Global Research

Imperial madness defines US geopolitics under Republicans and undemocratic Dems, seeking dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations.

Naked aggression and other hostile actions are its favored strategies. Trump delegated his geopolitical agenda to hardline extremists Pompeo and Bolton.

They’re spoiling for more wars than already, Venezuela and Iran in the eye of their storm — supported by congressional hardliners and major media, providing propaganda services for their imperial agenda.

On Monday after meeting with Pompeo in Rovaniemi, Finland, Sergey Lavrov said US military intervention in Venezuela would be “catastrophic.”

His warning applies equally to Iran.

“I don’t see any supporters of a reckless military solution” in Venezuela, he stressed, not regionally or in Europe.

Nor is there any international support for US belligerence against Iran, Israel, the Saudis, and perhaps the UAE likely the only nations for it.

Hostile Trump regime actions against Iran and Venezuela are all about wanting to isolate their countries, crush their economies, and immiserate their people — its actions in flagrant violation of international and US constitutional law.

Measures against Iran include withdrawing from the JCPOA nuclear deal, imposing multiple rounds of sanctions on its officials and enterprises, threatening sanctions on nations buying its oil and continuing normal relations with its ruling authorities, designating its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IGRC) a terrorist organization, along with threatening military action against the country.

In response to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani earlier saying US confrontation with the Islamic Republic would be “the mother of all (regional) wars,” Trump shot back tweeting:

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

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

Bipartisan hardliners in Washington support transforming Iran into a US puppet state, eliminating Israel’s main regional rival, a scheme the Jewish state has been pushing for by its majority extremists.

Prior to joining the Trump regime, Pompeo and Bolton publicly urged terror-bombing strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities — despite knowing they include no military component, nor is there any evidence that Tehran seeks it, just the opposite.

The Islamic Republic abhors these weapons, wanting them eliminated everywhere. Trump regime hardliners want regime change in Iran and Venezuela by whatever it takes to achieve it.

If war by other means fails, naked aggression remains an ominous possibility against both countries — despite no world community support for going this far.

Iranian retaliation against US and Israeli sites would clearly follow Pentagon surgical strikes on its nuclear and/or military facilities, destabilizing the region, risking global war if Russia intervenes as it did in Syria at the behest of Damascus.

Time and again, the Islamic Republic is accused of things it had nothing to do with. According to National Iranian American Council director Triti Parsi, “Bolton wants war (with Iran). He will do any provocation to get” it.

On Sunday, he ominously said the following:

“In response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings (sic), the United States is deploying the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force to the US Central Command region to send a clear and unmistakable message to (Iran) that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.”

Pompeo made similar remarks, falsely claiming the Trump regime has seen “escalatory actions from the Iranians,” adding:

“(W)e have good reason to want to communicate clearly about how the Iranians should understand how we will respond to actions they may take.”

Fact: Iran hasn’t attacked another countries in centuries. It threatens none now.

The US threatens everyone everywhere, at war in multiple theaters, threatening more aggression against Iran, Venezuela, perhaps against Cuba and Nicaragua as well — what the scourge of imperialism is all about.

Hostile statements by Bolton and Pompeo, along with Trump regime actions against the Islamic Republic and Venezuela ominously resemble anti-Iraq Bush/Cheney rhetoric in the run-up to their 2003 aggression — based on Big Lies and deception.

Neocon extremist head of the undemocratic Foundation for Defense of Democracies Mark Dubowitz urges war on Iran, earlier saying:

“The next time a Revolutionary Guard attack boat harasses the US Navy (sic), we should sink it, put it in the bottom of the Gulf. That would be a good start,” adding:

Israel is striking Iranian and other targets in Syria. “I thing the US could do the same.” Analyst Seyed Hossein Mousavian believes “(a)s the US pushes Iran to the brink, Tehran may need to get tough,” adding:

Trump regime hardliners are “laying siege to Iran in ways similar to the way (Bush/Cheney) did as it prepared to wage an illegal war against Iraq.”

Will they convince DJT to attack Iran and Venezuela, ignoring the risk of possible global war?

In early 2017, senior Iranian National Security and Foreign Policy Commission member Mojtaba Zonour warned that Tehran would retaliate swiftly if its territory is struck – saying it’s able to hit regional targets with destructive force in minutes.

“(O)nly seven minutes are needed for (an) Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv,” he added. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said “(i)f the enemy makes a mistake, our roaring missiles will come down on them.”

Over five million Venezuelans are armed and mobilized in citizen assemblies to defend the revolution from internal and external efforts to undermine it, Maduro explained.

Venezuela’s military stands with him against US regime change tactics, committed to protect the republic and its social democracy, its forces trained and able to wage protracted guerrilla war against Yankee imperialism.

If the Trump regime attacks Venezuela and/or Iran militarily, all bets are off. Both countries will go all-out to defend their sovereignty.

If Russia intervenes to help them as it acted in Syria, global war could follow. What’s unthinkable is possible — maybe inevitable given US rage for wanting all sovereign independent governments eliminated.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from The Bullet

The known extent of contamination of American communities with the highly toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS continues to grow at an alarming rate, with no end in sight. As of March 2019, at least 610 locations in 43 states are now known to be affected, including drinking water systems serving an estimated 19 million people.

The latest update of an interactive map by EWG and the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute, at Northeastern University, documents publicly known PFAS pollution in public water systems and military bases, airports, industrial plants and dumps, and firefighter training sites. The map and Northeastern’s PFAS Contamination Site Tracker are the most comprehensive resources available for tracking PFAS pollution in the U.S.

When the map was last updated, in July 2018, it showed 172 sites in 40 states. However, the data used for this latest update are not directly comparable to last year’s. We are now using more comprehensive data from the federal Safe Drinking Water Information System, which shows PFAS contamination in the tap water supplies of 446 communities. Information about other locations on the map come from the Defense Department and from news reports collected by Northeastern. (Details about our sources and methodology are here.)

PFAS compounds are a family of thousands of chemicals used in a wide array of consumer and industrial applications – nonstick cookware, waterproof clothing, grease-resistant food packaging, firefighting foam and many more. The most notorious PFAS compounds are PFOA, formerly used to make DuPont’s Teflon, and PFOS, formerly an ingredient in 3M’s Scotchgard.

PFOA and PFOS were phased out under pressure from the Evironmental Protection Agency, after studies linked them to cancer, thyroid disease, weakened childhood immunity and other health problems. They have been replaced by PFAS compounds with a slightly different chemical structure, which were not adequately tested for safety before the EPA or the Food and Drug Administration allowed them on the market. PFAS chemicals pollute the blood of virtually all Americans, including newborn babies, and they persist forever in the environment.

Michigan is the state with the most locations on the map, with 192. The state’s PFAS contamination problem is severe, but the high number also reflects the state’s ongoing comprehensive multi-agency effort to test for PFAS. Michigan environmental officials have estimated that more than 11,000 sites in the state may be contaminated with PFAS.

California has 47 known contamination sites and New Jersey has 43.

PFOS contaminates 117 military sites, including 77 military airports, a legacy of the Pentagon’s 50-year history of using firefighting foam with PFOA and PFOS. Firefighting foam is the source of contamination in two of the three states added to the map since the last update:

The site in the nation with the highest known PFAS contamination is the now-closed England Air Force Base in Alexandria, La., where the Pentagon says a groundwater monitoring well had a combined level of 10.97 million parts per trillion, or ppt, of PFOA and PFOS in March 2015. The worst contamination of drinking water was in Algoma Township, Mich., where a private well had a combined level of 72,300 ppt of PFOA and PFOS in December 2018.

The drinking water for 19 million Americans is thought to be contaminated with PFAS, but that number is an estimate only, since public water systems know how many locations they serve but not necessarily how many people live or work at those locations. Evidence has emerged that the number of Americans with PFAS-contaminated tap water is much higher than 19 million. An EWG analysis of unreleased EPA test data estimated that more than 1,500 drinking water systems, serving up to 110 million Americans, may be contaminated with PFAS chemicals.

The EPA has known of PFAS’ health hazards for two decades but has failed to set an enforceable legal limit for drinking water or standards for cleanup of contaminated sites. The agency recently released a so-called PFAS action plan, but it is woefully inadequate. The EPA plan will not stop the introduction of new PFAS chemicals, end the use of PFAS in everyday products, alert Americans to the risk of PFAS pollution or clean up contaminated drinking water supplies. (See the complete list of EWG’s recommendations for federal action on PFAS.)

A bipartisan PFAS task force has been formed in Congress. Several PFAS bills have been introduced, including legislation to force the EPA to set a legal limit for all PFAS in drinking water, and to add PFAS to chemicals covered by the Superfund cleanup law.

In the absence of EPA action, states are taking the lead. A number of states have set legal limits or health-based guidelines for PFAS chemicals that are much lower than the EPA’s non-binding advisory level of 70 ppt for PFOA, PFOS or both chemicals combined. Drawing on the best available research, EWG scientists recommend a drinking water standard of 1 ppt for any individual PFAS chemical, or the combined level of all PFAS chemicals.

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All images in this article are from EWG

Western governments and the xenophobic far right are engaged in a veritable war on Muslims. One way in which this attack unfolds is an ongoing effort to force Muslims to embrace dominant ‘values’ and change their forms of dress or abandon religious observances. Though he was not speaking exclusively about Muslims, the infamous war criminal, Tony Blair, recently sounded off on this very theme of the obligation to ‘integrate’ and was challenged very powerfully by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian.

As this vicious and escalating attack on Muslim communities unfolds, many on the left appreciate clearly its racist nature and the need for active solidarity with those on the receiving end. However, there are others whose ideological opposition to religion is rather rigidly applied and, when the hijab, niqab or burka come up or the issue of prayer rooms is considered, they fall into equivocation or worse. On my own Facebook page, which probably offers a fairly good sampling of broad left opinion, posts that deal with such matters always bring in comments on the need to keep religion out of schools and musings on the need to ‘save’ Muslim women from their own lack of enlightenment and assumed male coercion. In some instances, this viewpoint takes the form of equivocation, but there are leftists who will actually support the position that no one wearing the hijab should be allowed to teach in school and who actively campaign for Muslim prayer rooms in schools to be closed down.

Though I am on the political left and support secular public institutions, I give this perspective the somewhat tongue in cheek title of ‘left secularism.’ In my view, it is a mistaken approach that renders those who adopt it passive (or even complicit) in the face of the reactionary and highly dangerous proliferation of Islamophobia. I want to deal more fully with this, but, first, there are a couple of more general questions to consider about freedom of religion and the very valid and important issue of secularism.

Secularism

I was once accused by a left advocate of the ‘burka ban’ of being part of the ‘pro-Islamic left.’ Actually, I am an ideological opponent of religion in general, though not Islam in particular. I think all the major religions play a reactionary role and I work for a society where the need for religious faith no longer exists. However, I am also strongly of the view that the only just and viable approach is to defend religious freedom. I see no contradiction here. Even with progressive intentions, the use of prohibition and restrictions against religious believers would be both wrong and futile. When such measures are selectively employed by reactionary governments, however, the duty to oppose them is absolutely clear cut. To give any support to attacks on a religious minority should be unthinkable. I would agree, for example, that the Roman Catholic Church is a thoroughly reactionary institution, but Northern Ireland in the late 1960s was not the time or place for progressives to raise the anti-Catholic banner.

How then does the important principle of secularism fit into the situation? I fully agree that it is a vital principle that we should struggle for and defend. Sadly, though, there is considerable misunderstanding on just what it is. The state and its institutions should be secular and not endorse or promote any brand of religion. Laws should not be enacted in the name of a Supreme Being. Parliaments and legislatures should not display religious symbols, and the school day should not begin with a prayer. However, what of those whose religious obligations require that they dress a certain way or perform rituals or prayers at particular times? The Canadian state has, to some degree, accepted the principle of ‘reasonable accommodation’. In the area of religion, it accepts that reasonable efforts should be made to enable workers or users of public services to adhere to the obligations of their particular faith. I think it enormously unfortunate when leftists take a worse position than the state on such an issue.

It is a violation of the principle of secularism for school pupils to be compelled to start the day with a prayer, but it is not interfered with when those whose religion requires an act of worship are given a separate space where they can comply with this. It is a gross and fundamental breach for a crucifix to hang from the wall of the Quebec National Assembly, but it is outrageously unfair to tell a teacher, as Quebec’s Bill 21 does, that she can’t wear the hijab or to threaten the employment of a government worker who wears a turban. A crucifix in a legislature is an endorsement of Christianity, while a teacher wearing the hijab hardly makes her school an Islamic institution. She is merely a worker and community member dressing as her conscience and personal choices dictate, and it would be enormously sad to stand aside when her rights are being trampled on by a racist government playing to its bigoted cheering section.

Islamophobic Context

The proposition that we are living in a period when anti-Muslim hatred is rampant and worsening is so self evident that there is hardly a need to call for evidence or to advance any major supporting argument. Countries with majority Muslim populations are under attack by U.S. led Western imperialism. Muslim populations in the West face massive persecution. Governments feed this trend, and wide sections of the media fuel it. Laws are passed that target Muslims, with the above-mentioned Quebec legislation as but one example. While white supremacist terror increases horribly, the terrorist label is reserved almost entirely for Muslims. For every lethal attack on Muslims by far-right racists, drawing strength from the Islamophobia of the political mainstream, there are hundreds of assaults and thousands of abusive incidents. The pursuit of endless war, the need for an ‘enemy within’ in the age of austerity, and the rise of the populist right have all worked to ensure that Islamophobia is the prejudice of choice in Western societies, including Canada.

This Islamophobic context is utterly decisive. I came across a video taken in a Danish supermarket some months after a ban on the niqab and burka was introduced last year. Watching the horrible racist attack, and seeing the interview with the woman afterwards, makes something abundantly clear. You have to consider the position you take based on exactly this kind of sickening daily reality. You have to respond to the orchestrated persecution of Muslims that is unfolding. The woman in the video is not asking you to endorse her religious beliefs or approve of her clothing choices, but she does have a right to go about her life without insult and attack, and she does have a valid demand for your solidarity. Perhaps the famous comment by Arundhati Roy on the burka ban can help to drive that home. If you support the ban that has fuelled the climate of racist vigilanteism at work here or, if you equivocate on it, your disorientated view of ‘secularism’ has led you astray disastrously. Surely, we must actively function as the allies of Muslim people in such a situation.

Marx Weighs In

In the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx famously argued that, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people.”

A little further on, he added, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

Religious-minded allies will forgive me, I hope, if I end this with my socialism and atheism on display. I want a society where the need for religion is replaced by a sense of solidarity and purpose among people no longer dominated by the profit needs of a few but who work together to make life as rich and beautiful as it can be. I believe that the movements we build against the present system can begin that process of ending the need for ‘illusory happiness’. From the words of Karl Marx and the conclusions I draw from them, however, I see little reason to regulate how anyone dresses or to try to ban their religious devotions in the name of a distorted ‘secularism’. I see, in fact, plenty of reasons to challenge the racist upsurge of Islamophobia and to show the fullest solidarity with Muslim communities under attack.

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John Clarke is a writer and retired organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Follow his tweets at @JohnOCAP

Featured image is from The Bullet

On May 6, air defenses of Russia’s Hmeimim airbase in Syria repelled two militant rocket attacks intercepting at least 36 projectiles, the Russian Defense Ministry reported.

According to the defense ministry, the attacks caused no damage or casualties. Militants had used a unmanned aerial vehicle to direct their fire.

The shelling came from the Idlib de-escalation zone, which included the militant-held parts of Latakia, Idlib, Hama and Aleppo provinces. The Russian Aerospace Forces carried out strikes on militant positions in response to the attack.

According to pro-government and pro-militant sources, Russian warplanes struck two dozen of targets in northern Hama and southern Idlib on May 6 and continued striking militant positions on May 7.

The situation is developing in northwestern Hama where the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the Tiger Forces and their allies launched an advance on positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Jaish al-Izza and other militant groups on May 6.

Initially, government troops seized several points north and northwest of Kernaz and forced militants to retreat towards Kafr Nabudah.

However, by the evening, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led forces had launched a counter-attack attempting to recapture the lost positions. In the morning of May 7, clashes continued.

Pro-militant sources released multiple conflicting reports urging that from 20 to 80 pro-government fighters were killed, and militants destroyed or captured at least 2 pieces of military equipment. Most of these claims are a part of the ongoing propaganda war. According to pro-government sources, up to 20 militants were killed. This number also remains unconfirmed.

Additionally, clashes and artillery duels took place in western Aleppo where some civilian casualties were reported.

According to reports, the Turkish Armed Forces had retreated from their observation post in Qalaat al-Madiq amid an intense fighting in northwestern Hama. This may indicate that Ankara is expecting a further escalation in the nearby area.

However, if the SAA focuses its efforts on a short part of the frontline and employs a limited force only for this purpose, it’s unlikely that it will achieve any major gains.

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Operating like a global Mafia, CIA dirty hands are behind all post-WW II coup plots by the US. The late William Blum documented its actions against sovereign states.

US policies are “worse than (most people) imagine,” he explained, including virtually every conceivable form of lawlessness.

Its actions include instigating wars, waging drone wars, orchestrating color revolutions and coups, interfering in foreign elections, assassinating heads of state like JFK and other targeted officials (like RFK, MLK, and countless others abroad).

The agency helps prop up friendly despots. It’s involved in snatching individuals for “extraordinary rendition” to torture prison black sites it runs globally.

Complicit with organized crime, it engages in illicit drugs trafficking worldwide, gaining billions of dollars of revenues from its actions.

Since the early 1950s, its operatives conducted physically harmful and psychologically crippling mind control experiments — human subjects  used as unwitting guinea pigs.

Despite authorization to conduct intrusive spying for counterintelligence purposes abroad, it secretly operates domestically against US citizens.

The Agency’s AR 2-2 regulatory document governing its intelligence activities remained secret until mid-2015.

When revealed, it showed Langley engages in domestic spying and human experimentation without informed consent. Academia, major media, individual reporters, US think tanks and other organizations,  as well as the clergy are complicit in its activities.

Under the Patriot Act’s Section 215, it secretly collects financial, medical, and other personal information about US citizens, a flagrant Fourth Amendment violation.

The late Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, earlier said the agency’s existence is incompatible with democratic principles and the rule of law.

Blum called democracy “America’s deadliest export,” the way it should be abhorrent in the US and other Western countries.

Post-WW II, Washington’s monstrous “war machine has been on auto pilot,” Blum explained, the CIA an integral part of the US imperial agenda.

From the agency’s first coup against democratic Iran in 1953 to its dirty hands all over the Trump regime’s plot against Venezuela, advancing the US imperium depends heavily on unlawful CIA actions, along with Pentagon-waged aggression.

In Moscow with Sergey Lavrov, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said CIA dirty hands are behind Trump regime actions to topple Maduro and eliminate Bolivarian social democracy.

They want to “take control of our country’s (oil and other) natural resources, which belong to the people as a result of a socialist revolution,” he said, adding: “This is what we are trying to prevent. We don’t want the Venezuelan people to suffer.”

“We are witnessing (a) historic struggle” between Bolivarianism and the Trump regime’s aim to destroy it. Ongoing for 20 years, Trump regime hardliners escalated things to possible war based on Big Lies and deception.

Sergey Lavrov believes bellicose US rhetoric won’t result in war on Venezuela, saying:

“Judging by my contacts with my American and other colleagues (sic), including those from Europe and Latin America, I don’t see anyone who would call for a reckless military solution,” adding:

“I hope everyone understands that as far as practical politics is concerned, there can be no military solution because it would mean catastrophe.”

“We strongly oppose military actions in breach of international law, anywhere. Only the UN Security Council can authorize the use of force.”

Besides, (force) can (only legally) be used in response to an aggression against a sovereign state. No options concerning Venezuela imply any such thing.”

Lavrov knows well but didn’t explain that all US wars post-WW II were and remain naked aggression against nations threatening no one.

The rule of law imposes no restraints on its actions, operating by its own rules extrajudicially, how it’s been throughout the post-WW II era, especially post-9/11.

The gloves came off. Anything goes replaced them. Venezuela and Iran are in the eye of their storm — Trump regime hardliners going all-out to topple their governments.

So far, it’s short of military intervention. I don’t share Lavrov’s optimism. The US will do whatever it takes to achieve its objectives.

Its post-WW II wars were waged with so-called “coalition of the willing” partners.

There’s no world community appetite or support for war against Venezuela or Iran, restraining the Trump regime going this far.

I believe proxy war is most likely against either or both countries, using ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other paramilitary forces as imperial foot soldiers.

Hostile US actions against Venezuela and Iran have gone on throughout the history of these republics.

As long as they remain free from US control, imperial toughness to destroy their sovereign independence will continue.

Post-9/11, Dick Cheney said wars won’t end in our lifetimes. For Pentagon commanders, it’s America’s “long war,” what I call forever war, ongoing in multiple theaters.

Republicans and undemocratic Dems support military Keynsianism, countless trillions of dollars spent at the expense of world peace and vital homeland needs gone begging — the human toll of no consequence anywhere.

All sovereign independent governments the US doesn’t control are on its target list for regime change, including Russia and China.

It’s why catastrophic nuclear war may be inevitable — the fate of planet earth and humanity hanging in the balance.

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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.

Global Research Editor’s Note

The US transpolar territory is much smaller than that of Russia, Canada and Denmark. And in fact the US doesn’t really have territories bordering the Arctic Ocean. In this regard, we have to distinguish between territories above the Arctic Circle, which is the imaginary line at the 66th parallel, and those bordering the Arctic Ocean, which defines the Arctic region. From a geographic standpoint, the US is not an Arctic Nation because it does not have territories bordering the Arctic Ocean. 

M. Ch, May 8, 2019

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The American Secretary of State threw down the gauntlet at Monday’s Arctic Council summit and showed the world that his country will actively challenge Russia and China’s interests in the Arctic Ocean.

US Secretary of State Pompeo’s appearance at Monday’s Arctic Council summit in Finland would have been a routine affair had it not been for his keynote speech verbally assaulting Russia and China’s interests in the Arctic Ocean. His words amounted to nothing less than a declaration of Hybrid War against these two multipolar Great Powers and therefore deserve to be studied more in detail beyond the casual attention given to them by the Mainstream Media. What follows is a collection of excerpts from his speech followed by a brief interpretation of the strategic meaning being conveyed, with the purpose of this exercise being to raise awareness of the US’ approach to the region and its likely modi operandi for advancing its interests there:

Passage:

“This is America’s moment to stand up as an Arctic nation and for the Arctic’s future. Because far from the barren back country that many thought it to be in Seward’s time, the Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30 percent of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources. Fisheries galore.

 And its centerpiece, the Arctic Ocean, is rapidly taking on new strategic significance. Offshore resources, which are helping the respective coastal states, are the subject of renewed competition. Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days. Arctic sea lanes could come before – could come the 21s century Suez and Panama Canals.”

Interpretation:

The Arctic Ocean is one of the most resource-rich areas in the world and its geostrategic importance is rapidly rising due to its increasingly active sea lanes connecting East Asia with Western Europe.

Passage:

“China has observer status in the Arctic Council, but that status is contingent upon its respect for the sovereign rights of Arctic states. The U.S. wants China to meet that condition and contribute responsibly in the region. But China’s words and actions raise doubts about its intentions.”

Interpretation:

Fake news fearmongering about Chinese activity in the region, including the claims that Pompeo will soon make, could be exploited as the pretext for jeopardizing the country’s observer status in the Arctic Council and subsequently contributing to what the US believes would be its so-called “isolation” as a result.

Passage:

“Between 2012 and 2017, China invested in the Arctic nearly $90 billion. It’s planning to build infrastructure from Canada, to the Northwest Territories, to Siberia. Just last month, Russia announced plans to connect the Northern Sea Route with China’s Maritime Silk Road, which would develop a new shipping channel from Asia to northern Europe. Meanwhile, China is already developing shipping lanes in the Arctic Ocean.

This is part of a very familiar pattern.

Beijing attempts to develop critical infrastructure using Chinese money, Chinese companies, and Chinese workers – in some cases, to establish a permanent Chinese security presence. Our Pentagon warned just last week that China could use its civilian research presence in the Arctic to strengthen its military presence, including our deployment of submarines – including deployment of submarines to the region as a deterrent against nuclear attack.”

Interpretation:

The US is repeating its usual rhetoric about how China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) is supposedly a front for clandestinely expanding its military influence all across the world.

Passage:

“Do we want Arctic nations broadly, or indigenous communities specifically, to go the way of former government in Sri Lanka or Malaysia, ensnared by debt and corruption? Do we want crucial Arctic infrastructure to end up like Chinese-constructed roads in Ethiopia, crumbling and dangerous after only a few years? Do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims? Do we want the fragile Arctic environment exposed to the same ecological devastation caused by China’s fishing fleet in the seas off its coast, or unregulated industrial activity in its own country? I think the answers are pretty clear.”

Interpretation:

Unsurprisingly, the US couldn’t help but allude to its claims of China’s so-called “debt trap diplomacy“, but it also importantly hinted that one way in which it’ll push back against the People’s Republic is to try its best to have the Pentagon replicate the South China Sea’s divide-and-rule scenario of externally provoked militarization of this strategic sea space on the basis of countering competing territorial claims (presumably made by Russia).

Passage:

“We’re concerned about Russia’s claim over the international waters of the Northern Sea Route, including its newly announced plans to connect it with China’s Maritime Silk Road. In the Northern Sea Route, Moscow already illegally demands other nations request permission to pass, requires Russian maritime pilots to be aboard foreign ships, and threatens to use military force to sink any that fail to comply with their demands.”

Interpretation:

President Putin’s wholehearted commitment that he made to integrate the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union with BRI during his speech at last month’s BRI Forum in Beijing will result in the emergence of what some have described as the Polar Silk Road, a cross-Arctic maritime trading corridor outside the US Navy’s control, which has accordingly created worries in Washington about the future of its influence in Eurasia.

“Russia is already leaving snow prints in the form of army boots. Russia formally announced its intent to increase its military presence in the region in 2014, when it re-opened a Cold War Arctic military base.

Since then, thanks in part to its large icebreaker fleet, Russia has been able to renovate old bases and infrastructure. It claims to have built 475 new military sites, including bases north of the Arctic Circle, as well as 16 new deep-water ports. It secures this presence through sophisticated new air defense systems and anti-ship missiles.”

Interpretation:

Russia’s reassertion of military might in its legitimate sphere of influence scares the US to no end because the Pentagon knows that Moscow might very well do the same thing in the Arctic as it did late last year in the Kerch Strait, and that’s use military force to defend territorial claims that are integral to its national security.

Passage:

“Today America is sharing its focus on the Arctic and securing its future.

 Under President Trump, we are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area. On the security side, partly in response to Russia’s destabilizing activities, we are hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, rebuilding our icebreaker fleet, expanding Coast Guard funding, and creating a new senior military post for Arctic Affairs inside of our own military.

 And we’re also leveraging the important partnerships that we will expand on even this week. NATO’s Trident Structure exercise last fall was the largest Arctic military exercise since the Cold War, with over 50,000 persons participating. On the diplomatic side too, we’re fully engaged. We’re working to strengthen our presence across the entire region and enhance our engagement with each of our Arctic partners.”

Interpretation:

All of the aforementioned claims made in his speech were intended to “justify” the rolling out of the US’ new comprehensive strategy towards the Arctic aimed at challenging Russia and China’s interests there.

Read full speech here.

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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.

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D Is for a Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

By John W. Whitehead, May 07, 2019

What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

Syria Testimonies: A Mother’s Brave Testimony after Martyrdom of Her Son, Majed, 4th April 2019

By Vanessa Beeley, May 07, 2019

Majed was sitting on the street drinking coffee with his friends when the rocket landed around 20 meters away from them. He and 42 year old father of two, Yousef Habib Najjar, were hit by the shrapnel, the other friends survived uninjured. Yousef later also died from shrapnel that had entered his brain.

Named: The People Killed in Gaza and Israel this Weekend

By Middle East Eye, May 07, 2019

After the worst fighting seen in Gaza since the war in 2014, at least 25 Palestinians, including two pregnant women and a 14-month-old baby girl, have been killed in the past three days, while four Israelis were killed by rocket fire from Gaza.

Sloppy Journalism: CNN Falsely Claims Venezuela’s Guaido Was Elected President in January

By Jason Ditz, May 07, 2019

Continuing to try to advance the US narrative that Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido is the “duly elected” president, CNN went to the trouble on Sunday afternoon of inventing an entire election to base this around.

Bolton’s Vague Press Release Lays Foundation for Military Attack Against Iran

By Whitney Webb, May 07, 2019

According to Bolton’s statement, an attack launched by a “proxy” of Iran on not just assets but “interests” of the U.S. in the region or “interests” of a U.S. ally in the region, would now be sufficient to trigger a U.S. attack on Iran, even if Iran itself was not directly responsible.

Italy, the Aircraft Carrier on the War Front

By Comitato No Nato, May 07, 2019

The U.S. Armed Forces have in Italy (according to the official report of the Pentagon Base Structure Report) more than 1,500 buildings, with a total surface area of over 1 million m², and they rent or have been granted permission to use a further 800 buildings, with a surface of approximately 900,000 m². In total, there are over 2,300 buildings with an area of approximately 2 million m² scattered over fifty sites. But this is only part of the U.S. military presence in Italy.

Embassy Protection Collective: We’re Still Here and We’re Staying

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, May 07, 2019

The Embassy Protection Collective formed on April 10, the day after the Trump administration manipulated the Organization of American States (OAS) to change the rules so they could recognize their puppet, Juan Guaido, as president of Venezuela. The OAS could not get the required two-thirds vote to recognize a government so they changed the rules to a mere majority and barely got that. By then, the US had allowed their Guaido coup forces to take the Venezuelan military attaché building in Washington, DC and three diplomatic offices in New York City.

Ever More Complex EU Gas Pipeline Geopolitics

By F. William Engdahl, May 06, 2019

Israel plans to construct the world’s longest underwater gas pipeline together with Cyprus and Greece to carry Eastern Mediterranean gas on to Italy and the EU southern states. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just endorsed the project. It will run smack up against a competing Turkish-Russian gas pipeline, Turk Stream, against a potential Qatari-Iran-Syria pipeline, as well as de facto undercut the Washington attempt to get more US LNG gas to the EU to reduce Russian dependency.

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“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business

What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

Played out on the national stage and eagerly broadcast to a captive audience by media sponsors, this farcical exercise in political theater can, at times, seem riveting, life-changing and suspenseful, even for those who know better.

Week after week, the script changes (Donald Trump’s Tweets, Congress’ hearings on Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, the military’s endless war drums, the ever-widening field of candidates for the 2020 presidential race, etc.) with each new script following on the heels of the last, never any let-up, never any relief from the constant melodrama.

The players come and go, the protagonists and antagonists trade places, and the audience members are quick to forget past mistakes and move on to the next spectacle.

All the while, a different kind of drama is unfolding in the dark backstage, hidden from view by the heavy curtain, the elaborate stage sets, colored lights and parading actors.

Such that it is, the realm of political theater with all of its drama, vitriol and scripted theatrics is what passes for “transparent” government today, with elected officials, entrusted to act in the best interests of their constituents, routinely performing for their audiences and playing up to the cameras, while doing very little to move the country forward.

Yet behind the footlights, those who really run the show are putting into place policies which erode our freedoms and undermine our attempts at contributing to the workings of our government, leaving us none the wiser and bereft of any opportunity to voice our discontent or engage in any kind of discourse until it’s too late.

It’s the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

Indeed, while mainstream America has been fixated on the drama-filled reality show being televised from the White House, the American Police State has moved steadily forward.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people.

The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

None of these dangers have dissipated.

They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.

The new boss has proven to be the same as the old boss, and the American people, the permanent underclass in America, has allowed itself to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter what you call the old/new boss—the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter who occupies the White House, it is a profit-driven, an unelected bureaucracy that is actually calling the shots.

In the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer to spell out the grim realities of life in the American Police State that no one is talking about anymore.

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the cop culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. This governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice wherein government agents (usually the police) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property.

D is for DRONES. It is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be airborne in American airspace by 2020, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones will be used for benevolent purposes, many will also be equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for ELECTRONIC CONCENTRATION CAMP. In the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, all aspects of a person’s life are policed by government agents and all citizens are suspects, their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness dependent on the government’s say-so.

F is for FASCISM. A study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere economic units.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for inane crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between us and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. As of 2008, there were some 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION and OVERREGULATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a police officer should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button.

U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.

V is for VIPR SQUADS. So-called “soft target” security inspections, carried out by roving VIPR task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams, are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you can now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age.

You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.

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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]. He is frequent contributor to Global Research.

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With Juan Guaidó’s parallel government attempting to take power with the backing of the U.S., it is telling that the top political donors of those in the U.S. most fervently pushing regime change in Venezuela have close ties to Monsanto and major financial stakes in Bayer.

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As the political crisis in Venezuela has unfolded, much has been said about the Trump administration’s clear interest in the privatization and exploitation of Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world, by American oil giants like Chevron and ExxonMobil.

Yet the influence of another notorious American company, Monsanto — now a subsidiary of Bayer — has gone largely unmentioned.

While numerous other Latin American nations have become a “free for all” for the biotech company and its affiliates, Venezuela has been one of the few countries to fight Monsanto and other international agrochemical giants and win. However, since that victory — which was won under Chavista rule — the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition has been working to undo it.

Now, with Juan Guaidó’s parallel government attempting to take power with the backing of the U.S., it is telling that the top political donors of those in the U.S. most fervently pushing regime change in Venezuela have close ties to Monsanto and major financial stakes in Bayer.

In recent months, Monsanto’s most controversial and notorious product — the pesticide glyphosate, branded as Roundup, and linked to cancer in recent U.S. court rulings — has threatened Bayer’s financial future as never before, with a litany of new court cases barking at Bayer’s door. It appears that many of the forces in the U.S. now seeking to overthrow the Venezuelan government are hoping that a new Guaidó-led government will provide Bayer with a fresh, much-needed market for its agrochemicals and transgenic seeds, particularly those products that now face bans in countries all over the world, including once-defoliated and still-poisoned Vietnam.

U.S.-Backed Venezuelan opposition seeks to reverse Chavista seed law and GMO ban

In 2004, then-president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, surprised many when he announced the cancellation of Monsanto’s plans to plant 500,000 acres of Venezuelan agricultural land in genetically modified (GM) soybeans. The cancellation of Monsanto’s Venezuela contract led to what became an ad hoc ban on all GM seeds in the entire country, a move that was praised by local farmer groups and environmental activists. In contrast to anti-GM movements that have sprung up in other countries, Venezuela’s resistance to GM crops was based more on concerns about the country’s food sovereignty and protecting the livelihoods of farmers.

Although the ban has failed to keep GM products out of Venezuela — as Venezuela has long imported a majority of its food, much of it originating in countries that are among the world’s largest producers of genetically modified foods — one clear effect has been preventing companies like Monsanto and other major agrochemical and seed companies from gaining any significant foothold in the Venezuelan market.

In 2013, a new seed law was nearly passed that would have allowed GM seeds to be sold in Venezuela through a legal loophole. That law, which was authored by a member of the Chavista United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), was widely protested by farmers, indigenous activists, environmentalists, and eco-socialist groups, which led to the law’s transformation into what has been nicknamed the “People’s Seed Law.” That law, passed in 2015, went even farther than the original 2004 ban by banning not just GM seeds but several toxic agrochemicals, while also strengthening heirloom seed varieties through the creation of the National Seed Institute.

Soon after the new seed law was passed in 2015, the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition led by the Roundtable of Democratic Unity (MUD) — a group comprised of numerous U.S.-funded political parties, including Guaidó’s Popular Will — took control of the country’s National Assembly. Until Venezuela’s Supreme Court dissolved the assembly in 2017, the MUD-legislature attempted to repeal the seed law on several occasions. Those in favor of the repeal called the seed bill “anti-scientific” and damaging to the economy.

Despite the 2017 Supreme Court decision, the National Assembly has continued to meet, but the body holds no real power in the current Venezuelan government. However, if the current government is overthrown and Guaidó  — the “interim president” who is also president of the dissolved National Assembly — comes to power, it seems almost certain that the “People’s Seed Law” will be one of the first pieces of legislation on the chopping block.

The AEI axis

Some of the key figures and loudest voices supporting the efforts of the Trump administration to overthrow the Venezuelan government in the United States are well-connected to one particular think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). For instance, John Bolton — now Trump’s national security advisor and a major player in the administration’s aggressive Venezuela policy — was a senior fellow at AEI until he became Trump’s top national security official. As national security adviser, Bolton advises the president on foreign policy and issues of national security while also advising both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. As of late, he has been pushing for military action in Venezuela, according to media reports.

Another key figure in Trump’s Venezuela policy — Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s Special Representative for Venezuela — has been regularly featured at AEI summits and as a guest on its panels and podcasts. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Abrams’ current role gives him the “responsibility for all things related to our efforts to restore democracy” in Venezuela. Other top figures in the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, were featured guests at the AEI’s “secretive” gathering in early March. As MintPress and other outlets have reported, Guaidó declared himself “interim president” of Venezuela at Pence’s behest. Pompeo is also intimately involved in directing Trump’s Venezuela policy as the president’s main adviser on foreign affairs.

Other connections to the Trump administration include Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos who was previously on AEI’s board of trustees.

AEI has long been a key part of the “neoconservative” establishment and employs well-known neoconservatives such as Fred Kagan — the architect of the Iraq “troop surge” — and Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq War. Its connections to the George W. Bush administration were particularly notable and controversial, as more than 20 AEI employees were given top positions under Bush. Several of them, such as Bolton, have enjoyed new prominence in Trump’s administration.

Other key Bush officials joined the AEI soon after leaving their posts in the administration. One such was Roger Noriega, who was the U.S. representative to the Organization of American States (OAS) during the failed, U.S.-backed 2002 coup and went on to be assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs from 2003 to 2005, where he was extremely influential in the administration’s policies towards Venezuela and Cuba.

Since leaving the Bush administration and promptly joining the AEI, Noriega has been instrumental in pushing claims that lack evidence but aim to paint Venezuela’s current President Nicolas Maduro-led government as a national security threat, such as claiming that Venezuela is helping Iran acquire nuclear weapons and hosts soldiers from Lebanon’s Hezbollah. He also lobbied Congress to support Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López, Guaidó’s political mentor and leader of his political party, Popular Will.

Not only that, but Noreiga teamed up with Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan exile formerly employed by the IMF, and José Cardenas, who served in the Bush administration, to found Visión Américas, a private risk-assessment and lobbying firm that was hired to “support the efforts of the Honduran private sector to help consolidate the democratic transition in their country” after the U.S.-backed Honduran coup in 2009. In recent months, Noriega and his associates have been very focused on Venezuela, with Cardenas offering Trump public advice about how “to hasten Maduro’s exit,” while Rodil has publicly offered “to get you a deal” if you have dirt on Venezuela’s government.

While the AEI is best known for its hawkishness, it is also a promoter of big agricultural interests. Since 2000, It has hosted several conferences on the promise of “biotechnology” and genetically modified seeds and has heavily promoted the work of former Monsanto lobbyist Jon Entine, who was an AEI visiting fellow for several years. The AEI also has long-time connections to Dow Chemical.

The most likely reason for the AEI’s interest in promoting biotech, however, can be found in its links to Monsanto. In 2013, The Nation acquired a 2009 AEI document, obtained through a filing error and not intended for public disclosure, that revealed the think tank’s top donors. The form, known as the “schedule of contributors,” revealed that the AEI’s top two donors at the time were the Donors Capital Fund and billionaire Paul Singer.

The Donors Capital Fund, which remains a major contributor to the AEI, is linked to Monsanto interests through the vice chairman of its board, Kimberly O. Dennis, who is also currently a member of the AEI’s National Council. According to AEI, the National Council is composed of “business and community leaders from across the country who are committed to AEI’s success and serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing us with advice, insight, and guidance.”

Dennis is the long-time executive chairwoman of the Searle Freedom Trust, which was founded in 1988 by Daniel Searle after he oversaw the sale of his family pharmaceutical company — G.D. Searle and Company — to Monsanto in 1985 for $2.7 billion. The money Searle had made from that merger was used to fund the trust that now funds the AEI and other right-wing think tanks. Searle was also close to Donald Rumsfeld, who led G.D. Searle and Co. for years and was Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. Searle was also a trustee of the Hudson Institute, which once employed Elliott Abrams.

After the family company — which gained notoriety for faking research about the safety of its sweetener, aspartame or NutraSweet — was sold to Monsanto, G.D. Searle executives close to Daniel Searle rose to prominence within the company. Robert Shapiro, who was G.D. Searle’s long-time attorney and head of its NutraSweet division, would go on to become Monsanto’s vice president, president and later CEO. Notably, Daniel Searle’s grandson, D. Gideon Searle, was an AEI trustee until relatively recently.

Why is a top to Marco Rubio increasing his stake in Bayer while others flee?

Yet, it is AEI’s top individual donor noted in the accidental “schedule of contributors” disclosure who is most telling about the private biotech interests guiding the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy. Paul Singer (image on the right), the controversial billionaire hedge fund manager, has long been a major donor to neoconservative and Zionist causes — helping fund the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the successor to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); and the neoconservative and islamophobic Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), in addition to the AEI.

Singer is notably one of the top political donors to Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and has been intimately involved in the recent chaos in Venezuela. He has been called one of the architects of the administration’s current regime-change policy, and was the top donor to Rubio’s presidential campaign, as well as a key figure behind the controversial “dossier” on Donald Trump that was compiled by Fusion GPS. Indeed, Singer had been the first person to hire Fusion GPS to do “opposition research” on Trump. However, Singer has largely since evaded much scrutiny for his role in the dossier’s creation, likely because he became a key donor to Trump following his election win in 2016, giving $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Singer has a storied history in South America, though he has been relatively quiet about Venezuela. However, a long-time manager of Singer’s hedge fund, Jay Newman, recently told Bloomberg that a Guaidó-led government would recognize that foreign creditors “aren’t the enemy,” and hinted that Newman himself was weighing whether to join a growing “list of bond veterans [that have] already begun staking out positions, anticipating a $60 billion debt restructuring once the U.S.-backed Guaidó manages to oust President Nicolas Maduro and take control.” In addition, the Washington Free Beacon, which is largely funded by Singer, has been a vocal advocate for the Trump administration’s regime-change policy in Venezuela.

Beyond that, Singer’s Elliott Management Corporation gave Roger Noriega, the former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs under Bush, $60,000 in 2007 to lobby on the issue of sovereign debt and for “federal advocacy on behalf of U.S. investors in Latin America.” During the time Noriega was on Singer’s payroll, he wrote articles linking Argentina and Venezuela to Iran’s nonexistent nuclear program. At the time, Singer was aggressively pursuing the government of Argentina in an effort to obtain more money from the country’s prior default on its sovereign debt.

While Singer has been mum himself on Venezuela, he has been making business decisions that have raised eyebrows, such as significantly increasing his stake in Bayer. This move seems at odds with Bayer’s financial troubles, a direct result of the slew of court cases regarding the link between Monsanto’s glyphosate and cancer. The first ruling that signaled trouble for Monsanto and its new parent company Bayer took place last August, but Singer increased his stake in the company starting last December, even though it was already clear by then that Bayer’s financial troubles in relation to the glyphosate court cases were only beginning.

Since the year began, Bayer’s problems with the Monsanto merger have only worsened, with Bayer’s CEO recently stating that the lawsuits had “massively affected” the company’s stock prices and financial performance.

Forcing open a new market for RoundUp

Part of Singer’s interest in Bayer may relate to Venezuela, given that Juan Guaido’s “Plan País” to “rescue” the Venezuelan economy includes a focus on the country’s agricultural sector. Notably, prior to and under Chavismo, agricultural productivity and investment in the agricultural sector took a backseat to oil production, resulting in under 25 percent of Venezuelan land being used for agricultural purposes despite the fact that the nation has a wealth of arable land. The result has been that Venezuela needs to import much of its food from abroad, most of which originate in Colombia or the United States.

Under Chávez and his successor, Maduro, there has been a renewed focus on small-scale farming, food sovereignty and organic agriculture. However, if Maduro is ousted and Guaidó moves to implement his “Plan País,” the opposition’s coziness with foreign corporations, the interests of U.S. coup architects in Bayer/Monsanto, and the opposition’s past efforts to overturn the GM seed ban all suggest that a new market for Bayer/Monsanto products — particularly glyphosate — will open up.

South America has long been a key market for Monsanto and — as the company’s problems began to mount prior to the merger with Bayer — it became a lifeline for the company due to less stringent environmental and consumer regulations that many Western countries. In recent years, when South American governments have opened their countries to more “market-friendly” policies in their agricultural sectors, Monsanto has made millions.

For instance, when Brazil sought to expand biotechnology (i.e. GM seed) investment in 2012, Monsanto saw a 21% increase in its sales of GM corn seed alone, generating an additional $1 billion in profits for the company. A similar comeback scenario is needed more than every by Bayer/Monsanto, as Monsanto’s legal troubles saw the company’s profits plunge late last year.

With countries around the world now weighing glyphosate bans as a result of increased litigation over the chemical’s links to cancer, Bayer needs a new market for the chemical to avoid financial ruin. As Singer now has a significant stake in the company, he — along with the politicians and think tanks he funds — may see promise in the end of the anti-GM seed ban that a Guaidó-led government would bring.

Furthermore, given that Guaidó’s top adviser wants the Trump administration to have a direct role in governing Venezuela if Maduro is ousted, it seems likely that Singer would leverage his connections to keep Bayer/Monsanto afloat amid the growing controversy surrounding glyphosate. Such behavior on the part of Singer would hardly be surprising in light of the fact that international financial media have characterized him as a “ruthless opportunist” and “overly aggressive.”

Such an outcome would be in keeping with the increased profit margins for Monsanto and related companies that have followed its expansion into countries following U.S.-backed coups. For instance, after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, the loans given to Ukraine by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank forced the country to open up and expand the use of “biotechnology” and GM crops in its agricultural sector, and Monsanto, in particular, made millions as the prior government’s ban on GM seeds and their associated agrochemicals was reversed. If Maduro is ousted, a similar scenario is likely to play out in Venezuela, given that the Guaidó-led government made known its intention to borrow heavily from these institutions just days after Guaidó declared himself “interim president.”

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Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Kieran Barr contributed to the research used in this report.

Featured image is from Pesticide Action Network

In Niger, where agriculture is the main source of income, the message is simple: Losing your soil means losing your livelihood. The ability to grow food is inextricably linked to the productive capacity of the soil. In the case of Niger’s soil, the picture is bleak: The soils hold poor structural stability, low nutrient holding capacity, low water retention capacity… the list goes on.

Niger lies in one of the hottest regions in the world: The Sahel. Rainfall is short and unpredictable and Nigeriens face chronic water scarcity. In addition to the limited productive capacity of the soil, the Sahel has been plagued by soil degradation. Wind erosion, the main cause of soil loss, sees suspended soil particles travel thousands of miles in hazardous dust storms.

Soil degradation is instigated by climatic factors and compounded by anthropogenic factors. High temperatures trigger high evaporation rates, which cause the soil to form impenetrable surface crusts that rain cannot penetrate. Extreme rainfall events thus lead to flooding and the erosion of topsoil, the only horizon (the scientific term for a soil layer) with mildly productive capacities. Human land use has further aggravated the problem of soil erosion.

Niger exhibits one of the world’s highest population growth rates. Between 1960 and 2018, the capital, Niamey, has grown from a population of 30,000 to one of 1.2 million. The resulting agricultural intensification has led to the conversion of natural, woody savannahs to cultivated lands. Overgrazing and the loss of vegetation cover has reduced soil fertility and spurred soil loss. The situation is bound to worsen with climate change and the intensification of the hydrological cycle.

Sand storm in Galmi, Niger. Photo Credit: SIM USA, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

What does this mean for the future of Niger’s soil and the livelihoods of its millions of dependents? How can soil management be improved in a region that has little to no resources? It is indisputable that Niger should reverse unsustainable agricultural practices, but how realistic is this when the very livelihood of Niger’s people depends on extracting the maximum benefit from the soil? Niger, according to the 2018 United Nations Human Development Index, is the poorest nation on earth. How can it deal with its soil situation?

One proposed solution is agroforestry. Deliberately planting trees in association with crops, pasture, and livestock could help reduce soil erosion through stabilizing root systems. Some trees have the ability to fix nitrogen and can thereby increase the productive capacity of the soil. Their canopy’s shade provides immediate relief to all creatures, large and small, and puts a limit on direct evaporation from bare soil. Leaf litter helps with the soil’s deficient organic matter content and improved soil drainage can reduce flashy runoff and ultimately erosion.

Another option to relieve the soil of some of its burden is to limit overgrazing by returning to practices of migratory herding. Migratory herding had been common practice in pre-colonial Niger and allows the soil to recover between cycles of grazing.

Lastly, a soil management technique, known as conservation agriculture, which minimizes the disruption of the soil’s structure, has been proven successful in many arid and nutrient-limited areas of the world. The results have shown increased crop yields and long-term sustainability in farming.

The situation in Niger is devastating. Soil erosion has become a deleterious threat to livelihoods, bringing soil protection to the forefront of governance issues. Environmental scientists and managers need to do a better job at conveying the urgency of the matter of soil erosion. The future of Niger depends on the future of its soil.

Farmers in Galmi, Niger. Photo Credit: SIM USA, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Sophie Erfurth holds a BSc in Geography from University College London and graduated from Duke University with a Master’s of Environmental Management. A hydrologist by training, she is interested in the implications of environmental management on governance and peace-building efforts. Sophie will be working as a hydrogeologist with the Niger Basin Authority on ways to improve transboundary water management.

During my most recent trip to Mhardeh and Al Suqalibiyah– Syrian Christian towns bordering international terrorism – I interviewed the families of two martyrs, murdered by a Nusra Front rocket on the 4th April 2019.

I was profoundly affected by the interview with the mother of 22-year-old Majed Monif Qiddeeseh – Mary Sami Qazanji. She spoke movingly about the martyrdom of her youngest son and what his loss means to her. She still speaks of forgiveness and of steadfastly refusing to leave their town and their homeland. My admiration and love for this beautiful lady is boundless.

On March 24th 2017, Mary’s husband Monif was injured in another terrorist attack and was taken to hospital in Mhardeh. On April 4th 2017, Mary was injured also. Shrapnel entered her shoulder and is still embedded in her tissue, she told me she suffers impaired hearing and chronic pain in her arm, shoulder and neck as a result. Monif died from his injuries on the 8th April 2017. Mary’s youngest son was martyred on the 4th April 2019.

Try to imagine the scale and depth of this loss… and then remember that every family in Syria has suffered such loss and is processing the searing grief and pain that only fades but never goes away.

Majed was sitting on the street drinking coffee with his friends when the rocket landed around 20 meters away from them. He and 42 year old father of two, Yousef Habib Najjar, were hit by the shrapnel, the other friends survived uninjured. Yousef later also died from shrapnel that had entered his brain.

Majed’s grandmother told me that he was always laughing and joking, that he would hug her every day and reassure her that he would keep her safe through the terrorist attacks.

Please share this testimony widely – these voices need to be heard so we can fully understand what the West has done to these courageous, kind and generous people:

Full transcript of Mary’s testimony:

Our family…Yes, dear. I and Monif loved one another so much and for a long period of time. We got married and had those so beautiful two young men and we lived a very beautiful life.

When they grew up and the crisis started, they didn’t accept to emigrate and leave the country. Bless them, they are brave and their father raised them as men. They are so brave like their father, bless them. They refused to leave here, they didn’t accept to go (abroad) at all.

Habib, the elder brother joined the (Fifth) Corps before his brother and Majed was a member of the NDF on the day when his father passed away but after that, he joined the Fifth Corps without telling me.

I asked him: “Why dear?”

He replied: “Now, our family needs two men to provide for it so that we lack nothing”

I don’t know, I felt like he shouldered a heavy weight. Habib, my eldest son, also shouldered a heavy weight but he didn’t use to express it to me, while Majed (used to express it) a lot, he missed his father so much, he was too fond of him.

Every morning when he woke up, he would say to me “Mum, I saw my father in my dream”

(I would ask him) “Dear, what did you see?”

He would reply “I saw such and such”, for example “I saw him with uncle Simon (Al Wakil) and they did such and such… ”

He used to see his father in his dreams every single day and on days when he didn’t talk to me about it in the morning, I would ask him “Majed, Didn’t you see your father this time?”. He would say to me “Yes mum, but I forgot in which context I saw him”

We lived like that. Thank God, they always did the best they could, whenever there were problems, they would be here. They were on the frontlines…, they never hesitated to provide and give everything they could.

I don’t know…, I forgot…, I don’t know what to say…

After that, he decided to continue his studies, he was studying at the Topographic Institute. He would finish his studies, and later, if he had an opportunity to work abroad, he would do it, so that he can provide more help for the family. They did their military work with the Corps, and handled their shifts and never failed in fulfilling their duties towards the homeland.

We are all a sacrifice for the homeland and I am not sad because of that at all. Because he, his brother and his father loved the homeland so much and I love it so much too.

When events took place in Sijer (a village in Idleb), everyone left but I stayed here and I made “Manaqish” (Pastry) and cooked lunch for my children to eat and I helped the wife of our brother Simon al Wakil, she was distributing bread as aid to people and on that day, I came back home alone although it was so dark and I was not afraid of anything. My sons were coming home, and I am their mother, I should be with them to strengthen them and they would strengthen me.

If I had left and everyone had left, that would have shown a weakness of character and that shouldn’t happen, no, I was with them every single moment and things remained like that until what happened to us on the 4th of April (2017). Monif passed away and I got severe injuries in my hand, body and ears. I became hearing impaired. My siblings and everyone helped me for a period of time, everyone did what he could do and things got better…

Majed reminded me on that day, Thursday, He said “Mum, did you see the photo I put for you?” (on Facebook). I said “what’s is it about, dear?”. He said “it’s a photo of our house when it was destroyed and how it became”. I am not the kind of person who is into fame, so I said to him “Maybe you shouldn’t have done that”. He said “Yes, just take a look at it”.

I was feeling down for about a week..I thought maybe it was because the memorial of his father was approaching. Later in the evening…, we bring incense for the service. Majed brought me incense and left. I got dressed and headed to church. While I was in the church, the rocket landed. I stayed there and didn’t feel afraid, all men went out except for two men.

I started to address women who were there, “Calm down, stop talking, just calm down”

“How would these two young men be able to take care of us?! Just calm down a bit until we find out what’s going on”

But I didn’t know that my son was injured and taken to hospital, I didn’t know at all. Later, the pastor (or priest) came, we held the service and I came back home. I tried to call Majed but he didn’t answer my calls.

He was taken to the hospital and…martyred immediately…

But we love our homeland so much…

– Yes, we love it so much.
– What did he use to say to Mhardeh?

– Mhardeh…, what was that song?
– “Mhardeh, you are the only beautiful”

We wouldn’t leave it, no…, we wouldn’t leave it to anyone else. We have so much pride in him, Majed was so beautiful. I wish you knew him, he’s so beautiful. These 20 years he lived, they were wonderful. As if he lived for a million years, so wonderful… him and his brother too.

– How many friends he had! How many loved ones he had!
– …him and his brother too…

His brother is so wonderful too, but Majed, because he is the youngest, he breaks my heart. – May God protects the children of all people…he was a friend of all…yes, he was a friend of the young and old and he used to help and do whatever he could, whether it was for me or for other people. Yes, a lot, and I am not saying that because he’s my son, he was so good, so good and I miss him, I miss him so much. I miss his hands, I miss his face. Look how much a beautiful young man he was, these beautiful lips…, these eyes…

But it’s okay, God is with us, and God willing, He’s going to strengthen us. The most important thing…, I said to them today and yesterday “I feel that Majed was a sacrifice for the homeland, and I feel that nothing (bad) will happen anymore”. I said to them that I feel nothing (bad) will happen anymore. God willing, he would be the start and the end, God willing!

– God willing!
– May you never lose your wisdom and may God grant you patience.

God will strengthen us to face every difficulty, God willing, and may holding our cross be easy for us till the end of this life. And I don’t know…, the Western countries are supposed to sympathize with us a bit when they see what’s happening to us. It’s “Haram” what’s happening to all these people…, all this death…, and these beautiful young men. Those are the ones who are supposed to build the homeland, but if they were gone, then, what would we do?

They strengthen us, indeed. May God forgive them (the West) and may God help us to forgive them more than that, and may He sow goodness in their hands and minds, God willing!

No more…

Thank you.

End of transcript.

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Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards – the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism – whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. Please support her work at her Patreon account. 

Featured image: Mother of Majed Monif Qiddeeseh during his funeral. (Photo: Mhardeh)

Is President Trump about to invade Venezuela? His advisors keep telling us in ever-stronger terms that “all options are on the table” and that US military intervention to restore Venezuela’s constitution “may be necessary.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the Sunday news programs to claim that President Trump could launch a military attack against Venezuela without Congress’s approval.

Pompeo said that,

“[t]he president has his full range of Article II authorities and I’m very confident that any action we took in Venezuela would be lawful.”

The man who bragged recently about his lying, cheating, and stealing, is giving plenty of evidence to back his claim.

The president has no Constitutional authority to start a war with Venezuela or any other country that has not attacked or credibly threatened the United States without Congressional approval. It is that simple.

How ironic that Pompeo and the rest of the neocons in the Trump Administration are ready to attack Venezuela to “restore their constitution” but they could not care less about our own Constitution!

While Washington has been paralyzed for two years over disproven claims that the Russians meddled in our elections to elect Trump, how hypocritical that Washington does not even hesitate to endorse the actual overturning of elections overseas!

Without Congressional authority, US military action of any kind against Venezuela would be an illegal and likely an impeachable offense. Of course those Democrats who talk endlessly of impeaching Trump would never dream of impeaching of him over starting an illegal war. Democrats and Republicans both love illegal US wars.

Unfortunately, Washington is so addicted to war that President Trump would likely have little difficulty getting authority from Congress to invade Venezuela if he bothered to ask. Just as with the disastrous US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the mainstream media is nothing but non-stop war propaganda. Even so-called progressives like Rachel Maddow are attacking the Trump Administration not for its reckless saber-rattling toward Venezuela but for not being aggressive enough!

The real lesson is that even a “Constitutional” war against Venezuela would not be a just war. It would be a war of aggression for which Americans should be angry and ashamed. But the mainstream media is pumping out the same old pro-war lies, while the independent media is under attack from social media companies that have partnered with US government entities to decide what is “fake news.”

The latest outrage in the mainstream media is over the most sensible thing President Trump has done in some time: last week he spent an hour on the telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss, among other things, the dangerous situation in Venezuela.

While President Trump’s neocon advisors are purposely trying to position him so that war is the only option, we can only hope that President Putin was able to explain that the Venezuela problem must be solved by the Venezuelans themselves. Certainly the US, perhaps together with the Russians, could help facilitate discussions between the government and the opposition, but the neocon road to war will surely end up like all the other neocon wars: total disaster.

The media is furious that Trump dared to speak to Putin as the two countries increasingly face-off over Venezuela. The Democrats and neocons are pushing for a direct confrontation that may even involve Russia. Republicans agree. Do they really prefer thermonuclear war? Over Venezuela?

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MEE Editor’s note: This story is being updated and amended as more details about those killed by the air strikes and rocket attacks emerge.

After the worst fighting seen in Gaza since the war in 2014, at least 25 Palestinians, including two pregnant women and a 14-month-old baby girl, have been killed in the past three days, while four Israelis were killed by rocket fire from Gaza.

The violence started on Friday when the Israeli military and the militant group Islamic Jihad traded fire. Over the next two days, hundreds of rockets were launched into Israel from Gaza with the Israeli military pounding the besieged enclave with air strikes and artillery.

The fierce back and forth threatened to spill over into an all-out, protracted war, but by early Monday, a ceasefire was reached between Israel and Palestinian factions.

Those killed included one of the best English teachers in Gaza, two fathers of four – one an Israeli and the other a Palestinian, a man riding his bike and another at work, and a 12-year-old at home with his parents.

These are their names:

Saba Mahmoud Arar; Khaled Mohammed Abu Qlaiq; Emad Mohammed Nsair; Falasten Saleh Abu Arar

1- Emad Mohammed Nsair, 22, a member of Al-Aqsa Guards organisation was killed during an Israeli air strike on Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza

2- Saba Mahmoud Arar, 14 months, was killed in eastern Gaza

3- Falasten Saleh Abu Arar, 37, a pregnant Palestinian was killed along with her unborn child, named as Abdullah Abu Arar, in eastern Gaza

4- Khaled Mohammed Abu Qlaiq, 25, was killed in northern Gaza

Mohammed Subhi Issa; Abdullah Nufal Abu Al-Ata; Bilal Al-Bana; Fawzi Bawadi

5- Mahmoud Subhi Issa, 26, from Bureij refugee camp and a member of the rocket unit in Al-Quds Brigades, the militant wing of Islamic Jihad, was killed in central Gaza

6- Fawzi Abdulhamid Bawadi, 24, a media student at the University of Palestine and a resident of the Bureij refugee camp, was killed in central Gaza. He was also a member of the Al-Quds Brigades

7- Bilal Mohammed Abd al-Bana, 29, a member of Islamic Jihad from Al-Shujaiyya refugee camp, was killed in eastern Gaza

8- Abdullah Nufal Abu al-Ata, 21, a member of Islamic Jihad from Al-Shujaiyya refugee camp, was killed in eastern Gaza

Hamid Khodari; Fadi Ragheb Badran; Mohammed Abdulnabi Abu Armaneh; Mahmoud Samir Abu Armaneh

9- Hamid al-Khodari, 34, from Gaza City, a senior member of Hamas who ran a money exchange office in Gaza City, was killed in an air strike in the city centre. According to the Israeli military, Khodari was responsible for transferring Iranian money to factions in Gaza and was killed in a targeted strike, the first against a Hamas leader since the 2014 war

10- Mahmoud Samir Abu Armaneh, 27, was killed east of the Bureij refugee camp. He was a member of Islamic Jihad

11- Mohammed Abdelnabi Abu Armaneh, 32, a member of Islamic Jihad, was also was killed east of Bureij refugee camp

12- Fadi Ragheb Badran, 31, was killed northern Gaza

Musa Muamar; Ali Ahmed Ali Abduljawad; Amani Al-Madhoun; Abdullah Abdulrahim Al-Madhoun

13- Abdullah Abdulrahim Al-Madhoun, 22, was killed in northern Gaza

14- Amani Al-Madhoun, 33, was pregnant and killed in northern Gaza. She was a trainer and teacher at Al-Aqsa Society College and the Women for Palestine Institution. Her unborn child was named as Ayman Al-Madhoun

15- Musa Hussein Muamar, 24, was from Rafah, in southeast Gaza

16- Ali Ahmed Ali Abduljawad, 52, was an English teacher with 30 years experience, who was well-known in Gaza as one of the best English teachers. Abduljawad ran an education centre in Rafah where he was from and had just finished a lesson when Israeli jets targeted the Zurob building where the centre was based

Maria Ahmed Ramadan Al-Ghazali; Ahmed Ramadan Rajab Al-Ghazali; Iman Abdullah Musa Al-Ghazali; Abdulrahman Mustafa Taha Al-Madhoun

17- Maria Ahmed Ramadan Al-Ghazali, a four-month-old baby, was killed in northern Gaza

18- Ahmed Ramadan Rajab Al-Ghazali, 31, was killed in northern Gaza

19- Iman Abdullah Musa Al-Ghazali, 30, was killed in northern Gaza

20- Abdulrahim Mustafa Taha Al-Madhoun, 61, was killed in northern Gaza

Hani Hamdan Abu Shaar; Iyad Abdullah Al-Shreihy; Abdulrahman Talal Abu El-Gidian; Talal Abu El-Gidian

21- Abdulrahman Talal Attieh Abu El-Gidian, 12, was killed by an Israeli air strike on his home in the Sheikh Zayed Towers in northern Gaza

22- His father, Talal Abu El-Gidian, 46, was killed by the same air strike

23- Raghda Abu El-Gidian, 40, wife of Talal and mother of Abdulrahman, was also killed in the same air strike

24- Iyad Abdullah al-Shreihy, 34, from Al-Maghazi refugee camp was killed

25- Hani Hamdan Abu Shaar, 37, a father of four from Rafah, was killed while riding his bicycle near Zurob building which was targeted by Israeli jets

26- Moshe Agadi, 58, father of four and a greengrocer, was killed after a rocket hit his mother-in-law’s house in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon

27- Ziad Alhamada, 49, was killed after a rocket hit the factory where he worked in Ashkelon

28- Moshe Feder, 67, from the Israeli city of Kfar Saba, was killed after an anti-tank missile hit his car as he drove near the Gaza border

29- Pinchas Menachem Pshuzman, 21, was wounded by shrapnel after a rocket landed in the backyard of a building in the southern city of Ashdod

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All images in this article are from MEE except for the featured image which is from The Bullet

Continuing to try to advance the US narrative that Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido is the “duly elected” president, CNN went to the trouble on Sunday afternoon of inventing an entire election to base this around.

In the CNN report, they declared “pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido over him for president.” There was no election in January.

In reality, Venezuela’s presidential election was held on May 20, 2018. The opposition boycotted the vote, Maduro won with 67.8% of the vote, while Guaido did not participate at all.

Indeed, the only time Juan Guaido participated in a presidential vote of any kind was the 2012 Democratic Unity Roundtable’s presidential primary, which he lost. Guaido’s first claim to the presidency came in January of 2019, when he unilaterally declared himself “acting president.”

Yet the Trump Administration not only endorsed Guaido as president at this time, they’ve begun referring to him as the “duly elected” president despite such an election never taking place. US media outlets have parroted that claim, but CNN took it a step farther to invent the election too.

The CNN article was written by two senior writers, and had four others contribute to it. It is hard to imagine that none of them caught this false claim of a January vote. Yet the article remained unchanged throughout Sunday and overnight, and it was only some time on Monday that it was finally revised to say that Guaido had “declared himself interim president.”

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Featured image is from Euronews

This video was originally published in May 2018.

Over the past few years, Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territory and repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world — except the United States. The Occupation of the American Mind takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S.

Narrated by Roger Waters and featuring leading observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. media culture, the film explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel’s favor. From the U.S.-based public relations campaigns that emerged in the 1980s to today, the film provides a sweeping analysis of Israel’s decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people in the face of widening international condemnation of its increasingly right-wing policies.

Narrated by Roger Waters / Featuring Amira Hass, M.J. Rosenberg, Stephen M. Walt, Noam Chomsky, Rula Jebreal, Henry Siegman, Rashid Khalidi, Rami Khouri, Yousef Munayyer, Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal, Phyllis Bennis, Norman Solomon, Mark Crispin Miller, Peter Hart, and Sut Jhally.

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United States activists stand with President Maduro and the people of Venezuela in resistance to Washington’s attempts at regime change. Departing Venezuelan diplomats, ordered out of the country on April 15th by the Trump administration, gave the keys to its Washington DC embassy to activists, now called the Embassy Protection Collective (EPC), along with permission to remain until a permanent protectorate can be found. President Nicolas Maduro has extended his support to the lawful occupants which consist of veterans, senior citizens and students, and are members of CODEPINK, Popular Resistance.org, People’s Dispatch and the ANSWER Coalition.

The EPC stands guard against the infiltration and capture of the embassy by supporters of the self-proclaimed interim president, right-wing US puppet, Juan Guaido. In February, Guaido’s supporters seized the Venezuelan embassy in Costa Rica and blocked its lawful delegation from entry. According to Article 22 of the Vienna Convention, host countries are required by international law to protect foreign embassies.

The US Secret Service and DC Police continue to block the Venezuelan embassy’s egress with barricades, while Guaido’s supporters surround the building’s perimeter. Both actions taken together render freedom of entry and exit impossible.

Guiado’s supporters assault and verbally abuse defenders of the EPC. Defenders are routinely pushed, punched, sexually assaulted, and tortured by the use of painfully blinding high intensity laser, strobe and flash lights, as well as deafeningly loud noises generated by bullhorns, air-horns, and the clanging of pot and pans at close range. Despite law enforcements’ extensive presence, this violence continues with little censure. Their taunts are misogynistic, homophobic and racist.

Guaido’s supporters have attempted multiple break-ins and were successful once. The entire time law enforcement stood idly by, despite the embassy and its security cameras sustaining damage.  The EPC’s lawyer made calls and sent a letter to the Secret Service demanding action against these illegal activities.  To date, they have received no response. On Friday, May 3rd, activists reached out to the DC police commissioner and elected officials to make these same demands.  As of Saturday, these illegal activities have stopped.

However, Guaido’s supporters repeatedly block food and medical supplies from reaching the EPC, including those raised up in baskets. An attempt to throw food to those legally inside resulted in arrest for the charge of “throwing missiles”.  Nonetheless, EPC and their defenders say they will persevere until their mission is accomplished.

While Guaido’s supporters are unimpeded as they assemble tents around the embassy to seize control over the building’s perimeter, activists face different treatment.

On May 4th, Guaido’s supporters swarmed EPC defenders when they tried to erect a tent. Tighe Barry, a CODEPINK member of the Embassy Protection Collective says he was pushed so hard that he backed into a secret service agent. However, instead of arresting the perpetrators, police arrested the victim. He remains in custody at this time. CODEPINK has asked that its supporters contact the DC US Attorney to demand that the charges against him be dropped and that he be immediately released.

US activists recognize that Venezuela’s fight against Yankee Imperialism places it at the epicenter of their fight against fascism. Venezuela’s struggle to remain autonomous, like Cuba and Nicaragua, protects all countries and people from Washington’s tyranny, both abroad and domestic.

While activists worldwide support different struggles, all share the same imperialist enemy and its police state, military industrial complex and intelligence community.  So come to DC to lend your support or be active where you are and be a part of liberation history!

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Lauren Smith is an independent journalist. Her work has been published by Counterpunch, Common Dreams, Telesur, Monthly Review, Alliance for Global Justice and Global Research, CA amongst others. She holds a BA in Politics, Economics and Society from SUNY at Old Westbury and an MPA in International Development Administration from New York University.  Her historical fiction novel based on Nicaragua’s 1979 revolution is due out this year.

Images and video are from the author

“Freedom of expression,” and the pitfalls of the market as it is playing out in Cuba these days, provides us with some valuable lessons. Cuba’s Decree 349 on culture officially came into effect on December 7, 2018. However, it is being implemented gradually while the Ministry of Culture consults with artists across the country about how the law will be enforced through complementary rules. This consultation is still taking place as these lines are being written.

It replaces a previous Decree on culture which could not have taken into account new forms of foreign influence. The concern deals with the spreading of banality, vulgarity, violence, rudeness, discrimination against women, sexism and racism. (Coming from Canada and especially Quebec where we have a strong popular cultural tradition, which is however increasingly being swamped in Montreal by American stars and their banality, my first gut reaction was: “we need this type of law in Canada!”)

The Cuban Ministry of Culture claims that this trend is eating away at the cultural policy of the Revolution. These phenomena can be seen in state, private, and public spaces, some of which do not even have the legal permits. With the spread of private business, some interests are taking advantage of the new situation to promote a group of artists who defy the norms of Cuban culture as well as the laws of the land.

The complementary laws are not intended to be draconian in nature. The government inspectors created by the Decree will only be able to shut down cultural events in extreme cases such as public obscenity, racist content or sexist content. All other decisions will be made by a group of inspectors. In addition, inspectors cannot inspect any studio or home that is not open to the public.

The Vice Minister of Culture Fernando Rojas said the new law was designed to respond to public complaints about the misuse of patriotic symbols and vulgarity in popular culture. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that:

“Artistic creation is not the target…. I can assure you that this Decree has only one objective: to protect national culture from false artists, unqualified professional practice, and the pseudo-culture generating anti-values, issues denounced in multiple spaces by our creators, writers and artists.”

There is a wide-open debate in Cuba regarding Decree 349 on culture and the drafting of the rules for its future application. The controversy is also stirring on the international scene, especially in North America, Europe and Latin America. In Cuba, there are those who are in favor of the new code. Others are critical, and indeed some of these are very critical, but they are participating in the Ministry of Culture-led consultation to draft the enabling regulations. There are others who are completely against the new legislation and its regulations, even while the consultations with people in the cultural field are still under way.

However, some of those Cubans who are militantly opposed to any implementation of the decree are protagonists of an orientation actively promoted by  the U.S. The method employed is the usual disinformation campaign. It hopes to capitalize on preconceived notions such as the catch-all American “freedom of expression” mantra as applied to political systems in countries other than the U.S. This is nothing new, but there is a novel twist. It is now applied to artistic endeavors. The campaign targets the sector of the Cuban society dedicated to culture, hoping to win over those who critically support the new statute in order to create division among individuals involved in culture. Be that as it may, this article deals only with the extremist opponents to the legislation and regulations, both in Cuba and internationally, especially in the United States.

Careful reading of a wide, representative spectrum of opposition articles, social media posts and comments reveals a common point of reference. The U.S. Embassy in Havana tweeted in favor of “artistic freedom” with a very undiplomatic slogan: “No to Decree 349.” The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs recently stated that the “Gov[ernmen]t of Cuba should celebrate, not restrain, the artistic expression of Cuban people.” Among the shades of “left,” “centrist” and openly right-wing hard-core opposition, including some academics, a common thread stands out.

The U.S. Takes the Moral High Road of Freedom of Artistic Expression – for Cuba

Whether in Cuba or the U.S., the fundamentalist opposition to the Cuban government takes the moral high road of “freedom of artistic expression” for Cuba. However, they are viewing Cuba with U.S. blinders. They take it as a given that in the U.S., there is freedom of artistic expression (along with other types of expression) in the cultural realm. The logic goes that there are no cultural restrictions in the U.S. like the ones being brought in Cuba. They would also argue that in the U.S. there is no restriction to freedom of the press. Yet, when it comes to U.S. imperial international policy, all the press is expected to close ranks. This is what they are doing against Julian Assange. The same logic is fostered in favor of the U.S. model of democracy and pluralism. Yet, the very embodiment of pluralism in the U.S. political scene today, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are both silent on Assange.

Furthermore, according to these talking points, there is no Ministry of Culture in the U.S. that would control and guide cultural expressions in that country. The U.S.-centric outlook insinuates, either openly or covertly, that everyone in the U.S. is free to express their artistic talents. The United States is presented as the cultural model for the world, in the same way that it boasts about other features of its society, such as its economy and political process. Many people around the world, and in the U.S. itself, are all too familiar with the U.S. superiority complex. This built-in psyche finds its origins in the “chosen people” notion emerging from the very birth of the U.S. at the time of the Thirteen Colonies in the seventeenth century.

For someone who comes from the Global North and has direct experience of American mainstream artistic expression, such as music, it is obvious that what sells is what is promoted. If the elites can successfully market banality, sex, and violence, then so be it. Profit is the chief criterion. Those very few artists who are willing and able (because of their physical appearance above all) to compete in this market are highly rewarded. They then pay back their sponsors by standing out explicitly or implicitly as the expressions of the American Dream come true. Furthermore, U.S.-style extreme individualism is paraded as a value to be worshiped, to which social and international concerns must be completely sacrificed. In sum, the fairy tale narrative pretends that anyone from the slums of America can make it.

However, this process is presented as being spontaneous, without the state’s involvement. It is supposedly the law of supply and demand as applied to the arts. The rationale of the “invisible hand” of capitalism determines what is appropriate in the artistic realm.

Can culture be considered just another commodity?

In the course of social media interaction during the December 8, 2018 Cuban TV Mesa Redonda program, Vice Minister of Culture Fernando Rojas retweeted and commented on one of my tweets. He mentioned UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and the U.S. position counter-posing this agreement to the free market.

An investigation ensued, as I was not sufficiently familiar with this controversy. In 2000 in Paris, UNESCO adopted the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. It stipulates that culture is not just another commodity and recognizes the sovereign right of states to promote and protect their tangible and intangible cultural production, using the measures they deem appropriate. The convention allows states to protect their cultural creation. The U.S. opposed it, claiming to promote true cultural diversity by working for individual liberties, so that everyone has “cultural freedom” and can enjoy his own cultural expressions, not those imposed by governments. But the convention was adopted by a vote of 148 to 2. Guess which countries opposed it? The U.S. and Israel.

Should each country have the right to defend its own culture?                                                                               

Looking at this superficially, it may seem that that the U.S. government does not impose any norms on culture. Indeed, as “freedom of artistic expression” is assured only in the U.S. (and in Israel), according to this tale, once again the U.S. has the “burden” of exercising its role as the chosen people responsible for teaching everyone on the planet about culture, as it does for democracy and human rights. In fact, taking a page out of that literary classic the Bible (let’s give credit where credit is due), the U.S. has evolved as a “city set upon the hill” to which everyone in the world must look for guidance. Thus, goes the logic, it is all the other countries of the world, except for the U.S. and Israel, who are the violators of artistic freedom.

However, in opposing the Convention’s attempt to save artists’ creative activity from market values by emphasizing the government’s role as a protector of culture, the question arises as to the role played by the U.S. government in this sphere. By default, and by its own admission (as indicated above), in pleading for the supremacy of the market under the guise of “individual freedom” in Paris, one can conclude that the U.S. model imposes the capitalist market as the overriding norm for artists.

Thus, the U.S. government not only protects the market economy within its own country, but by opposing the sovereign right of other countries to form shields to defend a traditional, healthy culture, Washington’s position also constitutes a road map for the U.S. to extend its cultural tentacles into other countries. This is something that we in Canada are very aware of. UNESCO’s defense of sovereign the right to protect and promote cultural production was probably something that irked Washington in Paris in 2005.

Some history

To better grasp the issue, a look at the underlying historical context is warranted. Cultural hegemony, on a par with economic expansion and military and ideological warfare, is part of the U.S. imperialist goal of world domination, irrespective of who occupies the White House. Let us recall Frances Stoner Saunders’s groundbreaking book Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, first published in English in 1999, then in Spanish in 2001 under the title La CIA y la Guerra Fría cultural. The book presents a detailed report on the methods whereby the CIA influenced a wide range of intellectuals and cultural organizations during the Cold War.

Since then, and in the wake of similar revelations occurring both before and after Saunders’s book, the U.S. has had to adopt a more subtle way to influence events. It has since funneled support through front groups not openly tied to the CIA. For example, American journalist and U.S. democracy promotion expert Tracey Eaton, in his December 2018 report, wrote that “over the past three decades, the U.S. government has spent more than $1 billion for broadcasting to Cuba and for democracy programs on the island.”

Democracy promotion, free expression and individual rights are so all-inclusive that they encompass the cultural issue, which is even listed as one of the goals of this funding. Furthermore, if one clicks on the links to the activities of the front groups, such as the one with the innocent-sounding title “Observa Cuba,” one finds this: “Artists stage four-day sit-down at Culture against 349.”

Now, this is not to say that all or most of the hard-line opponents to 349 are financially linked to the United States. That would be an unfair assertion. However, living just about in the belly of the beast, we know that one cannot have illusions about U.S. foreign policy. The situation is admittedly very complex. For example, one of the most prominent critics of 349, Silvio Rodríguez, drew a clean line of demarcation between critics such as himself, who are participating in drafting the regulations to the law, and the position of the U.S. Embassy and its acolytes.

This situation calls for serious reflection and research before writing, while at the same time seeing the urgency and duty to deal with the disinformation campaign led by the West.

Thus, it was of great help to get the December 16, 2018 “Postcard from Cuba,” circulated by U.S. journalist Karen Wald, who has five decades of experience with Cuba. She writes from Havana with regard to her initial investigation on the controversy over 349: “My guess is that some of what’s behind this [opposition to 349] may be the fact that lots of pseudo ‘artists’ of all kinds make up a strong component of what the U.S. extols as ‘dissidence’ here… Most of those ‘dissident artists’ reported in U.S. press aren’t even known here…”

It seems to me that Cuba not only has every right to defend its culture and the process that is involved in working out its policy, but also that if it does not, it will sink. According to Fidel Castro, culture is the nation’s shield, and is therefore the first thing that must be saved in order to guarantee the progress of the revolutionary process.

The manner in which the U.S. and the hard-line opponents in Cuba, the United States, Europe, and Latin America are zeroing in on 349 and the government officials involved is an indication that culture is indeed a shield to defend the Cuban Revolution. It is a sine qua non if the Revolution is to continue along the path it has followed for 60 years.

The U.S. and its allies know full well that the preferred weapon for subverting the Revolution is the cultural war in the wide sense of the term, including ideological, political, and artistic aspects.

Thus, we can see the hollowness of the “invisible hand of the market.” Let us recall that in the Julian Assange case, the mainstream media such as the New York Times, The Guardian and the Economist originally “supported” Assange by leaking his documents. Why is that? It was a money-maker. The market was there to be taken advantage of. Today these same media are in the front ranks of denouncing Assange, assisting his persecution. Why? The current discourse against Assange led by the U.S. elite is so powerful and all encompassing – “popular” – that it has become a source of profit for the U.S. and other Western mainstream media. A second reason is that MSM’s default position is to tow the political line of U.S. exceptionalism, as they did in paving the way for the U.S. war in Iraq and are doing presently to justify Washington’s aggressions against Venezuela, Yemen, and Iran. Today, Washington’s attack on investigative journalism that exposes its misdeeds as well as market considerations drive these media to take advantage of this “popular” cause and join in the crusade against Assange.

Thus, Cubans have every right to be wary of the market when it comes to culture or any related activity such as journalism. Nevertheless, let us give the last word to Samir Amin, the outstanding Egyptian-French scholar, who recently passed away. He produced a long-standing analysis of how the state in capitalist countries, such as the U.S., far from letting the free market take its course, has a direct hand in its operation. We saw this with the U.S. position on the Convention on Cultural Diversity and we are seeing it again as the empire strives to punch holes in Cuba’s cultural shield. Amin wrote that, when necessary, the “visible fist” helps the “invisible hand” of the free market.

Bucking the international tide, the Cuban state press is fully supporting Assange. If the press were to be in private hands, as the same opponents to Decree 349 demand, would this situation prevail?

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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

All images in this article are from COHA

The Idlib de-escalation zone and the northern part of Aleppo province are now two main sources of instability in Syria.

On May 4, the pro-Turkish National Syrian Army (NSA), backed by Turkish special forces, launched a surprise attack on positions of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northern Aleppo. The NSA briefly captured the town of Ma’arnaz, but then were forced to retreat under pressure from the YPG.

Later on the same day, the so-called Afrin Liberation Forces (ALF) released a statement claiming that at least 40 NSA members were killed and 30 others were injured in clashes for Ma’arnaz. These claims are not based on any visual evidence.

Pro-Turkish sources claimed that multiple mines and IEDs set up in Ma’arnaz were among the key reasons of the NSA withdrawal. Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen TV also reported citing own source that at some moment the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) intervened in the situation to allow a surrounded Turkish special unit to withdraw from the area as a “gesture of goodwill”.

The ALF is a brand used by the YPG in order to hide its military activities against Turkey and its forces. The YPG is a core of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are a de-facto proxy of another NATO member state, the US.

In a separate development, the SAA reportedly shelled a Turkish observation post near Shir Mughar in northwestern Hama. According to reports, the Turkish position accidentally came under fire because of its close proximity to positions of terrorists. Over the past few days, Syrian and Russian forces have delivered over two hundreds of strikes on terrorists positions in the provinces of Hama and Idlib. The strikes came in response to an increased shelling of government-held areas by militants hiding in the Idlib de-escalation zone.

Following the Shir Mughar incident, Turkish helicopters entered Syria and landed near the observation post. Opposition sources said that the helicopters evacuated several injured Turkish service members.

In the late hours of May 4, the Turkish Defense Ministry said that 2 of its soldiers were injured in a mortar attack near the town of Shir Mughar. The official statement didn’t identify the side responsible for the shelling.

The Russian Defense Ministry came with a warning that militants led by members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are massing in the southern part of the Idlib de-escalation zone. Militants are building up their forces near Latamina and Kafr Zita. According to the Russian side, this strike group may soon launch a large-scale attack on the government-held part of Hama.

These developments came amid circulating speculations that the SAA is preparing for a military action in the Idlib de-escalation zone. However, this scenario remains unlikely if no significant incidents involving large-scale civilian or personnel casualties happen soon.

The SDF and its political leadership are working to strengthen their grip on northeastern Syria. On May 2, the US-backed group held the “Syrian clans conference” in Ein Essa. It was attended by senior officials of the SDF and other local figures affiliated with the US-led coalition.

During the event, the SDF Commander-in-Chief, Ferhat Abdi Sahin, revealed that the group is involved in “indirect talks” with Turkey in order to settle the existing differences.

The Damascus government described the event as “a meeting of treason, treachery, and subjugation.”

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According to Bolton’s statement, an attack launched by a “proxy” of Iran on not just assets but “interests” of the U.S. in the region or “interests” of a U.S. ally in the region, would now be sufficient to trigger a U.S. attack on Iran, even if Iran itself was not directly responsible.

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In a late Sunday press release, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced the deployment of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (ABECSG) and a bomber task force to U.S. Central Command as a “clear and unmistakable message to Iran.” The press release claims that the move was made “in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” which were left unspecified.

The statement further claims that

“any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force” and that, while “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime,” the Trump administration is “fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”

Last month, in a move that many viewed as a set-up for a war with Iran — which has long been sought by Bolton as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, even prior to their posts in the current administration — the Trump administration labeled the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran as a terrorist organization. Iran’s government subsequently responded in kind, labeling U.S. soldiers of Central Command as terrorists and designating the U.S. government as a state sponsor of terrorism.

While Bolton framed the latest move as a “warning” to Iran, it turns out that the deployment of the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group to U.S. Central Command was actually announced last month with no mention at all of Iran. Indeed, a Navy press release published on April 8 stated that “the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (ABECSG) departed Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, April 1, for a regularly scheduled deployment.” The fleet has already been stationed in the Central Command region since at least April 15, when the U.S. Naval Institute announced that it was anchored off the coast of Spain.

However, the New York Times subsequently clarified that the strike group had been ordered to move from the Mediterranean Sea to the Middle East in relation to Bolton’s announcement. The Times also noted that the validity of the “warnings” of an alleged imminent attack on American or allied assets in the region by Iran or its alleged proxies was unknown because, “as of late Friday, military analysts were not tracking any new, imminent or clearly defined Iranian or Iranian-backed threats against Americans in Iraq or the region.”

As MintPress has previously reported, Bolton has an extensive record of distorting or falsifying intelligence if it serves his political ends. Given that Bolton has long been an advocate for regime change by force in Iran as well as the pre-emptive bombing of Iran, the intelligence on these alleged “warnings” should be heavily scrutinized. Yet, because there is no permanent secretary of defense or secretary of homeland security, Bolton has more control over national security policy and intelligence now than at any time since he became national security advisor last April. As a result, this much-needed scrutiny is unlikely to materialize.

A sneeze could trigger war

The real danger of Bolton’s announcement is not the framing of the deployment of military assets or the validity of the “threats” it cites, but rather its sweeping vagueness. Indeed, Bolton’s press release states that any attack “whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces” would justify an aggressive U.S. military response. Thus, an attack launched by a “proxy” of Iran on not just assets but “interests” of the U.S. in the region or “interests” of a U.S. ally in the region, would now be sufficient to trigger a U.S. attack on Iran, even if Iran itself was not directly responsible.

Given that the Trump administration has defined Iranian proxies rather loosely to include any Shia-dominated militia in the entire region — including those that have no provable connection to Iran — it is hard to interpret Bolton’s statement as anything other than a set-up for war.

This concern has only been augmented following statements made by Pompeo about Bolton’s recent press release. Pompeo told reporters late Sunday that the deployment of the strike group was “something we’ve been working on for a little while,” continuing:

It is absolutely the case that we’ve seen escalatory action from the Iranians, and it is equally the case that we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests. The fact that those actions take place, if they do, by some third-party proxy, whether that’s a Shia militia group or the Houthis or Hezbollah, we will hold the Iranians — Iranian leadership — directly accountable for that.”

As MintPress and other outlets have previously noted, even the U.S. government’s own documents admit that the Houthis in Yemen are not a proxy of Iran and that Iran has no direction over their military actions. In addition, Pompeo’s claim that any actions taken by any “Shia militia group” will be blamed on Iran shows that the Trump administration is now building a foundation to attack Iran for actions that include those over which Iran has no control whatsoever.

Furthermore, given the vagueness of the press release, military action may not even be necessary to trigger a response, as the press release says that “any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” For instance, if Iran makes good on its promise to blockade the Persian Gulf in response to U.S. efforts to place a total embargo on its oil efforts, such a move could now be interpreted as an attack on U.S. interests or those of its regional allies even though it would not expressly involve an offensive attack.

In addition — given that the Trump administration also considers Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, a proxy of Iran — future hostilities between Hamas and Israel, the U.S.’ main ally in the region, could also be interpreted as an “attack” on the U.S. or allied (i.e., Israeli) interests launched by an alleged Iranian proxy. However, in the case of Israel and Hamas, an unnamed U.S. official told the New York Times that the recent strike group deployment was unrelated to the conflict between Hamas and Israel, which saw Israel pound the Gaza Strip with airstrikes over the weekend.

Furthermore, it is also worth considering that the execution of a “false flag” operation attributed to any militia even claiming to be Shia against a target deemed important to U.S. or allied interests could be used to justify war with Iran.

The vagueness of Bolton’s press release, as well as subsequent statements made by Pompeo, clearly show that the war hawks in the Trump administration are laying the foundation for an aggressive military attack against Iran, one that will inevitably lead to war with the Islamic Republic and likely engulf much of the Middle East — and potentially much of the world.

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Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

With over a billion dollars pledged so far to rebuild Notre Dame de Paris, another monument to what Western civilization has accomplished enacts a daily tragedy before the forests and villagers trying to stay alive in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Still ignored in the Euro-American press is a current Ebola epidemic in particularly Kivu province ¹ : the second largest outbreak of Ebola on record and the first where medical care givers are being attacked.

Previously Ebola was difficult to contain without quarantine and research into the ill person’s contacts. Currently the disease is being attacked by large scale vaccination programs relying on U.S. pharmaceuticals. But the vaccination and treatment programs are disrupted in Eastern Congo due to multiple conflicts forcing a hundred thousand people this April alone, into flight, some taking refuge across borders with other countries.

While not declared a global emergency by the UN World Health Organization, the potential is there. A report by the High Commissioner for Refugees notes its work in the RDC is hampered by lack of funding with 47 million USD allocated but only 6.2 million USD received in contributions. ²

Rececently Dr. Richard Valery Mouzoko Kiboung, head of the Ebola team in Butembo, a Camerounais working for WHO, was attacked and killed at a medical conference; two of his staff were wounded. The killers’ motivation is unknown. Some local groups say that Ebola doesn’t exist and its threat is used as a means of control, or money raising. ³

Others say Ebola was brought to the region by white people. Marburg disease which is a kind of hemorrhagic fever much like Ebola and 88% fatal first appeared in 1967 in a laboratory in Marburg Germany, and like Ebola is considered a biological warfare agent (a note).

The Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus) first identified in Zaire in 2010 may be a strain of the Marburg virus. The area where Ebola is proliferating has been contested with arms for several decades due to its natural resources sought by Rwandan, Euro-American and Asian markets. Buyers of desired metals are often forced to buy from the militias which control various mines or access to mines even when these are registered with the government. The DRC government army does not control the region. Regional militias represent breakaway units of the government’s army, Rwandan forces, Hutu refugee forces, Tutsi Congolese among other distinct Congolese tribes. The United Nations has peacekeeping troops committed to the region which regularly take casualties.

The recent murder of Dr. Mouzoko is one of 119 attacks so far this year on medical personnel attempting to counter the epidemic, most often under the auspices of the World Health Organization. In researching the causes of the murders press accounts are not helpful. Eleven men were recently arrested in response to the killing of Dr. Mouzoko, but no mention of their motives or allegiances is given. Logic suggests the killers of medical personnel serve the interests of the Ebola epidemic itself, causing panic flight and spread of the disease which could cause widespread death. 33 medical workers have died from contracting the disease.

There is some chance that medical personnel are being killed tactically in a biological war effort to depopulate the region of its inhabitants. But that would be an extreme tactic to accomplish more quickly what continues under corrupt policies the government and corporation boards have furthered for years. While depopulation would deprive mining enterprises of local workers it would favor technologically advanced companies using modern mining equipment. International corporations in the area (whether they are mining with license from the government or without), are involved in acts of plunder, taking what belongs to the region’s people without bettering their lives. It is a monstrous ongoing crime dating in the Congo back to the days of King Leopold.

Over a thousand verified Ebola deaths have been counted so far. Massive vaccination by a Merck produced drug are apparently effective. WHO is expecting new pharmaceuticals from Johnson & Johnson which await federal approval. ⁴ There is no suggestion in the press that U.S. corporate vaccine products are supplied at cost.

The UN’s emergency management plan for the epidemic is operational but requires 71.5 million USD. ⁵

Questioning a Euro-American media which has proven so faithful to the state in its propaganda against Venezuela, is not likely to provide answers. Media silence on Eastern Congo supports fears of illegal operations waged to the interests of major western corporations. Aside from pharmaceutical companies, according to Global Witness in 2009, the principle corporate buyers of minerals in the region were: “Bangkok-based THAISARCO (a subsidiary of British metals group AMC), UK-based Afrimex, and Belgium-based Trademet” (“Global Witness uncovers foreign companies’ links to Congo violence,” July 21, 2009). ⁶

Since informative reports in 2008 and 2009 by Keith Harmon Snow ⁷, Global Witness ⁸ and Roger Miller ⁹, updated reports of corporate involvement are not easily available.

The current political situation in the Congo doesn’t offer much hope of the government addressing the emergency. While Kabila promised to step down and hold elections which he did after some delay, the power of the country may have remained his. An article by Kambale Musavuli of Friends of the Congo reports that former President Kabila’s party won 342 of the Parliament’s 500 seats in the election, and controls 22 of the 26 provinces, 91 of 108 senate seats with a similar percentage of governors; the Congo’s “elected” president Félix Tshisekedi, is considered installed as a Kabila compliant president while the Catholic Church Observer Mission found that Martin Fayulu won the election. ¹⁰

In sum the change in Presidency isn’t likely to change the policies of the state as allied with corporate needs, which have allowed the conflicts and mining practices in the East Congo for many years.¹¹. An ongoing genocide warning for the peoples of the Eastern Congo continues. Background. ^{12   13}. Night’s Lantern first noted a genocide warning for peoples of the Eastern Congo, among others affected by resource theft in 2004, followed by others.

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This article was originally published on nightslantern.ca.

Notes

1 “Ebola virus disease – Democratic Republic of the Congo: Disease outbreak news. Update,” WHO, May 2, 2019, World Health Organization.

2 “RDC : Des attaques au Nord-Kivu poussent des dizaines de milliers de personnes à fuir,” UN High commissioner for Refugees, May 3, 2019, reliefweb.

3 “The Doctor Killed In Friday’s Ebola Attack Was Dedicated — But Also Afraid,” Nurith Aizenman, April 23, 2019, npr: Goats and Soda.

4 “Congo Ebola deaths surpass 1,000 as attacks on treatment centers go on,” May 3, 2019, Health News.

5 “RD Congo – Sud-Kivu et Maniema : Plan Opérationnel d’Urgence (Janvier – Juin 2019),” UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, April 10, 2019, reliefweb.

6 “Faced with a Gun What Can You Do? War and the Militarisation of Mining in Eastern Congo,” Global Witness 2009; “Global Witness uncovers foreign companies’ links to Congo violence,” Press release, July 21, 2009, Global Witness.

7 “Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,” Keith Harmon Snow, Dec. 7, 2008, Global Research.

8 Global Witness, ibid.

9 “How British Corporations are Fuelling War in the Congo,” Robert Miller, Nov. 10, 2009, www.zcommunications.org/.

10 “Hijacking the Congolese people’s victory,” Kambale Musavuli, April 30, 2019, New Frame.

11 “Crisis in the Congo: uncovering the truth,” Friends of the Congo. Jan 19, 2011, [access:< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLV9szEu9Ag >.

12 “Civil War in The Congo: Template for Neo-Colonialism,” J.B.Gerald, Dec. 4, 2012, Global Research.

13 “North Kivu: the background to conflict in North Kivu Province of Eastern congo,” Jacob Stearns, U.K.: Rift Valley Institute, 2012.

The Following text is Section 11 of

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,

by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

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

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

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Contents 

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

***

1. The U.S. Armed Forces have in Italy (according to the official report of the Pentagon Base Structure Report) more than 1,500 buildings, with a total surface area of over 1 million m², and they rent or have been granted permission to use a further 800 buildings, with a surface of approximately 900,000 m². In total, there are over 2,300 buildings with an area of approximately 2 million m² scattered over fifty sites. But this is only part of the U.S. military presence in Italy.

2. The U.S. military bases are joined by the bases of NATO under U.S. command and the Italian bases available to U.S./NATO forces. It is estimated that, in total, there are over 100 bases. The entire network of military bases in Italy is, directly or indirectly, under the command of the Pentagon. It is part of the “area of responsibility” of the United States European Command (EUCOM), the European Command of the United States, headed by a U.S. general, who at the same time holds the office of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. The “area of responsibility” of the EUCOM, one of the six “unified combat commands” with which the US covers the globe, includes the entire European region and all of Russia (including the Asian side), plus some Western and Central Asian countries: Turkey, Israel, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

3. The 31st Fighter Wing is deployed at the Aviano Air Base (Pordenone). The U.S. squadron maintains constant attack readiness with about 50 B61 nuclear bombs (number estimated by the FAS, the Federation of American Scientists, before 2020).

4. On the Ghedi Air Base (Brescia), the 6th Italian Air Force is deployed, ready to attack under U.S. command with about 20 B61 nuclear bombs (number estimated by the FAS before 2020). That Italian pilots are trained in nuclear attack – writes FAS – which is demonstrated by the presence in Ghedi of one of the four units of the U.S. Air Force deployed in European bases (along with units in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands) “where U.S. nuclear weapons are destined to be launched by aircraft of the host country”. The pilots of the four European countries, along with Turkish pilots, are trained in the use of nuclear bombs in NATO’s annual nuclear war exercise. In 2013, it took place in Aviano and in 2014 in Ghedi.

5. To the U.S.nuclear weapons stationed on Italian territory, the actual number of which is secret, are added those aboard units of the Sixth Fleet, whose main base is in Gaeta in Lazio. The Sixth Fleet depends on the US Naval Forces Command in Europe, whose headquarters is in Naples-Capodichino.

6. The 173rd Airborne Brigade of the U.S. Army is based in Vicenza. It provides rapid intervention forces to the European Command, African Command and Central Command (whose “area of responsibility” includes the Middle East and Central Asia). Forces of the 173rd Brigade, which were employed in Iraq in 2003, are sent on a rotation basis to Afghanistan, the Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

7. In the Pisa/Livorno area, there is Camp Darby, which has the largest US arsenal in the world outside the U.S. itself. It is the logistics base for the U.S. Army that supplies U.S. and allied land and air forces in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In its 125 bunkers are projected artillery shells, bombs for airplanes and missiles in a number that can be estimated at over 1.5 million. It cannot be excluded that there have been and may currently be nuclear bombs among the aerial weapons stored at Camp Darby. Together with the artillery ammunition, it is estimated that over 2,500 tanks and other military vehicles are stored at the base along with over 11,000 military materials of various types. The base holds the entire equipment for two armored battalions and two battalions of mechanized infantry, which can be quickly sent to the area of ​​operations through the airport of Pisa(a nationalmilitary air hub) and the Port of Livorno (to which they can also dock nuclear-powered units). Huge ships of private companies that carry arms on behalf of the Pentagon make monthly stops here, connecting U.S. ports to Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Asian ports.

8. A unit of the Italian Army Special Forces Command (COM.FO.SE) from the Gamerra barracks of Pisa will be transferred in 2019 to an area of Camp Darby that was formerly used for recreational activities and will formally be returned to Italy. This will enable them to better train and be integrated with U.S. Special Forces for secret operations in war zones.

9. As a result of the investigations by the judges Casson and Mastelloni, it emerged that Camp Darby, since the 1960s, played a basic role in the coup network formed by the CIA and the SIFAR for “Operation Gladio”. Camp Darby was one of the U.S./NATO bases that – according to Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Cassation – provided the explosives for the Operation Gladio massacres from Piazza Fontana to Capaci and Via d’Amelio. The U.S./NATO bases were where “black terrorists, NATO officials, mobsters, Italian politicians and Masons met on the eve of attacks”.

10. Camp Darby was also involved in the tragedy of the Moby Prince ferry, which collided with the Agip Abruzzo tanker on the evening of 10 April 1991 in the harbor of Livorno. 140 people died after waiting for hours for help in vain. That evening in the Livorno harbor there was intense traffic of United States military ships engaged in the transfer of U.S. weapons, part of which were secretly sent to Somalia, Croatia and other areas. It included arms that were a par of Operation Gladio. When the collision occured, the manager of the operation – under the US command of Camp Darby – immediately tried to get rid of any evidence.

11. The headquarters of the Allied Joint Force (JFC Naples) is located in Lago Patria (Naples). Its new headquarters, inaugurated in 2012 has a covered area of 85,000 m², surrounded by a large fenced area suitable for future expansion. The staff, on the rise, is composed of over 2,500 military and civilians. NATO’s JFC Naples is under the command of an American admiral, who at the same time commands the US Naval Forces in Europe (on which the Sixth Fleet depends) and the US Naval Forces for Africa.

12. Every two years the JFC Naples assumes the operational command of the “NATO Response Force” (NRF), a “highly flexible and capable” joint force of 40,000 men, which has the task of conducting military operations in the “area of responsibility of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and beyond that area”. The spearhead of the NRF is its “Joint Task Force with very high operational readiness”, which is composed of 5,000 men who can be deployed in two to three days in an intervention area “before the crisis begins”.

13. At the headquarters of Lago Patria, since September 2017, the “NATO Strategic Direction Hub for the South”, an intelligence center primarily used for espionage, has been in operation and has been “focused on the southern regions including the Middle East, North Africa and Sahel Sub-Saharan Africa and adjacent areas “.

14. In Sicily, the Naval Air Station (NAS) Sigonella, with a staff of about 7,000 military and civilians, constitutes the largest U.S. and NATO naval and air base in the Mediterranean region. In addition to providing logistical support to the Sixth Fleet, it forms the basis for launching military operations (mostly secret) mainly, but not exclusively, in the Middle East and Africa. The NAS, the official introduction reads, “hosts U.S. and NATO aircraft of all types”, including Global Hawk spy drones, which from Sigonella carry out reconnaissance missions on the Middle East, Africa, eastern Ukraine, Black Sea and other areas. For targeted attacks (almost always secret), Predator drones take off from Sigonella, armed with laser and satellite-guided missiles and bombs.

15. The Naval Air Station Sigonella is supplemented by the Italian base in Augusta, which supplies fuel and ammunition to the U.S. and NATO naval units, and the port of Catania, which can accommodate up to nine warships. For fire drills, U.S. special forces have the Pachino range (Syracuse) granted to them for their exclusive use.

16. The other major US installation in Sicily is the MUOS station in Niscemi (Caltanissetta). The MUOS (Mobile User Objective System) is a very high-frequency military satellite communications system, consisting of four satellites and four earth stations: two in the U.S., in Virginia and in Hawaii, one in Australia and one in Sicily, each with three large parabolic antennas of 18 meters in diameter. This system allows the Pentagon to connect to a single network of command and communications for submarines, warships, fighter-bombers and drones, military vehicles and terrestrial departments while they are in movement wherever in the world they are.

17. In Sardinia, there are the largest polygons for the training of Italian and NATO military forces: in particular those of Salto di Quirra, Capo Teulada, Capo Frasca and Capo San Lorenzo. Here, around 80% of the bombs, missile warheads and bullets used in military maneuvers taking place in Italy are used in fire drills, with serious consequences for the health of the population.

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Sections 12-16 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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According to Pompeo, US presidents have constitutional authority under Article II to preemptively attack other nations.

The article states the following: “The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States…”

Nothing in the Constitution gives the executive power to declare war — authority afforded solely to Congress.

It was last exercised on December 8, 1941 following imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, never since then. All US wars post-WW II were and remain illegal.

Article I, Section 8 states: “The Congress shall have power…(t)o declare war” — not the president or US courts.

International law supersedes the above. Under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2), international laws, treaties, conventions, and other agreements “constitute the supreme law of the land.”

The UN Charter (binding international law for all member states) mandates that Security Council members alone have power to declare war — authorized only in self-defense if a nation is attacked or an attack is imminent.

In the post-WW II era, every time the US went to war, it acted extrajudicially, including against North Korea, Southeast Asia, the rape of Yugoslavia, and all post-9/11 wars.

In all of the above cases, US forces preemptively attacked nations threatening no one. That’s what naked aggression and imperialism are all about — a scourge threatening nuclear war, the ultimate doomsday scenario.

Given US rage for dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations, what’s unthinkable is clearly possible, maybe inevitable.

On ABC News Sunday, Pompeo lied saying:

“The president has his full range of Article 2 authorities, and I’m very confident that any action we took in Venezuela would be lawful” — clearly not so!

Trump earlier said military force is an option against Venezuela “if that’s what’s required.” DJT, Pompeo, Bolton, and Abrams all said: “All options are on the table.”

Fact: Preemptive wars, color revolutions, and old-fashioned coups flagrantly violate international, US constitutional and statute laws pertaining to military action. There’s no ambiguity about it.

The Trump regime “ha(s) a full range of options (against Venezuela) that we’re preparing for,” according to Pompeo — to try replacing democratically elected and reelected President Maduro with US-controlled puppet rule, by his reasoning.

Ahead of meeting with Pompeo on Monday in Rovaniemi, Finland on the sidelines of an Arctic Council ministerial meeting, mainly to discuss events in Venezuela, Sergey Lavrov  denounced “an unprecedented campaign led by the US…aimed at toppling Venezuela’s legitimate government,” adding:

“Attempts to stage a violent upheaval in Caracas have nothing to do with the democratic process, and only disrupt any prospects of political settlement.

International law is clear and unambiguous. Under no circumstances may nations interfere in the internal affairs of others — except in self-defense if attacked.

On Sunday in Moscow, Lavrov and Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza discussed the Trump regime’s threat to Bolivarian Republic sovereignty — ahead of Lavrov’s Monday meeting with Pompeo.

There’s virtually no chance that Russia’s foreign minister will convince his US counterpart to keep Washington’s hands off Venezuela.

Calling on the Trump regime to cancel its “irresponsible” aim to topple Maduro fell on deaf ears at the White House.

The die is cast for continued hostile US actions, including possible aggression, though proxy war is most likely.

Millions of Venezuelans and the nation’s military are prepared to defend Bolivarian sovereignty.

What’s going on is likely to continue without letup. The next shoe could drop at any time, including Trump possibly ordering a blockade of Venezuela, an act of war if declared.

Good faith Russian efforts aren’t enough to convince Trump regime hardliners to abandon their imperial aims against the Bolivarian Republic.

Lavrov/Pompeo talks on Monday won’t change a thing. Separately, GOP Senator Todd Young called for Foreign Relations Committee involvement on Venezuela.

Expressing concern about “possible US military intervention,” he called on committee chairman James Risch and minority ranking member Bob Menendez “to hold immediate hearings with key (Trump officials) next week to discuss their plans for Venezuela and to explain any plans to deploy US forces to the country.”

The vast majority of House and Senate members are hostile to Maduro and Bolivarian social democracy.

It remains to be seen if they’ll support whatever actions Trump regime hardliners plan to pursue.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from LobeLog

The Embassy Protection Collective formed on April 10, the day after the Trump administration manipulated the Organization of American States (OAS) to change the rules so they could recognize their puppet, Juan Guaido, as president of Venezuela. The OAS could not get the required two-thirds vote to recognize a government so they changed the rules to a mere majority and barely got that. By then, the US had allowed their Guaido coup forces to take the Venezuelan military attaché building in Washington, DC and three diplomatic offices in New York City.

The Trump administration is allowing extreme violent right-wing Guaido supporters to blockade the embassy. Despite a standoff in the last week, we had a series of victories over those forces and remain steadfast protectors of the embassy.

We adopted a theme song for the Embassy Protection Collective, “We’re Still Here” by Holly Neer. The chorus begins with:

We’re Still Here
Choosing Love Over Fear
When the Lines Are All Drawn
We’re Still Here

Challenges and Victories

We woke up on April 30 to the news that Juan Guaido was going to attempt a coup again, which made us wonder why he needs to conduct a coup if he is the “president.” We were alerted by our Venezuelan allies that this second coup attempt would be easily defeated, which it was, but to expect coup-supporters in the US to protest at the embassy.

In fact, the extremist Venezuelan coup supporters showed up that morning and tried to take over the steps in front of the building. A team of embassy protectors took a stand on the steps and stopped them from taking over the entry. More violent extremists showed up throughout the day, causing police to erect a barricade between us in front of the embassy. We sang almost non-stop to keep ourselves from engaging with them while they blew sirens and other loud noises and insulted and threatened us shouting racist and misogynist comments and using lewd gestures. Police refused to pass food and water to us or to allow our allies into the space in front of the embassy. We held that space through the night by taking shifts.

In the courtyard behind the embassy, the pro-coup forces harassed, intimidated, threatened and assaulted our allies outside who bravely prevented them from entering the building while folks inside set up reinforcements to stop them from coming in the door. This lasted until 1:00 in the morning.

The next day, May 1, we agreed to cede the front steps if the police would protect the front porch and doors from damage. We moved inside to focus on protecting the embassy from within, thinking the police would honor their duty to protect the embassy from harm. That afternoon, Carlos Vecchio, Guaido’s fake “ambassador” showed up, with the intention of taking over the embassy.

We were ready for him to enter and be forced to remove us. As he came to the front porch to speak, we stood resolute behind him holding signs and chanting, ‘No Coup.’ When he began to speak, we cut off the power to his sound system and out-shouted him. Vecchio was forced to flee, chased by reporter Anya Parampil who asked him, “Where are you going next, the White House?”  A representative vaguely told the crowd they were “working on a process to evict us.” The coup failed in Venezuela on April 30, and failed again in Washington, DC on May 1.

Watch @carlosvecchio’s staff fail to answer what they plan to do from within the Maduro government’s embassy, considering they won’t even be able to issue visas.

Also can’t answer why their colleagues attended a DC think tank meeting to plan for the invasion of Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/xHXWc7bRua

— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) May 1, 2019

The coup supporters started setting up tents around the embassy that night and blocking our people from entering the building as police stood by and did nothing. When members of CODE PINK brought food the next day, surrounded by clergy, they were stopped from delivering it. Two allies, Ariel Gold of CODE PINK and Chris Herz tossed bread and other foods onto a patio to us. They were arrested and charged with “hurling missiles” at a building.

We pushed back at police for not allowing the food in, and they provided a blockade for our members to come down and get the groceries. Coup supporters stole hundreds of dollars worth of the food. We were also able to get some medications in that day for people who required it. Since then, we have struggled to get supplies. When we lowered a rope from a window and successfully brought up four bags of food, the coup supporters rushed a barricade and assaulted our allies. It was our people who were threatened with arrest even though they were the ones who were knocked to the ground.

An older gentleman from the neighborhood wanted to bring us toothbrushes and toothpaste. He was swarmed by the violent extremists. When he tried to pass between two people to get to the door, he was thrown to the ground violently and seriously injured. He was arrested, not the ones who threw him down. It has become common for police to arrest the victims of assault, not the people who committed the assault.

These seem to be US-trained regime change operatives who use violence, psy-ops and and intimidation against us. Some are Nicaraguans and Cubans, not Venezuelans. They have unlimited resources. They are constantly bringing in more supplies. From early in the morning, we are surrounded by them and subjected to their sirens, banging of pots and pans, loud music, taunts and threats of physical harm.

They have tried to break in numerous times. They drilled through a door to the garage and damaged the lift gate with a sledgehammer. On Friday night, they banged on the doors so hard for hours that they were damaging them. We had to fortify the old wooden doors so they would not break through. The Secret Service watched while they did it and not only let them but refused to say they would protect our safety. When we called them, they said we should ask the Venezuelan government for help. It took hundreds of calls from supporters to get them to stop.

The Secret Service is allowing them to do all they can to intimidate us very likely under orders from the White House. They want the extremists to frighten us so we leave the embassy. Their actions have had the opposite effect. They have united us in our determination to protect the embassy.

Despite being barricaded in the building and cut off from access to supplies, we are victorious. We are still here and there is little chance of eviction because we are violating no laws. We have built a powerful and united community that works together to protect the embassy and to keep the violent extremists and Trump administration out.

Surrounding the Embassy with Love and Resistance

The Trump administration realizes that entering the Venezuelan Embassy in violation of the Vienna Convention would set a precedent that could put US embassies around the world at risk. As a result, they are allowing right-wing extremists to harass and threaten us and try to starve us out. That is their only hope of taking over the embassy.

We refuse to give in no matter what they do. Our lawyers are making sure there is a record of the incidents, which we have in large part due to our embedded media, Anya Parampil of The Grayzone Project and Alex Rubinstein of Mintpress News. We also have to give a shout out to TeleSur, who was embedded with us until the pro-coup forces arrived and now is providing coverage from the outside. Allies outside are identifying the pro-coup actors. We wrote to the State Department and Secret Service about the violence and have told them we will hold decision-makers and police officers responsible for their actions.  But mostly, we have responded to these intimidation tactics in solidarity and have strengthened our resolve to protect the embassy.

A highlight of the week for us, after many difficult days, was to see hundreds of Embassy Protectors show up outside yesterday. They chanted with us and sang. We ended the night with revolutionary music blasting from the second floor embassy windows and dancing together even though they were on the sidewalk across the street and we were inside the embassy. The extremists’ banging of pots, strobe lights and blasting sirens at us only added to the festive atmosphere.

Today, more Embassy Protectors returned to show solidarity and express their love. We also started receiving many messages of solidarity and appreciation from individuals and social movements in Venezuela. This means the world to us. We are surrounded by violent, right-wing, regime change forces who are trying to wear us down. These are the same actors who held violent protests in Nicaragua and Venezuela. They are making death threats, threatening women with rape and mocking us, all in a posh Georgetown neighborhood. It is surreal.

We recall the mass mobilizations in Charlottesville, Boston and New York when right-wing, racist, misogynist hate-filled people came there and urge that mass resistance to join us now. This is a critical struggle. If the embassy is overtaken, it will set us on a path to war in Venezuela, and chaos and devastation to the region. If we can continue to protect the embassy, Venezuela and the United States will have time to negotiate with third countries to serve as protectorates for their embassies and this could begin a path to peace. Perhaps Trump will even see that the Bolton-Abrams-Pompeo team has misled him and reverse the disastrous policy course he is on. There is no reason to steal Venezuela’s resources, the US should respect Venezuelan sovereignty and negotiate agreements as has been done previously.

We are asking people to come to DC to surround this embassy with love and resistance. Let’s show that love will prevail.

If you absolutely can’t come to DC, please contact your member of Congress to make them aware of the situation. Tell them:

1. The US is required to protect embassies under the Vienna Convention, but is allowing the Venezuelan Embassy to be damaged when the Secret Service could easily protect it.
2. The United States’ coup in Venezuela has failed. Maduro is the legitimate elected President of Venezuela and is recognized by the United Nations and over 140 countries.
3. The Secret Service is violating the human rights of the Embassy Protectors by failing to ensure safe passage in and out of the embassy and access to supplies. We are literally under siege.
4. Review the Declaration of the Embassy Protection Collective and sign on to show your support.

And finally, please make a donation as we have incurred many unexpected costs for this mobilization.

Venceremos!

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

Featured image: Plato’s Cave reimagined for the Hollywood era  (Photo by: Derek Swansonn)

When we first looked at the relationship between politics, film and television at the turn of the 21st century, we accepted the consensus opinion that a small office at the Pentagon had, on request, assisted the production of around 200 movies throughout the history of modern media, with minimal input on the scripts.

How ignorant we were.

More appropriately, how misled we had been.

We have recently acquired 4,000 new pages of documents from the Pentagon and CIA through the Freedom of Information Act. For us, these documents were the final nail in the coffin.

These documents for the first time demonstrate that the US government has worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV titles.

The previous best estimate, in a dry academic book way back in 2005, was that the Pentagon had worked on less than 600 films and an unspecified handful of television shows.

The CIA’s role was assumed to be just a dozen or so productions, until very good books by Tricia Jenkins and Simon Willmetts were published in 2016. But even then, they missed or underplayed important cases, including Charlie Wilson’s War and Meet the Parents.

 

Jon Voight in Transformers — in this scene, just after American troops have been attacked by a Decepticon robot, Pentagon Hollywood liaison Phil Strub inserted the line ‘Bring em home’, granting the military a protective, paternalistic quality, when in reality the DOD does quite the opposite. (Source: Medium)

Alongside the massive scale of these operations, our new book National Security Cinema details how US government involvement also includes script rewrites on some of the biggest and most popular films, including James Bond, the Transformers franchise, and movies from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes.

A similar influence is exerted over military-supported TV, which ranges from Hawaii Five-O to America’s Got Talent, Oprah and Jay Leno to Cupcake Wars, along with numerous documentaries by PBS, the History Channel and the BBC.

National Security Cinema also reveals how dozens of films and TV shows have been supported and influenced by the CIA, including the James Bond adventure Thunderball, the Tom Clancy thriller Patriot Games and more recent films, including Meet the Parents and Salt.

The CIA even helped to make an episode of Top Chef that was hosted at Langley, featuring then-CIA director Leon Panetta who was shown as having to skip dessert to attend to vital business. Was this scene real, or was it a dramatic statement for the cameras?

James Bond and Domino are rescued via a plane and skyhook that was loaned to the production by CIA front company Intermountain Aviation — Thunderball (Source: Medium)

The Military’s Political Censorship of Hollywood

When a writer or producer approaches the Pentagon and asks for access to military assets to help make their film, they have to submit their script to the entertainment liaison offices for vetting. Ultimately, the man with the final say is Phil Strub, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) chief Hollywood liaison.

If there are characters, action or dialogue that the DOD don’t approve of then the film-maker has to make changes to accommodate the military’s demands. If they refuse then the Pentagon packs up its toys and goes home. To obtain full cooperation the producers have to sign contracts — Production Assistance Agreements — which lock them into using a military-approved version of the script.

This can lead to arguments when actors and directors ad lib or improvise outside of this approved screenplay.

On set at Edwards Air Force base during the filming of Iron Man, there was an angry confrontation between Strub and director Jon Favreau.

Favreau wanted a military character to say the line, ‘People would kill themselves for the opportunities I have’, but Strub objected. Favreau argued that the line should remain in the film, and according to Strub:

‘He’s getting redder and redder in the face and I’m getting just as annoyed. It was pretty awkward and then he said, angrily, “Well how about they’d walk over hot coals?” I said “fine.” He was so surprised it was that easy.’

In the end, this compromised line did not appear in the finished film.

One of several scenes for Iron Man filmed at Edwards Air Force Base (Source: Medium)

It seems that any reference to military suicide — even an off-hand remark in a superhero action-comedy adventure — is something the DOD’s Hollywood office will not allow. It is understandably a sensitive and embarrassing topic for them, when during some periods of the ever-expanding and increasingly futile ‘War on Terror’, more US servicemen have killed themselves than have died in combat. But why shouldn’t a movie about a man who builds his own flying suit of armour not be able to include such jokes?

Another one-line quip that was censored by the DOD came in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.

When Bond is about to HALO jump out of a military transport plane they realise he’s going to land in Vietnamese waters. In the original script Bond’s CIA sidekick jokes ‘You know what will happen. It will be war, and maybe this time we’ll win.’

This line was removed at the request of the DOD.

Strangely, Phil Strub denied that there was any support for Tomorrow Never Dies, while the pre-eminent scholar in the field Lawrence Suid only lists the DOD connection under ‘Unacknowledged Cooperation’.

But the DOD are credited at the end of the film and we obtained a copy of the Production Assistance Agreement between the producers and the Pentagon.

The DOD-approved version of the HALO scene in Tomorrow Never Dies

Vietnam is evidently another sore topic for the US military, which also removed a reference to the war from the screenplay for Hulk (2003). While the military are not credited at the end of the film, on IMDB or in the DOD’s own database of supported movies, we acquired a dossier from the US Marine Corps detailing their ‘radical’ changes to the script.

This included making the laboratory where the Hulk is accidentally created into a non-military facility, making the director of the lab an ex-military character, and changing the code name of the military operation to capture the Hulk from ‘Ranch Hand’ to ‘Angry Man’.

‘Ranch Hand’ is the name of a real military operation that saw the US Air Force dump millions of gallons of pesticides and other poisons onto the Vietnamese countryside, rendering millions of acres of farmland poisoned and infertile.

They also removed dialogue referring to ‘all those boys, guinea pigs, dying from radiation, and germ warfare’, an apparent reference to covert military experiments on human subjects.

The documents we obtained further reveal that the Pentagon has the power to stop a film from being made by refusing or withdrawing support. Some movies such as Top Gun, Transformers and Act of Valor are so dependent on military cooperation that they couldn’t have been made without submitting to this process. Others were not so lucky.

The movie Countermeasures was rejected by the military for several reasons, and consequently never produced. One of the reasons is that the script included references to the Iran-Contra scandal, and as Strub saw it ‘There’s no need for us to… remind the public of the Iran-Contra affair.’

Similarly Fields of Fire and Top Gun 2 were never made because they couldn’t obtain military support, again due to politically controversial aspects of the scripts.

This ‘soft’ censorship also affects TV. For example, a planned Louis Theroux documentary on Marine Corps recruit training was rejected, and as a result was never made.

It is impossible to know exactly how widespread this military censorship of entertainment is because many files are still being withheld. The majority of the documents we obtained are diary-like reports from the entertainment liaison offices, which rarely refer to script changes, and never in an explicit, detailed way. However, the documents do reveal that the DOD requires a preview screening of any project they support and sometimes makes changes even after a production has wrapped.

The documents also record the pro-active nature of the military’s operations in Hollywood and that they are finding ways to get involved during the earliest stages of development, ‘when characters and storylines are most easily shaped to the Army’s benefit.’

The DOD’s influence on popular culture can be found at all stages of production, granting them the same kind of power as major studio executives.

Agencywood: The CIA and NSA’s Influence on Movie Scripts

Despite having far fewer cinematic assets the CIA has also been able to wield considerable influence on some of the projects they have supported (or refused to support).

There is no formal CIA script review process but the Agency’s long-serving entertainment liaison officer Chase Brandon was able to insert himself into the early stages of the writing process on several TV and film productions.

The new recruits arrive at CIA training facility The Farm in The Recruit

Brandon did this most prominently on the spy thriller The Recruit, where a new agent is put through CIA training at The Farm — an obvious vehicle for inducting the audience into that world and giving them a glimpse behind the curtain. The original story treatment and early drafts of the script were written by Brandon, though he is only credited on the film as a technical advisor, covering up his influence on the content.

The Recruit includes lines about the new threats of the post-Soviet world (including that great villainous justification for a $600 billion defense budget, Peru), along with rebuttals of the idea that the CIA failed to prevent 9/11. And it repeats the adage that ‘the CIA’s failures are known, but its successes are not’. All of this helped to propagate the idea that the Agency is a benevolent, rational actor in a chaotic and dangerous world.

The CIA has also managed to censor scripts, removing or changing sequences that they didn’t want the public to see. On Zero Dark Thirtyscreenwriter Mark Boal ‘verbally shared’ his script with CIA officers, and they removed a scene where a drunk CIA officer fires an AK-47 into the air from a rooftop in Islamabad, and removed the use of dogs from the torture scenes.

In a very different kind of film, the hugely popular romantic comedy Meet the Parents, Brandon requested that they change a scene where Ben Stiller’s character discovers Robert De Niro’s (Stiller’s father-in-law to be) secret hideaway. In the original script Stiller finds CIA torture manuals on a desk, but Brandon changed that to photos of Robert De Niro with various dignitaries.

Ben Stiller discovers that Robert De Niro is working for the CIA — Meet the Parents (Source: Medium)

Indeed, the CIA’s ability to influence movie scripts goes back to their early years. In the 1940s and 50s they managed to prevent any mention of themselves appearing in film and TV until North by Northwest in 1959. This included rejecting requests for production support, meaning that some films were never made, and censoring all references to the CIA in the script for the Bob Hope comedy My Favourite Spy.

The CIA even sabotaged a planned series of documentaries about their predecessor, the OSS, by having assets at CBS develop a rival production to muscle the smaller studio out of the market. Once this was achieved, the Agency pulled the plug on the CBS series too, ensuring that the activities of the OSS remained safe from public scrutiny.

While very little is known about the NSA’s activities in the entertainment industry we did find indications that they are adopting similar tactics to the CIA and DOD.

Internal NSA emails show that the producers of Enemy of the State were invited on multiple tours of NSA headquarters. When they used a helicopter to film aerial footage of Fort Meade, the NSA did not prevent them from using it in the movie.

According to a 1998 interview with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, they changed the script at the NSA’s request so that the wrongdoings were the actions of one bad apple NSA official, and not the agency in general.

Bruckheimer said:

‘I think the NSA people will be pleased. They certainly won’t come out as bad as they could have. NSA’s not the villain.’

This idea of using cinema to pin the blame for problems on isolated rogue agents or bad apples, thus avoiding any notion of systemic, institutional or criminal responsibility, is right out of the CIA/DOD’s playbook.

NSA headquarters at Fort Meade — Enemy of the State (Source: Medium)

In all, we are looking at a vast, militarised propaganda apparatus operating throughout the screen entertainment industry in the United States.

It is not quite an official censor, since decisions on scripts are made voluntarily by producers, but it represents a major and scarcely acknowledged pressure on the kind of narratives and images we see on the big and small screens.

In societies already eager to use our hard power overseas, the shaping of our popular culture to promote a pro-war mindset must be taken seriously.

***

Tom Secker and Matthew Alford are co-authors of the new book, National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood.

Secker is a British-based writer who covers the security services, Hollywood and the history of terrorism. He runs the SpyCulture blog which can be supported via Patreon.com. His work has been covered by The Mirror, The Express, Salon, TechDirt and elsewhere.

Dr Alford is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Politics, Language and International Studies at the University of Bath. His documentary film based on his research, The Writer with No Hands, was premiered in 2014 at Hot Docs, Toronto and won runner-up at the Ammar Popular Film Festival, Tehran.

Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support INSURGE to keep digging where others fear to tread.

Israel plans to construct the world’s longest underwater gas pipeline together with Cyprus and Greece to carry Eastern Mediterranean gas on to Italy and the EU southern states. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just endorsed the project. It will run smack up against a competing Turkish-Russian gas pipeline, Turk Stream, against a potential Qatari-Iran-Syria pipeline, as well as de facto undercut the Washington attempt to get more US LNG gas to the EU to reduce Russian dependency.

The project, under discussion for several years since Israel discovered major gas reserves in the offshore Leviathan Field, is known as the East Med Pipeline Project. Natural gas will flow from Leviathan via Cyprus, Crete and Greece to reach its terminal at Otranto on the southeast heel of Italy. Plans call for a pipeline of 2,100 kilometers running three kilometers deep under the Mediterranean. Cost is estimated at $7 billion with a five year construction period.

New Fault Lines

The East Med is part of a complex of new geopolitical fault lines across the entire Middle East. Notable is the fact that the Gulf Arab Emirate, UAE, has already invested $100 million in a project the Jerusalem Post calls, “a covert cornerstone underpinning the change in relationship between parts of the Arab world and the Jewish State.” This would seem to be a reference to the 2017 proposal of the US to create an “Arab NATO” with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states, backed by Israeli intelligence input, to counter the influence of Iran in the region. Little is said today about any Arab NATO, but ties between Netanyahu’s Israel and key Sunni Muslim Arab countries remain strong.

One regional player definitely not happy about the proposed Israeli East Med pipeline is Erdogan’s Turkey. When Israel first proposed East Med two years ago, Erdogan quickly turned to Russia to sign a deal to build the Gazprom’s Turk Stream to rival Israel. East Med would tie into gas fields in the Greek EU part of Cyprus. In recent months Erdogan has moved Turkey closer to Iran and especially Qatar, home to key figures in the Muslim Brotherhood, as tensions with Saudi Arabia and Israel increase. The Sunni vs Shi’ite conflict seems to take a back seat to geopolitical power and control of pipelines.

In summer 2017 there was a dramatic split among Gulf Arab countries with Saudi Arabia declaring an embargo against Qatar for its “support of terrorism.” In reality, the move was aimed at cutting growing back-channel talks between Qatar and Iran, both of whom share the world’s largest natural gas field in the Persian Gulf. The Qatari section is called North Field and its LNG is said to be the world’s cheapest to extract, making Qatar in recent years the largest LNG exporter. The adjoining Iran section is called South Pars.

After spending a reported $3 billion financing anti-Assad and anti-Iran terrorist groups in Syria, in a futile try to get a pipeline through Syria to Turkey and on to the huge EU gas market, it seems that the shifty Qataris at some point, after Russia’s decisive entry into the Syria war in late 2015, realized it might gain more by shifting sides and covertly working with Iran and Assad and Erdogan to bring both Qatari and Iran gas to market. That was the real reason for the sharp break between Qatar and the Saudis. Notable is the fact that both Iran and Turkey came to the aid of Qatar when the Saudis tried to embargo them into submission.

Russia’s Turk Stream

Adding to the geopolitical cocktail of competing interests, the Black Sea sections of the Russia-Turkey gas pipeline were completed at the end of 2018 with full operation to begin later in 2019, offering 31.5 billion cubic meters of gas annually, half, some 16 bcm, available for the EU markets. Turk Stream, as does North Stream, both allow Russian gas to the EU independent of politically hostile Ukraine pipeline routes. From the Kiyikoy terminal in Turkey, the Russian gas can go either to EU member Bulgaria or Greece or both.

Non-EU member Serbia has just begun construction of its section of the TurkStream pipeline to carry Russian natural gas to Europe. Serb Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic recently in Moscow said Serbia’s plans for the construction of the gas conduit did not hinge on Bulgaria’s own work. TurkStream will carry Russian gas through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. Brussels is not overjoyed.

Now comes Israel into play, in a closer friendship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, backed by Washington, with financing also from a French company, IGI Poseidon, a subsidiary of Edison, offering another rival option to Qatar and Iran and Turkey as well as to Russia. Turkey is threatening to drill for oil and gas in the Turkish part of Cyprus while Lebanon disputes the offshore claims of Israel’s pipeline to Cyprus. And ExxonMobil just announced a major gas discovery in the offshore Cyprus waters disputed between Turkey and Greek or EU Cyprus.

It doesn’t need a crystal ball to see that future geopolitical energy conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean are being pre-programmed. Watch this space…

*

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Last Wednesday, Senior U.K. Cabinet ministers were hauled before a leak inquiry to determine who was responsible for the unprecedented reporting of highly secret discussions concerning national security.

Gavin Williamson was found to be guilty by an investigation of Theresa May’s instigation. Her letter to Williamson was not unambiguous – it categorically stated he was guilty. There was no margin for misunderstanding. As Williamson heads to the backbenches, May has made a new enemy – one who was a party whip – with all the secrets that role comes with.

But as Politico reported just a few days ago, there’s more to this story than a simple leak – even if it was about national security.

“There is another potentially culpable: former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Through reforms that he institutionalized, Cameron has inadvertently brought the American political culture of leaking highly classified information into British politics. Britain’s NSC is the “holy of holies.” Attended by a small core of politicians and the heads of the intelligence, security and military services, it is the ultimate decision-making forum in Britain’s national security architecture.”

It’s also a little-remarked fact that, unlike many British arrangements, the NSC is a relatively recent innovation, for which Cameron is responsible. Cameron argued in 2010 that Britain needed to formalize its national security decision-making after the freewheeling “sofa government” of Labour’s Tony Blair.

By appointing a national security adviser and instituting the NSC, partially modelled on the U.S. equivalent, Cameron gave structure to what had previously been the province of informal groups largely composed of officials. By instituting a formal entity of which he was the chair (of course), Cameron not only increased the power of the prime minister’s office in the process but brought senior Cabinet ministers into the heart of national security policymaking, giving them access to sensitive intelligence, therefore significantly raising the prospect of leaks.

The National Security Council (NSC) discussed the role of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei in Britain’s future 5G telecoms network and concluded some months ago that the Chinese company should be allowed to be involved. As for the mainstream media, the leak and end of Williamson’s role, that is the end of the story.

However, there is more information about this story that is worthy of note. These dots may or may not be connected, the point being, there’s more to understand about the motivation of Williamson’s demise.

Dot One. Since stepping down as PM after the Brexit result in 2016, David Cameron now has the role of putting together a $1bn investment fund between Britain and China. The idea was to formalise a closer working relationship between the two countries. The fund was formally approved of by both Westminster and Beijing.

Dot two. Back in 2011, former government Chief Information Officer John Suffolk joined China-based IT company Huawei as global head of cybersecurity. Read those words again – former Tory government Chief Information Officer now works for Huawei as head of global cybersecurity. Suffolk was the most senior civil servant to have access to sensitive matters of government, particularly as he was also head of security risk. It was Cameron who gave Suffolk his blessing to join Huawei.

This should not have happened. It is simply too sensitive a role for someone at the heart of government and the civil service to be loyal to a foreign state business with access to the most sensitive information regarding Britain’s cybersecurity. At the time, a Cabinet Office spokesman was keen to add that an “unprecedented number of conditions” were attached to Suffolk’s appointment – as if that means anything in today’s ruthless geo-political cybersecurity environment.

In the meantime, Suffolk has been defending Huawei to the hilt who said about the cybersecurity risk to Britain just two weeks ago that – “There’s no such thing as a zero-risk connected business.”

Dot three. Some months earlier in 2011, Sir Andrew Cahn stepped down after five years in charge of UK Trade & Investment, the government department that promotes exports and attracts foreign direct investment. He is currently a non-executive director of Nomura. Sir Cahn also just happens to be the Chairman of the UK Advisory Board of Huawei – a very ‘comfy’ connection between Huawei and the British government.

Dot four. Despite concerns about Huawei that included America forcing other ‘five-eyes’ nations to abandon plans to allow Huawei access to critical infrastructure projects, the UK decided to forge on ahead with Huawei. However, a recent government report concluded that Huawei’s “basic engineering competence and cybersecurity hygiene was poor, which could be exploited further down the line.” It went further – the HCSEC (Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre) continued to find serious vulnerabilities in the Huawei products examined. Several hundred vulnerabilities and issues were reported to inform their risk and remediation in 2018. Some vulnerabilities identified in previous versions of products continue to exist.”

Dot Five: In 2012, TechRadar magazine spoke to Derek Smith, a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office, who explained that the UK government has no concerns about Huawei at all. Since then Smith has become part of the National Security Council [NSC] Head of Counter-Terrorism, Security &Intelligence Communications. He was David Cameron’s Senior Press Officer on foreign policy and defence and was promoted to his current role by Cameron. Smith also disclosed in that interview – “The long-standing relationship the UK government has with Huawei, and the continued work between the two parties, means the Cabinet Office is confident that there are no security concerns.”

Dot Six: In 2009, America’s spy agency the NSA hacked into the Huawei router network in a programme called ‘Shotgiant’ which was unearthed by the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. The project was designed to spy on the Chinese government and other companies there. In the end, the NSA was itself trying to find out how it “could exploit the equipment to spy on end users.” Britain’s GCHQ was involved. At the time, BT routers in the UK extensively used Huawei products and Britain’s GCHQ set up a special facility for testing Huawei equipment to make sure it wasn’t quietly offering access of some kind to Chinese spies and hackers. Unbelievably, GCHQ was found to have allowed “The Cell” to be staffed by Huawei employees!

Dot Seven: The UK’s recent implementation of the so-called ‘porn-block’ was a contract that was originally given to Huawei, which would have allowed it to control the “Homesafe” filter, which David Cameron praised back in 2013 during his push for tighter controls on adult content. The BBC discovered that UK-based Huawei employees were able to decide which sites were blocked on the service and that even users who opted out of Homesafe would have their internet usage data routed through Huawei’s system. Even if that system is now served by another company, the point is that the government wants access to the information of who is accessing porn.

Dot Eight – In the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks, it was revealed that the British security services GCHQ in Cheltenham had Huawei constractors working on its networks (Image above). The file wording stated – “oddly enough, has Chinese Huawei contractors operating on their networks.”

Dot Nine: A senior Conservative politician has emerged as one of Huawei’s leading advocates in Brussels. Some dodgy dealings have recently emerged including hiding payments made by Beijing for many business class trips and luxury hotel stays along with ‘subsidence’ payments.

Conclusion

The point about these individual bits of information is this. The mix of ex-senior ministers, members of the national security council, counter-terrorism officers, GCHQ, America’s NSA, senior members of Britain’s ‘establishment’ with deep connections into the Huawei top brass, including David Cameron himself who is currently promoting a Beijing/UK trade collaboration and MEP’s being bought off all sounds very ‘muddy waters’ when considering the nature of Theresa May’s motivations for Williamson’s sacking. We must also consider that British spooks have been working very closely with Huawei and their employees.

Williamson has strenuously denied the leak. He has encouraged on multiple occasions a police investigation. He has even sworn on his children’s lives he is innocent – a genuinely suicidal thing to say from a career point of view if caught lying.

You don’t have to like Williamson to defend him. This whole matter which has elements of the government, unaccountable security services, the decidedly murky world of geopolitical cyberwarfare and the current political conflict that Britain finds itself in – smacks of something other than we have been told. Is Williamson simply a convenient ‘patsy’ to demonstrate Theresa May’s fortitude and power at a crucial time or is there something more insidious going on?

If Williamson is guilty of serious breaches of national security, the argument that the law has not been broken is nonsense. That is the sole reason he has been fired. Why has he not been thrown out from politics completely given the seriousness of the crime? Surely, if he was guilty of breaching national security as defence secretary he would be charged or silenced, not put back on the benches. Why has Theresa May repeatedly refused to release a copy of the findings of their investigation to Williamson himself?

There’s more to this than we’ve been told.

And why would anyone believe Theresa May?

*

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The Grayzone has obtained a list of “key outcomes” on Venezuela deleted out of apparent embarrassment by the State Department. It boasts of wrecking the nation’s economy, destabilizing its military, and puppeteering its political opposition.

***

On April 24, six days before self-proclaimed Venezuelan “interim president” Juan Guaido’s attempt to violently overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected government alongside a handful of military defectors, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet that boasted of Washington’s central role in the ongoing coup attempt. After realizing the incriminating nature of its error, the State Department quickly acted to remove the page.

The Grayzone has obtained a full copy of the expunged report. The deleted page puts to bed any claims of Guaido’s independence from Washington, as the State Department emphasizes the fact that he “announced his interim presidency… in January” at the the top of a section dedicated to breaking down “key outcomes” of U.S. efforts with regard to Venezuela.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Kimberly Breier recently took to Twitter to claim that “since he became acting president, Juan Guaido has given tangible results to the people of Venezuela.” Her tweet was accompanied with an infographic detailing alleged accomplishments of the powerless coup administration based on data compiled by the legally defunct National Assembly, the only governing body actually controlled by Guaido.

But the Venezuela fact sheet posted and then deleted days earlier by the State Department told a dramatically different story.

Read the entire expunged fact sheet here [PDF] and at the end of this article.

The State Department’s economic hit list

Entitled “U.S. Actions on Venezuela,” the document boasted that U.S. policy had effectively prevented the Venezuelan government from participating in the international market and has led to the freezing of its overseas assets. It read like a sadistic celebration of Washington’s retribution against the Venezuelan population as a whole, the kind of collective punishment which is illegal according to Article 33 of the Geneva Conventions.

The State Department gloated in the deleted fact sheet that its policy had ensured that the Maduro government “cannot rely on the U.S. financial system” to conduct business, noting “key outcomes” of U.S. actions include the fact that “roughly $3.2 billion of Venezuela’s overseas are frozen.” It went on to boast that “Venezuela’s oil production fell to 736,000 barrels per day in March… substantially reducing” government revenue.

“If I were the State Department I wouldn’t brag about causing a cut in oil production to 763,000 barrels per day — which is a 36 percent drop, in just the two months of February and March this year,” Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director at the Center For Economic and Policy Research, told The Grayzone. “This means even more premature deaths than the tens of thousands that resulted from sanctions last year.”

Weisbrot recently co-authored a bracing report which found that 40,000 Venezuelans died between 2017 and 2018 as a direct result of U.S. sanctions. The State Department patted itself on the back for announcing its preparedness “to provide an additional $20 million in initial humanitarian assistance” to Venezuela, however, the CEPR report concluded that Trump Administration sanctions implemented in August 2017 resulted in “a loss of $6 billion in oil revenue over the ensuing year” alone.

While the State Department praised the opposition for “providing medical and hygiene attention to over 6,000” Venezuelans, those numbers dwarf in comparison to the 300,000 people CEPR “estimated to be at risk because of lack of access to medicines or treatment… [including] 80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension.”

In other words, the supposed “Venezuela Crisis Response Assistance” touted by the State Department is not even a band-aid over the gaping wound that US unilateral coercive measures have inflicted on the country.

In Weisbrot’s view, the “policy” and “outcomes” promoted by the State Department in the disappeared document will merely lead to “more cuts in imports of medicine, food, medical equipment, and inputs necessary to maintain water, health, and sanitation infrastructure.”

Having denied the Venezuelan government the ability to provide for its own population, the U.S. has essentially promised that thousands more deaths will occur.

The State Department did not respond to The Grayzone’s request for a comment on the fact sheet it deleted.

“A list of confessions”

In a recent interview with The Grayzone, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations Samuel Moncada characterized the deleted State Department fact sheet as “a list of confessions.”

“Imagine if any other country says… it’s proud of saying that we are destroying the economy of our neighbor; we are proud that we destroyed the political system of our neighbor; we are proud that they are suffering. They are saying we are waging war against Venezuela,” Moncada emphasized.

The ambassador went on to accuse the U.S. of engaging in “bullying” rather than international diplomacy.

The State Department’s own fact sheet appears to support this accusation, as it asserts “diplomatic pressure resulted in fewer markets for Venezuelan gold.” The document further highlighted U.S. actions that have supposedly led “more than 1,000 members of the military [to recognize] Juan Guaido as interim President” and defect to Colombia, as well as stranding “an estimated 25 crude oil tankers with 12 million barrels” off Venezuela’s coast.

“They [say] it’s our ‘key’ achievements,” Moncada commented. “They are saying that they are causing trouble in our military and inducing a military coup, [which] so far they haven’t achieved, but they are working towards.”

“If any other person says that themselves,” the ambassador concluded, “and you take that confession to court, they would be in prison.”

The State Department’s fact sheet even frames recent decisions by the Organization of American States, Lima Group, Inter-American Development Bank, and European Union to either recognize or support Guaido’s shadow administration as a U.S. achievement, highlighting Washington’s outsized influence within each of these supposedly international governing bodies. The decision to mention the E.U. and Lima Group is particularly noteworthy considering the United States is not a member of either organization.

“They are so far out of any normal parameters of decency, morality, legality, reason, that really they are dangerous,” Moncada said of the Trump administration. “They are a real threat to international peace, and they are a real threat to my people.”

US Department of State Deleted Venezuela Hit List by Max Blumenthal on Scribd

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Anya Parampil is a Washington, DC based journalist. She previously hosted a daily progressive afternoon news program called In Question on RT America. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on the ground reports from the Korean peninsula and Palestine.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

Eight years on from Nato’s war in Libya in 2011, as the country enters a new phase in its conflict, I have taken stock of the number of countries to which terrorism has spread as a direct product of that war.

The number is at least 14. The legacy of David Cameron’s, Nicolas Sarkozy’s and Barack Obama’s overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has been gruesomely felt by Europeans and Africans.

Yet holding these leaders accountable for their decision to go to war is as distant as ever.

Ungoverned space

The 2011 conflict, in which Nato worked alongside Islamist forces on the ground to remove Gaddafi, produced an ungoverned space in Libya and a country awash with weapons, ideal for terrorist groups to thrive.

But it was Syria that suffered first.

After civil war broke out there in early 2011, at the same time as in Libya, the latter became a facilitation and training hub for around 3,000 fighters on their way to Syria, many of whom joined al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State-affiliated Katibat al-Battar al-Libi (KBL), which was founded by militants from Libya.

In Libya itself, a rebranding of existing al-Qaeda-linked groups in the north-eastern area of Derna produced Islamic State’s first official branch in the country in mid-2014, incorporating members of the KBL.

During 2015, IS Libya conducted car bombings and beheadings and established territorial control and governance over parts of Derna and Benghazi in the east and Sabratha in the west. It also became the sole governing body in the north-central city of Sirte, with as many as 5,000 fighters occupying the city.

By late 2016, IS in Libya was forced out of these areas, largely due to US air strikes, but withdrew to the desert areas south of Sirte, continuing low-level attacks.

In the last two years, the group has re-emerged as a formidable insurgent force and is again waging high-profile attacks on state institutions and conducting regular hit-and-run operations in the southwestern desert.

Last September, UN Special Representative to Libya Ghassan Salame told the UN Security Council that the IS “presence and operations in Libya are only spreading”.

Terror in Europe

After the fall of Gaddafi, IS Libya established training camps near Sabratha which are linked to a series of terrorist attacks and plots.

“Most of the blood spilled in Europe in the more spectacular attacks, using guns and bombs, really all began at the time when Katibat al-Battar went back to Libya,” Cameron Colquhoun, a former counterterrorism analyst for Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, told The New York Times.

“That is where the threat trajectory to Europe began – when these men returned to Libya and had breathing space.”

Salman Abedi, who blew up 22 people at a pop concert in Manchester in 2017, met with members of the Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, a faction of IS, several times in Sabratha, where he was probably trained.

Other members of the KBL were Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader of the 2015 Paris attacks on the Bataclan nightclub and sports stadium, which killed 130 people, and the militants involved in the Verviers plot to attack Belgium in 2015.

The perpetrator of the 2016 Berlin truck attack, which left 12 people dead, also had contacts with Libyans linked to IS.

So too in Italy, where terrorist activity has been linked to IS Libya, with several individuals based in Italy involved in the attack on the Bardo museum in Tunis in 2015, which killed 22 people.

Libya’s neighbours

Tunisia suffered its deadliest terrorist attack in 2015 when a 23-year-old Tunisian armed with a machine gun mowed down 38 tourists, mainly Britons, at a beach hotel in the resort of Port El Kantaoui.

The perpetrator was reportedly an adherent of IS and, like Salman Abedi, had been trained in the camp complex at Sabratha from where the attack was staged.

Libya’s eastern neighbour, Egypt, has also been struck by terrorism emanating from the country. IS officials in Libya have been linked to, and may have directed, the activities of Wilayat Sinai, the terrorist group formerly known as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which has carried out several deadly attacks in Egypt.

After the fall of Gaddafi, the Western Desert became a corridor for the smuggling of weapons and operatives on their way to the Sinai.

Egypt conducted air strikes against militant camps in Libya in 2015, 2016 and again in 2017, the latter following the killing of 29 Coptic Christians near Cairo.

Into the Sahel

But Libya has also become a hub for jihadist networks stretching south into the Sahel. Libya’s 2011 uprising opened a flow of weapons into northern Mali, which helped revive an ethno-tribal conflict that had been brewing since the 1960s.

By 2012, local allies of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had taken control of day-to-day governance in the northern Mali towns of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.

After France intervened in Mali, the ongoing lack of governance in Libya precipitated several groups to relocate their operational centres to Libya, including both AQIM and its offshoot, Al-Mourabitoun, from where these groups could acquire weapons more easily.

With Libya as its rear base, Al-Mourabitoun under its leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar was behind the attack on the Amenas hydrocarbon complex in eastern Algeria in January 2013, which left 40 foreign workers dead; the gun attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali in November 2015, which killed 22 people; and for the attack on Hotel Splendid in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which killed 20 people in January 2016.

Al-Mourabitoun has also attacked a military academy and French-owned uranium mine in Niger.

Disastrous foreign policy

The fall-out from Libya spreads even wider, however. By 2016, US officials reported signs that Nigeria’s Boko Haram jihadists, responsible for numerous gruesome attacks and kidnappings, were sending fighters to join IS in Libya, and that there was increased cooperation between the two groups.

The International Crisis Group notes that it was the arrival of weapons and expertise from Libya and the Sahel that enabled Boko Haram to fashion the insurgency that plagues north-western Nigeria today.

There have even been claims that Boko Haram answers to IS commanders in Libya.

In addition to these 14 countries, fighters from several other states have joined IS militants in Libya in recent years. Indeed, it is estimated that almost 80 percent of IS membership in Libya is non-Libyan, including from countries such as Kenya, Chad, Senegal and Sudan.

These foreign fighters are potentially available to return to their own countries after receiving training.

The true extent of the fall-out from the Libya war is remarkable: it has spurred terrorism in Europe, Syria, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Islamic State, although now nearly defeated in Syria and Iraq, is far from dead.

Indeed, while Western leaders seek to defeat terrorism militarily in some places, their disastrous foreign policy choices have stimulated it in others.

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Mark Curtis is a historian and analyst of UK foreign policy and international development and the author of six books, the latest being an updated edition of Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.

Nature is decreasing worldwide at an alarming rate – it is time to look to indigenous peoples to help find the solution. This was one of the key conclusions reached in the first global assessment of nature and biodiversity, released today (6 May) in Paris.

“We are at a historical crossroads for humanity,” said Cristiana Paşca Palmer, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Biodiversity Convention, speaking in Paris this week at the closing of the IPBES 7 plenary session.

“We are counting on everyone everywhere and especially indigenous peoples & local communities who are closest to the land, whose survival is most at risk, and whose traditional knowledge and practices can show us all the way forward,” she said.

The report shows that the situation of global nature looks dire, but there are glimmers of hope that could lead to a reverse in this trend. Scientists, governments and civil society agree – the answer lies in knowledge, both in ‘traditional’ science and also with knowledge generated by indigenous peoples and local communities, who have safeguarded nature for millennia.

“The combination of scientific evidence and indigenous and local knowledge makes this report much richer,” said Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of IPBES.

In the largest and most comprehensive attempt to assess the state of our living planet, governments, scientists, civil society and indigenous peoples and local communities came together at IPBES7 and agreed that we are exploiting nature faster than it can renew itself.

“This report shows that our global home is under threat, and nature is in decline,” said Aroha Te Pareake Mead, who attended IPBES 7 as a member of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IIFBES).

“This decline is driven by a predominant economic and political system that favours increasing consumption and growth over living in harmony with nature,” she added.

In New Zealand, Maori use the term ‘kaitiaki’ to describe their intergenerational guardianship responsibilities to their ancestral lands, environment, and rich cultural heritage.

“If we can adopt a global political model that focuses on the concept of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) we might still have a chance to save our planet and all of its biodiversity” said Te Pareake Mead.

Traditional knowledge is key in understanding nature.

More than a quarter of the global land area is traditionally owned, managed, used or occupied by indigenous peoples, and some of the world’s most biodiverse areas are found within lands that have been owned and managed by indigenous peoples and local communities for centuries, and in some cases millennia.

Image on the right: Lakpa Nuri Sherpa of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) delivers the indigenous caucus’ closing intervention at IPBES7

The global assessment reports that nature managed by indigenous peoples and local communities is under increasing pressure…but declining less rapidly than in other areas of the world. Increasingly, these ‘islands’ of great natural diversity found on indigenous lands are increasingly being surrounded by vast tracts of the earth in natural decline.

One reason for this difference in diversity could be down to the value systems that societies place on nature.

“Indigenous peoples don’t see nature as separate from people,” said Lakpa Nuri Sherpa of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) and representing IIFBES.

“We interact with nature every day, and we think carefully how we manage our resources – we have spiritual and sacred relationships with our natural resources, which means we must manage our lands in a sustainable way so we can pass it on to the next generation.

“For this reason, we must continue to fight for the rights to our lands, territories and resources – if we don’t have rights, if we are attacked, we cannot protect our forests – they take the resources from our lands, but we care for these lands. Without security for our collective land rights, the land can be exploited, nature loses out, and there’s nothing to pass on to the next generation,” he said.

“The Indigenous caucus (IIFBES) appreciates greatly the evidence generated by the global assessment highlighting the important contributions of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and nature’s gifts,” said Lakpa.

Action is now required. The Global Assessment states ‘The positive contributions of indigenous peoples and local communities to sustainability can be facilitated through national recognition of land tenure, access and resource rights in accordance with national legislation, the application of free, prior and informed consent, and improved collaboration, fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use, and co-management arrangements with local communities.’

“We look forward to working with all governments, scientists, citizens and all stakeholders involved in this quest for a solution over the coming years,” said Lakpa.

“Indigenous understanding encompasses practice, knowledge, spirituality and deep relationships with ancestral lands and sacred places, and it is good to see that this has now been recognised and included in this global assessment,” he said.

Representatives of the indigenous caucus and friends with IPBES Chair Sir Robert Watson 

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Featured image: Cristiana Paşca Palmer, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Biodiversity Convention, speaking in Paris this week at the closing of the IPBES 7 plenary session.

Avremmo raggiunto questo momento cruciale in cui l’iperpotenza declinante comincia a dubitare di se stessa? La stampa nordamericana ha appena raccontato quello che l’ex-presidente Jimmy Carter ha detto a Donald Trump durante l’ultimo incontro. L’inquilino della Casa Bianca aveva invitato il predecessore a parlargli della Cina, e Jimmy Carter (il 15 aprile scorso-ndr.) ha pubblicamente riferito del discorso durante una riunione battista in Georgia. Una vera pepita.

“Temi che la Cina va avanti e sono d’accordo con te. Ma sai perché la Cina ci supera? Normalizzai le relazioni diplomatiche con Pechino nel 1979. Da quella data, sai quante volte la Cina è stata in guerra con qualcuno? Neanche una. Noi siamo costantemente in guerra. Gli Stati Uniti sono la nazione più guerriera nella storia del mondo perché vogliono imporre i loro valori ad altri Paesi. La Cina, da parte sua, investe in progetti come le ferrovie ad alta velocità invece di spendere per le spese militari. Quanti chilometri di ferrovia ad alta velocità abbiamo in questo Paese? (1) Abbiamo sprecato 3 trilioni di dollari in spese militari. La Cina non ha sprecato un centesimo per la guerra, ed è per questo che ci supera in quasi tutto. E se avessimo preso 3 trilioni per le infrastrutture statunitensi, avremmo una ferrovia ad alta velocità. Avremmo ponti che non collassano. Avremmo strade che vengono mantenute correttamente. Il nostro sistema d’istruzione sarebbe buono come quello della Corea del Sud o di Hong Kong”. (Jimmy Carter, ex presidente USA 1977-1981)

Che tale senso comune non abbia mai toccato la mente di un capo nordamericano, lo dice la natura del potere in questo Paese. È senza dubbio difficile, per uno Stato che rappresenta il 45% della spesa militare mondiale ed ha 725 basi militari all’estero, dove i produttori di armi controllano lo Stato profondo e decidono una politica estera responsabile di 20 milioni di morti dal 1945, per mettere in discussione il proprio rapporto patologico con la violenza armata.

” La guerra in Vietnam”, disse Martin Luther King, “è sintomo di una malattia dello spirito nordamericano i cui pilastri sono razzismo, materialismo e militarismo”. Ma questa domanda riguarda principalmente il futuro. Per colpa dei loro capi, gli Stati Uniti sono condannati a conoscere il destino degli imperi che affondarono per le loro eccessive ambizioni, letteralmente asfissiati dal peso esorbitante della spesa militare? Alla fine del suo mandato, nel 1959, il presidente Eisenhower denunciò con accenti profetici il complesso militare-industriale che gravava pesantemente sulla società nordamericana. Non più a Donald Trump o Barack Obama, non gli importa del destino delle persone affamate, invase o bombardate dallo zio Sam in nome della democrazia e dei diritti umani. Ma come oggi Jimmy Carter probabilmente percepisce, la corsa agli armamenti sarà la causa principale del declino dell’impero.

Perché i neoconservatori e altri “Dottor Stranamore” del Pentagono per diversi decenni non hanno solo hanno usurato la democrazia liberale e massacrato Vietnam, Laos, Cambogia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libia e Siria, per non parlare degli omicidi orchestrati nell’ombra dalla CIA e suoi rami, dallo sterminio della sinistra indonesiana (500.000 morti) alle tragedie degli squadroni della morte guatemaltechi (200.000 morti) attraverso bagni di sangue eseguiti a nome dell’impero dalla jihad planetaria lobotomizzata. Gli strateghi del contenimento del comunismo a colpi di napalm, e poi gli apprendisti stregoni del caos costruttivo che importano terrore, infatti, non solo hanno infiammato il pianeta. I burattini dello Stato profondo nordamericano, guerrafondai stabilitisi al Congresso, Casa Bianca e think tank neo-con che facevano precipitare la società statunitense nella depressione interiore che maschera a malapena l’uso frenetico della zecca. Perché se il belluismo degli Stati Uniti è l’espressione del loro declino, ne è anche la causa. Ne è l’espressione, quando di cerca di fermare questo declino, brutalità dell’interventismo militare, sabotaggio economico ed operazioni sotto falsa bandiera sono il segno distintivo della politica estera statunitense. Ne è la causa, quando la folle inflazione delle spese militari sacrifica lo sviluppo di un Paese dove i ricchi sono più ricchi e i poveri sempre di più.

Mentre la Cina investe in infrastrutture civili, gli Stati Uniti le abbandonano a vantaggio delle industrie delle armi. Washington sbraita, ma lascia che il Paese si disintegri all’interno. Il PIL pro capite è enorme, ma il 20% della popolazione vive in povertà. Le prigioni sono piene: i detenuti statunitensi sono il 25% dei prigionieri nel pianeta. Il 40% della popolazione è colpita dall’obesità. L’aspettativa di vita degli americani (79,6 anni) è superata da quella dei cubani (80 anni). Come può un piccolo Paese socialista, soggetto a embargo, fare meglio di una gigantesca potenza capitalista coronato dall’egemonia planetaria? Si deve credere che negli Stati Uniti la salute della plebe non sia la principale preoccupazione delle élite.

Abile concorrente, Donald Trump vinse le elezioni del 2016 promettendo di ripristinare la grandezza degli Stati Uniti e impegnandosi a ripristinare i posti di lavoro persi a causa della globalizzazione sfrenata. Ma i risultati ottenuti, in assenza di riforme strutturali, infliggono una doccia fredda all’ardore incantatore. Il deficit commerciale col resto del mondo è esploso nel 2018, battendo un record storico (891 miliardi di dollari) che frantuma quello del 2017 (795 miliardi). Donald Trump ha completamente fallito nel cambiare la situazione, e i primi due anni della sua amministrazione sono i peggiori nella storia economica degli Stati Uniti. In tale deficit globale, lo squilibrio degli scambi con la Cina grava pesantemente, raggiungendo nel 2018 un record storico (419 miliardi) che supera il record disastroso del 2017 (375 miliardi). La guerra commerciale di Donald Trump ha particolarmente aggravato il deficit commerciale degli Stati Uniti. Mentre le importazioni di merci cinesi verso gli Stati Uniti hanno continuato a crescere (+ 7%), la Cina ha ridotto le importazioni dagli Stati Uniti. Donald Trump voleva usare i dazi per riequilibrare il bilancio degli Stati Uniti. Non era illegittimo, ma irrealistico per un Paese che lega il suo destino a quello della globalizzazione dettato dalle multinazionali degli Stati Uniti. Se aggiungiamo che il deficit commerciale con Europa, Messico, Canada e Russia è anche peggiorato, si misurano le difficoltà che affliggono l’iperpotenza in declino. Ma non è tutto. Oltre al deficit commerciale, il deficit fiscale federale si è ampliato (779 miliardi, contro 666 miliardi nel 2017). È vero che la spesa militare è impressionante. Il bilancio del Pentagono per il 2019 è il più alto nella storia degli Stati Uniti: 686 miliardi di dollari. Lo stesso anno, la Cina spende 175 miliardi, con una popolazione quattro volte superiore. Non sorprende che il debito federale abbia battuto il nuovo record di 22175 miliardi. Il debito privato, quello delle aziende e dei privati, dà le vertigini (73.000 miliardi).

Certo, gli Stati Uniti beneficiano di una situazione eccezionale. Il dollaro è ancora la valuta di riferimento nel commercio internazionale e nelle riserve delle banche centrali. Ma questo privilegio non è eterno. Cina e Russia sostituiscono le riserve in dollari con lingotti d’oro e una quota crescente degli scambi è ora denominata in yuan. Gli Stati Uniti vivono a credito a spese del resto del mondo, ma per quanto? Secondo l’ultimo studio della società di revisione PwC (“Il mondo nel 2050: come cambierà l’economia globale nei prossimi 30 anni”), i “Paesi emergenti” (Cina, India, Brasile, Indonesia, Messico, Russia, Turchia) potrebbe rappresentare il 50% del PIL globale nel 2050, mentre la quota dei Paesi G7 (Stati Uniti, Canada, Regno Unito, Francia, Germania, Italia, Giappone) scenderebbe al 20%. La caduta dell’aquila è vicina.

Bruno Guigue

Articolo originale in francese :

La chute de l’aigle est proche, 23 aprile 2019

Traduzione italiana : amicuba.altervista.org

(1) L’unico servizio AV (secondo la definizione statunitense) oggi esistente è gestito da Amtrak, con l’Acela Express tra Boston e Washington, D.C. per un totale di 724 km. (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_velocit%C3%A0_ferroviaria#Stati_Uniti_d’America)

To protect its culture Québec has decided veiled women shouldn’t be allowed to teach. But the crucifix adorning the National Assembly can stay, as well as a large cross atop the highest point in Montréal, not to mention the streets named after Catholic saints. The government has decided laïcité (secularism) should be pursued on the backs of the most marginalized immigrants.

Underlying support for this cultural chauvinism is a blindness to power relations that has long been part of Québec’s self-image and is especially evident in international affairs.

The week the governing party, Coalition Avenir Québec, announced it would prohibit public workers in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols, Québecer Catherine Cano was confirmed in the No. 2 position at la Francophonie. After former Governor General Michaëlle Jean failed to win a second term as leader of L’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), Ottawa/Québec City secured a return to the organization’s previous leadership structure. Between 2006-15 Québec diplomat Clément Duhaime was No. 2 at the Paris based OIF.

Second biggest contributor to la Francophonie, Ottawa gives $40 million annually to OIF and the other institutions of la Francophonie. A member in its own right, Québec says it provides “over 10 million dollars per year … to international solidarity activities in developing countries that are members of La Francophonie.” Québec’s international affairs ministry is named Le Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie.

La Francophonie seems to stir linguistic chauvinism within Québec nationalist circles. During the 2016 OIF Summit in Madagascar Le Devoir bemoaned the decline of la langue de Molière in the former French colony. Titled “Quel avenir pour le français?: À Madagascar, la langue de Molière s’étiole”, the front page story cited an individual calling the post-independence focus on the country’s majoritarian, Indigenous language “nothing less than a ‘cultural genocide.’” According to the head of OIF’s Observatoire de la langue française, Alexandre Wolff, it was “urgent to show French can be useful” in the island nation. The progressive nationalist paper’s hostility to Malagasy wasn’t even presented as a battle with the dominant colonial language. The story noted that “English is practically absent” there.

OIF reinforces cultural inequities in former French and Belgian colonies. While OIF is largely designed to strengthen the French language, is there any place aside from Québec where French has been the language of the oppressed?

Even more than the English, French imperialists used language as a tool of colonial control. Schooling in French African colonies, for instance, was almost entirely in French, which stunted the written development of local languages as well as the rise of a common national or regional language. It also oriented the intellectual milieu towards the colonial metropole.

At the same time newly independent African countries attempted to promote indigenous languages, Ottawa channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to link Québec with “French” countries. Efforts to strengthen the ‘common’ linguistic heritage between Québec and Algeria stunted its post-independence moves towards strengthening Arabic. Though less stark, the same dynamic played out in the Congo with Lingala, in the Central African Republic with Sango and in Senegal with Wolof. In Haiti Québec’s large (linguistically inspired) presence has reinforced the stark French-Creole linguistic/class divide. While basically everyone speaks Haitian Creole, less than 10 per cent of Haitians speak French fluently. French is the language of Haiti’s elite and language has served as a mechanism through which they maintain their privilege. (In terms of Haitians adopting a more useful common second-language, Spanish would facilitate ties with the eastern half of the island while English would enable greater relations with other parts of the Caribbean.)

Ottawa greatly expanded its aid to “Francophone” nations to weaken the sovereignty movement in the mid-1960s. In an influential 1962 internal memo, long time External Affairs official Marcel Cadieux argued that channeling foreign aid to “French” Africa was the most politically expedient means of demonstrating concern for Quebecker’s nationalist aspirations. Canadian aid to former French colonies skyrocketed through the late 1960s and Canada provided as much as a third of the budget for the institutions of OIF.

Ottawa/Québec’s interest in former French colonies isn’t only about culture of course. Namesake of the 1965 Doctrine that made projecting French the objective of Québec’s international relations, Paul Gérin-Lajoie built up Québec-based companies as head of the Canadian International Development Agency in the 1970s. SNC Lavalin was hired to manage CIDA offices in Francophone African countries where Canada had no diplomatic representation. Six years after Algeria won its independence from France, SNC’s vice president of development Jack Hahn described their plan to enter Algeria: “They might be interested in North American technology offered in French.”

In February Ministre des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie du Québec Nadine Girault spoke to the SNC Lavalin, Bombardier, Rio-Tinto, etc. sponsored Conseil des relations internationales de Montréal on “Le Québec à la conquête des marchés étrangers: tirer profit de 50 ans d’affirmation à l’international” (Québec seeks to conquer foreign markets: profiting from 50 years of international affirmation). Girault focused on employing Québec’s substantial linguistically inspired presence in Africa and elsewhere to benefit corporations, noting “we will take advantage of 50 years of affirmation to conquer foreign markets.”

While framed as a defence against English domination in North America, promoting French in Haiti, Senegal or Algeria can appear progressive only if you ignore imperialism and international power relations. But many Québecers have been willing to do just that.

Like Canadian cultural chauvinists who never let the truth stop them from claiming their country is a benevolent international force, nationalism has blinded many Québecers to their oppression abroad and at home. Protecting Québec culture by targeting the most marginalized immigrants is a similar type of cultural chauvinism.

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This article was first crossposted in July 2018.

Since the overwhelmingly nonviolent demonstrations in Gaza began on March 30, 2018, the international community has strongly condemned Israel’s armed attacks.A UN General Assembly resolution “deplore[d] the use of any excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force by the Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians,” while the UN Human Rights Council denounced Israel’s “disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force.” After Israeli snipers killed Razan al-Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old unarmed Palestinian paramedic, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process warned Israel that it “needs to calibrate its use of force.” In a devastating report, Human Rights Watch concluded that “Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip … against demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes.”

Welcome as these condemnations are, the question nonetheless remains whether they go far enough. Simply put, does Israel have the right to use any force under any circumstances against the people of Gaza?

The current legal debate has focused on a pair of interrelated questions:

• Did Israeli snipers resort to “excessive” or “disproportionate” force against demonstrators (as critics allege), or was the amount of force they deployed necessary to prevent protesters from breaching the perimeter fence (as Israel alleges)?
• Is Israel’s conduct toward the Gaza protests governed by human rights law (as critics allege) or by international humanitarian law (as Israel alleges)? International humanitarian law applies in situations of armed conflict, whereas human rights law regulates domestic law enforcement. The difference matters, as human rights law imposes more stringent constraints on the use of force.

All parties to both these controversies proceed from a common premise: that Israel has the right to use force in order to prevent Gazans from breaching the fence. The dispute comes down to: how much? Critics who allege “disproportionate” or “excessive” force tacitly legitimize Israel’s use of “proportionate” or “moderate” force, while those who insist upon the applicability of human rights law acknowledge that Israel’s resort to force is legitimate if demonstrators pose an “imminent threat” to a sniper’s life.

This presumption holds even at the most critical pole of the debate on Gaza. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselemcondemned as “illegal” Israel’s resort to lethal force against unarmed persons “approaching the fence, damaging it, or attempting to cross it.” But it conceded that “[o]bviously, the military is allowed to prevent such actions, and even to detain individuals attempting to carry them out.” A senior Human Rights Watch official argued that Israel’s use of live ammunition in Gaza was “unlawful.” But she suggested that “nonlethal means, such as tear gas, skunk water, and rubber-coated steel pellets” would have passed legal muster. The International Committee of the Red Cross cautioned Israel that “lethal force only be used as a last resort and when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.” Even the major Palestinian human rights organizations characterized Israel’s use of force as “excessive,” “indiscriminate,” and “disproportionate” rather than inherently illegal.

But the fact is, Israel cannot claim a right to use any force in Gaza — whether moderate or excessive, proportionate or disproportionate; whether protesters are unarmed or armed, don’t or do pose an imminent threat to life. If it appears otherwise, that’s because the current debate ignores critical caveats in international law and abstracts from the specific situation in Gaza.

What International Law Says

To justify its use of force in Gaza, Israel claims the right to prevent alien intrusion into its sovereign territory. An Israeli legal commentator observesthat this professed concern for the sanctity of the Gaza “border” is opportunistically selective. Israel invades Gaza at will; only when Palestinians seek to cross in the other direction does the fence become sacrosanct. Setting this hypocrisy aside, Israel’s purported right to self-defense still lacks any legal basis. On the contrary, Israel’s resort to force contravenes international law.

The Palestinian people in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza are struggling to achieve their internationally validated “right to self-determination” (International Court of Justice). As preeminent legal scholar James Crawford notes, international law prohibits the use of military force “by an administering power to suppress widespread popular insurrection in a self-determination unit,” whereas “the use of force by a non-State entity in exercise of a right of self-determination is legally neutral, that is, not regulated by international law at all.”

Demonstrators in Gaza have chosen to use nonviolence in pursuit of their internationally validated rights — a tactic that, of course, international law also does not prohibit. But this prudential decision is not a legal requirement. Even if Gazans opted to use weapons against Israeli snipers who obstruct their right to self-determination, Israel’s resort to military force would still be legally debarred.

The allocation of rights and obligations in standard Western discourse — which effectively accords Israel the right to use violent force in self-defense against Gazans, even as it obliges the people of Gaza to wage nonviolently their self-determination struggle — upends international law.

It might be objected that inasmuch as Israel is a belligerent occupier in Gaza, it has the right, under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, to use force in order to maintain public order. But this objection falls on three counts.

First, the Fourth Geneva Convention obliges a belligerent occupier to provide for and ensure the welfare of the occupied population. Indeed, “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” is the convention’s raison d’etre. Israel, however, has subjected Gaza’s civilian population to a protracted siege that amounts to illegal “collective punishment,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that has rendered Gaza physically “unlivable,” according to the UN. The Fourth Geneva Convention does not sustain Israel’s right to preserve order in Gaza even as it flagrantly breaches its complementary obligation to guard the welfare of Gaza’s civilian population. In fact, the disorder Israel claims the right to suppress directly springs from the criminal blockade it has imposed.

Second, even if Israel qualified as a belligerent occupier in Gaza, the right of a people to self-determination is a peremptory norm (jus cogens) of international law from which no derogation is permissible. If, as in this case, the law of belligerent occupation overlaps with the right to self-determination, then Gaza’s right to self-determination trumps Israel’s right to maintain order; and if, as in this case, the struggle for self-determination is being waged nonviolently, then Israel’s purported right to use armed force to maintain order is manifestly ill-founded.

Third, in point of fact, Israel’s occupation of Gaza has by now become illegal, and it has consequently forfeited its rights as a belligerent occupier. The International Court of Justice ruled in 1971 that since South Africa had refused to conduct good-faith negotiations to end its occupation of Namibia, that occupation had become illegal. Israel’s refusal over a full half-century to conduct good-faith negotiations on the basis of international law to withdraw from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza has likewise delegitimized its occupation.

There is also another critical legal dimension that has been ignored. It is a fundamental principle of international law that no state may resort to forceful measures unless “peaceful means” have been exhausted (UN Charter, Article 2). This principle is as sacred to the rule of law as the analogous Hippocratic oath, primum non nocere (first, do no harm), is to medicine. The impetus behind the protests at Gaza’s perimeter fence is Israel’s illegal siege, and their objective is to end it. Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceded: “They’re suffocating economically, and therefore, they decided to crash into the fence.”

If Israel wants to protect its border, it need not resort to either lethal or nonlethal coercion. It merely has to lift the siege. US president Donald Trump’s A-Team on Middle East diplomacy — son-in-law Jared Kushner, former bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, former Trump Organization legal advisor Jason Greenblatt, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — allege, on the contrary, that it is Hamas that “is holding the Palestinians of Gaza captive” and bears “primary responsibility … in perpetuating the suffering of the people of Gaza.” But if they’ve tumbled down Alice’s rabbit hole, it’s not incumbent on the rest of us to follow them. “Israel, as the occupying power,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs authoritatively observed, “must lift the blockade, which contravenes … the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting collective penalties and prevents the realization of a broad range of human rights.”

Hamas has also consistently offered Israel a long-term truce(hudna) in exchange for an end to the siege, and it reiterated this proposal throughout the current demonstrations. On May 7, a week before Israel shot dead more than sixty protesters in Gaza, Ha’aretz reported that “Hamas leaders” had “conveyed to Israel messages indicating their willingness to negotiate a long term cease-fire” in exchange for, among other things, “easing … the siege.” “Hamas keeps relaying messages to the defense establishment that it’s still interested in a ‘hudna,’” a veteran Israeli military correspondent revealed several days later. “Hamas itself has conveyed to Israel in the past year different versions of a restricted or wider hudna, which include not only Gaza but the West Bank as well.”

The Israeli military took these cease-fire offers seriously: “Hamas, according to the intelligence services, is willing to reach an agreement.” Indeed, a senior army officer urged that “now is the time to reach an agreement with Hamas” in order to “prevent further rounds of fighting.” But Israel’s government was uninterested: Hamas’s “demands and conditions have never been discussed, as Israel refuses to talk to Hamas.” Israel’s rejection of this preliminary peaceful step puts it in double breach of international law: the imposition of an illegal blockade and the unlawful resort to armed force when peaceful means have not been exhausted.

A Right to Poison Children?

Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – with grave impacts on people around the world, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), launched today in Paris.

The report, authored by 455 experts and reviewing over 15,000 scientific studies, assesses the global changes to the world’s biodiversity over the past five decades, providing a comprehensive picture of our relationship with, and impact on, nature.

The IPBES global biodiversity assessment can be seen as the the biodiversity equivalent of the climate change 1.5C report that was launched by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in November last year.

Web of life

“The loss of species, ecosystems and genetic diversity is already a global and generational threat to human well-being. Protecting the invaluable contributions of nature to people will be the defining challenge of decades to come,” says Sir Robert Watson, who chairs IPBES.

Of  the estimated 8 million animal and plant species on the planet, up to a million are threatened with extinction, many within a timespan of just decades, the report finds.

Around 10 percent of insect species are threatened with extinction, more than 30 percent of corals, sharks and marine mammals and more than 40 percent of amphibians. The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20 percent since 1900.

The current rate of global species extinction is tens to hundreds times faster than the average over the last 10 million years. At least 680 vertebrate species have been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than nine percent of all domesticated breeds of mammals we rely on for food and agriculture have gone extinct, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened.

“This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world,” says Professor Josef Settele, who co-chaired the report. “The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed.”

Human drivers

There are many causes for the increasing loss of the world’s biodiversity, but five stand out in terms of their relative impact on the living world.

These culprits are: changes in land and sea use; direct exploitation of organisms; climate change; pollution and invasive alien species. All these drivers interact with one another, often affecting species and ecosystems simultaneously.

1. Changes in land and sea use, driven by agricultural expansion and a steep rise in resource use, are the largest drivers of global biodiversity decline.

Three-quarters of the land-based environment has now been significantly altered by human actions, the report finds. A huge chunk of this, more than a third of the world’s land surface, is now devoted to crop or livestock production. Agriculture now also uses nearly 75% of the world’s freshwater resources.

We are also pushing our oceans to the brink. A third of marine fish stocks is being harvested at unsustainable levels; over half is being fished at the maximum allowed rate, and just 7% is harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.

The industrialisation of agriculture and overexploitation of land has caused land degradation and reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface. This has placed up to £425 billion (US$ 577 billion) in annual global crops at risk of losing the necessary pollinators, threatening global food security.

2. Direct exploitation of organisms, mainly via harvesting, logging, hunting and fishing has also been a large direct driver of the decline in biodiversity. Today, humans extract more from the Earth and produce more waste than ever before. The increasing human population and growth in per capita gross domestic product were identified as driving this pressure, with ever-more distant consumers shifting the environmental burden of consumption and production across regions.

3. Climate change is already impacting nature from the level of ecosystems to that of genetics, with impacts expected to increase over the coming decades, and in some cases surpassing the impact of other drivers of biodiversity loss.

The distributions of almost half of land-based flightless mammals, for example, and almost a quarter of threatened birds, may already have been negatively affected by climate change.

An estimated 5% of species face increased extinction risks in 2°C warmer world, rising to 16% of species at 4.3°C of warming. Even for global warming of 1.5 to 2°C, the geographical ranges in which terrestrial species can thrive will have shrunk profoundly for almost all species.

4. Environmental pollution, in all its forms, is another strong driver of biodiversity loss. Plastic pollution, for example, has increased tenfold since 1980.

An estimated 300 to 400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, totalling more than 245,000 km2, a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.

5. Invasive species, moved across the globe via the air- and seaborne transportation of goods and people, have increasingly outcompeted and replaced native species, thereby upending local ecosystems. In certain countries, the number of invasive alien species has risen by about 70% since 1970.

On a broader scale, the results of this far-reaching biodiversity loss are undermining progress towards achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, having negative effects on the development goals related to poverty, hunger, health, water, cities, climate, oceans and land.

Loss of biodiversity is therefore not just an environmental issue, but also a developmental, economic, security, social and moral issue as well.

Transformative change

However bleak a picture the global biodiversity assessment paints, it also provides a wakeup call to the world’s governments, all of which have formally agreed to the report’s Summary for Policymakers, which was published by IPBES in Paris on May 6th.

In an effort to help decision makers deal with the threat of biodiversity decline, the authors of the report also examined six policy scenarios, very different future options of policy decisions, including a ‘Business as Usual’ scenario and a ‘Global Sustainability’ path, projecting the likely impacts on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people of these pathways by 2050.

They concluded that, except in scenarios that include transformative change, the negative trends in nature, ecosystem functions and in many of nature’s contributions to people will continue long beyond 2050.

Examples of this necessary transformative change include adopting a cross-sectoral approach to conservation, one that integrates biodiversity considerations in global decision-making on any sector or challenge; as well as landscape planning; agricultural diversification; and rethinking the global financial and economic systems, away from growth and towards a sustainable economy.

Solutions

A number of conservation success stories during the past decade, although still few and to a limited scale, also offer hope, showing that with prompt and appropriate actions it is still possible to reduce human-induced extinction rates.

“Policies, efforts and actions – at every level – will only succeed, however, when based on the best knowledge and evidence. This is what the IPBES Global Assessment provides,” says Sir Robert Watson.

“This essential report reminds each of us of the obvious truth: the present generations have the responsibility to bequeath to future generations a planet that is not irreversibly damaged by human activity,” concluded Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO.

“Our local, indigenous and scientific knowledge are proving that we have solutions and so no more excuses: we must live on earth differently.”

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Arthur Wyns is a biologist and science journalist. He tweets from @ArthurWyns. A summary of the IPBES global biodiversity assessment can be accessed here.

Featured image is from The Ecologist

US President Trump tweeted that he will impose tariffs of 25% on $200 billion of Chinese goods by Friday and possibly even do the same to another $325 billion of them too if the ongoing trade talks between the US and China don’t conclude on America’s terms.

He also said that progress on this front is going too slowly for his liking and accused his counterparts of trying to renegotiate, something that he’s totally opposed to. These public messages are an unfriendly negotiating tactic intended to humiliate China by causing it to “lose face”, which is an important cultural concept in the East that most Westerners are unaware of or at the very least don’t properly understand. Trump’s threatened tariffs therefore undermine China’s trust in America as a reliable negotiating partner who can be spoken to in discretion without fear of the details of their sensitive talks being revealed to the global press by none other than the US President himself.

He’s of course not doing this in order to deliberately degrade his country’s international reputation and deal damage to American-Chinese relations but apparently believes that his tough stance towards China will win him more domestic political support ahead of the heated 2020 elections. Trump wants to differentiate himself from his Democratic rivals whose pragmatic stance towards China is considered by him to be inappropriate at best and treasonous at worst. After all, he won election in the first place partially because of his nationalist promise to “Make America Great Again”, and as is known, nationalism feeds off of an external enemy that can be blamed for the country’s problems. China, in this case, is portrayed as the US’ main rival, not only in Trump’s campaign rhetoric but also in his administration’s official policy as articulated by the National Security Strategy and other related documents that have been released under his tenure.

Words have consequences, however, and the American people can expect prices to increase if Trump’s tweets ultimately derail the ongoing trade talks, but he’s gambling that the nationalist revival taking place in the country will distract the masses from any adverse impact this could have on their country’s economy and therefore succeed in winning him re-election next November. This is a very risky strategy that’s fraught with many pitfalls and could easily backfire, but Trump has earned a reputation as a high-stakes gambler since entering into office and seems ready to apply this approach towards the ongoing trade talks with China. Regardless of their eventual outcome, the trust between the two parties will probably deteriorate after what the American leader just did in trying to publicly humiliate his counterparts on Twitter, which was a self-interested and undiplomatic move.

It’s understandable that Trump wants to advance his nation’s interests as he understands them, which is what every head of state is entrusted by their people to do, but he also has a responsibility to maintain stable relations with his international peers and to not disrespect them. He regularly remarks about his very close relations with President Xi, but his words are beginning to appear very insincere since he doesn’t have any restraint when it comes to insulting the negotiating team that represents the Chinese leader. Trump thinks that China needs the US more than the reverse and is basing this logic on the trade deficit between the two countries that he wants to rectify through the ongoing talks, but he should always keep in mind the concept of “face” and how China might be willing to accept the consequences that could come with the failure of the ongoing negotiations in order to protect its international reputation after Trump’s twitter attacks.

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

Two recent electoral regime changes in Central America pose serious challenges for China’s regional strategy since the incoming leaders of El Salvador and Panama have pledged to take a tougher stance towards the People’s Republic than their predecessors and thus appear poised to reach out to the US in an effort to play it off against China as they seek to maximize their countries’ strategic positions in the New Cold War.

The “Reverse-South China Sea” Strategy

Central America has suddenly become an undeclared battleground in the New Cold War between the US and China after two recent electoral regime changes there seem set to have far-reaching strategic repercussions for the region. The president-elects of El Salvador and now Panama have pledged to take a tougher stance towards the People’s Republic than their predecessors who surprisingly recognized Beijing over Taipei, with incoming Salvadoran leader harshly criticizing China during his trip to the US back in March while his Panamanian counterpart just said that the US must cultivate better relations with the region or risk losing out to its Asian rival. Both countries play important roles in China’s Central American grand strategy to turn the region into a “reverse-South China Sea” for the US through the inroads that Beijing has been quietly making in Washington’s soft underbelly after Panama and El Salvador decided to recognize the People’s Republic.

Panama + El Salvador = Pro-Chinese Central America

The southern isthmus state irreplaceably facilitates Chinese exports to the US’ East Coast, the Caribbean region, and Brazil, though the planned Trans-Oceanic Railroad (TORR) will revolutionize South American geopolitics if it’s ever constructed and render the latter purpose of the Panama Canal redundant for China. In addition, Panama joined China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) and is supposed to be host to a high-speed railway connecting the capital with the Costa Rican border, which could conceivably one day continue northward all the way to Mexico in becoming the “Central American Silk Road”. As for El Salvador, its strategic position in the migrant-originating Northern Triangle imbues this tiny country with outsized significance because of the fears (whether founded or not) that the US has of China exploiting “Weapons of Mass Migration” there to undermine its national security. Together, both countries form indispensable components of China’s regional strategy.

“Fortress America”

The US’ rolling campaign of hegemonic domination in the hemisphere (“Fortress America“) has seen the most success in resource-rich and more strategically important South America but is finally beginning to expand to Central America as Trump seeks to strengthen his country’s grip on this region. The so-called “Troika of Tyranny” that National Security Advisor Bolton declared late last year crucially includes the centrally positioned country of Nicaragua smack dab in the middle of the region, while the electoral regime changes that recently took place in El Salvador and Panama “bookend” the isthmus and complete the US’ strategy of pressure in Central America that’s intended to squeeze out Chinese influence. It’s too early to say whether either of those two aforementioned states will reconsider their recognition of Beijing, but they’re more than likely to try to play it off against Washington as they seek to maximize their strategic positions in the New Cold War.

“Balancing”

Neither the Salvadoran nor Panamanian president-elects seem content with being Old Cold War-like stooges of the US without at least receiving something tangible in return for their people since both were elected on promises of fighting corruption (which they implied was exacerbated in their countries since the commencement of their new partnerships with China) and bringing real dividends to their populations. As such, it’s predictable that they’ll likely scale back their Silk Road cooperation with China in exchange for more American aid or replacement projects by the US, though without cutting off ties with China in order to avoid becoming overly reliant on their “big brother”. This might expectedly see some setbacks for China but importantly probably won’t lead to the complete eradication of its influence by any means even though the US’ will likely increase at its expense.

Winning Hearts And Minds

It’s therefore not an exaggeration to say that it’s crunch time for China in Central America and that it’ll need to step up its strategy of engagement if it wants to compete with the US there under these much more difficult conditions. It would be advantageous to its interests if China proactively initiated the renegotiation of some of its Silk Road contracts as an “inaugural gift” to those countries’ new leaders, which would improve its standing among the public who might have been influenced by those incoming presidents’ unfriendly rhetoric towards Beijing. In addition, announcing socio-humanitarian projects such as scholarships and aid would show that partnering with the People’s Republic involves many more benefits than just low-interest loans and large-scale infrastructure projects. If China is to retain its influence in Central America, then it must work on winning “hearts and minds” so that people end up voting for its implied candidate of choice during the next elections like they just did for the US’ and consequently counteract some of the gains that America will likely make there during the next couple of years.

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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.

The Israeli forces escalated their attacks against the Gaza Strip and continued to carry out intense airstrikes and shelling throughout the Gaza Strip. Moreover, the Israeli warplanes continue until the moment to target residential buildings in central Gaza neighborhoods in a serious escalation forewarning of more casualties.

This wave of escalation came after a bloody day in which the Israeli forces killed four Palestinians.  Two of them were civilians, including a person with a disability, who were targeted with live ammunition during their participation in the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege, east of Khan Younis and al-Bureij refugee camp.  Meanwhile, the other two were members of the Palestinian armed groups who were in a military site that was targeted in eastern Maghazi refugee camp shortly after the Israeli forces announced that two Israeli soldiers were wounded in a Palestinian shooting, east of al-Bureij.

According to PCHR’s fieldworkers, the Israeli airstrikes began at 09:45 on Saturday, 04 May 2019, in an airstrike on Al-Qarman Street in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, under the pretext of responding to a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip and fell on an open area in the Israeli ”Shaar HaNegev” compound adjacent to the Gaza Strip, According to the Israeli forces’ Statement.

The Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling then continued across the Gaza Strip. According to our fieldworkers (until 21:30), the Israeli forces fired 50 artillery shells and 78 missiles at 76 targets, including two residential buildings, 11 agricultural plots, and the Palestinian armed groups’ military sites and checkpoints that were previously targeted more than once.

At approximately 17:55 on the same day, an explosion of still-undetermined origin occurred in al-Zaytoun neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City.  As a result, a 14-month-old toddler, Saba Mahmoud Hamdan Abu ‘Arar , and a 5-month pregnant woman, Falastine Saleh Abu ‘Arar (37) as well as her fetus were killed.  Moreover, Ma’azouzah Mohammed Abu ‘Arar (72) and Hussam Adnan Abu ‘Arar (2 years) were wounded.  Meanwhile, PCHR’s staff is still investigating the circumstances of the explosion.

The airstrikes also resulted in the killing of a member of the Palestinian armed groups in the northern Gaza Strip while 12 other Palestinians were wounded, including a woman.

Simultaneously with the preparation of this press release, the Israeli forces destroyed two buildings, which included residential apartments, offices and media offices in Al-Remal neighborhood in Gaza City.  As a result, the building was completely destroyed and the residents were displaced.

In addition to the destruction caused by the Israeli airstrikes against the targeted locations and the damage to nearby houses and facilities, the explosions caused widespread panic and fear among the Gaza population, especially women and children, recalling their harsh experiences in the 3 last offensives on Gaza (2008-2009, 2012 and 2014.)

While preparing this press release, the Israeli airstrikes and shelling continued to target residential buildings in densely-populated neighborhoods, inflicting more casualties and destruction.  All of this has been followed up by PCHR’s staff spread all over the Gaza Strip to document and investigate the circumstances of those crimes.

As part of their ongoing policy of collective punishment, the Israeli forces declared the closure of the Kerem Abu Salem Crossing, east of Rafah, the only commercial crossing in the Gaza Strip, and Beit Hanoun “Erez” Crossing for individuals in the northern Gaza Strip. It also announced completely closing the Sea, and prevented fishermen from sailing and fishing, starting at 16:30 today, depriving thousands of fishermen of their livelihoods.

In light of the continued strikes and indicators of escalating the aggression, PCHR warns that civilians are paying dearly and the successive airstrikes have turned more than two million Palestinians into hostages to aggression, fear, anxiety and direct targeting.

PCHR condemns the ongoing wave of escalation and fears the possibility of further deterioration. PCHR emphasizes that the Israeli ongoing airstrikes against the densely-populated areas and use of weapons on the basis of collective reprisal constitute grave violations of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949,and amount to war crimes.

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All images in this article are from PCHR

The ignorant warmonger masquerading as an American Secretary of State should be arrested for his impersonation of an American government official.  Mike Pompeo cannot possibly be the US Secretary of State, because not even Donald Trump would appoint “an idiot” to this high position who thinks that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president the authority to declare war and invade other countries.

Here is what imposter Pompeo said:

“The president has his full range of Article 2 authorities and I’m very confident that any action we took in Venezuela would be lawful.”

This was Pompeo’s answer when asked if President Trump could intervene in the country’s power struggle without congressional approval. (See this) Of course, it is not “the country’s power struggle.” It is Washington’s effort to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution and regain control over Venezuela’s resources.

Pompeo is twice idiot.  The US Constitution gives the power to declare war only to Congress. Moreover, under the Nuremburg laws laid down by the US government after World War 2, it is a war crime to commit of war of aggression, which is what US military intervention in Venezuela would be.  

I should have said that Pompeo is three times idiot, because he asserts that countries that are diplomatically defending the democratically elected government of Venezuela are “interfering with the Venezuelan people’s right to restore their own democracy.”  Someone should tell Pompeo that it is the Venezuelan people and the Venezuelan military that have refused Washington’s financial bribes and threats who are supporting Venezuelan democracy, not Washington whose failed coup might be followed up with another Washington war crime invasion.  

Lavrov and Putin have found it difficult in the past to put down a hard foot in order to deter more illegal war crime aggression from Washington.  Lavrov is too civilized of a person to have to confront Pompeo.

Putin should send Shoigu to deal with Pompeo. The time for polite, accommodating talk is long past.  A country and its people are at stake.

Let’s hope Russia and China do not permit another Libya.  

Someone needs to inform RT  about the US Constitution.  RT incorrectly reported that: “Article 2 of the US Constitution grants the president the right to declare war and act as commander in chief of the country’s armed forces.”  Utter nonsense!

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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.

Brothers and Sisters:

My name is Ken Stone and I am the treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War. I wish to thank the organizers for the privilege of speaking to you on the occasion of May Day.

On May Day, it is traditional for working people to rant and rail against war and militarism. We rant and rail against war and militarism for two important reasons. First, it is we working people who suffer the most from wars. It is our sons and daughters who come home in body bags. It is our family members who become widows, widowers, and ophans. It is our homes, or the homes of our brothers and sisters in distant lands, which are burned to the ground. It is we who bear the scars, phyiscal and emotional of the permanent war of terror raging around the globe. Secondly, all the public funds lavished on wars and militarism are funds that are denied to the social programs on which we depend.

This speech is about guns and butter. Bismarck, the Prussian aristocrat credited with unifying Germany in the 19^th century, was attributed with remarking that, in a country which spends a lot on war and armaments, the people will suffer. And that’s how it’s turning out in Canada today.

Let me give you some examples.

On February 4 of this year, Canada’s Minister of Global Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, shamefully hosted a meeting of the Lima Group, an unofficial group of countries dedicated to regime change in Venezuela. On that very same day, she announced she was giving 53 million dollars of your tax money, brothers and sisters, to a guy in Caracas named Juan Gauidó in order to help overthrow the legitimate government of President Nicolas Maduro.

Now, brothers and sisters, what could we do with 53 million dollars? I’ll tell you what we could do with 53 million dollars. For 15 months, we could make payments to 4000 recipients of the Basic Income Pilot Project, which was recently cancelled by Premier Doug Ford of Ontario, because he said it was not an efficient use of public funds. There are people in this rally who are the victims of the cancellation of that pilot project. I personally know some of the people culled from that project. These people can no longer afford butter. They are in danger of going hungry or homeless!

Another example: the Trudeau government of Canada is current engaged in a so-called “peace-keeping mission” in Mali, a country in West Africa. But this mission has nothing to do with peace at all. It is a neo-colonial operation to protect the interests of Canadian gold-mining companies in Mali, companies which extracted $1.2 billion dollars of pure gold from Mali in 2016 and left that country in tatters. Canada’s one-year “peace-keeping” mission on behalf of Barrick Gold and other Canadian miners cost 400 million dollars of your tax money, brothers and sisters. What could we do instead with 400 million dollars? I’ll tell you, brothers and sisters. For 392  million dollars, we could pay for the processing and resettling of each and every refugee and asylum-seeker in Canada for one year, many of whom had to flee their homes in distant lands where Canada and its NATO allies have made wars which turned whole populations into refugees.

Guns and butter indeed!

The Hamilton Spectator recently published an article detailing the never-ending cost to the Canadian taxpayer of the war in Afghanistan. Why? Because more and more of the 40,000 Canadian veterans of that illegal NATO operation are requiring treatment for PTSD for the things they did, the terrible things they did – just following orders – to the Afghani people, such as regular midnight raids on the homes of Afghani famers and workers, seizing “suspects”, and then turning the ”suspects” over for torture to Afghan authorities. How would we like it if foreign soldiers burst into our homes at midnight and seized our fathers, our husbands, our sons? The scandal about the torture of prisoners went right up to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper who went so far as to prorogue parliament to avoid an enquiry.

I am NOT saying that the vets don’t deserve to receive treatment for their PTSD. They were just pawns in a grand international game of chess. I AM saying that making war on Afghanistan was a criminal act which we Canadians should not have to pay for. So far, we have paid, according to some estimates, between 18 and 25 billion dollars and that figure will rise continuously over the next forty years. What could we buy instead for 25 billion dollars? I’ll tell you, brothers and sisters. For 20 billion dollars, we could build a high-speed rail line running between Windsor and Toronto. And for the longer-term cost of the war in Afghanistan, we could probably extend it all the way to Quebec City.

Which do you prefer? High-speed, environmentally-friendly public transit or war? Guns or butter?

Finally, last year US President Trump demanded of his NATO allies that they all spend a full 2 per cent of their gross domestic product on armaments. Immediately Chrystia Freeland and Harjeet Singh, Canadian Minister of Defence, piped up promising that they would increase Canadian military spending from .9 per cent of GDP to 1.5 per cent of GDP. That’s a whopping 70% increase in military spending that works out to 12 billion dollars a year. What could we buy instead for 12 billion dollars a year? I’ll tell you, brothers and sisters. For 12 billion dollars a year, according to The Leap, we could pay for most of the 15 billion dollars required for a Green New Deal for Canada. In other words, for almost the increase in military spending projected by the Trudeau government, we could transition Canada from an economy based on fossil fuels to an economy based on renewable energy.

Which do you prefer, brothers and sisters, guns or butter? The chaos of war or environmental justice?

On May Day, we working people need to let the power brokers in this country know that we will no longer stand for their wars and militarism. We have to develop an independent foreign policy for Canada. We have to get out of NATO. We have to see to it that our tax dollars go to healthcare, childcare, pharmacare, education, infrastructure, environmental protection, anything but warfare.

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Ken Stone is a veteran antiwar activist, a former Steering Committee Member of the Canadian Peace Alliance, an executive member of the SyriaSolidarityMovement.org, and treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War [hcsw.ca]. Ken is author of “Defiant Syria”, an e-booklet available at Amazon, iTunes, and Kobo. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

A high level Pentagon official has admitted that US forces will be in Syria for “the long haul” and coupled his statement by declaring the territory contains “a lot of the oil resources and arable land.”

The unusually frank remarks were made this week by Michael Mulroy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, while addressing a conference at the D.C. based Center for a New American Security (CNAS), months after President Trump appeared to have caved to his advisers, reversing course earlier this year from his stated goal of a full and rapid US troop exit from Syria.

Mulroy said “we have a very capable partner” — in reference to the primarily Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) — and quickly noted the US-trained SDF happens to occupy key regions in eastern Syria with “a lot of the oil resources and arable land,” and added that, “we are there with them”.

The Pentagon official further vouched for the think tank’s new feature policy recommendations on Syria which call among other things for continuing to “maintain a presence in over one-third of the country.”

Referencing the CNAS’ new policy report entitled “Solving the Syrian Rubik’s Cube,” regional Iraqi media outlet Kurdistan 24 reported:

Nicholas Heras, one of the study’s co-authors, spoke with Kurdistan 24. He explained that of the six scenarios considered in the report, “The option that we supported is that the United States should continue to maintain a presence in over one-third of the country” and “should invest more, both in terms of financial resources and personnel to stabilize” that region of Syria.

U.S. is in Syria for the long haul, says Michael Mulroy, Dep Ass Sec for Def. The US is “not in a bad situation” in Syria, Mulroy said, the country has “ a very capable partner,” & the territory contains “a lot of the oil resources & arable land.” https://t.co/X4ajRef49t

— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) April 30, 2019

Earlier this month the SDF and western coalition forces declared total defeat over ISIS after fully securing the last ISIS holdout town of Baghouz.

Meanwhile, the majority of Syria’s population is now under the Syrian government, now reeling from the worst fuel shortage in the nation’s history as a result of new oil sanctions targeting Damascus and its ally Iran.

Even with the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate now long gone, major oil and gas sites like al-Omar oil field in Deir Ezzor province in Syria’s east remain controlled by the SDF and its US backers, something which Damascus has repeatedly condemned before the United Nations as an illegal violation of its sovereignty.

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge

Despite what United States government officials and the deluded groupies of President Donald Trump like to proclaim, the U.S. is not now and never has been the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave.’ Attempting to identify its most disgraceful action in a long history of disgraceful actions, or its most shocking behavior in 243 years of such abominations, is impossible; there are simply too many to choose from.

This writer attempted to determine the nation’s worst actions just since World War II. The choices seemed endless:

• The McCarthy witch hunts.
• The Korean War
• Police brutality against people of African descent who were demanding equal rights.
• The Vietnam War.
• Police brutality against people protesting the Vietnam War.
• Any of the following invasions:
  • Dominican Republic
  • Angola
  • Cambodia
  • Nicaragua
  • Laos
  • Lebanon
  • Grenada
  • Panama
  • Iraq (twice)
  • Afghanistan
  • Libya
  • Syria
  • Yemen
• Any of the following situations, where the U.S. orchestrated anti-Communist ‘interventions’, overthrew democratically-elected governments, or supported brutal dictators:
  • Ghana
  • Indonesia
  • Democratic Republic of Congo
  • Brazil
  • Chile
  • Argentina
  • El Salvador
  • Yugoslavia
  • Colombia

These lists could go on.

Today, however, the focus of this writer’s attention is another shocking, brutal and inhumane policy currently being perpetrated, and which the populace seems either to be unaware of, or simply doesn’t care about. He is referring to the separation of families at the U.S. – Mexico border, and the caging of children.

Does not this offend the sensibilities of any human being? Families are being torn apart and children as young as infancy are being snatched from their mothers’ arms and put in cages. Several have died in U.S. custody.

Does not the phrase ‘children in cages’ shock everyone?

Occasionally, a sensational news story will appear about some family that kept their children caged. Sometimes the story only comes to light when a child dies. The perpetrators are arrested, charged with a variety of crimes and shamed by everyone. Their victimized children are placed in foster care, where they will hopefully receive better treatment.

Yet when the same behavior is performed by the U.S. government it is perfectly acceptable. Kidnap children by seizing them from their parents’ arms, don’t let their parents know where they are, and cage them. If they die, well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it?

This is typical for the U.S., and other nations as well. Something done on an individual basis is a shocking crime, but done by the government, it is perfectly legal and acceptable. Let us take murder as an example. The murder rate in the U.S. is high, but pales in comparison to the rate of murder committed by the United States. As long as someone is wearing a uniform, and the victim isn’t a U.S. citizen (although there are certainly exceptions to this bizarre rule), killing someone is not only not a crime, it is an act of heroism and patriotism. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. is estimated to have caused the deaths of 20,000,000 people worldwide. When hijackers rammed jets into three sites in the eastern U.S., killing about 3,000 people, the U.S. began two wars in retaliation. The number of people who died as a result of those wars is, to date, about 1000 times the number who died on September 11. Yet the U.S. populace doesn’t seem to care.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh killed nearly 200 people when he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This was a shocking and unspeakable action that resulted, ultimately, in his execution (capital punishment is a topic for another discussion). Yet when the U.S. government bombs buildings around the world, or finances and supports the bombings of homes, hospitals, United Nations refugee centers and other buildings in Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous other nations, no one is charged with terrorism or murder. McVeigh’s death toll is nothing compared to that of the U.S. government.

But let us get back to the caged children of the U.S. The idea of caging human beings is not new for the U.S. government; during World War II, American citizens of Japanese descent were put into cages by the thousands; they, like Mexican children, were somehow considered less than human, and therefore caging them, like stray dogs, was acceptable.

Where is the outrage? One should ask oneself: why am I not demonstrating in the streets against a U.S. policy that seizes innocent children from their parents and puts them in cages? Why am I content to look the other way as these children are maltreated in their caged environments? What is wrong with me that I condone this by my silence?

This is how Donald Trump ‘makes America great again.’ These are actions that have the support of his ignorant, racist, misogynist, homophobic, Islamophobic base. This is how the U.S. government makes racism fashionable again, pitting the white, European-descended, uneducated, often older citizens against everyone else. This is why hate crimes are increasing, not only in the U.S., but around the world. The U.S. influence, for better or worse (usually for much worse) is felt globally, and racism approved by the U.S. president gains some legitimacy everywhere.

But it is no more pronounced then right in the so-called ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’. It is there that the government officially cages Mexican children, allows and finances the imprisonment for up to 15 years of Palestinian children accused of throwing rocks at heavily-armed, Israeli occupation soldiers. It is the U.S. that condones and finances the slaughter of school children in Yemen, with a U.S.-supplied bomb dropping on a school bus of young boys a few months ago, killing 40 of them, and another bomb killing 13 school-aged girls this a few weeks ago.

And yet, Trump supporters, both within the citizenry and within Congress, get teary-eyed as the president hugs an American flag. They cheer as he attempts to force Congress to pay for the multi-million-dollar boondoggle of a wall across the southern border. They support him as he proclaims that, in a conflict between avowed white nationalists and anti-racists, there are ‘good people’ on both sides.

What will it take for the U.S. citizenry to awaken from the profound sleep of apathy? If they haven’t done so yet, this writer cannot imagine what will be necessary.

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Featured image: Children in immigration detention facilities are required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, according to the Washington Post. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol)

Increasingly, groups and even foreign governments have pandered to Israel and its supporters in the United States because they have come to understand that success in dealing with Washington can be dependent on Jewish support.

Last week, Raed Saleh, the leader of the so-called White Helmets, also referred to as the Syrian Civil Defense, a terrorist-affiliated group, was in the United States to “…receive the Elie Wiesel Award from the Holocaust Memorial Museum for his organization’s work in Syria.” He was also dropping by to pick up a check for $5 million courtesy of the U.S. government “…to help us with acquiring ambulances and help us with search and rescue operations.”

During his visit, Saleh was treated to a nauseatingly obsequious interview courtesy of National Public Radio, which, inter alia, described how the Helmets “were the subjects of an Oscar-winning documentary two years ago, which captured images of them carrying broken and bloody Syrians from dust and rubble.”

Saleh claimed that the alleged victory of the Syrian regime in the yet to be completed war is an illusion as President Bashar al-Assad presides over a broken country, yet reports from inside Syria indicate that the return of the government to areas formerly controlled by terrorists has been welcomed and refugees from the fighting are now eager to return home. Saleh also claimed, falsely, that his organization has been

“providing services to all Syrians and to providing support to all Syrians. Now after six years of war, we have saved more than 116,000 people from under the rubble. We have not asked any of these 116,000 people who did they belong to? Is he a Kurd? Is he a Christian? Is he a Muslim? Is he with Assad? Is he against Assad? Is he with the Kurds? Is he against the Kurds? We have never asked anyone these questions.”

Saleh, whose group has only operated in terrorist-controlled areas, could not, however, maintain his approved narrative. He fairly quickly abandoned his non-partisan quasi-humanitarian rhetoric when asked about how he sees the Syrian conflict developing, saying

“We do not call this a civil war, but we rather call it a revolution against a dictatorship…the revolution still goes on. We have not lost.”

Those who are unfamiliar with the White Helmets should understand that the group has been praised by those who hate the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and want to see it removed, which includes the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The White Helmets have played a leading role in the propaganda campaign that seeks to instigate violence or use fabricated information to depict the Damascus government as guilty of slaughtering its own citizens. The propaganda is intended to terrorize the civilian population, which is part of the definition of terrorism.

Favorable media coverage of the group has largely derived from the documentary The White Helmets, which was produced by the group itself and tells a very convincing tale promoted as “the story of real-life heroes and impossible hope.” It is a very impressive piece of propaganda, so much so that it has won numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Documentary Short two years ago and the White Helmets themselves were even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. More to the point, however, is the undeniable fact that the documentary has helped shape the public understanding of what is going on in Syria, describing the government in Damascus in purely negative terms.

Nine months ago, with the Syrian Army closing in on the last White Helmet affiliates still operating in the country, the Israeli government, assisted by the United States, staged an emergency “humanitarian” evacuation of the group’s members and their families to Israel and then on to Jordan. It was described in a BBC article that included

“The IDF said they had ‘completed a humanitarian effort to rescue members of a Syrian civil organization and their families’, saying there was an ‘immediate threat to their lives.’ The transfer of the displaced Syrians through Israel was an exceptional humanitarian gesture. Although Israel is not directly involved in the Syria conflict, the two countries have been in a state of war for decades. Despite the intervention, the IDF said that ‘Israel continues to maintain a non-intervention policy regarding the Syrian conflict.’”

All of the Israeli assertions are nonsense, including its claimed “humanitarianism” and “non-intervention” in the Syrian war, where it has been bombing almost daily. The carefully edited scenes of heroism under fire that have been filmed and released worldwide conceal the White Helmets’ relationship with the al-Qaeda affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra and its participation in the torture and execution of “rebel” opponents. Indeed, the White Helmets only operate in terrorist-held territory, which enables them to shape the narrative both regarding who they are and what is occurring on the ground.

The White Helmets were accustomed to traveling to bombing sites with their film crews trailing behind them. Once at the sites, with no independent observers, they are able to arrange or even stage what is filmed to conform to their selected narrative. Exploiting their access to the western media, the White Helmets thereby de facto became a major source of “eyewitness” news regarding what was going on in those many parts of Syria where European and American journalists were quite rightly afraid to go, all part of a broader largely successful “rebel” effort to manufacture fake news that depicts the Damascus government as engaging in war crimes directed against civilians, an effort that has led to several attacks on government forces and facilities by the U.S. military. This is precisely the propaganda that has been supported both by Tel Aviv and Washington.

Perhaps the most serious charge against the White Helmets consists of the evidence that they actively participated in the atrocities, to include torture and murder, carried out by their al-Nusra hosts. There have been numerous photos of the White Helmets operating directly with armed terrorists and also celebrating over the bodies of execution victims and murdered Iraqi soldiers. The group’s jihadi associates regard the White Helmets as fellow “mujahideen” and “soldiers of the revolution.”

For those interested in further details, White Helmet activities have been thoroughly exposed by Maxim Grigoriev of the Russian NGO Foundation for the Study of Democracy. Grigoriev presented his findings at a special meeting of the United Nations just before Christmas 2018. A video prepared based on the U.N. meeting includes interviews with actual witnesses of White Helmet atrocities and participants in the staged chemical attacks that were blamed on the government.

So Raed Saleh was in Washington to pick up his award and his multi-million dollar check on top of the tens of millions that his organization has already received from Congress and the White House. He also met with a number of Congressmen who support his initiatives and was praised by New Jersey’s own seriously corrupt Israel-firster Senator Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who observed “that Saleh’s group of about 3,000 volunteers has ‘saved almost 100,000 lives’ doing ‘courageous work on the ground in Syria, while being targeted by Russia.’” Yes, Russiagate is alive and well.

There is considerable irony in the fact that the National Holocaust Museum, which is taxpayer funded, has given an apparently prestigious award to a terrorist group, something which could have been discerned with even a little fact checking. And the museum also might have been sensitive to how the White Helmets have been used in support of Israeli propaganda vis-à-vis Syria. Perhaps, while they are at it, the museum’s board just might also want to check out Elie Wiesel, for whom the award is named. Wiesel, who was a chronicler of Jewish victimhood while persistently refusing to acknowledge what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, notoriously mixed fact and fiction in his best-selling Holocaust memoir Night. Ironically, the award and recipient are well matched in this case as mixing fact and fiction is what both Elie Wiesel and the White Helmets are all about.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.

Featured image: Raed Alsaleh of the “White Helmets” received 2019 Elie Wiesel Award from U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Credit: Wolf Blitzer/ Twitter

Juan Guaido’s coup attempt failed.

The United States is re-tooling.

Yet a battle rages at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., where activists living inside at the invitation of the Maduro government have been under siege. They have been assaulted by blaring bullhorns, sirens, strobe lights, and a violent opposition that has been drilling holes into the building and attempting to knock down the embassy door. The opposition also reared its racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQIA+ head, with its members spewing slurs at activists and journalists, and stalking a journalist.

All this while the Secret Service and the Metropolitan Police Department have looked away and arrested more embassy activists than opposition members.

Opposition members who support Guaido first held a rally in front of the embassy on April 30, the day Guaido’s failed coup took place outside an air base in Venezuela. But Guaido’s fake ambassador, Carlos Vecchio, who claimed he was taking over the embassy that day, was driven away by activists who drowned out his words with their speaker system.

Since then, the opposition has dwindled, but remains combative.

Yesterday, Black Alliance for Peace member organizations such as Friends of the Congo and Pan-African Community Action stood in solidarity with the Embassy Protection Collective and against the U.S. intervention in Venezuela. As African/Black internationalists, we stand with the colonized peoples of the world. We also condemn the Trump administration’s attempt at a coup. Read our official statement.

As you see below, Paul Pumphrey, co-founder of Friends of the Congo, was assaulted with the blare of a megaphone. Fortunately, he was wearing earplugs.

Our folks have shown up regularly to support what has developed into another battlefield in the struggle against the U.S. attempt at a coup in Venezuela, and the larger struggle against U.S. imperialism. The opposition, dressed in polo shirts and dresses, looked like they were ready for Saturday brunch instead of a protest. The opposition appears to be well-funded, as a truck has been noticed dropping off a speaker system and other items. The opposition’s members don’t even seem interested in the opposition’s political position as they sway their hips to the revolutionary beats emanating from the embassy’s speakers. Activists inside the embassy say opposition numbers have dwindled, having dropped from a peak of 100 oppositionists on Tuesday to about 20 yesterday. A person on Twitter found out where some of these opposition members work and surprise: Current and former employers include the World Bank, Raytheon and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All are involved in the exploitation and destruction of the Global South.

In Colombia, our allies, Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), had a close call yesterday. Armed men launched an attack on PCN’s leadership while they held a meeting. The perpetrators fired automatic weapons and a grenade was thrown. Goldman Environmental Prize-winning grassroots activist Francia Márquez’s guard returned fire, driving the perpetrators off. The leadership was unharmed. Two of the guards sustained minor wounds. Colombia has taken a sharp turn to the right with the support of the United States. Last month, its president changed his mind and turned around when he was only 200 meters away from signing a peace agreement with the most marginalized people. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians remain under siege in their territories. PCN represents the most sophisticated African/Black organization in South America. We must connect this attack to the struggle of Afro-Venezuelans, who are in the cross-hairs of repression at the hands of U.S. and European capital and their local class collaborators.

Back in the United States, BAP members have appeared in the press this week. Margaret Kimberley, a BAP Coordinating Committee member, told TeleSUR English the U.S.-backed fascist coup in Venezuela has long been supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of the Congo, discussed U.S. priorities on the continent of our ancestors on RT after a new report uncovered 36 code-named U.S. military operations in Africa. Margaret also wrote a piece in Black Agenda Report about how the United States has crippled Venezuela.

BAP members Vanessa Beck, Erica Caines and Glen Ford, and Rebecca Bonhomme of Pan-African Community Action, will speak on panels Saturday at the Ujima People’s Progress Party’s 2019 statewide conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

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All images in this article are from BAP

… we’re the party of love, we’re the party of compassion, we’re the party of inclusiveness. What we are fighting for is not for the few, but for the many. Every single one, just this week, when we’ve had the attack in California on a synagogue, it’s the same person who’s accused of attempting to bomb a mosque. So I can’t ever speak of Islamophobia and fight for Muslims, if I am not willing to fight against anti-Semitism. We collectively must make sure that we are dismantling all systems of oppression. – Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat, April 30, 2019

Of the 435 members of Congress elected in 2018, Ilhan Omar won her race with more votes than 428 of her colleagues of both parties won theirs. She is a black woman born in Somalia, an immigrant, a Muslim, intelligent and outspoken. From her first moment in Congress, right-wing bigots have targeted her with whatever smear seemed useful. The most effective has been the bogus claim that she’s anti-Semitic, rooted in imaginary evidence. Democrats failed to understand the fraud and still haven’t rallied around a party member whose life has been endangered by the occupant of the White House. Media reports routinely include comments referring to the accusations of anti-Semitism as if they were real, giving continuing credence to political lies. All in all, it is a massive cluster-fiasco of incompetence and bad faith from a huge portion of the supposed “leadership” class in the US.

On April 30, Black Lives Matter organized a rally on Capitol Hill calling for “Hands Off Ilhan Omar.” More than a hundred African American women leaders in and out of Congress gathered in Omar’s support, issuing a call to Congress to censure President Trump for endangering the life of a sitting member of Congress. There is no doubt that a Trump tweet on April 12 constituted reckless endangerment with an incendiary but false incitement against Ilhan Omar. The tweet sparked a sharp increase in death threats against the congresswoman by tying her to the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11, with no basis in fact.

WE WILL NEVER FORGET!

– Tweet from Pres. Trump, 6:35 p.m., April 12, 2019, accompanying a 43-second fraudulent attack video dishonestly suggesting that Rep. Ilhan Omar was somehow accountable for the attacks of 9/11, a fascistic meme of Islamophobic demagoguery of the first order.

The 43-second video is a polished production, with the same manipulative slickness as the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl. This was more than just another apparently casual tweet from the White House. This tweet required production and planning. It was apparently inspired by an April 9 tweet from Rep. Dan Crenshaw,  Texas Republican, who once called for toning down political rhetoric. Crenshaw supports Trump’s border wall, denies climate change, opposes any ban on assault weapons, and voted against the election reform act of 2019. His tweet about Rep. Omar used an out-of-context quote to create a political lie based on a racist trope:

First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as “some people who did something”.

Unbelievable. https://t.co/IKtoZWWmIT

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) April 9, 2019

Omar’s choice of words is similar to President Bush’s language in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and both require context to determine meaning. Crenshaw’s policing of right-wing political correctness had its own problems, since he forwarded, without qualification, a tweet that called CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, “a terrorist organization” – another lie.

Piling on in the endless demonization of Ilhan Omar, GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called on Democrats to enforce dishonest Republican perceptions. Well, Democrats had done it before, right?

Ilhan Omar isn’t just anti-Semitic – she’s anti-American.

Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives to Islamic terrorists on 9/11, yet Omar diminishes it as: “Some people did something.”

Democrat leaders need to condemn her brazen display of disrespect.pic.twitter.com/k3meEbUOAk

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) April 9, 2019

The next day, Omar responded to Crenshaw:

This is dangerous incitement, given the death threats I face. I hope leaders of both parties will join me in condemning it.

My love and commitment to our country and that of my colleagues should never be in question. We are ALL Americans! pic.twitter.com/foTZMpiZKv

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) April 10, 2019

Two days later, the president raised the ante with his unconscionable 9/11 Big Lie. For the Democrats, whether they liked it or not, this was a moment of truth.

Establishment Democrats have failed dismally to react responsibly to the dishonest attacks on Ilhan Omar, mustering neither courage nor coherence in the face the latest form of McCarthyite bullying over the past four months. The president’s over-the-top tweet using 9/11 as a bludgeon gave Democrats another chance to behave honorably. Some of the presidential candidates did, but the first response appears to have come from New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. [The Twitter date stamps are mysterious. There are two sets, an hour apart. I have followed the same sequence for all the tweets, so while the exact time may be wrong, the interval seems correct.]

Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today.@IlhanMN’s life is in danger. For our colleagues to be silent is to be complicit in the outright, dangerous targeting of a member of Congress.

We must speak out.

“First they came…” pic.twitter.com/ygOX1vhE9j

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 12, 2019

The first Democratic presidential candidate to respond was Bernie Sanders, with prompt and unambiguous support:

Ilhan Omar is a leader with strength and courage. She won't back down to Trump's racism and hate, and neither will we. The disgusting and dangerous attacks against her must end.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 13, 2019

A few minutes later, Elizabeth Warren issued an even stronger condemnation, with a direct rebuke to the president and a direct challenge to her fellow elected officials:

The President is inciting violence against a sitting Congresswoman—and an entire group of Americans based on their religion. It's disgusting. It's shameful. And any elected leader who refuses to condemn it shares responsibility for it.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 13, 2019

As the evening wore on, Gov. Jay Inslee tweeted that Trump was jeopardizing Omar and all Muslims. Former congressman Beto O’Rourke tweeted that Trump’s action was “incitement to violence” without mentioning Omar. Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s tweet accused Trump of using 9/11 “to incite his base against a member of Congress, as if for sport,” without mentioning Omar. Senator Amy Klobuchar’s tweet tried to have it both ways, referring to an arrest for a threat on Omar’s life but noting that she had disagreed with Omar before. And that was reportedly all the significant Democratic response to a president deliberately putting a congresswoman in the cross-hairs. The next day’s responses were generally weaker or absent. There was no word of note from Speaker Nancy Pelosi or the rest of the House “leadership.”

Since April 13, there has been no effort to censure the president for reckless endangerment of a Congress member’s life. The president committed this crime in plain sight and House Democrats do nothing. By doing nothing, House Democrats signal that as far as they’re concerned, Ilhan Omar is fair game. Most of the presidential candidates are no better. This is shameful. My guess is that most Trump supporters look at Democrats with greater scorn than ever for their unwillingness to defend one of their own. As far as Ilhan Omar is concerned, most Democrats have acted and continue to act without principle, without courage, without integrity. This doesn’t seem like a really great way to win an election in 2020. Standing up to bigots should be one of the easier things to do politically. If Democrats can’t do that, what can they do?

It looks like the Democratic establishment has been doing things the Washington way for so long they can’t see themselves clearly in the mirror anymore. No matter who Ilhan Omar truly is, no one has a right to lynch her, and those who stand by and watch the lynching happen are just despicable. Here’s the way Ilhan Omar described herself to her supporters on April 30:

Here’s the thing that really offends a lot of people and the reason that we are here. I was born—I was born as a very liberated human being, to a country that was colonized, that recognized that they can colonize the land but they can’t colonize your mind, to people who recognized that all of us deserve dignity and that no human being was ever, ever going to tell you that you are less than them. Thirteen people organized for our independence in Somalia. So I was born in that breath of recognizing that they might be more powerful than you are, that they might have more technology than you have, they might think that they are wiser than you, they might control all of the institutions, but you control your mind, and that is what sets you free.

… the thing that upsets the occupant of the White House, his goons in the Republican Party, many of our colleagues in the Democratic Party, is that—is that they can’t stand—they cannot stand that a refugee, a black woman, an immigrant, a Muslim, shows up in Congress thinking she’s equal to them. But I say to them, “How else did you expect me to show up?”

… So, I know my place in this society. All of you know your place in this society. And it’s one that is equal to every single person that walks in it.

Protecting Ilhan Omar should be a reflexive no brainer. Protecting Ilhan Omar is so obviously the right thing to do, it should come easily to anyone of conscience. This is not rocket science. This is not morally ambiguous. The Democratic Party doesn’t seem to have a clue that it is in the midst of an existential litmus test. Does the Democratic Party actually stand for anything anymore? There’s still time to figure it out, if they start soon. A good starting place would be to stop going for the bait of trolling Republican bigots. Is it some perverse political calculation that brings on timidity, silence, cowardice, a betrayal of the best American values to appease the values of the worst Americans? If the Democratic Party lacks the strength to defend and protect Ilhan Omar just because she’s human, then all the talk of American values and freedoms and principles and “the soul of the nation” is just more political garbage.

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The Following text is Section 10 of

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,

by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

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

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

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Contents 

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

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1. The “new mission” of NATO was made official by the September 2014 Summit in Wales, launching the “Readiness Action Plan”, the official purpose of which was “to respond quickly and firmly to new security challenges” attributed to “military aggression of Russia against Ukraine “and to the growth of extremism and sectarian conflict in the Middle East and North Africa”. The Plan was defined by the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, as “the greatest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War”.

2. In just three months, NATO quadrupled the fighter-bombers, with both conventional and nuclear capabilities, deployed in the Baltic region (once part of the USSR), sent AWACS radar aircraft to Eastern Europe and increased the number of warships in the Baltic, Black and Mediterranean Seas, deployed US, British and German land forces in Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and intensified joint exercises in Poland and the Baltic countries, bringing them to over 200 during the year.

3. From 2014, the US/NATO pressure on Russia grew in geometric progression. In four years, from 2014 to 2018, the United States spent US$10 billion on the “Europe Reassurance Initiative” (ERI), the official aim of which was “to increase our ability to defend Europe against aggression Russian”. Almost half of the expenditures were used to strengthen the US “strategic prepositioning” in Europe. The armaments that were placed in an advanced position allowed “the rapid deployment of forces in the war theater”. Another large segment of funds were destined to “increase the presence on a rotating basis of US forces throughout Europe”. The remaining funds served to develop the infrastructure of bases in Europe to “increase the readiness of US actions”, and to strengthen military exercises and training in order to “increase the readiness and interoperability of NATO forces”.

4. The funds of the European Defense Initiative (EDI) – formerly known as the European Reassurance Initiative of the United States – were only a part of those targeted for the “Operation Atlantic Resolve that demonstrated the USA’s ability to respond to the threats against the allies”. In the framework of this operation, the 3rd Armored Brigade, comprising 3,500 men, 87 tanks, 18 self-propelled howitzers and other means, was transferred to Poland from the USA in January 2017. It was subsequently replaced by another unit so that US armed forces could be permanently stationed on Polish territory. From there, their departments were transferred, for training and exercises, to other Eastern countries, especially Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania and also Ukraine. In other words, they were continuously deployed close to Russia.

5. Also in the framework of this operation, the 10th Combat Air Brigade was transferred to the Storck Barracks/Illesheim Kaserne United States Army facility (Germany) along with 100 war helicopters. The Combat Air Brigade’s forces are sent to  “advanced positions” in Poland, Romania and Latvia. In the bases of Ämari (Estonia) and Graf Ignatievo (Bulgaria), US and NATO fighter-bombers are deployed, including Italian Eurofighters, for the Baltic air patrol. The operation also provides for “a persistent presence in the Black Sea” along with the Mihail Kogalniceanu Base (Romania) and the Novo Selo Training Area (Bulgaria).

6. General Curtis Scaparrotti, head of the European Command of the United States and at the same time Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, has assured Congress that “our forces are ready and positioned to counter the Russian aggression”. A US contingent is positioned in eastern Poland, in the so-called “Suwalki Gap”, a stretch of flat land about a hundred kilometers long which, NATO warns, “would be a perfect gateway for Russian tanks”. The propaganda paraphernalia of the old cold war is thus revived: that of the Russian tanks ready to invade Europe. Waving the specter of a non-existent threat from the East, the US tanks arrived in Europe instead.

7. The plan is clear. After provoking a new confrontation with Russia in the Maidan Square protests, Washington (despite the change of administration from President Obama to President Trump) has pursued the same strategy: transforming Europe into the forefront of a new cold war to the advantage of US interests and their balance of power with the major European powers.

8. The European powers of NATO participate in the deployment on the eastern flank – including armored forces, fighter-bombers, warships and even nuclear missile units – as evidenced by the dispatch of French troops and British tanks to Estonia. In this period, we talk about “a European army, but in the meeting with the defense ministers of the EU, in April 2017 in Malta, NATO general secretary Stoltenberg explained in what terms.” It was clearly agreed by the “The European Union that its purpose is not to build a new European army or competitive structures in competition with those of NATO, but something that is complementary to what NATO does.”

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Sections 11-16 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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5G: The Big Picture

By Dr. Jeremy Naydler, April 29, 2019

There are at present approximately two thousand fully functioning satellites orbiting the Earth. Some beam down commercial GPS (or “SatNav”), some provide TV, some provide mobile phone services, and some bounce radar back and forth to produce images for meteorologists and military surveillance. The Earth is thus already comprehensively irradiated from outer space.

What You Don’t Know About 5G but Will Find Out When Its Too Late

By Claire Edwards, April 27, 2019

The first eight months of WWII with no fighting – was called The Phoney War. Using millimetre waves as a fifth-generation or 5G wireless communications technology is a phoney war of another kind.

The Dangers of 5G to Children’s Health

By Children’s Health Defense, April 27, 2019

The enthusiasm with which the public has embraced each new mobile and wireless technology—most of which have never undergone any appropriate safety testing or standards development—suggests that consumers rarely stop to consider the health implications of the infrastructure shoring up their ability to browse, stream and download anytime and “on the go.”

5G Wireless Technology Is the “Stupidest Idea in the History of the World”

By Arjun Walia, April 25, 2019

It’s clear that we are not being protected, and politicians are simply abiding to the the will of their masters, the big corporations, who in turn act as slaves to their ‘financial overlords,’ the big banks. We continue to see products and services being approved and implemented without ever going through any safety testing.

5G Health Effects: Swiss Telecom Ignores Official Laws and Launches 5G; Rule of Law Under Attack

By Josh del Sol, April 24, 2019

It is deeply ironic that within a nation historically recognized for its higher-minded values to not engage in war, wireless companies have now effectively declared war on all people living in this nation, by deploying 5G against consent and directly in violation of both official moratoria and independent science.

Will 5G Cell Phone Technology Lead to Population Reduction as Large Numbers of Men Become Sterile?

By Michael Snyder, March 06, 2019

The big cell phone companies will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to install hundreds of thousands of new 5G antennas, and every single one of those antennas will be constantly emitting very powerful electromagnetic radiation.  Since we can’t see the radiation, to many people the threat does not seem real, but the truth is that if you live in a major urban area you are constantly being bombarded by it.

International Appeal: Stop 5G on Earth and in Space

By Arthur Firstenberg, January 27, 2019

Telecommunications companies worldwide, with the support of governments, are poised within the next two years to roll out the fifth-generation wireless network (5G). This is set to deliver what is acknowledged to be unprecedented societal change on a global scale.

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The just released report on April jobs on first appearance, heavily reported by the media, shows a record low 3.6% unemployment rate and another month of 263,000 new jobs created. But there are two official US Labor dept. jobs reports, and the second shows a jobs market much weaker than the selective, ‘cherry picked’ indicators on unemployment and jobs creation noted above that are typically featured by the press.

Problems with the April Jobs Report

While the Current Establishment Survey (CES) Report (covering large businesses) shows 263,000 jobs created last month, the Current Population Survey (CPS) second Labor Dept. report (that covers smaller businesses) shows 155,000 of these jobs were involuntary part time. This high proportion (155,000 of 263,000) suggests the job creation number is likely second and third jobs being created. Nor does it reflect actual new workers being newly employed. The number is for new jobs, not newly employed workers. Moreover, it’s mostly part time and temp or low paid jobs, likely workers taking on second and third jobs.

Even more contradictory, the second CPS report shows that full time work jobs actually declined last month by 191,000. (And the month before, March, by an even more 228,000 full time jobs decline).

The much hyped 3.6% unemployment (U-3) rate for April refers only to full time jobs (35 hrs. or more worked in a week). And these jobs are declining by 191,000 while part time jobs are growing by 155,000. So which report is accurate? How can full time jobs be declining by 191,000, while the U-3 unemployment rate (covering full time only) is falling? The answer: full time jobs disappearing result in an unemployment rate for full time (U-3)jobs falling. A small number of full time jobs as a share of the total labor force appears as a fall in the unemployment rate for full time workers. Looked at another way, employers may be converting full time to part time and temp work, as 191,000 full time jobs disappear and 155,000 part time jobs increase.

And there’s a further problem with the part time jobs being created: It also appears that the 155,000 part time jobs created last month may be heavily weighted with the government hiring part timers to start the work on the 2020 census–typically hiring of which starts in April of the preceding year of the census. (Check out the Labor Dept. numbers preceding the prior 2010 census, for April 2009, for the same development a decade ago).

Another partial explanation is that the 155,000 part time job gains last month (and in prior months in 2019) reflect tens of thousands of workers a month who are being forced onto the labor market now every month, as a result of US courts recent decisions now forcing workers who were formerly receiving social security disability benefits (1 million more since 2010) back into the labor market.

The April selective numbers of 263,000 jobs and 3.6% unemployment rate is further questionable by yet another statistic by the Labor Dept.: It is contradicted by a surge of 646,000 in April in the category, ‘Not in the Labor Force’, reported each month. That 646,000 suggests large numbers of workers are dropping out of the labor force (a technicality that actually also lowers the U-3 unemployment rate). ‘Not in the Labor Force’ for March, the previous month Report, revealed an increase of an additional 350,000 added to ‘Not in the Labor Force’ totals. In other words, a million–or at least a large percentage of a million–workers have left the labor force. This too is not an indication of a strong labor market and contradicts the 263,000 and U-3 3.6% unemployment rate.

Bottom line, the U-3 unemployment rate is basically a worthless indicator of the condition of the US jobs market; and the 263,000 CES (Establishment Survey) jobs is contradicted by the Labor Dept’s second CPS survey (Population Survey).

For a more detailed discussion and explanation of these, and other, contradictory facts about the current US labor market, released by the Labor Dept., listen to my May 3, 2019 Alternative Visions radio show podcast accessible below at the end of this print contribution.

GDP & Rising Wages Revisited

In two previous shows, the limits and contradictions (and thus a deeper explanations) of US government GDP and wage statistics were featured: See the immediate April 26, 2019 Alternative Visions show on preliminary US GDP numbers for the 1st quarter 2019, where it was shown how the Trump trade war with China, soon coming to an end, is largely behind the GDP latest numbers; and that the more fundamental forces underlying the US economy involving household consumption and real business investment are actually slowing and stagnating. Or listen to my prior radio show earlier this year where media claims that US wages are now rising is debunked as well.

Claims of wages rising are similarly misrepresented when a deeper analysis shows the proclaimed wage gains are, once again, skewed to the high end of the wage structure and reflect wages for salaried managers and high end professionals by estimating ‘averages’ and limiting data analysis to full time workers once again; not covering wages for part time and temp workers; not counting collapse of deferred and social wages (pension and social security payments); and underestimating inflation so that real wages appear larger than otherwise. Independent sources estimate more than half of all US workers received no wage increase whatsoever in 2018–suggesting once again the gains are being driven by the top 10% and assumptions of averages that distort the actual wage gains that are much more modest, if at all.

Ditto for GDP analysis and inflation underestimation using the special price index for GDP (the GDP deflator), and the various re-definitions of GDP categories made in recent years and questionable on-going GDP assumptions, such as including in GDP calculation the questionable inclusion of 50 million homeowners supposedly paying themselves a ‘rent equivalent’.

A more accurate ‘truth’ about jobs, wages, and GDP stats is found in the ‘fine print’ of definitions and understanding the weak statistical methodologies that change the raw economic data on wages, jobs, and economic output (GDP) into acceptable numbers for media promotion.

Whether jobs, wages or GDP stats, the message here is that official US economic stats, especially labor market stats, should be read critically and not taken for face value, especially when hyped by the media and press. The media pumps selective indicators that make the economy appear better than it actually is. Labor Dept. methods and data used today have not caught up with the various fundamental changes in the labor markets, and are therefore increasingly suspect. It is not a question of outright falsification of stats. It’s about failure to evolve data and methodologies to reflect the real changes in the economy.

Government stats are as much an ‘art’ (of obfuscation) as they are a science. They produce often contradictory indication of the true state of the economy, jobs and wages. Readers need to look at the ‘whole picture’, not just the convenient, selective media reported data like Establishment survey job creation and U-3 unemployment rates.

When so doing, the bigger picture is an US economy being held up by temporary factors (trade war) soon to dissipate; jobs creation driven by part time work as full time jobs continue structurally to disappear; and wages that are being driven by certain industries (tech, etc.), high end employment (managers, professionals), occasional low end minimum wage hikes in select geographies, and broad categories of ‘wages’ ignored.

Listen to the audio below for the On the Jobs Report for April.

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Jack is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, Summer 2019, and ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, March 2019. He blogs at jackrasmus.com, tweets at @drjackrasmus, and hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network on Fridays, 2pm eastern time.

As I discussed yesterday, nobody should be using the term “booming” to describe the state of the U.S. economy until we have a full year when GDP growth is 3 percent or better, and at this point we haven’t had that since the middle of the Bush administration.  And as you will see below, the latest numbers are clearly telling us that the U.S. economy is not even moving in the right direction.  Economic conditions are getting worse, and they weren’t that great to begin with.  According to the calculations that John Williams has made over at shadowstats.com, the U.S. economy is already in a recession, but of course the Federal Reserve will continue to tell us that everything is just fine for as long as they possibly can.  Unfortunately for them, they can’t hide the depressingly bad numbers that are coming in from all over the economy, and those numbers are all telling us the same thing.

The following are 19 facts about our current economic performance that should deeply disturb all of us…

#1 In April, U.S. auto sales were down 6.1 percent.  That was the worst decline in 8 years.

#2 The number of mortgage applications has fallen for four weeks in a row.

#3 We just witnessed the largest crash in luxury home sales in about 9 years.

#4 Existing home sales have now fallen for 13 months in a row.

#5 In March, total residential construction spending was down 8.4 percent from a year ago.

#6 U.S. manufacturing output was down 1.1 percent during the first quarter of this year.

#7 Farm incomes are falling at the fastest pace since 2016.

#8 Wisconsin dairy farmers are going bankrupt “in record numbers”.

#9 Apple iPhone sales are falling at a “record pace”.

#10 Facebook’s profits have declined for the first time since 2015.

#11 We just learned that CVS will be closing 46 stores.

#12 Office Depot has announced that they will be closing 50 locations.

#13 Overall, U.S. retailers have announced more than 6,000 store closings so far in 2019, and that means we have already surpassed the total for all of last year.

#14 A shocking new study has discovered that 137 million Americans have experienced “medical financial hardship in the past year”.

#15 Credit card charge-offs at U.S. banks have risen to the highest level in nearly 7 years.

#16 Credit card delinquencies have risen to the highest level in almost 8 years.

#17 More than half a million Americans are homeless right now.

#18 Homelessness in New York City is the worst that it has ever been.

#19 Nearly 102 million Americans do not have a job right now.  That number is worse than it was at any point during the last recession.

But at least the stock market has been doing well, right?

Actually, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been down for two days in a row, and investors are getting kind of antsy.

Hopes of a trade deal with China had been propping up stocks in recent weeks, but it looks like negotiations may have hit “an impasse”…

The latest round of US-China trade talks may have hit an impasse, raising doubts about the chances of an early trade deal between the world’s two leading economies, Chinese official media reported on Thursday.

Unlike the previous negotiations, the 10th round of high-level economic and trade talks, which concluded here on Wednesday, had fewer details about specific discussions and results, state-run Global Times reported.

I warned my readers repeatedly that this would happen.  The Chinese are going to negotiate, but they are going to drag their feet for as long as possible in hopes that the U.S. will free Meng Wanzhou.

Of course that isn’t going to happen, and so at some point the Chinese will have to decide if they are willing to move forward with a trade deal anyway.

But if the Chinese drag their feet for too long, Trump administration officials may lose patience and take their ball and go home.

In any event, the truth is that the U.S. economy is really slowing down, and no trade deal is going to magically change that.

And a lot of other pundits are also pointing out that a substantial economic slowdown has now begun.  For example, the following comes from Brandon Smith’s latest article…

The bottom line is, the next crash has already begun. It started at the end of 2018, and is only becoming more pervasive with each passing month. This is not “doom and gloom” or “doom porn”, this is simply the facts on the ground. While stock markets are still holding (for now), the rest of the system is breaking down right on schedule. The question now is, when will the mainstream media and the Fed finally acknowledge this is happening? I suspect, as in 2008, they will openly admit to the danger only when it is far too late for people to prepare for it.

Hopefully things will remain relatively stable for as long as possible, because nobody should want to see a repeat of 2008 (or worse).

Unfortunately, we can’t stop the clock.  We are already more than a third of the way through 2019, and we will be into 2020 before we know it.

It has been an unusual year so far, but I have a feeling that it is about to get much, much more interesting.

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Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Featured image is from The Economic Collapse

A junior Canadian gas E&P company has shut down abruptly, leaving as many as 4,700 wells behind, CBC reports, quoting the Alberta Energy Regulator, which said it had sent Trident Exploration Corp. an order to manage its wells, to which the company did not respond.

Trident closed two days ago and announced it would not be returning any money to shareholders or holders of unsecured bonds, adding it had well abandonment and reclamation liabilities of US$244.78 million (C$329 million) to deal with.

According to the Alberta Energy Regulator, these 4,700 wells add to more than 3,000 abandoned wells in Canada’s oil heartland that are currently awaiting remediation. The regulator also said it had been working with the company to smooth its exit from the industry and had ordered it to decommission the wells or transfer them to another company. Trident failed to comply with the order, the AER said.

“Trident does not have the funds to operate its infrastructure or enter into creditor protection. As a result, they have decided to walk away, leaving more than 4,400 licensed sites, many of them active, without an operator,” the watchdog told CBC.

Data from the Alberta Energy Regulator says there are some 170,000 abandoned wells in the province, most of these sealed and taken out of service or reclaimed. The number represents more than a third of the total well count in Alberta, with the watchdog noting in its overview on the topic that even their abandonment, the wells remain the responsibility of the company that owns them.

Two years ago, think tank C. D. Howe warned Alberta was facing a well cleanup and reclamation bill of US$5.95 billion (C$8 billion) and needed to change the way it made companies take financial charge of the abandonment and reclamation of their wells. Since then, this figure has grown.

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Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

UPDATED: According to pro-IDF sources,yet to be confirmed, a total of 90 rockets were launched.

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At least 50 rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip at Israeli targets in the morning of May 4, according to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). According to pro-IDF sources, “tens” rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system.

Especially intense explosions were reported in the area of Ashkelon.

.

There are reports that the IDF’s aircraft delivered strikes on at least two supposed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.

RAW FOOTAGE: Incoming rocket fire from Gaza at Israeli civilians, as filmed by the Israeli civilians that Hamas is targeting. pic.twitter.com/Kz1d1KwCle

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 4, 2019

The May 4 rocket launchers took place one day after two Israeli troops were shot and injured during patrol along the contact line with the Gaza Strip. In response to the shooting, the Israeli Air Force struck an alleged Hamas target, killing two people.

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Just two weeks after the nine-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster—the largest ocean oil spill in U.S. history—the Trump administration on Thursday moved to dismantle offshore drilling regulations aimed at preventing another catastrophic leak.

The White House’s revised Well Control Rule—which could save the fossil fuel industry close to a billion dollars over the next decade—was unveiled by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who advocacy groups have described as a “walking, talking conflict of interest.”

Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana, called the Trump administration’s move “a major step backward in offshore drilling safety.”

“Gutting the few offshore drilling safeguards established in wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is reckless and wrong,” Hoskins said in a statement. “More drilling and less safety is a recipe for disaster. We should be implementing new safety reforms, not rolling back the few safety measures currently in place.”

The Trump administration today weakened crucial offshore drilling safety standards that were put in place after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, which killed 11 people and covered the seas with millions of barrels of oil. https://t.co/y9MY87Vuuk

— NRDC 🌎 (@NRDC) May 2, 2019

This administration is constantly trying to literally poison Americans.https://t.co/gTTbVBVkKh

— Thor Benson (@thor_benson) May 2, 2019

The rule will go into effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register, which could happen as early as Friday.

According to the New York Times, one of the major components of the Trump administration’s plan “is a significant reduction in the requirement for oil companies to test fail-safe devices called blowout preventers, which are intended to be a last line of defense against disasters like Deepwater Horizon.”

The White House’s revisions also included slight tweaks to the language of existing regulations that environmentalists warned could have massive effects.

As the Washington Post reported:

“Safety-bureau regulators removed a key word from language describing the level of down-hole pressure the agency requires operators to maintain in a given well to avoid an accident. The word it removed is ‘safe.'”

Chris Eaton, oceans attorney with Earthjustice, said his organization “will use every tool we have to prevent these rollbacks.”

“The Trump administration is rolling back mechanisms and technology designed to protect rig workers and prevent another disaster offshore,” Eaton said in a statement. “These rollbacks are a hand out to oil company CEOs at the cost of endangering the lives of their workers and heightening the risk for another environmental catastrophe off America’s coastlines.”

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Featured image: U.S. Coast Guard crews work to put out a fire during the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. (Photo: U.S. Coast Guard)

Under the guise of protecting human rights, the Trump administration is illegally meddling in three countries it has dubbed the “troika of tyranny” — Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. National Security Adviser John Bolton claimed,

“Miami is home to countless Americans, who fled the prisons and death squads of the Castro regime in Cuba, the murderous dictatorships of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, and the horrific violence of the 1980s and today under the brutal reign of the Ortegas in Nicaragua.”

But the U.S. government’s human rights record doesn’t compare favorably to Cuba’s. And the Trump administration, which ignores notorious human rights violators like Saudi Arabia, is acting out of more cynical motives in its commission of egregious human rights violations against Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

The U.S. government has imposed unlawful, coercive sanctions on these nations, and attempted to mount a coup to illegally change Venezuela’s regime.

Trump and the real troika of tyranny — Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams — have failed in their coup attempt against the democratically elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Trump’s troika, egged on by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), are seeking to substitute U.S. puppet Juan Guaidó for Maduro as president of Venezuela.

On May 1, Pompeo told Fox Business that the U.S. might use military force in Venezuela “if that’s what is required.” Eric Prince, founder of the infamous Blackwater mercenary group, presented a plan to U.S. and European leaders to provide 5,000 mercenaries to Guaidó.

McClatchy reported that covert U.S. weapons shipments arrived in Venezuela from Miami in February.

This is particularly alarming because Russia has a solidarity presence in Venezuela and a U.S.-backed attack could risk a conflagration with Russia.

Furthermore, the United Nations Charter forbids countries from using or threatening to use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another country. The Charter of the Organization of American States prohibits any country from intervening in the internal or external affairs of another nation. And the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees the right to self-determination.

Sanctions Constitute Illegal Collective Punishment

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has increased punishing sanctions on Venezuela as a step toward forcible regime change.

“Statements from the [Trump] administration indicated that the purpose of the sanctions was to provoke a military rebellion to topple the government,” according to a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Those sanctions are exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe in Venezuela. They have led to more than 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018 and oil production has fallen more than 36 percent since January 2019.

Source: Embassy Protection Collective/Facebook

The report says the economic sanctions Trump imposed in August 2017 “reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation.” In addition, “They exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis and made it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.”

According to the report,

“Even more severe and destructive than the broad economic sanctions of August 2017 were the sanctions imposed by executive order on January 28, 2019, and subsequent executive orders this year; and the recognition of a parallel government.”

Seeking to pressure Cuba to cease its solidarity with Venezuela, Trump has slammed Cuba with more sanctions, stiffening the economic and travel blockade and activating Title III of the Helms Burton Act to allow thousands of lawsuits that will discourage tourism and investment in Cuba.

Trump has threatened Cuba with “a full and complete” embargo if it does not “immediately” stop supporting the Maduro government. Cuba called Bolton a “pathological liar” for alleging that Cuban troops are stationed in Venezuela. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez stated at a news conference, “This is vulgar calumny. Cuba does not have troops nor military forces nor does it participate in military or security operations of the sister Republic of Venezuela.” Indeed, the CIA has determined that Cuba is much less involved and its solidarity is much less crucial to Venezuela than U.S. officials think, according to a former official.

In December 2018, Trump signed a bill levying sanctions to block Nicaragua from obtaining loans from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. government is targeting Nicaragua’s Bancorp, which has ties to Venezuela.

All of these sanctions constitute collective punishment of the civilian population, which is prohibited by the Geneva and Hague Conventions. They also violate the Charter of the Organization of American States, which prohibits intervention in the internal or external affairs of another country and the use of economic or political coercive measures “to force the sovereign will of another State.”

This is not the first time the U.S. government has interfered and intervened in these three sovereign socialist countries. In 1960, responding to a secret State Department memo, the Eisenhower administration imposed an economic embargo on Cuba. The memo proposed “a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” The cruel U.S. economic blockade against Cuba, which continues to this day, has never led to the overthrow of the Cuban Revolution.

In the 1980s, the Regan administration illegally assisted the Contras, who sought unsuccessfully to overthrow Daniel Ortega’s socialist government in Nicaragua.

And in 2002, the CIA during the George W. Bush administration mounted a failed coup attempt against socialist president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

The United States uses a double standard for its human rights concerns and its attacks on socialist countries.

Embassy Protection Collective Protects Venezuelan Embassy

Meanwhile, the Embassy Protection Collective remains in the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C. Members of CODEPINK and Popular Resistance have lived in the embassy for more than two weeks to protect it from a coup attempt and possible invasion by U.S.-backed opposition forces. On May 1, members of the collective fended off an attempted takeover of the embassy by forces loyal to Guaidó.

Starting to gather for the rally in front of the embassy. (Source: Embassy Protection Collective/Facebook)

If the Trump administration were to enter the embassy to expel these people, who are present with consent of the Venezuelan government, it would violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Article 22 of that treaty states, “The premises of the mission shall be inviolable.” U.S. agents are prohibited from entering the embassy without the consent of the Maduro government. The United States is also “under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.” And the premises, furniture and other property “shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.”

Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, members of the Embassy Protective Collective, wrote,

If the Venezuelan embassy in Washington is taken over by the opposition, it will have disastrous results. The Venezuelan government declared that if this happens, they will take the US embassy in Caracas. The US will view this as an act of aggression, and because it is already looking for an excuse to do so, could attack Venezuela. Because Russia and China are close allies of Venezuela, this could spark a global conflict.

Why Is Team Trump Intent on Sanctions and Regime Change?

Why is Trump’s troika so intent on regime change in Venezuela and sanctions in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua?

Last month, Bolton addressed the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association on the 58th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which the U.S. aided and abetted a failed attempt to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro. “Together, we can finish what began on those beaches,” Bolton said, adding, “We must reject the forces of communism and socialism in this hemisphere.”

It’s not simply anti-communism that animates the Trump administration’s fixation on sanctions and regime change in these Latin American countries. “With at least a half-million voters who were born in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia or Nicaragua — and more with ancestral roots in those countries — it’s a constituency that could prove pivotal in November 2020 in a state that’s essential to Trump’s reelection fortunes,” Marc Caputo wrote at Politico.

U.S. strategies on Cuba and Venezuela intertwine in an insidious way, and Senator Rubio is pivotal in both. “Venezuela is really an extension of the position on Cuba,” according to Ricardo Herrera, director of the Cuba Study Group. The Wall Street Journal reports that both countries are part of a plan to reassert U.S. dominance in Latin America and finally destroy the Cuban Revolution.

Moreover, corporate America wants to get its hands on Venezuela’s oil. Bolton said in January, “We’re in conversation with major American companies now…. It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

Veterans for Peace issued a statement calling on U.S. troops to resist illegal orders to invade Venezuela, noting, “While President Trump speaks of supporting democracy in Venezuela and Latin America, the real purpose of the U.S. assault on the Venezuelan government is to fully open the vast Venezuelan oil reserves to U.S. and other Western oil corporations as well as to destroy progressive governments in Latin America that put their own peoples’ needs above the profits of foreign corporations.”

Although there is opposition to Maduro’s policies in Venezuela, people don’t want the United States to impose its will on them. Eva Golinger, former adviser to Hugo Chavez, told Democracy Now! that “certainly, there are many in Venezuela who would hope for change in their country, but they don’t want a U.S.-backed regime in place. They don’t want a far-right-imposed regime that answers to foreign interests, which is what we’re seeing take place in the country.”

On May 1, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), also appearing on Democracy Now!, said, “A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela,” adding, “this particularly bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela, and it certainly does not help and is not in the interest of the United States.”

Many in Congress and the corporate media walk in lockstep with the administration on its Venezuela strategy. On April 3, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill to recognize Guaidó as the president of Venezuela.

Instead, Congress should pass H.R.1004, the Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Act, which would forbid the use of U.S. military force in Venezuela without explicit congressional authorization. This bill is now pending in the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees. People can contact their representatives and urge them to co-sponsor and support H.R.1004.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Embassy Protection Collective/Facebook

Relying heavily on confidential industry research, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to re-approve glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.

EPA’s conclusion that glyphosate poses no risks to humans contradicts a 2015 World Health Organization analysis of the leading independent research that determined glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.

“American consumers have no reason to trust the EPA’s deeply flawed assessment of glyphosate’s safety,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “As with past EPA studies, the agency has relied heavily on confidential industry research that can’t be reviewed by independent scientists. This is an industry-friendly conclusion that’s simply not based on the best available science.”

In addition to the WHO’s conclusion, other U.S. federal agencies have acknowledged evidence of glyphosate’s link to cancer. This includes the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

The EPA assessment release today was conducted by the agency’s pesticide regulatory office, which has long had the reputation of reaching industry-friendly decisions.

“The EPA’s biased glyphosate assessment ignores its own guidelines for estimating cancer risks and falls short of the most basic standards of independent research,” said Donley. “Trump’s EPA lost no time in trying to hand Bayer a consolation prize following last week’s shareholder revolt over glyphosate. But it can’t erase glyphosate’s well-documented links to cancer.”

Within the past nine months, two juries have ordered Monsanto/Bayer to pay multimillion-dollar awards to glyphosate users suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which independent research has linked to glyphosate. A third trial is currently underway, and lawsuits involving roughly 13,000 people have been filed against the company for failing to warn consumers of the pesticide’s cancer risks.

Emails obtained in litigation brought against Monsanto by cancer victims and their families uncovered a disturbingly cozy relationship between the EPA and Monsanto on matters involving the glyphosate risk assessment.

In one example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would be reviewing glyphosate’s safety, an EPA official assured Monsanto he would work to thwart the review, saying, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.”

That Health and Human Services review was delayed for three years and only recently released.

In addition to evaluating the risks of glyphosate to human health, the EPA also analyzed risks to plants and animals and found that serious harms could result from using glyphosate, including exposure to spray drift that could harm the growth and reproduction of birds and mammals. It also found that exposure to small mammals exceeded by 10-fold the agency’s level of concern — the exposure level known to cause harm.

“In addition to the threats glyphosate poses to human health, glyphosate is a leading cause of the decline of the imperiled and iconic monarch butterfly,” said Donley. “The minor, industry-vetted restrictions the EPA has proposed are a far cry from what’s needed to bring these amazing creatures back from the brink.”

The EPA’s assessment found that field buffers up to 600 feet would be needed to prevent harm to milkweed, the sole host plant for monarch caterpillars. Yet the EPA’s interim approval does not contain any field buffers, and the minor spray-drift mitigation measures put in place were preapproved by the pesticide industry.

Migratory monarch populations have declined by 80 percent in the past two decades, and their decline has been driven in large part by the surge in glyphosate use resulting from the widespread planting of corn and soybeans crops genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate.

Glyphosate is a potent killer of milkweed. The dramatic surge in glyphosate use has virtually wiped out milkweed plants in the Midwest’s corn and soybean fields. While monarch populations enjoyed a one-year spike due to ideal weather conditions in the 2018-2019 season, migratory monarchs continue to be gravely imperiled by glyphosate use.

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Featured image: Monarch butterfly photo by Lori Ann Burd, Center for Biological Diversity. (Source: CBD)

No place on Earth is free from human influence—not even the bottom of the deepest trenches in the ocean.

Shrimp-like critters from three West Pacific ocean trenches were found to munch on food that sinks down from the surface, leaving a unique chemical signature from decades-old nuclear bomb tests in the bodies of the deep-sea crustaceans. The findings, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, not only help marine scientists figure out how these bottom dwellers survive, but also underscore the depths to which humanity’s influence can penetrate.

Deep ocean trenches may be among the least explored nooks on Earth. The deepest of these, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, reaches down to about 36,000 feet below sea-level. (Mt. Everest could sit at the bottom, and its summit would still lie beneath more than a mile of water.) At the bottom, temperatures hover just above freezing and the water exerts a pressure more than 1,000 times that felt at the surface.

“Biologically, [ocean] trenches are taken to be the most pristine habitats on Earth,” says Weidong Sun, a geochemist at the Institute of Oceanology in China and coauthor of the new study. “We are interested in how life survives down there, what’s its food source, and whether human activities have any influence.”

In those dark depths, one of the most common critters is the shrimp-like amphipod, a family of crustaceans that scavenge the ocean floor for food. Where that food comes from is a matter of debate. Potential sources include morsels that percolate up from Earth’s interior, nutrient-rich sediment that slides down steep trench walls, or tasty detritus that wafts down from the surface.

A recent haul of deep-sea amphipods offered Sun and colleagues a chance to solve this marine mystery. Using baited traps, two Chinese research vessels in 2017 harvested amphipods from three trenches in the West Pacific, including the famous Mariana Trench. Sun’s team chemically analyzed the amphipods’ muscle tissue and gut contents and found elevated levels of carbon-14, a heavy variant of carbon. The levels closely matched abundances found near the surface of the ocean, where the amount of carbon-14 is higher than usual thanks to nuclear bomb tests conducted more than half a century ago.

Carbon comes in a few different varieties based on how many neutrons are stuffed into its atomic nucleus. About one out of every trillion carbon atoms on Earth has two extra neutrons. This form, known as carbon-14, occurs naturally thanks to high-speed atomic particles from deep space whacking into nitrogen atoms. But in the middle of the 20th century, humans doubled the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, from 1945 to 1963 the United States and the Soviet Union (with a little help from the United Kingdom and France) detonated nearly 500 nuclear bombs, 379 of which exploded in the atmosphere. These tests dramatically increased the amount of carbon-14 on our planet. The Test Ban Treaty of 1963 put a stop to most atmospheric and underwater tests, and carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere started a slow return to normal—though they are still higher than pre-nuclear levels—as ocean waters and land-based life absorbed carbon from the air.

This steady decline of carbon-14, which has a half-life of about 5,730 years, has become a useful tool for figuring out the age and source of organic matter. Throughout any organism’s life, it latches on to carbon in the environment. When the organism dies, that exchange stops. By measuring how much carbon is in the form of carbon-14, researchers can determine when an organism died.

Different places on Earth also have highly variable inventories of carbon-14. Organic material from inside the planet is largely free of carbon-14. Sediments from ocean trench walls also have very low levels. But material from the ocean surface mirrors the relatively high amounts in the atmosphere.

In the muscle tissue of the harvested amphipods, carbon-14 levels closely matched surface abundances from 2004 to 2007, which suggests that these creatures live for more than a decade. Their cousins near the surface typically live for just two years. The freshly digested food in the amphipods’ guts, meanwhile, had carbon-14 levels similar to those found in contemporary surface samples, suggesting that surface flotsam quickly plummets to the deepest trenches where the amphipods scarf it down.

A map of the Mariana Trench with Challenger Deep labeled, the deepest known point in the ocean with a depth of about 36,000 feet. (Kmusser via Wikicommons CC BY 2.5)

While the nuclear bomb signature has been recorded a couple miles down in the West Atlantic, no one has seen it as these depths before.

“This is just interesting as all get out,” says Robert Key, a Princeton oceanographer who was not involved with this study. He points out that starting about a mile below the surface of the North Pacific, carbon-14 levels closely match what the atmosphere looked like before the bomb tests. “The high carbon-14 [in the amphipods] could only come from food that’s come down from the top,” he says.

The abundance of material created in nuclear bomb tests high in the sky found in the bodies of deep-dwelling amphipods underscores a very intimate connection between human activity and the most isolated reaches of the sea.

“These are indeed extraordinary results, but I am not surprised,” says Timothy Shank, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “From 25 years of conducting exploration and research on deep-sea ecosystems, I find their connection to us being closer than we ever thought.”

Toilets and showers lurk two miles down, he says, while plastic and metal trash has turned up in more than 30 deep-water canyons off the east coast of the United States.

And this isn’t the first time that researchers have seen trench amphipods dealing with humanity’s refuse. A 2017 paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution reported that amphipods from two West Pacific trenches contained elevated levels of the industrial pollutants PCB, once widely used in electronic devices, and PBDE, a flame retardant. In some Mariana Trench amphipods, PCB levels were as much as 50 times higher than levels found in crabs caught near the Liaohe River, one of the most polluted rivers in China.

Sun and colleagues aren’t done with their amphipods or the rich ecosystem that flourishes in these underwater canyons.

“There are lots of creatures in the very deep, very dark places,” Sun says. “We want to understand how the ecosystem deals with human activity … and how the system reacts to this heavy pollution from the surface.”

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Featured image: The first test of a thermonuclear weapon, or a hydrogen bomb, codenamed Ivy Mike and conducted by the United States in 1952 over the island of Elugelab in Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. (Public Domain)

We bring this article to the attention of our readers for informational purposes only

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After the statement from Chinese geneticist Jiankui He that he and his team had achieved the birth of the first genetically modified babies (that our Observatory covered extensively, see HERE), the Chinese government ordered an official investigation that has now confirmed the veracity of these facts.

Jiankui and his team used the CRISPR gene editing tool to inactivate the CCR5 gene in human embryos, giving them immunity to the AIDS virus. Two of these embryos were transferred to the patient, with the pregnancy progressing and resulting in the birth of the first babies with a modified genome. Another pregnancy is also currently underway.

The investigation has revealed that the Chinese scientist falsified documents to pretend that the experiment had been approved by an Ethics Committee. He also used blood samples from other individuals so that the tests would not detect that the men participating in the experiment were HIV positive, as in China, HIV carriers are banned from participating in vitro fertilization cycles. The university where he worked has announced that he has been formally dismissed.

International scientific community opinion

These experiments have been widely criticized by the international scientific community, because the technique is not safe and the changes will be transmitted from generation to generation. Furthermore, in a recent issue of journal The Lancet, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and a group of HIV researchers have joined the criticisms, classing the facts as contrary to ethics, morality and legality, and proposing the implementation of appropriate regulations and practical guidelines. They also recommend that the privacy of the babies be protected.

Counterproductive effects of the modification

It is also interesting that the HIV researchers stress how inactivation of the CCR5 gene not only does not mean the cure of any disease (it is a preventive modification), but that it may be counterproductive: “The CCR5 gene has a key role in maintaining proper physiological and immunological functions of the cell. Genetically knocking out CCR5 in healthy human embryos has no scientific basis, could have serious adverse effects, and is likely to have unpredictable consequences”. They also highlight that “HIV is highly mutable and CCR5 is only one of the co-receptors for HIV entry. Therefore, disabling the CCR5 gene would not completely prevent HIV infection” and that “proven effective and accessible strategies already exist for the prevention of perinatal transmission of HIV”. They therefore concluded that this genetic modification “provides no benefit but is likely to have uncontrollable risks to the babies and their future health”.

Should only be condemned genetic modifications with reproductive purposes?

Up to this point, the assessments provided appear adequate. Nevertheless, there is another aspect in which the ethical criterion does not seem right to us. Thus, the three publications condemn only those genetic modifications that have a “reproductive purpose”, understood as the implantation of the embryos in a woman and their development. The modification of embryos for investigational ends, in contrast, would not be reproachable. However, this involves the modification of human embryos for their subsequent use and destruction, which is ethically unacceptable. Scientific advances in this area should be based on research on animal embryos.

Spanish Bioethics Committee position

In light of this news, the Spanish Bioethics Committee has issued a document stating their position on these events and on germline genetic modification.

The report highlights the importance not only of the safety problems that gene editing poses, but also the ethical and social conflicts. It also states that

“in no case, the decision to apply gene editing and the corresponding gene therapy in humans can start from private and singular initiatives, but rather should be taken in a general framework of reflection, deliberation and consensus”.

As regards the distinction between genetic modification for curative or enhancement purposes, it states that “although the use of these techniques in the strictly curative field is not exempt from ethical problems, their use for direct or indirect enhancement purposes (mere biology or enhancement genetic engineering), as has happened in the case of the two girls born in China, is absolutely unacceptable and inadmissible, under the requirements of the essential value of the dignity and equality of human beings”.

The US has more or less succeeded in convincing Belarus to “defect” from Russia and pivot to the West, which therefore puts Trump in a prime position to twist Putin’s arm through Lukashenko as he attempts to squeeze seemingly endless strategic concessions out of Moscow, but it remains to be seen whether this geopolitical blackmail will actually work.

The Crisis That’s Being Kept Under Wraps (For Now)

There’s a serious crisis brewing in Europe but barely anyone has noticed because the relevant Great Powers have self-interested reasons in staying silent about it. Unbeknownst to many, Russian-Belarusian relations are rapidly transforming before the world’s eyes and potentially becoming a game-changer in the New Cold War after Minsk shut down Moscow’s oil transit through its territory and just unprecedentedly got Putin to replace his ambassador to the country after less than a year on the job following controversial comments that he recently made about his host country. His remarks weren’t all that inflammatory but they got Lukashenko to issue a thinly veiled demand to Putin that he punish his envoy, which the Russian leader ultimately acquiesced to because he really had no choice if he wanted to de-escalate this worsening crisis and carry out much-needed “damage control” for his country’s image.

Denying Reality Doesn’t Change It

Russia officially denied that these developments indicate a crisis between the two Eurasian Union and CSTO allies, but then again, it’s understandable why it would want to downplay this drama in order to avoid the attendant disaster that it would be for its soft power if the international audience realized that this “fellow Slavic Orthodox country” is following in Ukraine’s footsteps by “defecting” to the West.

The US, which has been successfully courting Lukashenko since 2014, is aware of just how sensitive of an issue this is for Russia in all respects, which is why it’s keeping quiet about it in order to cut a deal with Moscow behind closed doors that would give Putin a “face-saving” defeat and avoid the loud domestic criticism that he’d come under if he was blamed for “losing Belarus”.

Simply put, despite their asymmetries in geographic and demographic sizes, Belarus is much more important to Russia than the reverse because Minsk can always replace the role that Moscow plays in its economy by embracing the West, an “inconvenient fact” that few in the Kremlin cared to recognize due to the hubris that’s pervaded within its walls since Putin restored the country’s Great Power status. Taking its alliance with Belarus for granted, Russia imposed a tax on its oil exports at the beginning of the year that Minsk said would cost it hundreds of millions of dollars a year but which Moscow claimed was necessary to stop the billions of dollars that it’s been bleeding to subsidize its neighbor’s economy.

Everything snowballed from then on out until the geopolitical avalanche finally happened and Belarus cut off Russia’s energy exports to Europe on the pretext that $2.7 billion in tainted oil was recently pumped through the Druzhba (ironically, “Friendship”) Pipeline. Moscow maintains that an act of sabotage might have been responsible for contaminating its oil exports while there are those who suspect that it might have been a “plausibly deniable” way to punish Minsk for its pro-Western pivot even though this speculatively “clever plan” ended up backfiring in the worst way possible. Either way, there’s no avoiding the fact that Russia stands to lose untold billions in current and future revenue from this oil crisis alone, to say nothing of its long-term geostrategic consequences in the economic and military spheres vis-a-vis the Eurasian Union and the CSTO.

Catastrophic Strategic Consequences

This isn’t mere “fearmongering” either since the EU just announced that “there are no market barriers to US LNG coming to Europe” during the 1st EU-US Energy Council Business To Business Energy Forum that took place on Thursday and saw the attendance of US Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Seeing as how energy-hungry Europe can no longer depend on the reliability of Russia’s overland pipelines through Ukraine and now Belarus, it makes sense why it would seek to replace the sudden drop in Russian exports with American resources instead. This will have the inevitable effect of hitting the Russian budget at its most sensitive moment when the country is racing to implement Putin’s landmark “Great Society” socio-economic development strategy and preparing for the impending change of power that will finally happen in 2024 (PP24, “Post-Putin 2024”).

Russia literally can’t afford to lose the revenue that it receives from its energy exports to Europe (especially those through Belarus) given the aforementioned domestic context and the ongoing Arms and Space Races with the US, though Moscow can conceivably take advantage of the US’ anti-Iranian sanctions regime to replace Tehran in the growing Chinese and Indian marketplaces and recoup some of its losses at its “partner’s” expense. Even so, the fact of the matter remains that Belarus is disproportionately more important to Russia than the reverse, and Minsk’s “defection” to the West and its stunning turning of the strategic tables on Moscow carry with it very serious security implications for the larger of the two countries that are also immensely embarrassing for its international image, hence why its media has been conspicuously mum about these developments.

As horrifying of a scenario as many in Alt-Media will undoubtedly consider it to be, objective observers can’t discount the possibility of Washington using Minsk to geopolitically blackmail Moscow,. Instead of publicly humiliating Russia by openly flaunting this and risking the chance that international awareness about it could trigger an  “unpredictable reaction” from Putin in order to “save face”, however, Trump wants to first try reaching a deal behind closed doors and only then would he openly throw this in his counterpart’s face if he fails to reach one on America’s terms. It’s with this in mind that the upcoming Lavrov-Pompeo meeting in Finland next week takes on a completely new significance because it might lead to the US requesting Russia to do something for it in Syria in exchange for not weaponizing Belarus more intensely than it already has.

The Real “Deal Of The Century”

Russia is already doing its utmost to pressure Syria into initiating Iran’s dignified but “phased withdrawal” from the country by refusing to provide it with energy relief during the ongoing fuel crisis, attempting to ensnare it in a strategic trap through the Tartus port deal, and speaking on its behalf by provocatively misrepresenting Damascus’ position towards Idlib and “Israel” until it gets what it wants, but its efforts might take on a renewed urgency if the US demands that this be done by next month to coincide with its expected unveiling of the so-called “Deal of the Century” at the end of Ramadan. It remains to be seen whether Russia can succeed within such a short timeframe considering that it’s been trying to achieve this for roughly a year already, but it might nevertheless still try.

In any case, Moscow would be sorely mistaken if it thinks that Washington would stop geopolitically blackmailing it with Belarus in the event that Russia does the US a favor in Syria because Trump has succeeded in reversing the power dynamics between Lukashenko and Putin and won’t hesitate to repeatedly play this hand as he seeks to advance America’s grand strategic interests. What the US really wants from Russia is for Moscow to slow down the pace of its Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) integration with Beijing, but that’s politically impossible for Putin to do after he proudly committed his country to this global series of megaprojects during his keynote speech at last week’s BRI Forum. As such, the US will probably try to transform Belarus from a thorn in Russia’s side to a spear that strategically strikes the Great Power’s Heartland.

What’s meant by this is that the US has the potential to seriously damage Russia’s soft power by propagating global awareness of Belarus’ pro-Western pivot and then instrumentalizing it in such a way that it renders the much-touted Eurasian Union and CSTO post-Soviet integration frameworks useless, especially if Washington is able to convince Minsk to sign an EU Association Agreement and strengthen its ties with NATO through the ongoing “Partnership for Peace” negotiations. Under those very probable scenarios, Russia would have no choice but to either cut a deal with the US and/or Belarus, buy off Lukahsneko (if it’s even still possible), or take him out, the latter choice of which the US has been deviously preconditioning the international community to expect ever since the beginning of the year in order to raise suspicions about Moscow’s geopolitical motives.

Concluding Thoughts

There should be no doubt by now that Trump is getting ready to twist Putin’s arm through Lukahsneko as he attempts to squeeze seemingly endless strategic concessions out of Moscow, but there’s no telling whether or not he’ll succeed in getting what he wants out of Russia since its leadership might have foreseen this dark scenario and has backup plans to implement for when it happens. In the event that Russia refuses to enter into a series of behind-the-scenes deals with the US in exchange for preventing Washington from propagating the embarrassing crisis in Russian-Belarusian relations across the world and irreversibly damaging Moscow’s soft power, it’ll have to accept the consequences to its international image and the post-Soviet integration structures that it leads. Strategically reorientating itself eastward towards China and southward through the “Ummah Pivot” could help lessen the blow, but nothing would ever be the same again if Russia “loses” Belarus for good.

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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.

In the wake of RussiaGate 1.0, will there be a shift in US foreign policy involving a decisive change in US-Russia relations?

Is the Witch-hunt over? 

Or is RussiaGate 2.0 in the making? 

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On March 3, Trump and Putin held a telephone conversation. They spoke for an hour and a half.

The discussions were described by Trump as “positive”.

Trump “unofficially” discussed “The Russian Hoax” with Vladimir Putin. “Very Productive Talk”.

“Getting along with Russia and China, getting along with all of them is a very good thing, not a bad thing, it a good thing, it’s a positive thing,” (to reporters on May 3)

Trump confirmed that he was open to negotiations on reducing the stock of nuclear weapons with both Moscow and Beijing in the context of a trilateral deal (US-Russia-China). Indelibly, such an agreement could potentially destabilize Trump’s 1.2 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program. It could also have an impact on the movement of Aerospace and Defense (A & D) stocks, which experienced a market bonanza in 2018.

The lifting of sanctions on North Korea, Ukraine and the crisis in Venezuela were also discussed.

The Trump-Putin telephone initiative was taken without prior consultation with John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who have systematically blocked the restoration of normal dialogue and diplomatic exchange with Moscow.

Is this part of an unfolding internal battle between Trump and his national security advisers, not to mention Vice President Mike Pence? (image right).

President Trump’s overture to the Kremlin visibly contradicts both Bolton and Pompeo who are threatening president Maduro,  pressuring him to leave Venezuela and hand over the presidency to Guaido.  According to Trump:

“He [Putin] is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela,”

It is worth noting that two days prior to the Trump-Putin telephone conversation, Pompeo told Lavrov (also in a telephone conversation) that

“the intervention by Russia and Cuba is destabilizing for Venezuela and for the U.S.-Russia bilateral relationship.”

In a bitter irony, this (telephone) statement by Pompeo was made one day after the failed “military coup” in Caracas.

Will Trump’s dialogue with Putin have a bearing on the Bolton-Pompeo threats directed against the Maduro government? Was Trump’s call to Putin (May 3) meant to override Pompeo’s overt threats (May 1st) to intervene militarily in Venezuela?

Lavrov and Pompeo are set to meet early this week in Finland. Will Pompeo, a former army officer, Christian evangelical and for a short while a former-CIA director change his tone and approach following Trump’s telephone conversation with Putin? Unlikely. Mike Pompeo has been the architect of numerous foreign policy blunders since his appointment by Trump first as CIA director in January 2017 and then as Secretary of State.

The presumption of the mainstream media(Time) (which borders on ridicule) is that Donald Trump as president of the United States should have sought the green-light from Bolton-Pompeo. The fact of the matter is that these two individuals are deliberately involved in sabotaging US relations with a large number countries:

The conversation, which Trump went on to describe as “very positive,” appeared to be yet another example of Trump taking Putin’s claims at face value despite contrary evidence from his own government. The White House national security adviser, John Bolton, and U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo both said earlier this week that the Kremlin talked Maduro out of leaving Venezuela after U.S.-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido attempted to end his regime on Tuesday by calling for a military uprising. (emphasis added)

RussiaGate 2.0

How is this internal confrontation going to evolve? Who is calling the shots at the White House?

Pompeo and Bolton are an obstacle to normalizing diplomatic relations with Russia. They are dangerous individuals, psychopathic in their understanding of global geopolitics, influential with regard to sanctions and  military intervention. They are also misinformed with regard to the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, which they consider as peace-making bombs.

Both Bolton and Pompeo were instrumental in the sabotage of the latest US-North Korea summit in Hanoi.

Impeachment

Despite the release of the Mueller report, the impeachment campaign prevails. Immediately following the Putin-Trump telephone conversation, the campaign to impeach Trump has gone into high gear.

The Atlantic, March 2019

Will The Kremlin Intervene in the 2020 elections? 

Another absurd proposition: The US media is now intimating that Trump’s conversation with Putin is setting the stage for Kremlin intervention in the 2020 elections:

“Mr. President, did you tell him not to meddle in the next election?” a reporter asked.

“Excuse me, I’m talking, I’m answering this question. You are very rude. So we had a good conversation about several different things,” Trump told the reporter.

When asked again about Russian interference in future U.S. elections, Trump said: “We didn’t discuss that.”

According to the Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro

“President Donald Trump wants Russia to interfere on his behalf again in 2020”.

“All of a sudden, he’s willing to take the word of a leader like Vladimir Putin who, time and again, has shown himself to be adversarial to the United States and to be dishonest,” .

In turn, former Vice President Joe Biden, who is now candidate for the 2020 presidential elections has stated:

 “that Congress would have “no alternative” but to impeach President Trump if his administration seeks to block its investigations of issues raised in the special counsel’s report on Russian election interference.” (WaPo, April 30, 2019)

See Trump’s press conference 

ANNEX.

The Russian embassy in the US on the Trump-Putin Telephone Exchange

Embassy of Russia in the USA / Посольство России в США

May 3 at 10:25 AM ·

Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the United States of America Donald Trump, at the initiative of the American side.

The current state and prospects of bilateral relations were discussed with a focus on economic cooperation. The two presidents spoke in favour of developing mutually beneficial trade and investment relations. They affirmed their shared commitment to step up dialogue in various areas, including on issues of strategic stability.

Vladimir Putin informed Donald Trump of the key results of his April 25 meeting in Vladivostok with Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK Kim Jong-un, stressing that Pyongyang’s good-faith fulfilment of its commitments should be accompanied by reciprocal steps to ease the sanctions pressure on North Korea. Both parties noted the importance of consistent progress towards denuclearisation and achieving long-term normalisation on the Korean Peninsula.

The situation in Ukraine was touched on in the context of the recent presidential election. Vladimir Putin emphasised that the new leadership in Kiev should take real steps to implement the Minsk Agreements, which are critical to resolving the internal Ukrainian conflict.

While exchanging views on the situation around Venezuela, the President of Russia underscored that only the Venezuelans themselves have the right to determine the future of their country, whereas outside interference in the country’s internal affairs and attempts to change the government in Caracas by force undermine prospects for a political settlement of the crisis.

It was agreed to maintain contacts at various levels.

The two heads of state expressed satisfaction with the business-like and constructive nature of the conversation.
——————

“The conversation between Trump and Putin lasted for almost 1.5 hours,” Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
More:
http://tass.com/world/1056870

Baby Boomers should remember that innovative Sci Fi television series, The Outer Limits (1963). The opening monologue really was a rare look into the future… OUR future here in Military Industrial Empire’s America. Remember the opening:

Control Voice: [introduction] There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly, and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits!

Well, that was 56 years ago, and look at the boob tube now. They say in all the civics classes that We the People own the airwaves. Yeah right! It is those who run this empire who control our media, and not us. You channel surf through ALL the so called news and news talk shows, and all you get is ****!

The Two Party/One Party food fight centers lately on the ominous Mueller Report , all day and all night!

In between that nonsense the Democratic Party leaning networks focus on how terrible (and he is) Trump is behaving, but not on the real issues that we working stiffs should be concerned about. No, they spend time, after many commercial breaks, on sexual scandals and other low brow things, while this straw man is allowing the Military Industrial Empire to bankrupt us!

On the right wing pro Republican networks they focus on how great our economy is, despite the fact that too many working stiffs need to work second ( even third) jobs to stay afloat. Both sides seem to wish Julian Assange should be jailed for life… if not executed along with Ms. Manning and of course Eric Snowden… who had the foresight to get the hell out of Dodge before they got him. Both sides also want to satisfy the empire’s movers and shakers by seeing regime change in Venezuela, ignoring the fact that Maduro was legally elected and re-elected by his people. And through it all our cherished media servants make sure to genuflect at the altar of this massive beast called the Pentagon.

I used to love watching sports talk shows. No more. On any of the multitude of such shows all you get is hype and spin for either the NBA or the NFL. You have millionaire commentators, many ex jocks, who carry the water for their masters, the uber rich, who own those sports and the networks… and of course the corporations who advertise on them.

Scandal is in and strategy is out! Ever try to watch a live sporting event? In the old days of my baby boomer youth a NFL game was maybe 2.5 to 3 hours long. Now, they are at least close to 4 hours. So, a smart fan tapes the game and watches it on delay to avoid those incessant commercials. Major league baseball games used to also be 2.5 to 3 hours long… now they too are close to or even over 4 hours. 

I won’t even delve too much into the financial aspect of pro sports, with the mega millionaire players who spend too much time being on injured reserve, or the millionaire players who can’t even hit with a .250 average. Well, look at how much their team’s owners are raking in: Billions in some cases! And the media , like the Outer Limits monologue says, controls everything and makes mega billions on these sports. Meanwhile, any working stiff who dares to fork out a couple of hundred bucks to take his kid to a game is a jackass! Bad enough what we have to all pay for cable television when the 1996 Telecommunications (under so called ‘progressive’ President Clinton) opened the door for massive fee increases! The rest of the world may yet be ahead of us as many of their pro soccer leagues have the players wearing sponsor’s ads on their backs.

What I love is the two year cycle of preparation for another presidential election. Yes, it usually begins two years after the last election when the Two Party/One Party con job returns to overwhelm the suckers.

The drama intensifies as to who will be the next water carrier for the uber rich empire. Dumb downed Amerikans get so intense and so angry, each at the other side of this phony spectrum. The candidates are running around to raise money, for without the cash no one can ever have the sufficient commercial time of twenty and thirty second sound bites to win ‘Hearts and minds’. The print and electronic media whores love this all, as it fattens their piggybanks, with all those commercials and mailings.

Meanwhile, our ship is sinking and you better start taking Chinese language lessons!

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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].