its role in the Afghan peace process that very same week, but this just proves that pragmatic cooperation between the two countries is still possible in areas of shared interest despite disagreements elsewhere and that the official’s words should therefore be interpreted as sincere.

China has been participating in the Afghan peace process for quite a few years already, but the latest round has been the most successful thus far. Out of all the main parties taking part in this process, China is the only one that’s totally neutral because it doesn’t have a history of military-political involvement in the country.

The first China-Afghanistan-Pakistan foreign ministers’ dialogue was convened in Beijing, December 26, 2017. /CGTN Photo

This uniquely positions China to mediate between all the relevant players and contribute to shaping a constructive long-term outcome for sustaining peace in the conflict-torn country if an agreement is ever reached between the warring sides. Only China has the capability to rebuild Afghanistan, and it can put its experience with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to use in constructing much-needed roads, railways, schools, hospitals, and power plants there once the war ends.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the root causes of terrorism can be traced back to economic factors that somehow or another contributed to an individual’s radicalization, so rectifying socio-economic disparities by bringing fair and even development to Afghanistan’s people should in theory reduce terrorism in the long run.

Providing jobs and respectable livelihoods to its citizens can give them opportunities that they’ve never had before, improving their lives and therefore making all of them stakeholders in enthusiastically upholding whatever peace might eventually be reached. This in turn could strengthen national reconciliation by creating a community of shared destiny within the country prior to incorporating this national community into the wider one presently being formed along the Silk Roads.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani receives U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad at the ‍Presidential Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, February 18, 2019.  /VCG Photo

Although the current American administration generally views relations with China as a zero-sum game, it seems that Afghanistan might be a notable exception to this pattern, suggesting that the U.S. might be more flexible on its stance when it concerns security-related issues (and especially those dealing with terrorism) than economic ones.

There’s a certain logic to this observation because President Trump is a successful businessman who earned his fortune in the hyper-competitive market of New York real estate, which naturally inclines him to see economic issues through a zero-sum prism. His military, however, has learned the hard way that anti-terrorist and nation-building campaigns must embrace win-win principles if they’re ever to be successful.

Keeping these concepts in mind, it makes sense why the State Department official welcomed the positive role that China is playing in the Afghan peace process in spite of the prevailing trade tensions between the two countries.

The U.S. seemingly understands the need for multilateral win-win cooperation in bringing peace to Afghanistan, but also more importantly in sustaining whatever deal might be reached seeing as how only China is capable of funding the war-torn country’s reconstruction and development projects.

Integrating the strategically positioned state into the Belt and Road Initiative would go a long way towards ensuring that its people have a bright future and are less vulnerable to the pernicious sway of terrorist propaganda, which therefore serves the entire world’s interests and is understandably worthy of universal praise.

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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 SCF

GR Editor’s Note

This incisive list of countries by the late William Blum was first published in 2013. 

In relation to recent developments in Ukraine, Latin America and the Middle East, it is worth recalling the history of US sponsored military coups and “soft coups” aka regime changes.

This article reviews the process of overthrowing sovereign governments through military coups, acts of war, support of terrorist organizations, covert ops in support of regime change.

Needless to say, while “US-Gate” is not an issue, this list in nonetheless revealing.

The legacy of William Blum lives

Michel Chossudovsky, March 20, 2022

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Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War. (* indicates successful ouster of a government)

• China 1949 to early 1960s
• Albania 1949-53
• East Germany 1950s
• Iran 1953 *
• Guatemala 1954 *
• Costa Rica mid-1950s
• Syria 1956-7
• Egypt 1957
• Indonesia 1957-8
• British Guiana 1953-64 *
• Iraq 1963 *
• North Vietnam 1945-73
• Cambodia 1955-70 *
• Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
• Ecuador 1960-63 *
• Congo 1960 *
• France 1965
• Brazil 1962-64 *
• Dominican Republic 1963 *
• Cuba 1959 to present
• Bolivia 1964 *
• Indonesia 1965 *
• Ghana 1966 *
• Chile 1964-73 *
• Greece 1967 *
• Costa Rica 1970-71
• Bolivia 1971 *
• Australia 1973-75 *
• Angola 1975, 1980s
• Zaire 1975
• Portugal 1974-76 *
• Jamaica 1976-80 *
• Seychelles 1979-81
• Chad 1981-82 *
• Grenada 1983 *
• South Yemen 1982-84
• Suriname 1982-84
• Fiji 1987 *
• Libya 1980s
• Nicaragua 1981-90 *
• Panama 1989 *
• Bulgaria 1990 *
• Albania 1991 *
• Iraq 1991
• Afghanistan 1980s *
• Somalia 1993
• Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
• Ecuador 2000 *
• Afghanistan 2001 *
• Venezuela 2002 *
• Iraq 2003 *
• Haiti 2004 *
• Somalia 2007 to present
• Libya 2011*
• Syria 2012

Q: Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington?

A: Because there’s no American embassy there.

Global Research Editor’s note: To this list published in February 2013, we must add Ukraine, where Viktor Yanukovych was successfully ousted in February 2014.

John Bolton has gotten away with a dangerous deception. The national security adviser’s announcement Sunday that the Pentagon has deployed air and naval forces to the Middle East, which he combined with a threat to Iran, points to a new maneuver to prepare the ground for an incident that could justify a retaliatory attack against Iran.

Bolton presented his threat and the deployments as a response to alleged intelligence about a possible Iranian attack on U.S. targets in the Middle East. But what has emerged indicates that the alleged intelligence does not actually reflect any dramatic new information or analysis from the U.S. intelligence community. Instead, it has all the hallmarks of a highly political case concocted by Bolton.

Further underscoring the deceptive character of Bolton’s maneuver is evidence that senior Israeli national security officials played a key role in creating the alleged intelligence rationale for the case.

The new initiative follows an audacious ruse carried out last fall by Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, detailed in Truthdig in February, to cast the firing of a few mortar rounds in the vicinity of the U.S. embassy and a consulate in Iraq as evidence of an effort by Tehran to harm U.S. diplomats. Bolton exploited that opportunity to press Pentagon officials to provide retaliatory military options, which they did, reluctantly.

Bolton and Pompeo thus established a policy that the Trump administration would hold Iran responsible for any incident involving forces supported by Iran that could be portrayed as an attack on either U.S. personnel or “interests.”

Bolton’s one-paragraph statement on Sunday considerably broadened that policy. It repeated the previously stated principle that the United States will respond to any alleged attack, whether by Iranian forces or by what the administration calls “proxy” forces. But it added yet another major point to Trump administration policy: “a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force [emphasis added].”

That language represents an obvious move by Bolton to create potential options for U.S. retaliation against Iran for a real or alleged attack by “proxy forces” on Israeli or Saudi forces or “interests.” Such a commitment to go to war with Iran over incidents related to Israeli or Saudi conflicts should be the subject of a major debate in the press and in Congress. Thus far, it has somehow escaped notice.

Significantly, on a flight to Finland on Sunday, Pompeo repeated the threat he made last September to respond to any attack by “proxy forces” on U.S. “interests.” He made no reference to possible attacks against “allies.”

Bolton and his staff claimed to the news media that what he characterizes as “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” are based on “intelligence.” Media reports about Bolton’s claim suggest, however, that his dramatic warning is not based on either U.S. intelligence reporting or analysis.

Citing “U.S. officials,” The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the alleged intelligence “showed that Iran drew up plans to target U.S. forces in Iraq and possibly Syria, to orchestrate attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb strait near Yemen through proxies and in the Personal Gulf with its own armed drones.”

But in the very next paragraph, the report quotes an official saying it is “unclear whether the new intelligence indicated operations Tehran planned to carry out imminently or contingency preparations in the case U.S.-Iran tensions erupted into hostilities.”

A Defense Department source said the intelligence showed “a change in behavior that could be interpreted to foreshadow an attack on American forces or interests,” according to The New York Times’ story on the matter. But the source didn’t actually say that any emerging intelligence had led to such a conclusion or even that any U.S. intelligence official has come to that conclusion.

The timing of the alleged new intelligence also suggests that Bolton’s claim is false. “As recently as last week there were no obvious sign of a new threat,” The Wall Street Journal reported. The New York Times similarly reported that “several Defense officials” said “as recently as last Friday they have had not seen reason to change the American military’s posture in the region.”

Normally, it would require intelligence from either a highly credible source within the Iranian government or an intercept of a sensitive communication from Iran to justify this kind of accusation. But no news outlet has brought word that any such spectacular new intelligence has found its way to the White House or the Pentagon.

The Journal’s report revealed, moreover, that Bolton has only a “fresh intelligence assessment” rather than any new intelligence report. That “assessment” is clearly not a product of the intelligence community, which would have taken at least several days to arrive at such a fundamental reinterpretation of Iranian intentions. The mysterious new “assessment” was evidently unknown outside Bolton’s office before Bolton swung into action last weekend.

We now know, in fact, that the sources behind Bolton’s claim were Israel’s national security adviser and intelligence agency. Axios published a report Monday by leading Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, who covers national security for Israel’s Channel 13, revealing that a delegation of senior Israeli officials had given Bolton “information” about “possible Iranian plots against the U.S. or its allies in the Gulf” two weeks earlier.

The Israeli delegation, led by national security adviser Meir Ben Shabbat, met with Bolton and other unnamed officials in the White House, according to Ravid, to discuss possible Iranian plans. Bolton himself tweeted on April 15 about his meeting with Shabbat:

Great meeting with Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat today. The close United States-Israel strategic partnership reflects the tremendous strength of the ties between our governments and the citizens of our two allied countries. pic.twitter.com/yEMQaFpHVx

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) April 15, 2019

Israeli officials told Ravid that they understood that “intelligence, gathered by the Mossad intelligence agency, was part of the reason for Bolton’s announcement.” What Ravid’s official sources told him reveals, however, that what the Israelis provided to Bolton was not really new intelligence at all.; it consisted of several scenarios for what the Iranians might be planning, according to one Israeli official.

“It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it,” the Israeli official told Ravid, “but it is clear to us that the Iranian temperature is on the rise as a result of the growing U.S. pressure campaign against them, and that they are considering retaliating against U.S. interests in the Gulf.”

That revelation explains the lack of evidence of either genuine U.S. intelligence reporting or proper assessment to support Bolton’s statement.

Bolton is an old hand at using allegedly damning intelligence on Iran to advance a plan of aggressive U.S. war. In 2003-04, he leaked satellite photographs of specific sites in Iran’s Parchin military complex to the press, claiming those images provided evidence of covert Iranian nuclear weapons-related experiments—even though they showed nothing of the sort. He then tried to pressure International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to insist on an inspection of the sites. When ElBaradei finally relented, he found nothing in that inspection to support Bolton’s claim.

Bolton’s deceptive maneuver has the effect of increasing the range of contingencies that would trigger a U.S. strike on Iran and represent a major advance toward his long-declared intention to attack it. More alarmingly, however, some media outlets have reported his claims without any serious questioning.

Given the violent struggles in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Israel itself, Bolton and the Netanyahu government will be able to portray an incident as an attack by Shiite militias, the Houthis or Hamas on Israeli, Saudi or U.S. “interests,” just as Bolton and Pompeo did last fall. That, in turn, would offer an opportunity for urging Trump to approve a strike against one or more Iranian military targets.

Even more alarming is that both acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and new CENTCOM commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie have signed up for the Bolton initiative. That means that the Pentagon and military leaders can no longer be counted on to oppose such a war, as they did in 2007, when Vice President Dick Cheney pushed unsuccessfully for a plan to retaliate against a future Iraqi militia attack on U.S. troops in Iraq.

The United States is in danger of falling for yet another war ruse as malignant as those that led Congress and the mainstream media to accept the invasion of Iraq or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist, historian and author who has covered U.S. wars and interventions in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen and Syria since 2004 and was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” (Just World Books, 2014).

Featured image is from Medium

There’s no doubt that India is one of the most geostrategically positioned countries in the world today and that its tilt one way or the other in the New Cold War could have major hemispheric reverberations for this global competition. That’s why the South Asian state has emerged as an object of intense rivalry between Russia and the US, with both Great Powers doing their utmost to get notionally “non-aligned” India to take their “side”.

The tug-of-war between the two is rapidly climaxing, however, after the US threw down the gauntlet and reportedly issued an ultimatum to India. The “Hindustan Times” published a piece headlined “US offers to sell THAAD defence system to India as alternative to Russian S-400s” detailing the offer that America made to its new “Major Defense Partner”. According to the outlet, the US is ready to impose CAATSA secondary sanctions against India if it honors its S-400 deal with Moscow, though seeing as how the country genuinely needs to procure new air defense systems, the US is willing to sell it THAADs instead.

Quite clearly, India’s choice one way or the other will greatly determine its geostrategic disposition in the New Cold War, but the odds don’t seem to be in Russia’s favor. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the international authority on the global arms industry, reported that Russia’s arms exports to India dropped 42% between 2009-2018 and were replaced by Western wares from the US, Israel, and France instead.

Moreover, India recently agreed to abide by the US’ unilateral anti-Iranian sanctions by discontinuing its purchase of oil from the country after Washington refused to renew its previous sanctions waiver to New Delhi. This will have catastrophic consequences for Iran because it will exacerbate the economic component of the ongoing Hybrid War against it by depriving the Islamic Republic of what had hitherto been its second-largest customer, and it also strongly suggests that India might bend to America’s will on the S-400s, too.

Simply put, Indo-American trade is much larger than its Indo-Russo counterpart, so Washington naturally wields much more leverage over New Delhi than Moscow does and isn’t afraid to weaponize it in pursuit of its grand strategic ends. That’s why it looks likely that Prime Minister Modi will bow down to Trump on trade if he wins re-election, at least judging by the comments made by the US Commerce Secretary during his recent trip to the country, in which case it should be assumed to be a fait accompli that India would also submit to American pressure on its S-400 deal as well.

Should that scenario come to pass, then it would surely have consequences not only for Russia, but for the whole of Eurasia as well. It’s difficult to imagine that the US would allow India to continue with its trans-Iranian North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) to Russia under those conditions, so threatening to impose secondary sanctions against it for non-compliance with America’s unilateral ones could deal serious economic damage to the Iranian economy if India bends on that issue too.

In addition, the US’ so-called “Indo-Pacific” concept clearly intends to use India to “contain” China, something that was noted by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and Sri Lankan Ambassador to Russia Dayan Jayatilleka. The US appreciates India’s stalwart refusal to join China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) just as much as it does its geostrategic location as a South Asian beachhead into Eurasia, which is yet another major commonality between these two countries and further explains why New Delhi has been wandering westward over the past half-decade since the start of the New Cold War.

As such, it appears very likely that the “Battle for India” will be won by the US instead of Russia, but the New Cold War would nevertheless be far from over since Moscow can just ramp up its relations with the global pivot state of Pakistan and focus on forming the Multipolar Trilateral between it, Islamabad, and their shared strategic partners in Beijing in order to counteract the strategic gains that America might make in South Asia through  India.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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 April 30, 2019, the Bolivarian Revolution defeated the latest in a series of attempted U.S.-orchestrated coups d’états since the inaugural one on January 23, when Guaidó was recognized as President by Washington.

One of the main pretexts being used for the U.S. intervention is that the May 2018 presidential elections were supposedly steeped in electoral irregularities and therefore deficient. Thus, Maduro was, according to this false narrative, not elected democratically.

However, in a twist of irony, it is the very U.S. interventionist activities – ongoing and supported by the Lima Group – that resulted in the ratification of Maduro as President. Since January 23, Venezuelans in the millions have marched and demonstrated innumerable times all across the country in support of Maduro as President and the Bolivarian Revolution he embodies. The detractors may scoff at this manifestation of political expression as not conforming to the acceptable norms of democracy, let alone electoral procedures.

However, millions of Venezuelans have continuously – for close to three months – voted with their feet and their voices. Can this experience replace actual voting in a ballot box? obviously, it cannot replace the formality. Nonetheless, the ongoing “voting in the streets and workplaces” is even more meaningful than a simple deposit in a ballot box. In fact, on May 4 the Venezuelans armed forces “went to the polls” once again to ratify what they voted for in May 2018.

It is only poetic justice that Maduro has strengthened his position as the legitimate President despite, or rather as a result of, the U.S. Maduro and the government know this; so does the U.S. However, the U.S. cannot afford to admit it, as it challenges the U.S.-centric view that people do not want socialism and revolution, which is supposedly forced upon the people despite their will.

In addition to an electoral procedure serving as an excuse for U.S. intervention, the charge that Maduro and the government are “authoritarian” at best, or a dictatorship, irrespective of how he was elected also serves as a pretext. Why has the U.S. not been able to overthrow the Maduro government? Is it because it is a dictatorship? No, if it were indeed a dictatorship, it would be relatively easy for the U.S. to win over the people, with a dose of naïveté, to free themselves from their “oppressors.”

The U.S. could not succeed because of the civic–military union. Despite all the attempts, including the latest one on April 30, it remains not only fully intact, but its consciousness, patriotism and military strength have all been strengthened.

The fact that the already broad armed alliance is continuously sinking its roots yet further into the communities that are arming themselves (at their own request) makes what would normally be applauded as democratization seen as another proof of dictatorship.

The U.S. is pitted against this force. Can the U.S. and its puppet offer democracy? Its stated goal is to convert Venezuela into an economic and political satellite of the U.S. In the face of this, the civic–military alliance and the Maduro government are the guarantee of democracy for the majority of Venezuelans.

Thus, in yet another twist of irony, the very government that has been dubbed a dictatorship, as a result of U.S. policy, is on a daily basis acting – and more importantly, being seen by millions of Venezuelans – as the instrument of democracy for Venezuela, and not the antithesis of it.

This consciousness is worth its eight in gold, and it is omnipresent in society, including the military. The U.S. claims it wants democracy for Venezuela, but the majority of Venezuelans are increasingly gripping on to their own government as the instrument for maintaining – and seemingly strengthening – democracy. Virtue is rewarded while infamy is punished. Moreover, the way the situation is evolving, the U.S. is destined to be punished time and time again, as it is blinded by its own self-serving, preconceived views on democracy.

The Bolivarian Revolution’s resistance to the ongoing U.S.-led economic and political war is going to be one of the most heroic chapters in post-World War II Latin American history. Today, millions of Venezuelans are writing history.

It is this very outcome that the critics of the Trump policy fear. Their only difference with Trump is their claim that his economic/political (and potential military) intervention is “counterproductive.” What does that mean? They fear what they call “polarization.” This is a liberal code word for the strengthening of Chavismo, which strikes fear in the hearts and minds of the “left” opposition.

The Bolivarian Revolution metes out poetic justice against all the accusations against it. It is turning the tables on history and on its accusers, all the while increasingly winning the support of people worldwide. This includes the people in the U.S. itself and in one of its main allies, Canada.

On the other hand, the U.S. government is increasingly isolated. It is lashing out like a mad dog and swinging widely, such as on Cuba, and in the process even further isolating itself on an international scale.

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Arnold August is a Canadian journalist and lecturer, the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections, Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion and Cuba–U.S. Relations: Obama and Beyond. As a journalist, he collaborates with many websites in North America, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Twitter and Facebook. His website is www.arnoldaugust.com

Featured image: Caracas, May 4, 2019 (Credit: Twitter Account of Nicolás Maduro)

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki on Thursday voiced opposition to US President Donald Trump‘s so-called ‘Deal of the Century‘, saying the terms amount to “surrender” for Palestinians.

“This is not a peace plan but rather conditions for surrender and there is no amount of money that can make it acceptable,” al-Maliki said, addressing a UN Security Council meeting.

The Palestinians cut off contacts with the Trump administration after it recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017 and have accused the United States of taking a strongly pro-Israel stance.

“We cannot afford not to engage with any peace efforts,” said Maliki, but he added that the US efforts could not be characterized “nor can qualify, as peace efforts, unfortunately.”

European powers along with Russia and China fear the US plan will ditch the two-state solution to the conflict that provides for a Palestinian state to be established as part of a final settlement.

The Palestinian Authority position of a two-state solution is supported by the UN and almost all of its 193 member-states.

The long-awaited US peace plan was crafted over two years by a team led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt.

It is widely expected to impose Israel’s positions on the Palestinians, without addressing key final status issues such as Jerusalem, illegal settlements, and borders – or ending the occupation.

The peace plan won’t be released before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends during the first week of June, and perhaps not even then.

“It seems that the American position has been totally taken by the Israeli position and right now the US administration has no independent position,” al-Maliki added.

Israel seized control of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and has militarily occupied the Palestinian territories ever since.

Successive Israeli governments have built illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, with the number of Israeli settlers estimated at over 650,000.

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Today, 187 countries took a major step forward in curbing the plastic waste crisis by adding plastic to the Basel Convention, a treaty that controls the movement of hazardous waste from one country to another. The amendmentsrequire exporters to obtain the consent of receiving countries before shipping most contaminated, mixed, or unrecyclable plastic waste, providing an important tool for countries in the Global South to stop the dumping of unwanted plastic waste into their country.

After China banned imports of most plastic waste in 2018, developing countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, have received a huge influx of contaminated and mixed plastic wastes that are difficult or even impossible to recycle. Norway’s proposed amendments to the Basel Convention provides countries the right to refuse unwanted or unmanageable plastic waste.

The decision reflects a growing recognition around the world of the toxic impacts of plastic and the plastic waste trade. The majority of countries expressed their support for the proposal and over one million people globally signed two public petitions from Avaaz and SumOfUs. Yet even amidst this overwhelming support, there were a few vocal outliers who opposed listing plastic under Annex II of the Basel Convention. These included the United States, the largest exporter of plastic waste in the world; the American Chemistry Council, a prominent petrochemical industry lobbying group; and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a business association largely comprised of waste brokers. As the United States is not a party to the Basel Convention, it will be banned from trading plastic waste with developing countries that are Basel Parties but not part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

David Azoulay, Environmental Health Director, Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL):

“Today’s decision demonstrates that countries are finally catching up with the urgency and magnitude of the plastic pollution issue and shows what ambitious international leadership looks like. Plastic pollution in general and plastic waste in particular remain a major threat to people and the planet, but we are encouraged by the decision of the Basel Convention as we look to the future bold decisions that will be needed to tackle plastic pollution at its roots, starting with reducing production.”
Contact: David Azoulay, +41 78 75 78 756, [email protected]

Von Hernandez, Global Coordinator, Break Free from Plastic:

“This is a crucial first step towards stopping the use of developing countries as a dumping ground for the world’s plastic waste, especially those coming from rich nations. Countries at the receiving end of mixed and unsorted plastic waste from foreign sources now have the right to refuse these problematic shipments, in turn compelling source countries to ensure exports of clean, recyclable plastics only. Recycling will not be enough, however.  Ultimately, production of plastics has to be significantly curtailed to effectively resolve the plastic pollution crisis.”
Contact: Von Hernandez, +63 9175263050, vonhernandez (Skype)

Martin Bourque, Executive Director, Ecology Center:

“Recycling is supposed to be part of the solution, this legislation will help prevent it from being a source of pollution. False claims by the plastic industry about plastic recycling resulted in a complete disaster for communities and ecosystems around the globe. This legislation raises the bar for plastic recycling which is good for people and the planet, and will help restore consumer confidence that recycling is still the right thing to do.”
Contact: Martin Bourque, [email protected]

Mageswari Sangaralingam, Research Officer, Friends of the Earth Malaysia:

“Controls on the plastic waste trade are much needed now to curb dumping of waste in the Global South. The inclusion of prior informed consent is a step towards addressing the issues of the plastic waste trade and pollution crisis. Recycling is not enough, we need to break free from plastic.”
Contact: Mageswari Sangaralingam, +60128782706, [email protected]

Dr Tadesse Amera, CoChair, International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) (Ethiopia):

“Africa knows a lot about waste dumping due to our experience with e-waste. This decision will help prevent the continent from becoming the next target of plastic waste dumping after Asia closes its doors.”
Contact: Tadesse Amera, +251911243030 (phone/whatsapp), [email protected]

Prigi Arisandi, Founder, Ecoton (Indonesia):

“We hope these Convention amendments will reduce marine litter — but on the ground in Indonesia we will continue monitoring the waste trade, and pushing our government to properly manage imported plastics. We call on exporting countries to respect their obligation not to dump their rubbish in Global South countries and our government to strictly enforce restrictions and strengthen our custom controls.”
Contact: Prigi Arisandi, +62 8175033042, [email protected]

Yuyun Ismawati, Co-founder, BaliFokus/Nexus3 Foundation:

“This amendment could be a game changer and force every country to set a higher standard of responsible plastic waste management. Toxic plastics disposed by rich communities in other countries will no longer become the burden of poor communities.”
Contact: Yuyun Ismawati, +447583768707, [email protected]

Sirine Rached, Global Policy Advocate, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA):

“It’s only fair that countries should have the right to refuse plastic pollution shipped to their borders. China had raised the ambition, arguing for countries to have the right to refuse virtually all plastic waste imports, but the final result was a compromise. Since the onslaught of plastic dumping will continue for a year until the measures come into effect, GAIA calls on countries to protect themselves from global plastic waste dumping by banning dirty plastic imports in national law. Countries can tackle the plastic pollution problem while protecting the climate, by focusing on reducing plastics and shifting to Zero Waste systems free from dirty technologies like incineration or plastic-to-fuel.”
Contact: Sirine Rached, +33 6 76 90 02 80, [email protected]

Jim Puckett, Executive Director, Basel Action Network (BAN):

“Today we have taken a major first step to stem the tide of plastic waste now flowing from the rich developed countries to developing countries in Africa and Asia, all in the name of “recycling,” but causing massive and harmful pollution, both on land and in the sea. A true circular economy was never meant to circulate pollution around the globe. It can only be achieved by eliminating negative externalities and not just pushing them off to developing countries.”
Contact: Jim Puckett, [email protected]

Tim Grabiel, Senior Lawyer, Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA):

“The Basel amendments are a critical pillar of an emerging global architecture to address plastic pollution. Other international bodies must now do their part, including ambitious measures under the IMO and ultimately a new legally binding UN treaty. The EU was a vocal and active supporter of the Basel amendments, proposing to increase ambition so that only the cleanest of clean plastic waste would not be subject to notification. The EU is not only leading by example but taking its Plastics Strategy to the international level.”
Contact: Tim Grabiel, +33 6 32 76 77 04, [email protected]

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Featured image is from breakfreefromplastic

Trump destroyed his chance at being a successful president by the stupid appointments he has made.  At the moment he is being set up by his national security advisor John Bolton and Israel for a war with Iran.

Using the same format of lies that was used against Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela, Bolton has accused Iran of “troubling and escalatory indications” of a forthcoming Iranian attack on American forces in the Middle East.  To help protect against the attack, Bolton has ordered Patriot missile batteries, an aircraft carrier strike group, and a bomber strike force to the region.

Even the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, pointed out that Bolton failed to identify the “troubling and escalatory” Iranian actions. (See this) No one else has seen any sign of them.

The reason for the Patriot missiles is not to deter Iran from an attack, but to prevent successful Iranian response to an attack on Iran.

This is the likely situation:  The deal between the Washington Ziocons and Netanyahu is that either Israel will attack an American ship or whatever is selected, and it will be blamed on Iran, thus forcing Trump to “defend America” and retaliate, or Israel using American disguise will attack Iran, thus provoking a response from Iran.  

Iran is already on hair trigger from having been provoked excessively by Washington withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear agreement, reimposing sanctions, and making endless false accusations against Iran, as Washington has done against Russia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Yemen.  It wouldn’t take much more to set off Iranian emotions.  

Trump is clearly set-up.  If Bolton and Netanyahu want the US at war with Iran, it is their call.

And they do want the US at war with Iran.  Iran and Syria back Hezbollah, and Hezbollah prevents Israel’s annexation of southern Lebanon, which Israel has twice tried only to have its army, which is not good for anything except killing unarmed women and children in Gaza, quickly defeated by Hezbollah.  Thus, eliminating support for Hezbollah is a high priority for Israel and its neoconservative allies in Washington.

The neoconservatives have an additionall reason for delivering chaos to Iran.  If Bolton can produce a situation in Iran like the one the US created in Libya, Iraq, and Syria, American-supplied jihadists can be infiltrated into Muslin provinces in the Russian Federation as punishment for Russia’s independent stance in world affairs.

The stakes for Russia are higher in Iran than in Syria.  Russia can stand aside only at huge cost to itself.

China also has an interest.  Until the Russian energy pipeline to China is completed, China needs Iranian oil.  Disruption of Iran by chaos is a way of throttling China by reducing China’s energy supply.

The war that Bolton and Netanyahu are preparing to spring on Trump is likely to be much larger than they think.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from FAIR

Visiting Central Asia had been on my bucket list for quite a while. So when I finally got the chance to head to Kazakhstan, I decided to take a pit-stop on my way there. This is how I got to Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan, and also the most populous city in former-Soviet Central Asia.

So what was Tashkent like? Considering the fact that it is a popular tourist destination, both from scenic and historical points of view, a lot has already been written about its various monuments and attractions. As such, I’d rather stick to my own observations about the city in this travelogue.

Uzbeks, in general, are very helpful people. They’d go out of the way to help you with directions, advice and anything else that you might ask for. Ask any passerby for a direction, chances are high they won’t understand your language. But, they’d be quick to open up the translate app in their phone, and ask you to speak to its voice input.

Compare this with the shrug and “I don’t know” behavior that’s the norm in many parts of the world. 🙂

Speaking of Friendliness…

“Welcome to Uzbekistan!”

Said the immigration guy as he stamped my passport. This was the first in a list of many “wait, what!” moments that I was soon to have there. Traveling in various countries, be it the Gulf, far-eastern Europe or even India, I’ve never come across an immigration or passport control official who ‘welcomes’ visitors. Can’t blame them; customer satisfaction is not part of their job. But it was pleasantly surprising to hear that coming from an immigration official.

This was not a one-off incident though. On my way out of Tashkent, at the departures area, I accidentally dropped a small envelope from my laptop bag while checking-in for my flight. Over an hour later, when I was at the lounge, I found the check-in guy looking around for me — “Sir, you forgot this paper!”

Tashkent: The City and Tourism

During my visit, the Novruz decorations were still intact around Tashkent. Generally speaking, Tashkent is an oddly “green” city — keeping in mind it is the capital of the country and the seat of almost everything important over there, the number of trees is fairly high. It was easy for me to walk around the city and not feel tired, all thanks to the clean air and consistently pleasant April weather.

Tourism has a big role to play in the Uzbek economy. The country contains various historic sites, and is the birthplace of Tamerlane as well as the first Mughal Emperor Babur. More importantly, Tashkent itself lies on the historic Silk Route.

All of this has prompted the government to focus heavily on tourism. There is an electronic visa system that works only for tourist visas. Plus, you can easily grab a “tourists’ flyer” from any hotel’s lounge in the city. Such flyers contain a good deal of info related to important places to visit, things to do, etc.

These flyers were identical across all of Tashkent. This made me curious, and yes, my guess was correct — the government has, by and large, attempted its best to streamline the tourism sector. Unlike Georgia, there are no unregulated drawing-room based hotels in Tashkent. There are a decent set of rules and regulations in place, with fairly stringent requirements for hotel and tour operators, including background checks and site visits.

Talk to any local, and they’d tell you that things were not the same half a decade ago. But over the course of the past few years, the Uzbek government has attempted to curb down corruption and regulate virtually every aspect associated with the tourism industry. This has improved Uzbekistan’s reputation as a “safe tourist destination”. Back in the day, Uzbekistan used to be a closed enigma. Now, more and more tourists are flocking to Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and elsewhere.

The Police and Security Checks

The abundant number of policemen on the streets of Tashkent is something that no visitor can fail to notice. Having read a large array of negative remarks about police in Central Asia, I had my apprehensions. However, the folks in uniform mostly keep to themselves and almost always greet you with a smile. Personally, my experience was the exact opposite of the online reviews — the locals did remark that problems arise when visitors take too many liberties (read: get drunk and forget their way back).

That said, there are innumerable security checks at every public place, such as airports and train stations. And they love stamping things! Successfully entered from Gate A? Stamp on paper! Went upstairs to the lounge? Stamp on paper!

Make sure you carry all the tickets and booking receipts in printed format. Repeat: keep everything on paper!

Picturize this: I dislike carrying papers, and keep everything on my phone. The guy at the security desk was all geared up with the stamp in his hand. He was expecting to be handed a paper that he can place the stamp on, but instead got the phone from me. He gave me the confused glare of the century.

Wanna Go Back in Time?

The infrastructure is well developed, albeit most of it is from the Soviet era. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find something that does not bear a mark of its Soviet legacy. For instance, I stayed at Wyndham Hotel Tashkent. A great hotel with friendly staff and really fast internet (oh, and terrific breakfast).

However, this particular Wyndham was nothing like the ones that you might find in Bahrain or UAE. There were no ergonomic adjustable chairs and no modern energy saving lamps. The furniture, though in perfect shape and squeaky clean, almost shouted at me — “I’m older than you!”

The table reminded me of my grandfather’s study table, and the wooden chair had a good deal of ornamental work. Let’s put it this way — if you were to remove the flatscreen TV, the room would absolutely belong to the set of a 1980s sitcom.

There is a high speed train that runs from Tashkent to Bukhara via Samarkand — Afrosiyab High Speed Rail (operating speed: 250 km/h). Since the number of tourists is fairly large almost all round the year, tickets are often sold out in advance.

With that said, there is one very visible problem that visitors might face in Tashkent. The country, by and large, is a predominantly cash economy. Virtually all transactions happen in cash, and it is not very easy to find an ATM either. More often than not, most of the roadside ATMs do not work.

I generally travel with a very negligible amount of cash, and rely heavily on cards. Naturally, I did not have enough cash to go by, and the ATMs around the city weren’t really in the mood to be of any help. Thankfully, Wyndham Tashkent had a working ATM that dispelled USD (not the local currency). So one can withdraw USD and convert it at an exchange for Uzbek Som.

So here is a pro-tip: if you’re ever visiting Tashkent anytime soon, make sure you carry a responsibly decent amount of cash. Perchance you find yourself running out of cash, try the ATMs at hotels or banks — those are more likely to be working.

Conclusion

Visiting Tashkent was a unique and memorable experience.

Even more unique was flying with Uzbekistan Airways, an airline that is a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, their Business Lounge wi-fi refuses to work unless you provide a local Uzbek number for authentication (yes, goodluck with your international roaming SIM card!). On the other hand, their airplanes are in good shape (read: brand new) and the flight experience is very pleasant.

Similarly, booking a ticket is a mess, with no web check-in, and no mobile-friendly website. But the billing and refund process is a breeze should you wish to cancel — they’d even refund 100% of the cost of some tickets. I can write on and on about Uzbekistan Airways, so perhaps this is something that deserves an article of its own for a later date.

It’s a pity I did not have time to visit Samarkand and Bukhara. Perhaps, some other time…

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Sufyan bin Uzayr is a writer, educator, traveler and analyst with a special focus on current affairs. His op-eds often expose the atrocities being committed against the minorities, such as the Rohingya people of Myanmar or the ethnic tensions in South Sudan and CAR. Sufyan bin Uzayr is a published author and an experienced web developer. Read his blog at www.politicalperiscope.com

The United States Army has established a long history of war crimes, beginning with the genocide of native peoples in the North America, through those committed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, more recently.

Usually, the U.S. government, the armed forces, and the press are able to cover up the atrocities committed. To cite a few examples from the war in Iraq, on November 19, 2005, U.S. troops entered the town of Haditha, killing individuals indiscriminately. Aws Fahmi, a witness to the massacre, saw Marines murder members of three families, and heard his neighbor beg in English for his life and those of his loved ones, including his daughters, 14, 10, five, three and one years of age.

Nine-year-old Eman Walid Abdul-Hameed recounted that the Marines broke into his home around 7:00 am, saying that they “entered the bedroom where my father was praying and shot him. They went into my grandmother’s bedroom and killed her without a thought. They threw a grenade under my grandfather’s bed.”

The attack lasted five hours and the Marines killed a total of 24 civilians.

On November 13, 2006, U.S. troops opened tank fire on the Al-Dhubat neighborhood of Ramadi and killed some 35 people, all civilians. Haji Jassim, 60, told Inter Press Service that residents “were not allowed to go near the houses to rescue the wounded, so many bled to death.”

In November of 2004, U.S. forces began Operation Phantom Fury against the city of Fallujah. Over ten days, they destroyed the city and killed thousands of people, using white phosphorus munitions prohibited by international treaties.

A video of the operation, recorded by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites, shows several wounded Iraqis in a mosque, guarded by Marines. The detainees had been interrogated and were left on the ground overnight. A Marine pointed to a wounded man lying on the floor and said: “He’s not dead, just pretending”. The soldier raises his rifle and shoots him in the head. Another Marine shouts: “Well, he’s dead now.” The execution of a prisoner, especially a wounded one, is a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions.

The United States deployed troops in Afghanistan in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 Twin Towers attack, reaching 100,000 soldiers. Several international organizations have denounced the actions of U.S. military forces and the CIA in that country, including the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague, which has processed hundreds of allegations of torture and assassinations of civilians.

According to information available, Gambian jurist Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the ICC, stated that members of the armed forces inflicted “torture, cruel treatment, and offenses against the dignity of persons, in Afghan territory,” acts that qualify, according to International Law, as war crimes.

The response of the United States was not long in coming: The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, was denied a visa, preventing him from entering the United States.

Washington has not ratified the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding text and has taken the position that its soldiers will not be tried by international organizations.

John Bolton, National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump, stressed in a speech at the Federalist Society, a conservative Washington forum,

“We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own.”

Last March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated his intention to refuse entry to ICC officials to investigate U.S. personnel in relation to Afghanistan. The Court is not directly affiliated to the United Nations, but the chief prosecutor informs the General Assembly of its activities.

Under this pressure, the ICC declined to investigate the allegations of atrocities committed by the U.S. in that country and President Trump praised the decision:

“This is a great international victory, not only for these patriots, but also for the rule of law.”

For her part, the prosecutor insisted that there is “a reasonable basis to believe” that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed in Afghanistan, and that all parties must be investigated, including members of the U.S. Armed Forces and the CIA.

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Featured image is from Oxfam International

National Security Advisor John Bolton’s announcement this week that the U.S. is deploying a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region seemed perfectly framed to put America on a war footing with Iran. And it is.

Claiming that the decision was made in response to “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” Bolton declared that “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime.” But, he added, “we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”

It took the Defense Department a full day to respond to Bolton’s statement, with acting Secretary of Defense Pat Shanahan finally tweeting that the

“announced deployment of the @CVN_72 and a @USAirForce bomber task force to the @CENTCOM area of responsibility…represents a prudent repositioning of assets in response to indications of a credible threat by Iranian regime forces.”

Shanahan followed with another tweet:

“We call on the Iranian regime to cease all provocation. We will hold the Iranian regime accountable for any attack on US forces or our interests.”

The USS Abraham Lincoln battle group had deployed a month ago from its Norfolk, Virginia, home port and was recently engaged in maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea. The Pentagon acknowledged that the Abraham Lincoln was scheduled to support CENTCOM during its deployment, but that its arrival was being “accelerated” due to intelligence indicating an imminent Iranian threat.

The fact that Bolton chose to repurpose routine deployments of U.S. military forces into the Middle East as an emergency response to an unspecified threat from Iran is in and of itself a curiosity. Bolton is an advisor to the president, a non-statutory (i.e., not confirmed by the Senate) member of the White House staff who is not in the military chain of command and lacks any command authority.

While Shanahan followed up indicating that the orders for the deployments had been authorized by him the day of Bolton’s announcement, this simply isn’t the case—they were authorized well prior to Bolton’s statement. The fact that the White House announced the deployment of U.S. military forces in response to allegations of an emerging threat in the Middle East, as opposed to by the Pentagon, reflects the political and operational roots of the current crisis.

“U.S. Central Command [CENTCOM, the U.S. unified military command responsible for the Middle East] continues to track a number of credible threat streams emanating from the regime in Iran throughout the CENTCOM area of responsibility,” a CENTCOM spokesman noted after Shanahan’s tweet.

This threat was deemed serious enough for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel a long-planned visit with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. Pompeo instead made a secret trip to Baghdad, where, according to reports, he met with Iraq’s political and national security leadership to discuss the emerging threat from Iran.

In a statement made to reporters on his way to Baghdad, Pompeo declared that

“it is absolutely the case that we have seen escalatory actions from the Iranians, and it is equally the case that we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests.” He added, “If these actions take place, if they do by some third-party proxy—a militia group, Hezbollah—we will hold the Iranian leadership directly accountable for that.”

But the reality is that the deployment of American military forces and the diversion of the secretary of state to Baghdad is little more than grand theater. This is being done in support of a policy dictated by Israeli intelligence and passed to Bolton during a meeting on April 16, 2019 at the White House, where, according to Bolton, they discussed “Iranian malign activity and other destabilizing actors in the Middle East and around the world.”

The intelligence, derived from analysis conducted by the Mossad, consisted of “scenarios” regarding what Iran “might” be planning. According to an Israeli official, “It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it, but it is clear to us that the Iranian temperature is on the rise as a result of the growing U.S. pressure campaign against them, and they are considering retaliating against U.S. interests in the Gulf.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has derided Bolton’s statements as directed by what he derisively termed the “B-team,” which includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Zarif accuses Bolton, in concert with the rest of the “B-team,” of trying to push President Trump “into a confrontation he doesn’t want.”

The precise nature of the supposed Iranian threat hasn’t been officially articulated by either the White House or the Pentagon. CENTCOM had nebulously noted that “recent and clear indications that Iranian and Iranian proxy forces were making preparations to possibly attack US forces in the region,” and added that the threats were both maritime and on land.

However, CNN, citing unnamed Pentagon officials, has reported that specific intelligence that Iran was moving short-range ballistic missiles by boat into the Persian Gulf, combined with other indicators, is what triggered the military deployment, and that additional deployments of American forces, including Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missiles, was being considered. “It’s not clear if Iran could launch the missiles from the boats or if they are transporting them to be used by Iranian forces on land,” CNN reported.

This statement is facially absurd. Iran possesses a well-known family of short-range ballistic missiles derived from an indigenously produced copy of the Frog-7, a Russian-made short-range artillery rocket. This weapon, known as the Zelzal-2, has been exported to Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, where it has been used against Syrian rebels, Saudi-backed opponents of the Houthis, and Israel. The Zelzal-2, lacking a guidance and control system, is not a short-range ballistic missile, but rather an unguided rocket projectile. Iran does, however, possess two derivatives of the Zelzal-2—the Fateh-110 and the Zulfiquar—which meet the technical definition of a short-range ballistic missile.

The Fateh-110 has been exported to Hezbollah, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq. In September 2018, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired seven Fateh-110 missiles against Iranian Kurdish opposition forces based in northern Iraq. An even more advanced derivative of the Zelzal-2, known as the Zulfiqar, has recently entered service; in June 2017 and in October 2018, the IRGC fired Zulfiqar surface-to-surface ballistic missiles against ISIS targets located inside Syria.

These missiles are real, and they do pose an active and ongoing threat to American forces deployed in the Middle East. But they are not designed to be operated aboard a ship. Iran has already been accused of supplying Houthi rebel forces with short- and medium-range ballistic missiles via maritime supply routes. A continuation of this activity should hardly trigger a crisis requiring the emergency deployment of U.S. forces. Likewise, Iran has provided short-range ballistic missiles to both Syria and Hezbollah using an existing air bridge between Tehran and Damascus.

Finally, Iran has transferred short-range ballistic missiles to the Iraqi popular militias, Shiite groups affiliated with the IRGC. All this activity has taken place over the course of the past few years and, except for the Houthis, none have required missiles to be sent via sea.

The threat being promulgated by Bolton, CENTCOM, Pompeo, and the media ignores the reality that Iran has been preparing to strike American military forces in the Middle East for years as part of its efforts towards self-defense. Iran’s short-range ballistic missile capability is part of a larger missile threat that could, at a moment’s notice, blanket U.S. bases in the region with high explosives. Dispatching the Abraham Lincoln battle group and a B-52 task force to the Middle East is an act of theatrical bravado that will do nothing to change that. Iran’s missile force is, for the most part, mobile.

The American experience in the Gulf War, and Saudi Arabia’s experience in Yemen, should underscore the reality that mobile relocatable targets such as Iran’s missile arsenal are virtually impossible to interdict through airpower.

By purposefully escalating tensions with Iran using manufactured intelligence about an all too real threat, Bolton is setting the country up for a war it is not prepared to fight and most likely cannot win. This point is driven home by the fact that Mike Pompeo has been recalled from his trip to participate in a National Security Council meeting where the Pentagon will lay out in stark detail the realities of a military conflict with Iran, including the high costs. (Hopefully, they’ll emphasize that Iran would win such a war simply by not losing—all they’d have to do is ride out any American attack.)

That Israel is behind the scenes supplying the intelligence and motivation makes Bolton’s actions even more questionable. It shows that it is John Bolton, not Iran, who poses the greatest threat to American national security today.

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Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Dealbreaker: Donald Trump and the Unmaking of the Iran Nuclear Deal (2018) by Clarity Press.

Featured image: Iranian Army in 2016. (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)

After the water was suddenly shut off in the Venezuelan embassy in the United States located in Washington, D.C. Saturday morning, CODEPINK activists are being stopped by local police from bringing in food to those inside.

Electricity inside the building was shut off despite all bills being up to date May 8. CODEPINK co-founder, Medea Benjamin, tweeted Saturday morning the water had also just been shut off.

“BREAKING NEWS: The US govt turned off water at Venezuela Embassy this morning to try to force the #EmbassyProtctionCollective to leave. No lights, no water, little food. Come show support. 1pm 1099 30th St NW DC. Join us in saying No Coup. No US Intervention #HandsOffVenezeula” tweeted the human rights leader whose organization also advocates to free Palestine.​​

Benjamin added in a followup tweet:

“Now the US govt has turned off the water in the Venezuela Embassy to smoke us out. No lights, no water, little food. This is how Big Brother tries to crush other countries as well. We remain firm. Send love to #embassyprotectioncollective #HandsOffVenezeula.”

Venezuelans calling for a US military invasion should study a little history first. US invasions bring death, destruction and mayhem in their wake—often for decades. Negotiations, not war!!!

— Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin) May 11, 2019

The group had already planned a rally outside the embassy in continued support of Maduro and to denounce the U.S.’s continued threats to use military force to overthrow the president.

By Saturday afternoon, teleSUR correspondent in the U.S., Alina R. Duarte, tweeted video of D.C. police and opposition protesters blocking Venezuelan government supporters from bringing food to those who have been inside for weeks and are running out of food and provisions.

The police openly working with the Venezuelan opposition blocking the access of food to the Embassy.

La policía abiertamente trabajando con la oposición venezolana bloqueando el acceso de comida a la Embajada.#EmbassyProtectionCollective #CPEV pic.twitter.com/ijKUZ6Lz3w

— Alina R. Duarte (@AlinaTelesur) May 11, 2019

Pro-Guiado protesters outside of the embassy became violent this week when they injured pro-Maduro supporters. One human rights leader was arrested by local police for throwing bread into the windows of the building for the activists inside.

The embassy building’s electricity was shut off Wednesday without explanation. Carlos Vecchio, a part of the U.S. envoy that has several times tried to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro and install Guaido, described the move as “a small victory.”

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Featured image: The CODEPINK coalition outside the Venezuelan embassy located in Washington, D.C. May 10, 2019 | Photo: @medeabenjamin

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today released a set of proposed changes that would dramatically reduce protections for the nation’s most endangered plants and animals from pesticides known to harm them. The proposals ignore the real-world, science-based assessments of pesticides’ harms, instead relying on arbitrary industry-created models.

The EPA proposals would, for example, gut protections for endangered plants that are pollinated by butterflies and other insects by ignoring the fact that animals routinely move back and forth between agricultural areas and places where endangered species live.

Today’s proposals follow intensive efforts by Interior secretary David Bernhardt to halt federal work on protecting wildlife from pesticides.

“The federal government’s own science indicates this disgraceful proposal could drive endangered butterflies, birds and hundreds of other species to extinction,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The pesticide industry asked Trump to kill protections from harmful pesticides, and Interior chief Bernhardt and the EPA’s pesticide office are quickly pulling the trigger.”

The proposed change comes over a year after a draft biological opinion that was scuttled by the Trump administration found that the loss of pollinators from the insecticide chlorpyrifos would put hundreds of endangered species on a path to extinction.

Today’s so-called “refinements” will make it easier for the EPA to claim that pesticides have no effects on endangered species, allowing pesticides to remain on the market without common-sense restrictions on their use to protect endangered species.

The proposal disregards the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and ignores the mandate of the Endangered Species Act to give imperiled wildlife and plants the benefit of the doubt when evaluating the range of impacts caused by exposure to pesticides. Records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that the refinements were driven by political-level appointees at the EPA, Department of the Interior, Department of Commerce and the White House.

From 2013 to 2017 career scientists at the EPA and federal wildlife agencies worked to implement the recommendations of the National Academy of Science assessing the impacts of pesticides. This collaborative and transparent process was developed with hundreds of hours of stakeholder input. By 2017 the scientists were in the final stages of completing their first-ever nationwide consultations on the impacts of three pesticides to protected species.

Documents obtained by the Center through the Freedom of Information Act showed that one of the pesticides, chlorpyrifos, jeopardizes the continued existence of 1,399 endangered plants and animals.

When then acting Interior secretary David Bernhardt was briefed on the results of those assessments in October 2017, he halted the release of the analysis. This unprecedented effort to scuttle endangered species consultations has spurred the EPA and wildlife agencies to attempt to justify their failure to release the analysis and take urgently needed action to save endangered animals like the San Joaquin kit fox from extinction.

The inspector general for the Department of the Interior announced last month it will open an investigation of Bernhardt’s role in blocking the release of the scientific assessments. Bernhardt’s efforts to suppress the assessments — revealed in the documents obtained by the Center — were highlighted in a New York Times investigation published last month.

“The EPA’s proposal was created specifically to prevent endangered species from getting the protection they need from toxic pesticides,” said Burd. “This sham promotes the pesticide industry’s financial interests above saving endangered species, ignores the National Academy of Sciences recommendation and trashes years of work by career scientists to protect endangered wildlife from chlorpyrifos and other dangerous pesticides.”

The EPA “refinements” were developed without transparency or any stakeholder feedback. Just four days prior to this document’s release, the Center was forced to sue the EPA, Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, National Marine Fisheries Service and Council on Environmental Quality over their failure to produce records on the activities of a new interagency working group on pesticides and the Endangered Species Act.

The Center has also had to sue the EPA to obtain records on secret meetings between the agency and CropLife America — the pesticide industry lobbying arm — during the development of the revised methods.

“This disgusting proposal was crafted by political servants of the pesticide industry, the American Chemistry Council, the Koch brothers, American Petroleum Industry and Americans for Tax Reform,” said Burd. “They are truly the A-Team of selling out our nation’s natural environment to the highest bidder.”

Bios on participants of the interagency working group on pesticides and the Endangered Species Act, including their prior affiliations, are available upon request.

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The above title was influenced from Joseph Sargent’s 1974 classic The Taking of the Pelham 123. In the film (remade again in 2009, and not bad actually) gunmen hijack a NYC subway train and hold the passengers of one car as hostages, demanding a one million dollar ransom (lots of moolah for 45 years ago). If the city of NY does not comply, they start executing them one by one. Well, it looks to me that we passengers on Choo Choo America have really been hijacked, along with our flag, our economy and our national honor… and they didn’t even have to use guns!

There is a Deep State operating in what is now Amerika, and it was always there in force, especially during the 20th and now 21st century.

No, this is not the so called Deep State that the Trump people keep parroting as their enemy. You see, Trump was and is handled by this Deep State.

If they did not want this Reality Television/Real Estate buffoon to obtain office, he never could have. Of course, since this Deep State owns and controls our phony Two Party/One Party system, anyone who obtains high office must be approved by this cabal. As far as the actual voting, we serfs are allowed  to choose between TweedleDum and TweedleDee.

The most recent exception was when Junior Bush was both elected and re-elected. He had been ordained to be the boy emperor by this Deep State while Cheney pulled the puppet strings for them. Therefore, it was fixed by this Deep State to assure his election (check out what went on in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004). Looking back at this most recent presidential horserace in 2016, most likely the Deep State would have preferred Ms. Hillary to fulfill their Neo Con visions… especially via a new Cold War with the Russkies. Yet, they knew they had ‘the Donald’ just where they wanted him as well.  Of course, once Trump got into the White House this same Deep State made sure he was surrounded by their Neo Con goons to fulfill their plans… and he does!

You can forget about all that Russian meddling etc. The real crux of the matter is about what the Deep State thrives on: Money and Economic Power. You see, when the owners of our nation had their monopoly with a strong US dollar being used as a petrodollar, and our ‘jackbooted’ control of the majority of what many term ‘The Third World’, all was copacetic.

With the emergence of China as the new primary economic power, and Russia in much better financial shape than us, something had to be done. With these two countries making strides in Africa (the source of the greatest mineral resources anywhere), the Middle East, Eurasia and of course even in our once ‘Monroe Doctrined’ Latin America, “This means war!” the Deep State shouted from their private clubs, think tanks and embedded Congress & Media.

Looking back to see how this always plays out, why do you think the Bush/Cheney Cabal made war on Iraq? The excuse was WMDs , which intelligence said there weren’t any, but the main thrusts were twofold:

A) Saddam was going to start trading his oil in Eurodollars instead of US dollars and

B) the Deep State needed to stop the Chinese and Russkies from getting too popular in that region.

It was ALL about keeping US influence Numero Uno in the Middle East…and of course our desire to NOT have Iraqi oil sold directly to our economic enemies. You can now say the same about Venezuela, one of the two largest sources of Oil in the world. The ‘regime change’ rhetoric is not so much about Socialism, but more so about OIL, and of course maintaining US power in that hemisphere.

This formula for control is so easy for this Deep State. As long as our nation continues to allow money to legally flow into electoral politics, nothing will change. It is a proven and sad fact that the candidate who spends the most money usually gets the suckers to vote that way. This is why the Two Party/One Party system, owned by the Deep State, has thrived for so long.

They have the means to get money funneled to their candidates, so that 3rd party types have little or NO chance. Period!

If one ‘Follows da money’ one sees how much their benefactor, this Deep State, controls everything. They use the media they own and the politicians they own (via campaign coffers) and their Military Industrial Empire chugs along on railroad tracks that were supposed to be owned by We the People. Alas, WE are the hostages ready to be executed through a myriad of means formulated by that Less than 1%. So few of our fellow citizens say but a word about all this. Ignorance is not bliss and Silence is not golden!  They allow tyranny!

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Philip A Farruggio is the contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

On May 1 the Washington Post published an article entitled “Venezuela’s opposition put together a serious plan. For now it appears to have failed.”^[1] By doing so it has presented its readers with a gripping fairy tale. 

The fairy tale

The “hero” is self-proclaimed president Juan Guaido, who assumes the guise of a mild mannered United States agent. He battles to “restore” democracy from the clutches of demonized elected President Nicolas Maduro. True to his heroic character, Juan fights a battle for the “American Way” by peacefully seeking an assumption of power.  His well thought out plan is contingent on persuading the ruling President Maduro to fly to Cuba. Along the way, Guaido convinces some top military and civilian aids to join him.

His plan is validated with a blessing from his benevolent benefactor, the Trump administration. Out of concern for Venezuela’s well-being, US President Trump and his advisors are monitoring Guiado’s efforts closely. Unfortunately, they can’t yet reach an agreement about how to best help Juan. While committed to the cause, Trump is a bit reluctant to use his military forces directly.  Nevertheless, some men on his staff are unabashed about saying that use of the military remains an option. The keenest one to rattle his saber is impetuous John Bolton, whose eagerness for war is apparently making Donald nervous. As a compromise, for the time being, the US therefore opts to impose sanctions and helps “run back-end logistics for aid deliveries to Colombia for the Venezuelan people, and a U.S. navy hospital ship sailed to neighbouring Colombia to aid Venezuelan refugees.”

Throughout the story, Guaido’s claim to the presidency is never disputed.  How could it be? He is the heroic champion for democracy. As proof, the story points out that he has the backing of the National Assembly and over 50 nations.   What more proof is needed?

As the tale progresses, the reader is led to believe that had his plan succeeded the story would have had a happy ending. Big bad Maduro would have been allowed to leave in peace. Our hero Juan would have assumed power through a successful coup and thereby restored democracy. Venezuela would have once again have the United States as its friend, and everyone would have lived happily ever after.

Maduro and Putin

Alas, this happy ending was not to be.  Juan’s enthusiasm got the better of him.  He prematurely attempted his coup for democracy, named “Operation Liberty”, resulted in failure.  Instead of supporting heroic Juan, the Venezuelan military rallied behind their constitutionally elected president. The dream of an American Venezuela was not to be.

Sadly, the story ends with the allegation that Maduro would have abandoned ship had he not been talked out of it. Who could be blamed for undermining such an otherwise flawless plan? The Russians, of course. Hasn’t this been the mantra that has been repeatedly chanted by the mainstream media? Nefarious Russia, despite its abandonment of communism, has been looking for every means possible to undermine Western values – meddling in elections^[2], hacking into computers^[3].

Lessons

This fairy tale teaches some important lessons:

1. In order to restore democracy, a coup is needed to overthrow the existing democracy.

2. A hero is someone who seeks the help of outside forces, with the expectation that they use military force against his country, if needed, to assure his ascent to power.

3. When providing humanitarian assistance, it is necessary to first impose crippling economic sanctions to necessitate the need for aid.

4. Recognition of a self-proclaimed president by over fifty outside nations is more important than the plebiscite of the constituent citizens of his country, as well as the majority of United Nations members who have either rejected his claim or remained neutral on endorsing him.

5. If all else fails, blame the Russians.

Viewing Venezuela without the fairy tale lens

Unfortunately, like all fairy tales, this article is based on typecast characters who bear little resemblance to the real world. What would have given this account credibility as fact rather than fiction would have been the inclusion of the glaring omissions that would have given it a balanced perspective.

Several facts that have been reported in mainstream or alternate news sources, were apparently deemed neither relevant nor newsworthy for this article.   As was repeatedly aired on TV news networks, Juan Guaido swore himself in as president.^[4]  Is this the type of democratic process that is worthy of endorsement?

There is no evidence that Maduro ever considered abandoning his post or engaged in secret negotiations with Guiado.  Maduro denied this.  Nevertheless, the article accepts the allegations by Guaido as facts.  Moreover, the possibility that his efforts to remain in power could be interpreted as patriotism is never considered. Instead, he is presented as someone whose decisions are made in consultation with Russian advisers, which has been denied.  This is in stark contrast with Guiado who has had photo ops with US Vice President Mike Pence^[5], (image right, Guaido meets Pence, February 2019) and is quite open about plotting the overthrow of his government through consultation with the US.

Given Venezuela’s economic hardships, and vocal opposition, why does Maduro still have a loyal military, as well as large public demonstrations by supporters? To answer these questions would require another article detailing the numerous programs that he and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, implemented to prioritize the needs of the poor.^[6]

To its credit, the Washington Post includes in this article an online video showing demonstrations by both supporters of Maduro and opposition supporters of Guaido.  At first glance, one would consider this to be evidence of balanced reporting, but a closer look tells a different story. More video time is allotted to the opposition, giving one man the opportunity to voice a litany of grievances against Maduro focused on Venezuela’s economic hardships. These grievances are neither questioned nor contested, and no mention is made of the role that US sanctions^[7] have played in promoting these hardships.

In most Western democracies, if anyone were to plot a coup, as Guaido openly professes, he would probably be deemed guilty of treason and terrorism. This blatant indictment is never pointed out.  Nor has it been asked why has Guaido not yet been arrested and is allowed to roam the streets and speak freely, especially if Maduro is a dictator?

The aims of the US are presented as humanitarian. If that were so, then why wasn’t its “humanitarian aid” convoy endorsed by the Red Cross^[8]? Conveniently, John Bolton’s statement about how beneficial it would be for the US to have US companies controlling Venezuelan oil is omitted.^[9]

Fact or fiction, as events unfold in Venezuela, we are seeing the struggle of a sovereign nation fighting to resolve its internal disputes.  If international law prevails, it would be allowed to do so without outside interference.^[10]  If that happens, then it might not have the happy ending that mainstream media are rooting for. Nevertheless, it would be a resolution that would have been decided by the Venezuelan people.

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The author, Gerrard Bonello, is a retired Vice Principal who currently resides in Mississauga, Ontario. Prior to his career as a school administrator, he was a school teacher of art in high school, and special education in elementary school.  During his teaching career he was active in the OECTA teachers unions in the secondary panel executive and on various committees. In the late 1980’s he was a founding member of the Toronto “Teachers Against Apartheid”.

Notes

Unlike a regular corporation, the corporations that manufacture and sell weapons to their government are virtually 100% dependent upon their government and its military allies, for their own success; their markets are only those governments, not individuals (such as is the case for normal corporations). Consequently, either their government will control them, and those firms won’t have any effective control over their own markets, or else those firms will, themselves, control their government, and thereby effectively control their markets, via the government’s foreign policies — not only via expanding its military alliances (those firms’ foreign markets), but via its designating ‘enemy’ nations that it and its ‘allies’ (those arms-producers’ foreign markets) can then use those weapons against.

In countries such as the United States, arms-producers are benefiting and controlled by the country’s billionaires, instead of (as in Russia, for example) benefiting and controlled by the government. These totally profit-driven arms-producers need to have market-nations that are called ‘allied’ governments, but they also need to have some target-nations that are called ‘enemy’ governments, so as to ‘justify’ more arms-production by these firms, against which to use these weapons. Only in nations where arms-producers are privately instead of publicly controlled are the government’s foreign polices predominantly controlled by the country’s arms-producers. That’s the way it is in America.

The main ‘ally’ of the US is the Saud family, who own the government of Saudi Arabia. As a recent debate-brief said,

“The US has been the world’s leading exporter in weapons since 1990 and the biggest customer is Saudi Arabia. The US sold a total of $55.6 billion of weapons worldwide, and in 2017, cleared $18 billion dollars with Saudi Arabia alone.”

Under Trump, those sales are set to soar, because on 20 May 2017 “US $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements US-Jihadist Alliance” — notwithstanding now the slaughter in Yemen and the slaughter of Jamal Khashoggi. Yet, Trump talks up his ‘humanitarian’ concerns for the people of Venezuela as ‘justification’ for his possibly invading Venezuela, and America’s military is preparing to do that.

The main and central ‘enemy’ of the US is Russia’s government; and all of the other ‘enemies’ of America (the spokes of America’s ‘enemy’ wheel) are led by people — such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, Bashar al-Assad, Salvador Allende, Jacobo Arbenz, and Nicolas Maduro — who are friendly toward Russia. The objective here is to force other nations to join America’s anti-Russia alliances or else to face the consequences of a likely invasion or coup by America to overthrow and replace those leaders. Therefore, America targets all nations that are/were friendly toward Russia, such as pre-2003 Iraq, and such as pre-2011 Libya, and such as Syria, and such as pre-1973 Chile, and such as post-1979 Iran — all of America’s various target-nations, which are the authorized targets for America and its ‘allies’ to invade or otherwise regime-change (change from being a target, to becoming instead a new market).

In order for privately controlled arms-producers to thrive, there is just as much of a need for ‘allies’ as for ’targets’, because without targets, there can be no authorized markets, since every weapon is useless if it has no authorized target against which it may be used. There consequently needs to be at least one ‘enemy’ for any country whose arms-production is privately instead of publicly controlled. Both ‘allies’ and ‘enemies’ are needed, in order for America’s arms-makers to continue flourishing.

By contrast, in Russia, where each of the arms-producers is majority-controlled by the government instead of by private investors, each arms-producer exists only in order to defend the nation, there is no need for any ‘enemy’ nations, and the best situation for such a government is to the contrary: to have as many allies, or buyers of its country’s weapons, as possible (so that it will be as safe as possible), and as few nations as possible that are enemies. For such a country, there’s no benefit in having any enemies. America has publicly been against Russia ever since the end of World War II, and privately and secretly remains against Russia even after the Cold War ended on Russia’s side in 1991. Whereas the billionaires who control America’s arms-makers profit from this military competition against Russia, the controlling interest in all of Russia’s arms-makers is Russia’s government, which simply suffers the expense of that competition and would greatly prefer to end that competition. It’s just a drain on Russia’s treasury. The profit-motive isn’t driving the arms-producers in countries that control their own arms-makers. The government leads the nation there, basically because the nation’s billionaires — even if they are minority stockholders of the armaments-firms — don’t. And the reason the billionaires don’t is that the arms-producers in Russia are controlled by the government, not by any private investors.

Consequently, in countries that socialize arms-production, ‘humanitarian’ excuses don’t need to be invented in order to create new ‘enemies’. Instead, the goal is for the number of enemies to be reduced, so that the nation itself will be safer. Their arms-producers don’t need constantly to generate (by lobbying, media-propaganda, etc.) authorized targets (‘enemies’ such as Iraq, Syria, etc.), because such a nation, as this, has designed its system to be driven for protecting the public’s safety, and not for any investors’ profits. If an armaments-firm, in such a nation, goes out-of-business, that’s entirely okay, so long as that nation’s safety isn’t being reduced by ending the firm. The international policy of such a country is totally different from that of a country in which arms-makers’ profits, and not the entire nation’s welfare, is in the driver’s seat regarding all foreign policies.

If arms-makers are being driven for profits, then target-nations are needed in order to expand profits so as to serve their investors. Such a country is run actually for its investors, not for its public. But if the arms-makers are being driven to serve the government instead of to serve private investors, the government is controlling the armament-firms. The nation’s safety is the objective in such a land, because increasing profits for private investors in its weapons-firms is not the company’s objective. Any profits to such investors, are then irrelevant to the government. It’s truly sink-or-swim, for each of such a nation’s arms-makers — not socialism-for-the-rich, and capitalism (actually fascism) for the poor, such as is the case in the United States.

In a nation such as the United States, the constant need for new wars is being constantly driven by investors’ needs for expanding both markets and targets. And — since in the arms-making business, all of the markets are one’s own government, plus all of its allied governments (no significant consumer-business whatsoever, which is why such firms are fundamentally different from the firms in all other types of fields) — the government needs to serve its armaments-firms, because those firms are totally dependent upon the government, and upon its international diplomacy (to increase the sales of its armaments, and thereby to serve the billionaires who control the armaments-firms). So: the government there naturally becomes an extension of its major “contractors” or armaments-firms. The politicians know this, though they don’t want to talk publicly about it, because they don’t want the voters to know who is actually in the driver’s seat. They know whom they are actually serving, which is the billionaires who control the armaments-firms. So: those politicians, whatever they might say in public (“America shouldn’t be the policeman for the world,” etc.), always actually vote to invade (Iraq, Syria, etc.), and to approve the first stage of any war, which is economic sanctions (such as against Russia itself, or Iran, or Iraq, or Syria, or Venezuela, etc.), and it’s always allegedly being done “to serve God, mother and country” at home, and “to expand freedom and protect human rights in that dictatorially ruled country” abroad. This is basically the marketing campaign for the owners of the armaments firms. The winning politicians in such countries are the ones that those billionaires support. In such a country, it’s almost impossible for any politician who is competing for a national office to succeed who isn’t being funded by those billionaires. And, the billionaires’ ‘news’-media support only such candidates. That’s why there’s almost no possibility for an honest person to be elected (or appointed( to any national public office in the United States.

If a nation’s sole reason for producing weapons is in order to protect the public — a public purpose — then there is no reason for the government to lie so as to demonize foreign leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Salvador Allende, Viktor Yanukovych, and Nicolas Maduro. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with how bad (or good) the demonized leader actually is.

Why does the US government demonize those people, while simultaneously serving (if not actually installing) barbaric dictators such as King Saud, Augusto Pinochet, Castillo Armas, and the Shah? The publicly stated reasons are always ‘humanitarian’ (when not ‘national defense’ — and often, as in 2003 Iraq — both at once). The alleged purpose is to ‘bring democracy to the people there’, and to ‘protect human rights, which are being violated’ by ‘the dictator’ — but it’s actually in order to make suckers out of their country’s own population, so as to serve the billionaires whose income can’t be boosted in any other way than to turn ‘enemies’ (targets) into ‘allies’ (markets) — to conquer those ‘enemies’. This is just a marketing campaign, and the voters are not the consumers of these products, but they are instead merely the gulls who have to be fooled in order for those profits to keep rolling in, to the (usually) offshore accounts of those billionaires. This is not the type of socialism in which the government controls the economy, but instead the type of economy in which the economy — actually the billionaires who control the armaments-firms — control the government. This is why it’s “socialism for the rich and capitalism for everybody else.” (The term “fascism” can be used for that.)

This is the New America. And here is the New America Foundation, which is one of the many ‘non-profit’ PR arms of this new America. (That one represents mainly Democratic Party billionaires. Here is one that instead represents mainly Republican Party billionaires.) These are taxpayer-subsidized public relations agencies for their businesses. These individuals are exceptionally gifted businesspeople, because they deeply understand how to fool the public, and they understand that the public never learns and so history just keeps repeating itself, such as in 1953 Iran, and then in 1954 Guatemala, and 1973 Chile, and 2003 Iraq, and 2019 Venezuela, and so many others, ad nauseum. And it goes on and on, for decades if not forever.

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

When governments criminalize truth-telling, on the phony pretext of protecting national security, tyranny replaces freedom.

Revealing vital information in the public interest by whistleblowers and independent investigative journalists deserves high praise, not prosecution.

The 1989 US Whistleblower Protection Act protects federal employees who report misconduct — crimes of war and against humanity the highest of high wrongdoing.

By law, federal agencies (including the executive branch and Congress) are prohibited from retaliating against whistleblowers.

They’re obligated to report law or regulatory violations, gross mismanagement, waste, fraud and/or abuse, as well as actions endangering public health or safety.

The Office of Special Council is empowered to investigate whistleblower complaints. The Merit Systems Protection Board adjudicates them.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the only judicial body authorized to hear whistleblower case appeals.

Since the Whistleblower Protection Act’s 1994 revisions, it ruled on over 200 cases — only three times in favor of whistleblowers, the deck stacked against them, US law failing to protect them.

The 2012 Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) failed to protect government employees from reprisal for disclosing official misconduct, revealing it to co-workers or supervisors, or disclosing policy decision consequences — any or all of the above in relation to their jobs or duties.

The Obama regime prosecuted more whistleblowers and leakers involved in exposing US wrongdoing than all his predecessors combined, reportedly nine targeted individuals.

His Justice Department and the FBI illegally spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records and by other means, subpoenaing them and other reporters to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

Trump is heading toward matching or exceeding his war on truth-telling — notably by his actions against Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.

Former US air force/National Security intelligence officer Daniel Everett Hale is his regime’s latest target.

On Thursday, he was wrongfully arrested, detained, and indicted on five counts, four under the long-ago outdated 1917 Espionage Act — for revealing secret information “to a reporter” about illegal (Pentagon/CIA) drone wars US authorities want suppressed, part of the US war OF terror, not on it.

Reportedly, he passed on classified documents to Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill. In 2015, he published a series of articles called “The Drone Papers.”

Based on material obtained from an anonymous source he hasn’t publicly identified, he said around 90% of deaths by drones were not individuals targeted.

Hale was arraigned in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, located in Nashville. He faces up to 10 years imprisonment on each of five counts against him, potentially a maximum 50-year sentence.

He’s scheduled to appear in US District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division on May 17 — the same court involved in persecuting Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. He’s the sixth whistleblower targeted by Trump regime.

Enacted shortly after US entry into WW I, the Espionage Act was all about prosecuting individuals involved in inciting insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny in the military, or obstructing recruitment.

A year after enactment, provisions were added, criminalizing government criticism or opposition to military conscription.

Offenses included publishing “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.”

Despite congressional repeal of these provisions post-war, related to revealing information US authorities want suppressed, they’re used at the government’s discretion against targeted individuals — on the phony pretext of protecting national security.

Since 1945, the Espionage Act has been used 12 times to prosecute individuals for revealing information the US wants suppressed, Daniel Everett Hale the latest indictee, Julian Assange likely next once in US hands.

Used in all US wars of aggression, drones largely kill civilians, few so-called “high-value targets.” Operations are conducted secretly in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other US war theaters, transparency and accountability absent.

By executive order in March, Trump banned disclosure of civilian deaths by drones — rescinding a DNI rule to produce annual reports of civilian deaths by drones outside of official war theaters.

At the time, a White House National Security Council statement dismissively said the order removes “superfluous reporting requirements” that “distract our intelligence professionals from their primary mission.”

The order was and remains all about suppressing US crimes of war and against humanity.

According to UK-based Reprieve, reporting on the US “secret assassinations program,” drone strikes greatly increased under Trump in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, adding:

“…America’s illegal drone war has expanded (greatly) across the globe, (Trump) increas(ing) and widen(ing) drone strikes…systematically weaken(ing) safeguards.”

“(E)ven individuals not considered to pose a ‘continuing and imminent threat’ can be targeted for death without trial” under a secret assassination program – murder by drones, conventional warplanes, and/or special forces operations.

“The CIA’s own leaked documents concede that the US often does not know who it is killing, and that militant leaders’ account for just 2% of drone-related deaths.”

US wars in multiple theaters are flagrantly illegal. So are its other hostile actions — in all cases against nations threatening no one.

It’s what naked aggression is all about, the favored strategy by US ruling authorities to advance the nation’s imperium.

Their rage for global dominance risks eventual nuclear war against Russia or other nations — able to kill us all if launched.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

I was wearing a hipster-establishment wide tie and cranking across the Interstate toward Lake Morey. Something between fear and early onset dementia had drawn me more than 100 miles to the Governor’s Conference on Older Workers. Actually, it was the “invitation” from my boss, who ran work and training programs across Vermont under contracts with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Half conscious, I pit-stopped in Manchester for coffee and news; gas shortage paranoia and the latest Washington Looney Tunes. Today the newsmaker was James McCord, competing for headlines with John Dean. The former White House counsel had secrets to tell, but the ex-wire man was threatening to sue. It was June 12, 1973, deep into the Watergate era, I was 26 years old, and getting prepared to spend a day deciphering the cliches of bureaucrats and businessman.

“Did you come for the same thing I did?” Walter shouted as he shuffled across the parking lot, his backdrop a paunchy foursome and the 18th green, tucked away a few miles from the highway. Chic. He repeated the welcome. “So, did you come for the same thing?”

“What?”

“The girls!” He elbowed me and winked, eyebrows edging toward receding hair. Sly devil. Walter was definitely an older worker. And a State Legislator. Despite the casual sexism, my first impulse was to grin. I settled instead for a return jab and headed quickly toward the Inn.

Once inside, I momentarily gaped at all the video equipment, before remembering that the state’s governor would attend. Only the second Democrat elected in a century, Vermont’s big fish, Tom Salmon, was heading toward this very spot.

I had tried to plan for everything, all the necessary gear and attire, and a mindset meant to camouflage how out of place I felt. But I’d messed up. Crossing my legs I stared down at two sneakered feet. The conference shoes were back in the car and I was trapped at the plenary session in ragged, torn white tennis shoes.

Most people were still hugging the back of the auditorium, downing their first drinks of the day. The cash bar here opened early. They hadn’t noticed me yet, so I made a run for the exit and retrieved a pair of black boots. Slightly scuffed, but they made me feel more secure.

What’s the point? Back in those days the dress code in places like the “home of the Vermont Open” was shifting slowly toward “mod,” especially since Salmon’s election, but it was still pretty formal. My tie was a safe choice, wide with a little flash. Similar touches were visible in a field of mostly grey suits. But sneakers? Not yet acceptable for official government or corporate work.

On a porch two veteran bureaucrats were shooting the breeze as they gazed at the lake on a warm late Spring day. One worked for the state, the other was a Fed. I stopped for a talk.

“I wish I could do that,” the Fed sighed. He nodded toward the young people on a beach below. Several of them were about my age, old enough for bank accounts and debts. Before his companion could ask what exotic things the “kids” were doing, the Fed explained. “You know, just take a few days and (sigh) do what I want.”

He savored the words. Then followed up with the news that I had already missed the best show the night before. Apparently, the fireworks were wondrous to behold. As I recalled later in an article for The Vermont Freeman, my mind wandered for a moment to a strange fantasy; balding men — from both public and private sectors — spacing out on the hotel light show, and baying at the moon as they hunted down female “assistants” through the underbrush. Weird things were happening in the Age of Aquarius.

Tom Salmon shares with a group as Greg takes notes.

“The best way to tell a person’s age is not to.” This was the slogan for thought from the Commissioner of Employment Security, who issued the official welcome along with some quick tips and vital statistics. She explained, for example, that older workers are a good employer bet for several reasons — work habits, experience, productivity and dependability, plus their low absenteeism and high retention.

Next was the Coordinator of the National Council on Aging, who reminded us that “whether we like it or not, we get one day older each day we live.” Heavy. The rest of her talk was peppered with stats and logic apparently lifted from Reader’s Digest.

With more than 90 million people in the workforce, we learned, 45 percent were over 45 years of age. “Baby boom is now baby bust,” she claimed. “People 25 to 35 years old are not producing.” What America needed was 2.5 children per family, but only 2.0 were being produced. Noting that a third of all US citizens were over 55, she concluded with the upbeat announcement that the “youth revolution” was over.

Since those 1973 stats, the US workforce has almost doubled. However, the percent of people in it who are over 45 has actually stayed about the same. On the other hand, the birthrate has continued to drop, while the number of people over 65 has grown from 35 to 50 million in the last 20 years. They currently account for about 29 percent of the population.

According to a spokesmen for Vermont’s Apprenticeship Council, what the country needed in the 1970s was more manufacturing jobs for proud, dependable older employees, along with a reduction in the eligibility age for Social Security and, oddly enough, a lower minimum wage for students. The last suggestion took me by surprise.

“Wisdom, experience and productivity is being robbed from the economy,” the speaker warned. Nevertheless, “We WILL be blessed with clean air, clean water and lower noise levels. That doesn’t yet include rock bands. But we can hope.”

In the midst of such bad jokes and relentless pandering it was hard to keep my negativity in check. Making matters worse, a television in the room where I was writing my notes provided a jarring counterpoint. The coverage that day dealt with all manner of dirty tricks. Specifically, Gordon Strachan was tracing the White House-Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) approach to disciplining disloyal members of the Republican Party. Apparently, Nixon wanted to help “sympathetic” Democrats (a few still existed) while denying financial support to any Republican who defied the administration. This sounded a lot like President Trump.

But it wasn’t the news of the day or the talking points being hammered home at the conference that made me the most uncomfortable. It was how the real concerns of the elderly were being sidestepped and exploited to score points or secure funding.

It was too late for second thoughts, however. Everyone was standing for applause as Governor Salmon swept down the aisle. Grey suit, naturally, with wing-like lapels, red striped tie and healthy tan. Plus a flash of teeth that momentarily blinded me.

“I notice some younger types,” said the chief executive with a brief glance in my direction. It felt like an ominous start.

Salmon had reached “the ripe old age of 40,” he announced, while 49 percent of Vermonters were 25 years of age or younger. “The concerns of the young are a different proposition,” he concluded. The remark was perplexing. Maybe he was just trying to identify with his audience.

Charging on, Salmon mentioned a “fascinating article” he had read just that morning “between bumps and grinds.” That must have been a reference to the drive over. The story in Natural History was called “A New Age for the Aging.” But that’s all we heard about it, although his tone did indicate that the “new age” would be a good one.

Over the next five minutes he transitioned from generalizations to anecdotes. Salmon talked about jogging, the billions spent on cosmetics and “the proliferation of books on diet.” Then he asked rhetorically, “How many of us have given up smoking? How many have advised that others give up smoking? All of these things indicate that, indeed, we are intensely aware of the process — getting along in years, growing old.”

Despite the platitudes, the performance was impressive. More than 150 people were happily digesting big scoops of Salmon’s random thoughts. There were few hard facts in the mix. What he offered mostly were feelings and jokes. Yet most of the audience was with him; the rest were at least trying to follow his train of thought. After all, it was his conference.

“Take a gander at the facts,” he instructed, right hand shooting out at some supporting data that was invisible to the rest of us. “If only we could double the post-training years, people could put back from their vast pool of resources twice as much.” It was reasonable, on the surface. But the argument reminded me of a line from the film comedy, The Heartbreak Kid: “It’s time people stopped taking things out of this country and started putting things back in,” says the witless hero.

To be fair, Governor Salmon was wandering toward a point. “A fundamental goal of this society is to extend the span of healthy years,” he eventually explained. So, the basic idea was that the able-bodied elderly could be putting more back into the economy. But the way he expressed it left me unconvinced. There were also obligatory references to the environment, the issue that had turned the election in Salmon’s favor the previous November, and warnings about the decline in industrial jobs as service employment increased.

Finally, he offered a candid admission: “We’re not doing anywhere near enough.” Yet you had to wonder, about what? Biological research? Industrial jobs? Jogging? It was hard to tell, and he was becoming distracted. Leafing through his notes, Salmon mumbled several times, “We haven’t done enough…”

After a moment, however, he recovered and shifted back into comedy club mode. “I had the pleasure of seeing Danny Thomas last week at Lake Tahoe at a governor’s conference,” Salmon recalled. At one point Thomas had asked a question: “Did you ever hear about a group of widowers touring Italy on a bus?”

Get it? Widowers. You see, husbands usually die first. Hilarious.

We had reached the finale. The governor’s role, he explained, was “to serve as a catalyst for discussion and ideas.” But then he added a disclaimer. “We don’t want to give the impression we have a neat package plan.” No risk there. And some future shock. Salmon had just read Alvin Toffler’s book on the subject and summarized its point as follows: “Human beings are unable to accept too much change too fast.”

He also linked the idea that “we aren’t doing nearly enough” to another assertion, that “we’ve made modest beginnings.” The point? Apparently that, although we aren’t doing enough, we must also be wary of doing too much.

Edging away from the podium, Salmon assured everyone that he looked forward to more dialogue… but regretted that he had to leave. His exit line was another joke, this one unattributed: “I don’t have to leave, but I can’t stay here.”

The punchline hung in the air just long enough for the governor to glide out the door. What all of it suggested to me was simple: a good-looking young man with a deep voice and a first-rate tailor can move into some very high places.

At this point I had to ask: Why had I bothered to attend? Desperate for friends, or seeking tennis partners? Then I remembered — job security. But also had a more serious thought. Fear of aging was being manipulated, here and elsewhere, to promote a preoccupation with age. Related to that, one of the speakers had noted that the Older Americans Act was the only piece of social legislation that Nixon had signed. It was all that remained of President Johnson’s “war on poverty.”

After the morning session I walked past the bar. As usual it was packed. Passing on alcohol for the moment, I returned to my car for a private joint. Floating back to the lunch line my wide tie felt big enough to trip me.

Swim-suited teens sat in the canopied walkway between the parking lot and the lounge. “Every sha na na na, every wo oh oh oh, still shines,” they sang. “Every shing a ling a ling, that we started to sing, so fine.” The Carpenter’s nostalgic tune fit in well. Forward into the past.

I bought a beer and found a perch at the periphery of the action. The participants were mostly identified by name tags. Deals were definitely being made. The morning’s boredom had given way to the expectation of nailing down some funding.

A bit later, noticing a corner table surrounded by the low hum of lunchtime patter, I nabbed a seat. A man from GE was trading small talk with my boss and a younger management type. The manager was proto-Nixon, tightly wound, committed, and eager to make connections.

GE started the ball rolling. “Where do I know you from? Do you belong to the Elks?”

“No. Rotary,” said Nixon. As it turned out, they had even more common ground.

GE then turned to me and asked, “What do you get out of this?”

“All foreplay,” I whispered. “No action.”

Nixon zeroed in on my boss. “You with OEO?” He asked.

“Sponsored by them.”

A sly smile. “How’s funding look?”

“OEO looks dim, very dim,” he admitted. “But we DOL contractors have been expanded. Matter of fact, I got a call yesterday asking how much money I can use.”

Nixon recoiled, his lips narrowing to a slit. “I see,” he grumbled. This wasn’t what he expected, especially with the government trumpeting de-funding and Nixon promising smaller budgets and staff reductions.

“You always wonder,” my boss pressed, “what you would say to that kind of question. The real question, though, is whether you can use the money effectively.

“I see. Of course.” Nixon took a drag from his cigarette and turned to me, a missing piece of the puzzle, some young guy with longish hair making notes about who-knew what. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

I smiled sheepishly and nodded down the side of the table lined with bureaucrats. “I’m with them,” I said.

Nixon was finding this slice of real life hard to swallow. But my boss explained that the main issue concerning what were then called “Manpower” programs was who would control the purse strings. Governors were the most likely candidates; states’ rights usually translated into governors’ discretion. And governors responded strongly in those days to at least two known stimuli — federal cash and weekends at Lake Tahoe.

Somewhere between lunch and the afternoon panel discussions I lost the thread of the day. Only phrases penetrated the fog of conference talk. Later, as I headed back along the Interstate, I passed a road crew. Young men were strung along a roadside ditch, sweating in the afternoon heat. It made me wonder, just what will be the future of young people like these in the new age of the aging?

The goal, as outlined during the conference, was to extend the years of productivity. Retirement was once the light at the end of the tunnel, a safety net and reward for decades of service. But the new reward was apparently another job. The logic was that normal people, “responsible citizens,” want to work as long as possible, no matter whether it is on an assembly line or at the side of the road. Given the national epidemic of boredom and depression, that didn’t make much sense.

Nevertheless, the prevailing assumption was that healthy people are “hooked in,” busy, off the street, and not concerned about changing the system. So, productive people are happy people, and older people, at least according to the experts at Lake Morey, could be the happiest of all. This was reinforced often through anecdotes and innuendo, a dubious notion that could only be asserted with confidence from a podium.

The reward for a lifetime of work used to be retirement, and maybe also a gold watch. In the future it may become a part-time job. But one ingredient still seems to be missing — a meaning for it all.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Greg Guma/Maverick Media.

All images in this article are from the author

High profile journalists have been jabbering about whether or not Julian Assange is really one of them. If “journalist” is understood to mean “propagandist for the ruling class,” then he most certainly is not.

However, if we go by the more common, less restrictive definitions, anyone who compiles and transmits information to a willing audience is a journalist. Some are good, most are awful, even evil, but Julian Assange is historic. Saying he’s not a journalist is like saying Charles Darwin wasn’t a biologist, Albert Einstein wasn’t a physicist, LeBron James can’t play basketball, and by the way, Galileo was wrong. The earth’s flat after all and we’re the center of the universe.

Assange is a genius who could have joined the club of tech billionaires, but instead he looked at global injustice with the mind of a systems analyst, then founded Wikileaks and the transparency movement. They put corporations and government, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and all the other intel agencies on notice that they could no longer count on operating in secret. State and corporate scandals had been uncovered before, but there had never been anything like Wikileaks. It guaranteed sources anonymity if they used its dropbox secure technology, and it has never busted a source. It has published well over 10 million documents and never had to retract even one. Its decentralized technical infrastructure protects it from attack, and that strikes terror in the twisted psyches of Mike Pompeo and his inner circle of spies, murderers, and thieves without borders. If a global movement can free Julian Assange, with the full force of the national security state coming at him, it’ll be a game changer, perhaps even as historic as Wikileaks itself.

On the other hand, prosecuting and convicting Assange for the crime of possessing and publishing classified material would establish a precedent for convicting any journalist, media outlet, or citizen who publishes, republishes, cites, quotes, or even tweets classified material. There’s a growing list of classified Wikileaks that I could go to prison for quoting even though they’re not the ones that have shocked the world like the “Collateral Murder” video of US soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians from an Apache Helicopter as though they were playing video games.

One is “ETHNICITY IN RWANDA – – -WHO GOVERNS THE COUNTRY?” This is a cable generated in Rwanda on July 5, 2008. It doesn’t identify the sender, only the location it was sent from—Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. It could have been written and sent by one of many US officials: the US ambassador, a member of his staff, and/or any member of CIA, DIA, or other spooks in the region. The recipient is the US State Department, but no one in particular.

Whoever wrote this described Rwanda as an apartheid state exclusively ruled by an ethnic Tutsi elite headed by Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Most of all an English-speaking Tutsi elite who grew up in Uganda and joined Kagame in invading Rwanda from Uganda on October 1, 1990. The ninety days known as the Rwandan Genocide were not an isolated bloodbath, but the end of four-year war that began on that date. During that war Kagame’s army massacred Hutu civilians on a scale equivalent to or greater than the Tutsi massacres depicted in the movie Hotel Rwanda.

Ethnic reconciliation is one of the most boldfaced lies about Rwanda. For years we’ve been told that President Kagame was Rwanda’s savior, that he swept down out of nowhere to stop the genocide and ended the country’s long history of bitter Hutu and Tutsi competition. This US diplomatic cable from Kigali turns the reconciliation myth on its head, and the US State Department, including its higher-ups, know that. They’ve promoted the lie and lauded the criminal president for the last 25 years anyway. US elites put him in power, and he’s their man in Africa. He helps secure access to the trillions of dollars worth of strategic and critical mineral wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at staggering human cost. At the same time, 38% of Rwandan children, a majority of them Hutus, are stunted by malnutrition.

Rwanda’s brutal ethnic apartheid could lead to another bloodbath, and if it does, there’ll be blood all over US officials’ and elites’ hands. They know that’s what it is, and they’ve backed it up and exploited it for the last 25 years.

The Global Intelligence Files

In February 2012, Wikileaks began publishing the Global Intelligence Files, 5 million emails leaked from Stratfor, an intel-for-hire outfit based in Texas.

In the introduction to this release, Wikileaks writes that ”they reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Dow Chemical Company, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques, and psychological methods. For example: ‘…Control means financial, sexual or psychological control.’ – CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011.”

There are emails about how Stratfor corrupted the press from Reuters to the Kiev Post.

There’s one email in which the Stratfor founder and CEO says he’d like to assassinate Julian Assange.

There’s another, also written by a Stratfor exec, that says there’s a secret indictment of Assange in a federal court in Virginia. We all know that now but that was back in February 2012.

There is a lot more about what Stratfor would like to do to Assange, but, moving on, there’s one about how to exploit an Israeli spy providing information on the medical condition of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez back in 2011.

There’s another about a Stratfor subdivision called StratCap, whose goal is to use Stratfor’s information and analysis to trade in a range of global financial instruments, including government bonds, currencies, etc. It says that in 2011, a Goldman Sachs exec invested over $4 million in this scam and joined Stratfor’s board of directors.

There’s also one about Stratfor staff’s revolving door with government offices. Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division.

There’s one I take particular interest in headlined “Re: DISCUSSION – RWANDA/SOUTH AFRICA – Rwandans are cold ass mofos.” This describes the exploits of President Kagame’s assassination squads in Europe and Africa. Since I’ve been following their trail for the past ten years, I know more details than there are in the doc, so I wrote that one up under the headline “US Intel: Rwandans Are Cold Ass Mofos.”

Cold as these Rwandan mofos are, they couldn’t be colder than those trying to get their hands on Assange. They want to wreak vengeance on his body and mind, maybe even damage his outsized brain, and make a spine-chilling, blood-curdling example of him. So we’ve got to throw all we’ve got at stopping them.

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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Is it possible Senator Tom Cotton ghostwrites fairy tales on his days off from Congress? Cotton and his neocon buddies are pretty good at making things up. 

For instance:

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Europe must not give in to Tehran’s nuclear blackmail as the ayatollahs threaten to renew their rush toward the bomb. UK, Germany, & France ought to walk away from their financial backchannels w/ Iran & join us in imposing maximum pressure on the regime.https://t.co/3IqHudWJnV

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) May 8, 2019

But you really don’t get the full impact unless you read the unabridged statement posted May 8 on his Senate webpage. 

Europe must not give in to Tehran’s nuclear blackmail as the ayatollahs threaten to renew their rush toward the bomb. The United Kingdom, Germany, and France ought to walk away from their financial backchannels with Iran and join the United States in imposing maximum pressure on the regime. The United States will remain steadfast in its approach until Iran abandons its nuclear and missile programs and support for terrorism.

Nuclear blackmail.

This is the central theme of the fairy tale. Iran is making progress on a nuclear weapon. But like a lot of things the neocons claim, there isn’t a whole lot of evidence Iran is anywhere near developing a nuclear bomb, or even that it wants one.

The JCPOA is an agreement in part allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to verify Iran’s compliance. It also allowed the IAEA “wider access to, and information on, Iran’s nuclear program and implements a more robust verification system.” 

But, of course, we can’t have that. 

The idea Iran is ruled by irrational religious fanatics determined to attack the Great Satan America and especially the Zionist state of Israel. It’s taken as uncontested fact these wild-eyed mullahs will nuke both if they can successfully cobble together an atomic bomb.

This idea must be implanted in the head of the average American through all-pervasive propaganda fed into social media, television, radio, and the internet at large. 

Most Americans really don’t have a handle on what is happening. The illusion they believe is delivered in controlled fashion by corporate propaganda media network news, talk radio, countless videos on the internet, and above all social media.

Can you blame them?

It’s difficult enough making ends meet in this economy. It is managed by a financial elite and jimmy-rigged by a Federal Reserve and its monetary policies. Much wealth has gone to the crony capitalists, their industries are insrumental to the functioning of a national security state.

The so-called one percent is in fact more like the 0.01 percent. The average Joe and Jane are steadily losing ground in a dwindling and cannabilized middle class gutted by inflation, the offshoring and robotizing of employment, taxation, and ever-increasing government mandates, fees, fines, and revenue generation by militarized police at the local level.

The parasite is about to kill the host. 

Economic disaster is now casting a portentous shadow. But what is the main concern in a neocon-ized WH? 

Iran. Venezuela. 

Saving Israel (from itself and its superannuated racist ideology). 

Forcing a “peace deal” scribbled out by a Zionist and friend of Netanyahu who supports illegal settlers and their often violent response to Palestinians. 

North Korea. Kim started up his missile program again.

Is this a third front for Trump and his Crusade Against the Oil and Commie Evildoers? 

The national debt is an asteroid ready to hit America. No, it’s not as popular as the other asteroid, the one NASA says might get us like the one that killed off the dinosaurs. It’s like a Hollywood movie, another gripping disaster flick. 

But the debt—what we owe the banks and other countries—is very rarely talked about, and certainly not made into a mini-series. 

Instead, we get fairy tales, official lies and fabrications. 

We’re stuck with war (again) and the tab for that and everything else the financial elite have us on the hook for, including having us foot a gambling debt in the billions.

But even that was a ruse designed to funnel more money up into the maw of an insatiable and criminal uber-wealthy leviathan. 

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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.

The relentless push by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth for a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers has opened a promising new front over the past year thanks to the volunteer efforts of more than 40 engineers.

In May of 2018, AE911Truth launched a bold initiative called Project Due Diligence (PDD) aimed at engaging and educating the nation’s civil and structural engineers. The project is spearheaded by AE911Truth board member Roland Angle, CE, who has made it his mission to galvanize America’s engineering community to restore the professional and scientific credibility it lost after 9/11.

Image on the right: Civil engineer Roland Angle speaks at the first presentation of Project Due Diligence in April 2018 at the Marines’ Memorial Association in San Francisco.

Angle is a civil engineer who was trained in the use of explosives while in the U.S. Army Special Forces (see his bio with those of other key volunteers below). He has joined other AE911Truth members to create a PowerPoint presentation called, “A Critique of the NIST WTC Building Failure Reports and the Progressive Collapse Theory.” The presentation outlines the many errors, omissions, and false premises contained in the official reports, which were published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and endorsed by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

The PDD presentation also cites major errors in Zdeněk Bažant’s “Progressive Collapse Theory,” which he submitted to the ASCE just two days after 9/11 and was published in their Journal of Engineering Mechanics just a few months later. AE911Truth takes the position that the ASCE leadership performed unethically from the start of the official investigations. In addition to failing to protest the illegal removal of debris (i.e., physical evidence) from the WTC crime scene, the ASCE continues to suppress scientific challenges to the data and methodology used by both the Bažant and NIST analyses, which misrepresent the building collapse mechanisms.

Angle and his team maintain that it is the professional duty of engineers to become familiar with the official reports endorsed by the profession’s most publicly visible organization (ASCE) and to assess the merit of any challenges to those reports. It is incumbent upon engineers, they argue, to carefully review all discourse on these catastrophic building failures in order to ensure public safety and uphold U.S. engineering standards.

PDD’s outreach constitutes a novel attempt to build a self-expanding contact network. The program currently has 42 volunteers (who are civil, structural or mechanical engineers recruited from among AE911Truth petition signers). Their immediate goal is to reach out to the 160 local branches of the ASCE. They have already begun to expand the effort to include other engineering organizations and the general public.

The presentation process is efficient and flexible

Presentations are anchored by the PDD slideshow, first used by Angle in a video address at the Marines’ Memorial Association in San Francisco. Presenters receive a flash drive containing the video as well as the original PowerPoint slides. Presenters can show the video or use the slides with their own narration.

The original video is 78 minutes long but may be divided into two parts. Part one is devoted to problems with NIST’s Building 7 analysis. It makes heavy use of preliminary findings released by Dr. Leroy Hulsey, who is completing his study, “A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7” at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Part two uses data that refutes the official account of the Twin Towers’ destruction. Faulty premises in Bažant’s analysis are also examined because that theory was later cited in the NIST report as an explanation for the towers’ total collapse, which NIST did not attempt to explain, instead only carrying its analysis up to the point where it says the buildings were poised to collapse.

The presentation remains dynamic and can be updated as needed. The presentation sessions, which include open discussion, offer an opportunity to:

• gauge engineers’ familiarity with the NIST reports
• elucidate points challenging the findings in those reports
• encourage participants to honor their duty to examine these points
• promote a climate of scientific debate without political or emotional overtones
• increase participants’ confidence to discuss 9/11 issues
• motivate participants to take a position on the existing reports
• inspire participants to act on their convictions

Versions of the presentation more suitable for the general public are also being developed.

PDD results inspire optimism

More than 10 presentations have already taken place, and positive audience feedback has predominated. To date, 100 percent of attending engineers have indicated their approval of the presentation. Most were not previously familiar with the NIST reports and seemed to appreciate what they learned from the presentation. PDD’s engineers hope that this positive feedback will supersede overt attempts by the ASCE national leadership to prevent their presentations from being given at ASCE branches.

Overlapping the ASCE outreach is a second wave directed at other engineering organizations. A primary target is the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE). PDD’s engineers have encountered little resistance from this organization and believe this was due to the NSPE not being part of the original investigations.

In addition to presentations at local ASCE and NSPE branches, presentations have been held during the ASCE’s Forensic Engineering 8^th Congress in November of 2018 and the ASCE’s Structures Congress in April 2019. Advertised during the day at each conference, the presentations were made at nearby hotels in the evening. Each was attended by a dozen and half a dozen Congress participants, respectively, as well as several local AE911Truth petition signers.

Dr. Oswald Rendon-Herrero spoke at the November 30th PDD presentation in Austin, TX. He is a professor emeritus of civil engineering at Mississippi State University, was one of the original founders of the ASCE’s Forensic Engineering Congress, held every three years, and he was co-chair of the Forensic Engineering 2nd Congress in 2000.

Attendees of the November 30th PDD presentation in Austin, TX, gather for drinks and conversation.

Roland Angle and PDD engineer Larry Cooper mingle with attendees of the April 25th PDD presentation in Orlando.

Who are the volunteers for Project Due Diligence?

Here are several of the original members of the group, who bring their own expertise and experience to the project:

Roland Angle, CE, is a civil engineer with a Bachelor of Science degree from UC Berkeley. He has 50 years of experience in the design and testing of blast-hardened missile launch facilities and in the design of U.S. Naval explosive’s containers, harbor terminal facilities, earth foundation systems, and hydraulic systems. He has owned three construction companies and has taught high school engineering-related subjects.

Lynn Affleck, PE, has a BS in civil engineering from the University of Utah and first worked as a structural engineering specialist, designing heavy structures for the petrochemical industry. He went on to establish his own engineering business, which he operated for 21 years. He returned to engineering with a new consulting firm for which he continues to work part-time.

Jeffrey Bishop has a BS in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Since graduating in 2010, his work has focused on designing architectural building envelopes for high-rise structures and industrial projects.

Charles Coleman, PE, has a BS in civil engineering from San Diego State University and did civil engineering graduate studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. He worked as a surveyor with the California Aqueduct Project, and then went on to a 42-year career in structural steel design involving the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline as well as working on construction projects in Saudi Arabia. He has worked for the Alaska Department of Transportation and done private consulting. He also has piloted large Boeing jets for American Airlines. He was flying 757s and 767s for AA’s International Division at the time of 9/11. In fact, he had served as captain on two of the jets that were alleged to have been hijacked: AA11, which is alleged to have flown into the WTC North Tower; and AA77, which is alleged to have hit the Pentagon.

Larry Cooper, PE, has a BS in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin and an MS in structural engineering from the University of Illinois. He has 40 years’ experience as a consulting engineer involved in structural design and construction of major wastewater treatment facilities as well as highway and railway bridges. His first consultancy led him to become involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the late 1960s, and he became affiliated with an organization called Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East.

Bill Graham, PE, received a BS in mechanical engineering and a BA in environmental studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, an MS in civil engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and a master of management degree from Northwestern University. He has more than 40 years of experience in engineering studies, design and construction, working with government and industrial clients in chemical, civil, and environmental spheres.

Michael Herzig has a BS in civil engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder and has retired with 42 years of experience in public works. He was employed for 11 years by the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering, where he did street, drainage, and wastewater system design, as well as construction management. He also supervised operations in their hydraulic research laboratory and performed failure analysis in the wake of various environmental disasters. He supervised engineers for the City of Fort Collins, CO, working on transportation facility design and plan review. This experience included analysis of reinforced concrete and steel bridges.

Gene Johnson has a BS in mechanical engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and more than 30 years of construction and mining experience. He designed and used heavy machinery in open pit mining operations and is familiar with the use of explosives.

Dan May received a BS in civil engineering from Marquette University and began his career doing construction management. He moved on to the field of employee safety in industrial plants where he gained considerable experience in root cause analysis following workplace accidents. He has an understanding of forensic engineering investigations. Dan also has an MBA and does product development work.

Kathy McGrade has a BS in materials engineering from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and has done related graduate studies at Stanford University. She began her career working for various start-up companies, including Starstruck, where she developed satellite-delivery rockets; and Metcal, where she worked with shape-memory alloy materials.

Zaida Owre, PE, has a BS in civil engineering from UC Berkeley. She is retired after more than 20 years working for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and the Alameda County Public Works Agency in California.

Fred Schaejbe, PE, has a BS in civil engineering from Tufts University and received a scholarship to the University of Illinois to obtain his MS in structural engineering. For 21 years he worked in structural design and project management involving steel structures for offshore drilling operations and production platforms for the oil and gas industries. After moving to Wisconsin, he devoted another 24 years to civil engineering projects.

John Schuler, PE, has BS and MS degrees in civil engineering from Lehigh University and the University of Alaska, respectively. He has 27 years’ experience with geotechnical and transportation projects, including 15 years with the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Ibrahim Soudy, Ph.D., PE, received his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral degrees in structural engineering from the University of Alberta. He has more than 30 years of academic and practical experience in the design and evaluation of bridges, buildings, and offshore marine and materials-handling structures in structural engineering projects.

Tony Szamboti has a BS in mechanical engineering from Villanova University. He has decades of experience in the aerospace and communications industries and has designed many types of structures for use in dynamic environments.

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All images in this article are from ae911truth.org

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The Gwadar Terrorist Attack Exposed the International Media’s Double Standards

By Andrew Korybko, May 12, 2019

The BBC reported that the “Balochistan Liberation Army” (BLA) claimed responsibility for the attack and quoted the terrorist organization as “saying it had targeted Chinese and other foreign investors”.

The 5G Revolution: Millions of “Human Guinea Pigs” in Big Telecom’s Global Experiment

By Michael Welch and Chris Cook, May 12, 2019

On April 3, Verizon flipped the switch in the US cities of Chicago and Minneapolis, making the telecom company the first carrier in the world to make the 5G network accessible to properly equipped devices.

The Zionist Idea Has Never Been More Terrifying than It Is Today

By Rima Najjar, May 11, 2019

To Palestinians, the intersection between Judaism and Zionism has always been considered the most dangerous aspect of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state in Palestine today.

Al Baghdadi: The US Couldn’t Wish for a Greater Ally

By Tony Cartalucci, May 11, 2019

The goal had been to further isolate the Syrian government in aid of Washington’s ultimate goal of overthrowing Damascus. When growing numbers of extremists failed to do this, the US then used the presence of ISIS as a pretext for a revised version of the direct military intervention Russia had thwarted just a year earlier.

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

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 11, 2019

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality.

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

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

Considering the fact that between 25 and 30 percent of the Iranian economy is owned and/or operated by the Revolutionary Guards, sanctioning of the organization’s economic activities,especially its foreign trade, is bound to further depress Iran’s economy and, hence, its people’s living conditions.

The Western American Empire Plays the War Card

By Comitato No Nato, May 10, 2019

A vast arc of growing tensions and conflicts extends from East Asia to Central Asia, from the Middle East to Europe, from Africa to Latin America.

Why Does Trump Like Communist Vietnam? Because It’s Capitalist.

By Mark Karlin, May 09, 2019

In 2019, the evolution of Vietnam toward capitalism, praised by the Trump administration, is not without irony. A ruinous and brutal U.S. war against North Vietnam and its Viet Cong supporters in the south ended with the U.S. withdrawal of military troops in 1973, followed by a complete end to the conflict in 1975.

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Featured image is from Iranian Presidency/Anadolu Agency

It has been an uninspiring election, punctuated by occasional moments of madness on the part of various candidates.  Their sin was to be incautious in their previous use of social media, a form of communication that reveals everything and nothing about a person.  In a political sense, the erring tweet and the injudicious remark on an online forum have laid waste to incipient political careers and ambitions.

This is a far cry from the supposedly mighty role the use of social media was meant to have in participatory politics.  Now, the chickens have come home to roost in various unexpected ways.  Social media outlets are condemned for being platforms for misinformation and manipulation (the horror!) and tech giants are given daily tongue lashings by politicians and representatives for not being online Bobbies. 

Paradoxically, these are the same critics who have been more than happy to embrace such media to access voters at virtually no cost.  As President Donald J. Trump once explained on his use of Twitter,

“I like it because I can get my point of view out there, and my point of view is very important to a lot of people that are looking at me.” 

Various surges in the polls by presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in 2016 were occasioned by a conspicuous and aggressive presence on social media relative to his rival, Hillary Clinton.  In Britain, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the position of Labour leader was very much boosted by a dedicated social media following.

Social media in this Australian federal election has done quite the opposite: rather than advancing profiles and improving visibility for the candidate, mistakes have been noted, and previous misbehaviour drawn out as grave errors of judgment.  Bad speech has been picked up and prosecuted by the machine men and women of various parties.  Resignations have been encouraged, and, in some cases, forced.

This instances have provided marvelous distractions from policy, fitting for those who do not have any.

“The offensive remarks,” noted The New York Times, “have forced at least six candidates for Parliament to quit, while many more linger like zombies – most of them from the conservative governing coalition and other parties on the right.”

The range of comments, for all the unsavoury nature, would not have seemed out of place in previous elections.  Susan Harris-Rimmer, a law academic at Griffith University, expressed amazement “that these people are being asked to resign, because a lot of this stuff would have been seen as normal a few years ago.”  It was “a bit of a sign of success that they’re being forced to leave.”  Harris-Rimmer ignores that obvious point that such individuals do not leave so much as retreat to the party undergrowth.

Has Australian politics suddenly become righteous?  A sense of proportion is in order, and social media is precisely the medium that distorts it.  Rage is magnified, as are errors.  Idiotic behaviour, probably mandatory for a teenager, is rendered immutable if it touches on rape humour or sexual observation.  Luke Creasey, an urchin-looking Labor candidate running in Melbourne, expressed contrition at doing so but ultimately fell on his sword.  He acknowledged making “those awful comments many years ago and they in no way reflect the views I hold today,” claimed Creasey in a statement.  He understood “, especially as a member of the LGBTIQ community, that we need to be careful about what we share or like on social media.” 

Others have been somewhat fresher in their sins.  Jessica Whelan, formerly a Liberal candidate running in the seat of Lyons, came undone with the airing of various social media posts in the Tasmanian parliament.  In 2017, Whelan’s response to a woman regarding public housing waiting lists was piquant:

“Given that your profile states that you went to college at ‘never lose hope in Allah’… I hope you’re not bloody on our housing waiting list.” 

Another, addressed to a Facebook video purportedly showing American Muslim and non-Muslim women praying together, was similarly direct. 

“Round them up Donald, cut their clitorises off and sell them to Muslims in Muslim countries and cancel their passports.  You’ll make a mint.”

Jeremy Hearn, also of the Liberal Party, was binned for anti-Muslim remarks made in 2018.  Those sinister warriors of Allah (“people of bad character”), he said pointedly, had been insinuating themselves into the landscape, concealing their true intentions in wishing to overthrow the Australian government. 

Not to be outdone, Peter Killin, another Liberal candidate, resigned after attacking his own colleague and member for Goldstein, Tim Wilson, in a comments thread of a blog post by Christian conservative blogger Bill Muehlenberg.  While contesting the seat of Wills in Melbourne’s inner-north, Killin made no secret of the fact that he was against the pre-selection of Wilson for Goldstein, who had won by “one lousy vote” in 2016.  “Many of us will recall [Wilson] was the openly homosexual who proposed to his boyfriend in parliment [sic].”

One of the last hold outs – and there are no doubt a few more lurking – was Gurpal Singh, Liberal candidate for Scullin.  What eventually pushed him?  Not remarks made in 2017 equating same-sex marriage with paedophilic tendencies.  It took Facebook comments to an SBS article written in 2018 expressing disagreement with an allegation of rape made by a Punjabi woman against her husband. 

“Based on new information that has come to light,” explained a Liberal party spokesman, “Mr Gurpal Singh has been asked to resign as candidate for Scullin.”  

Singh called it “shameful that a married woman suffering family violence can go to such extent” having “skimmed her lover, husband and father of her two children for all these years.”

Perversely, in an era characterised by episodic Twitter deluges by a US President, many bruising and scornful of political correctness, Australian politics shows a far more regulated concern for the red mist of online commentary.  The social media scrubbers within the parties have gotten busy.  Tweet and be damned; share, and face the consequences.  In Creasey’s own warning, “this is a really important lesson for young people that your social media footprint will follow you.”

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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]

Most of the international media is referring to Saturday’s attack on the Pearl Continental hotel in Gwadar as being committed by either “gunmen” or “militants” instead of the actual terrorists that the perpetrators are after the BBC reported that they chose their target in order to kill Chinese and other foreign investors, therefore exposing a common double standard whereby “politically convenient” terrorist attacks are simply reframed as “shootings” or “militancy” while “politically inconvenient” acts of resistance are smeared as “terrorism”.

Several terrorists tried storming into the Pearl Continental hotel in CPEC’s terminal port of Gwadar Saturday afternoon, but a large-scale tragedy was thankfully averted after the security services managed to evacuate most of the guests. The BBC reported that the “Balochistan Liberation Army” (BLA) claimed responsibility for the attack and quoted the terrorist organization as “saying it had targeted Chinese and other foreign investors”. This incident is a blatant act of terrorism just like the much more devastating ones that were carried out against several hotels and churches in Sri Lanka last month, but the international media is resorting to its tried-and-tested double standards after most of them described the perpetrators as “gunmen” or “militants” instead of the actual terrorists that they are.

This is because the terrorist attacks are “politically convenient” for the US and India, with these two allies collectively commanding impressive influence across the world’s media space, because it targeted Chinese civilians and infrastructure as part of the ongoing Hybrid War on CPEC. The evident purpose was to deter further investments and visits by foreign businessmen to this strategically significant port in the global pivot state of Pakistan, as well as to trigger an overreaction by the security services against local Baloch which could then be basis upon upon which a Xinjiang-like fake news campaign alleging “concentration camps” and “cultural cleansing” can be carried out prior to the possible imposition of sanctions for “humanitarian reasons”. Of course, this would also be executed in parallel with the Hybrid War on Hybrid War in Pakistan pretending that the country has no terrorist threats whatsoever and that all forms of opposition to the state — including taking up arms and targeting civilians — are “legitimate”, especially if they’re being led by minority Pashtuns or Baloch.

On the opposite side of the coin, “politically inconvenient” acts of resistance such as what the Kashmiris and Palestinians are doing against their Indian and “Israeli” occupiers (who not coincidentally have recently become military-strategic partners and are both allied with the US) are smeared as “terrorism” even if they only target soldiers and paramilitary units. Another double standard is that international media is usually pleading for the world’s leading economies to invest in underdeveloped “Global South” regions, yet these same information outlets are now lending “legitimacy” to the BLA’s terrorist crusade against China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) investments in Pakistani Balochistan because it serves the US’ grand strategic purposes. Having said that, even the most casual information consumer must sense that they’re being manipulated after the world condemned last month’s terrorist attacks on Sri Lankan hotels but is now silent about the latest one Pakistan’s PC Gwadar.

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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.

 “If you are one of the millions who seek faster downloads of movies, games and virtual pornography, a solution is at hand, that is, if you do not mind volunteering your living body in a giant uncontrolled experiment on the human population.”

– Dr. Devra Davis, President of the Environmental Health Trust [1]

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