Global Research

A clear shortage of fuel has forced the reduction of the quantity of gasoline sold to 20 liters every two days for private cars. In total, the sales would not exceed 200 liters of petrol per car per month and almost double that quantity for taxis.

Muhammad Khodhr, Lebanese Al-Mayadeen News Channel reporter in Syria wrote to almayadeen.net commenting on the pressing issue of the shortages in Syria. Mr. Khdhr’s article is in Arabic and we tried to translate it to our best to English.

The current crisis started on Saturday, April 6th, which the government attributes to the impact of US sanctions on the Syrian economy. Oil Minister Ali Ghanem said during a tour of the gas stations that the material was available at stations in an effort to reassure consumers who have just got out of a severe shortage in gas which stretched throughout the winter months and effectively ended with the start of the spring.

The US punishing the Syrian people for rejecting its intervention in their affairs

The main oil and gas fields in Syria went out of the government’s control in the early days of the crisis. Syria used to produce about 385 thousand barrels of oil per day before 2011, mostly from fields east of the Euphrates in the countryside of eastern Deir Al-Zour and Hasaka, and about 21 million cubic tons of gas, mostly from the central region. Production fell sharply to about 24 thousand barrels of oil per day.

Securing the Central Region and the rehabilitation of gas facilities helped increase the production of gas to 17 million cubic meters per day.

Overall estimated losses of this sector over the past eight years, according to official estimates, about 74.8 billion dollars, the most important losses, in the economic sense of any production sector in Syria due to the war.

The size of the depletion of oil production has exerted a strong pressure on the Syrian economy in all its details. For the first time, the government allowed the private sector to import its fuel and diesel oil to secure the work of factories and craft enterprises. The step that came into force was an attempt to circumvent US sanctions and access that material, but it is certainly not enough.

This was evident with very high prices for selling the material from its suppliers. The sale of diesel fuel was estimated at about 475 Liras per liter for industrialists according to Damascus Chamber of Industry, which decreased by simple margins due to competition but remained more than double the price at which the government sells diesel oil estimated at 185 Liras per liter.

In dealing with the issue of gas, efforts to double the production of local fields appeared to have reasonable results, especially as efforts continue to improve production according to official statements, while work is being done to import the difference between production and consumption.

The most important node today is the sanctions on the arrival of oil derivatives to the Syrian ports.

According to high-level government sources, the Suez Canal Authority prevented the passage of oil shipments from Iran to Syria in response to American pressure. It added to the difficulties faced by shipping companies to reach the Syrian ports in light of the complexities of insurance and fears of Western sanctions that would affect the work of these shipping companies. All these factors led to the suspension of the arrival of any shipment of oil to the Syrian ports for months, while the increased consumption, especially industrial with the return of tens of thousands of industrial and handicraft facilities in Aleppo, Hama and the countryside of Damascus, to double the features of the crisis.

No comprehensive solutions are soon coming, as per the given indications, regardless of government assurances. The current measures are aimed at managing the crisis through the sale of smaller quantities and the use of the smart card, and even the study related to raising the price of gasoline towards the liberalization of the price of quantities exceeding 100 liters per month for each car seems to be deferred now.

To end the current cycle may impose one of two solutions as long as the conditions of sanctions and restrictions on shipments to the Syrian ports, the first: to transfer these products by land from Iran through Iraq to Syria, and there is information about the possibility of adopting this option despite the length of the road and security risks on the border.

And the second: the restoration of rich oil fields east of the Euphrates to the Syrian state through a bold solution to the matter of East Euphrates as a whole. A solution seems more pressing today than ever before with the intensification of the pressure on the Syrians in their livelihood and economy and reconstruction plans… In this perspective can be understood the words of Syrian Defense Minister General Ali Ayoub during the high-level military meeting, which included the Chiefs of Staff of the Iraqi army, Othman Al-Ghanmi and The Iranian armed forces, Major General Mohammad Jafari, on March 18, and his assertion that the remaining card for the Americans in Syria is the “SDF” and “we will deal with it either by reconciliations or by liberating the land.”

Two solutions seem difficult but there is no substitute for them as long as there is no possibility in the foreseen future to circumvent the US sanctions which affects mostly Syria’s main ally Iran.

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Roundup lawsuits claim the weed killer caused several types of cancer like non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, b-cell lymphoma, leukemia, and others.

Monsanto faces 11,200+ Roundup lawsuits, including one in which the plaintiff received a jury award of $78.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

Why are Roundup Lawsuits Being Filed?

Monsanto developed glyphosate in 1970 to kill the weeds and grasses that harm crops. Monsanto marketed the chemical as Roundup Weed Killer, and by 2007 it became the most used herbicide in the United States. An estimated 1.4 billion pounds of Roundup are used in more than 160 countries each year.

Roundup has increased in popularity since Monsanto introduced seeds for genetically modified organisms (GMO) resistant to glyphosate, allowing farmers to spray the product everywhere without worrying about killing crops. Roundup Ready crops, as they are called, include plants like corn, soybean, and cotton, and they account for over 270 million pounds of crops each year.

Despite its widespread use, the popular weedkiller has been called into question as a possible health hazard within the past several years. Thousands of Roundup users have filed lawsuits alleging that they have developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, b-cell lymphoma, leukemia, or other forms of cancer after using the product.

Types of Blood Cancer Claimed in Roundup Lawsuits

• Anaplastic Large T-Cell Lymphoma
• Follicular B-Cell Lymphoma
• Mediastinal B-Cell Lymphoma
• Large B-Cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL)
• Mantle Cell Lymphoma
• High Grade Mature B-Cell Lymphoma
• Hairy Cell Leukemia
• Acute T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma
• Thymic Lymphoma
• Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

Does Roundup Cause Cancer?

There has been a lot of debate around the dangers of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer. Conflicting studies have been released, and Monsanto representatives argue that most studies have not found a cancer risk from glyphosate exposure.

However, a 2015 assessment of glyphosate released by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)  looked at the safety of five pesticides on the market in an attempt to see if they could be considered carcinogenic. Through their investigation, the IARC labeled glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A). This category is used for substances that the IARC believes has sufficient enough to indicate a likelihood that the substance can cause cancer, but the evidence is not yet entirely conclusive.

Representatives of the IARC have stood by their evaluation, even speaking out as recently as February 2018 to defend their findings. The agency said the monograph is a crucial first step for further research into glyphosate and other pesticides to better determine carcinogenicity and what levels of exposure specifically can be linked to these various types of cancer.

Separately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) originally stated back in 1995 that glyphosate should be labeled as a probable human carcinogen. In recent years, however, the agency has changed its mind and argued that glyphosate is not carcinogenic and actually has low toxicity for humans, as long as it is used according to the label directions. In its most recent drafted assessment released in December 2017, the EPA went further to say that the pesticide showed virtually no toxicity to animals, including birds, that encounter glyphosate in the natural environment. The EPA’s final assessment on glyphosate is due in 2019.

Given the disparity in studies, it is still unclear to what degree glyphosate may affect human health or a person’s risk of cancer.

Potential Monsanto Collusion

According to Bayer’s 2018 Annual Report, approximately 11,200 cancer patients and their families have filed lawsuits against Monsanto, claiming the company has been aware of the potential dangers of glyphosate and failed to properly warn consumers. Nonetheless, Monsanto and Bayer refute these claims.

In one recent Monsanto lawsuit, unsealed documents and emails emerged suggesting Monsanto had ghostwritten several scientific studies to help ensure that glyphosate was found to be safe to use in the EPA’s evaluation of the widely used herbicide, a claim the company publicly denies. Roundup cancer lawyers claim that company executives worked with a former EPA employee to refute claims that glyphosate was dangerous and tried to squash an investigation of the pesticide. Monsanto allegedly received notice of the herbicide’s evaluation months before it was made public, allowing them to prepare for a public relations attack against studies supporting a cancer link.

Roundup Settlements and Verdicts

Monsanto faces thousands of lawsuits as a result of its Roundup cancer-causing ingredients. A Roundup class action lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Monsanto, claiming its advertising falsely stated that Roundup products were safe to use. The class action suit also claims the company deliberately falsified documents and concealed information that glyphosate is dangerous to humans and environmental health.

Roundup Multidistrict Litigation (MDL 2741)

Due to the growing number of lawsuits against Roundup, federal multidistrict litigation has been consolidated under MDL No. 2741 under U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California. There are over 624 lawsuits pending under the multidistrict litigation, with the next case set for trial in February 2019.

Featured Roundup Lawsuit: Dewayne Johnson

Plaintiff Dewayne Johnson is a former school groundskeeper for a California county school system who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after years of using Roundup weed-killer and other glyphosate-based herbicides. According to Johnson, he used the product as many as 30 times per year, and on at least two occasions spilled a substantial amount of the chemical on his body.

In January 2016, Johnson filed a Roundup lawsuit against Monsanto, claiming that his use of Roundup contributed significantly to the development of his cancer. Because he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, California state law allowed Johnson to seek a fast-track lawsuit – though, the case still took nearly two and a half years to reach a jury trial. He built his case around the classification of glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the fact that not enough testing has been done on Roundup’s formulation, which includes other chemicals in addition to glyphosate.

On August 10, 2018, the San Francisco jury returned with a verdict that awarded Mr. Johnson $289 million ($39 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages) in his Roundup case. Monsanto appealed, asking for a new trial. However, in October 2018, a judge ruled against Monsanto, and the final amount awarded to Mr. Johnson and his family was $78.5 million.

Edwin Hardeman v Monsanto

Another early trial involved 70-year-old Edwin Hardeman, who used Roundup from the 1980s through 2015, when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Hardeman filed his lawsuit in 2016, claiming that Monsanto ignored and withheld evidence of Roundup’s link to cancer. The company also failed to warn consumers of the potential hazards of the weedkiller, according to Hardeman’s legal complaint.

In March 2019, a San Francisco jury decided unanimously in favor of Hardeman, confirming that Roundup was a “substantial factor” contributing to Hardeman’s lymphoma diagnosis. About a week after the verdict, the jury awarded $80 million to Hardeman in the damages phase of the trial, finding that Monsanto had filed to warn him and other consumers about the potential dangers of the Roundup formula.

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Randy L. Gori received his J.D. with honors from the St. Louis University School of Law, and is licensed to practice law in several U.S. District Courts. Mr. Gori is an accomplished trial attorney who is currently involved in Roundup cases across the United States. He is dedicated to representing victims in their pursuit of claims against Monsanto.

Featured image is from ConsumerSafety

The Russian Embassy in Washington has prepared an accurate 121-page report, THE RUSSIAGATE HYSTERIA: A CASE OF SEVERE RUSSOPHOBIA.

Everyone should read this report. It documents the fake news, lies, violations of diplomatic standards and international law, and gratuitous aggressive actions taken against Russia during the period beginning May 18, 2016 and continuing through the issuance of the Mueller Report.

Without explicitly saying so, the report shows that neither the US government nor the American media has a nanoparticle of integrity. Both are criminal organizations that are willing to risk war with Russia in their pursuit of narrow policitized agendas.

This is important information for Americans and the rest of the world to have. Every person, every government and every private organization that supports Washington’s Russophobic policies is contributing to the growing threat of nuclear war.

One hopes also that the entirety of the Russian government, media, and population also read the report as it has equally powerful messages for Russia. The messages are no doubt unintended, but they nevertheless emerge from the embassy’s report.

The Russian government should marvel at its naivete in trusting Washington, US institutions such as Citibank, and US adherence to international law. For 121 pages the report lists transgression against Russia followed by transgression and lie followed by lie; yet the Russian government continued to send diplomatic notes that are never answered, requests for meetings that are never answered, requests for evidence that are never answered. One would think that month after month of abuse would have caused the Russian government to wonder where was the intelligence, “cooperative spirit,” reason, and “common interest in global security” that Russia’s responses to Washington assumed were present in Russia’s “partner.”

The Russian government’s naive and gullible response to Washington played into Washington’s hands. By responding to Washington’s orchestrated Russophobia as if it were some kind of mistake based on bad information, the Russian government allowed Washington to keep the process of demonization alive and thereby contributed to the ongoing demonization of Russia. If, instead, the Russian government had denounced the demonization of Russia as Washington’s act of preparing Americans for war with Russia and had taken a belligerant rather than a complaining stance, the realization that Washington’s policy had serious cost would have spread throughout the US and Europe and voices would have arisen against Washington’s dangerous and reckless policy. Today in place of the uniformity of voice against Russia, there would be dissent opposing Washington’s irresponsible provocations.

The danger of Russian self-delusion is not over. The embassy’s report expresses the hope that now that the Mueller report has concluded that the much heralded collusion has no basis in fact, relations between Washington and Russia can be normalized and cooperation achieved.

There is no such possibility. The Democrats are screaming “coverup” and demanding the resignation of attorney general Barr and Trump’s impeachment. The presstitutes are claiming that the Mueller report vindicates their reporting. Trump continues to use US foreign policy to commit criminal acts. He has declared that the president of Venezuela is the person he picked, not the one Venezuelans elected. He has given to Israel part of Syria as if Syrian territory is his to give. He threatens Iran with war as Israel requires. In other words, American arrogance rises to ever higher heights.

At some point the Russian government and Russian people are going to have to accept the fact that to reach an understanding with Washington Russia must either surrender her sovereignty or become as belligerent as Washington and replace Russia’s useless refutations of Washington’s accusations with accusations of her own. Otherwise, Washington is going to keep pushing until war is the only possible outcome.

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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.

Western imperialism was built off of the exploitation of African land and labor from the mid-to-late 15^th century through the conclusion of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the consolidation of classical colonialism at the end of the 1800s.

Leading African historical scholars have documented the link between the tremendous profits accrued through the plantation system in the Caribbean, South America, Central America and North America and the rise of industrial capitalism. (See this)

The capitalist modes of production as exemplified in shipping, commerce, banking, commodities production and services all grew into formidable sectors during the period of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. By the dawn of the 20^th century and the eventual advent of the First World War, heavy industry had become the engine for the competition between various imperialist states seeking domination of global markets.

Of course the resistance of African workers, including agricultural, domestic and extractive-manufacturing, developed rapidly as an inevitable response to the horrendous conditions under which people labored. Peasant societies were often turned into a rural proletariat when the character of their labor production was exclusively designed to enrich the colonial powers.

As African farmers were driven from their traditional lands to work in the mines, large-scale agricultural production businesses, docks, mining facilities and factories, the conditions were conducive to the creation of labor organizations. In the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910 as result of the compromise over the conflict between the Boer and British settler populations aimed at the consolidation of white-minority rule, African miners began to demand better pay and working conditions through work stoppages at Dutoitspan, Voorspoed and Village Deep mines in January 1911. Nonetheless, they were forced back into the mines by the repressive tactics of the bosses supported by their European worker counterparts. (See this)

When the white miners went out on strike in 1913, they were committed to raising the standard of living for the European workers only, leaving African workers isolated for the purpose of super-exploitation. After WWI, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) was formed under the leadership of Clements Kadalie of Nyasaland (Malawi).

South African Industrial and Commerical Workers Union during the 1920s.

During the period of 1920-22 there were strikes and violent unrest in the mines where both African and white workers put forward their demands. The mine bosses sought to divide African and European miners by laying off whites to hire Blacks at inferior wages.

By 1922, white workers were in revolt in the Rand and managed to seize control of several towns while waging a reign of terror against African workers, murdering numerous people. The capitalist-colonialist regime would put down the white miners’ rebellion through aerial strikes against their meeting places and the killing of hundreds of European workers. The disturbances prompted the passage of the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 designed to win labor peace between the mine owners and European workers.

Eventually the racist government sought to deport ICU leader Kadalie from South Africa. A South African historical website says of the developments in 1926 that:

“Clements Kadalie, originally from Nyasaland, was targeted utilizing the South Africa’s pass laws, and was convicted for entering Natal without a permit. In a May Day address, Kadalie urges workers to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers’ commonwealth. However, by December, under the influence of a liberal coterie including Margaret Ballinger, the ICU adopted a motion at the national council meeting prohibiting members of the ICU from belonging to the Communist Party. Despite revolts at branches in Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg, the decision was endorsed at the seventh annual congress in April 1927. The Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926 firmly establishes the principle of the color bar in certain mining jobs. The South African Trade Union Congress (TUC) was formed. December saw an ultimatum being issued to the communists within the ICU to choose between the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and the ICU. Those who choose not to resign were expelled.” (See this)

Workers Fight Back in Africa Alongside the Independence Movement

These labor actions by African workers were not limited to South Africa. In West Africa there were strikes and rebellions in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast (Ghana). In Sierra Leone, still a British colony established after the conclusion of American war of separation, railway workers struck in January 1926 demanding higher wages. The work stoppage lasted for several weeks until broken by the colonial authorities.

Nigeria experienced the “Women’s War” of 1929-1930 when the threat of taxation and the restructuring of traditional life sparked a rebellion which lasted for several months in the eastern region of the country. Women torched colonial buildings and attacked British interests as well as warrant chiefs who had been collaborating with imperialism. The events represented the advent of a nationalist movement which transcended ethnic lines. (See this)

African Women’s War participants in Nigeria during 1929-1930.

Gold Coast public workers walked off the job in 1919 and 1921. Other strikes took place in the gold mines during 1924 and 1930. All through the decades of the 1930s there were industrial actions in the railway, mining and public works sectors. The most well-known strike took place among railway workers in 1939. During World War II, in 1942, there were ten major strikes in the British colony. (See this)

These developments were integral to emboldening of the struggle for national liberation after the conclusion of the second imperialist war. Two conferences held in Britain during 1945 were critical in raising the profile of African workers in the movement towards independence, Pan-Africanism and socialism.

The World Confederation of Trade Union (WFTU) was founded at a conference in England in 1945 and enjoyed the participation of African workers. In a forward to “The Voice of Colored Labor” by George Padmore, he noted:

“The wide and representative character of the Colonial delegation to the World Trade Union Conference in February was significant and encouraging. It was significant for the fact that for the first time in the history of international labor, colored Colonial workers – the most oppressed and exploited section of the world proletariat – were given the opportunity of voicing their grievances and of expressing their hopes and aspirations through their trusted leaders. It was encouraging because in discussing the question of a new international trade union organization, the white working class trade union movements of Europe and America, which have hitherto ignored the colored workers, are apparently beginning to recognize that ‘Labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself while Labor in the black skin is enslaved.’ This awareness was manifested in drawing the long-neglected and forgotten millions of Colonial workers into the world fraternity of labor.” (See this)

Padmore went on to emphasize the meteoric growth in organized labor activity in Africa and other regions of the colonial world during the WWII:

“Colonial delegates came from Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia in West Africa; from Jamaica in the West Indies; British Guiana in South America; from Palestine, Cyprus, and elsewhere. It is noteworthy that the Northern Rhodesian Mineworkers’ Union was represented by a white man, for the Color Bar in that colony excludes African miners from entering the union…. The Nigerian Trade Union Congress, which came into being only three years ago, now boasts a membership of 500,000 and 56 affiliated unions, covering transport, mining, dock-labor, seamen, public works, government employees, etc.”

The Fifth Pan-African Congress was convened later in October 1945 in Manchester. This gathering was pioneering as a result of its mass character encompassing figures such as Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, George Padmore of Trinidad, Amy Ashwood Garvey of Trinidad and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois of the United States. What made the summit so significant was the representation from African workers and farmers through their organizational formations.

Pan-African Congress Fifth Congress delegates in Manchester, England in October 1945.

A resolution passed at the Fifth PAC called upon the masses to rise up and fight for national liberation and social justice. Recognizing that independence was the initial phase in the movement for total freedom, the “Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers and Intellectuals” says:

“The object of imperialist powers is to exploit. By granting the right to Colonial peoples to govern themselves that object is defeated. Therefore, the struggle for political power by Colonial and subject peoples is the first step towards, and the necessary prerequisite to, complete social, economic and political emancipation. The Fifth Pan-African Congress therefore calls on the workers and farmers of the Colonies to organize effectively. Colonial workers must be in the front of the battle against Imperialism. Your weapons-the Strike and the Boycott-are invincible.” (See this)

Two Independence Roads in the Quest for Continental Trade Union Unity: The All-African Trade Union Federation and the Organization of African Trade Union Unity

The struggle for the acquisition of national independence would swiftly emerge after WWII. From the rebellions and general strikes in the Gold Coast from 1947-1950; the Egyptian Officers Coup of 1952; the ascendancy of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in establishing a transitional government in the soon to be renamed Ghana from 1951-1957; Guinea-Conakry’s independence vote of 1958; the Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws in South Africa between 1952-1956; Sudanese declaration of independence in 1956; Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) war of independence from 1954-1961; etc., Africa was clearly on the move.

Organization of African Trade Union Unity conference held in Asmara, Eritrea.

As a working class specific counterpart to Pan-African gatherings such as the Conference of Independent African States in Accra in April 1958 and the All-African People’s Conference in the December of the same year, by 1961, the All-African Trade Union Federation (AATUF) was established in Ghana as well. The project was supported by the CPP of Ghana under direction of Nkrumah as a corollary of the aims of creating a United States of Africa under socialism.

After two preparatory meeting in Accra during November of 1959 and one year later in 1960, the first conference of the AATUF was held in Casablanca, Morocco in May 1961. From its inception there was a split between the Ghana Trade Union Congress (TUC) and other allied labor organizations on the one side against those groups which wanted to maintain affiliation with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) based in the United States.

AATUF took a position of non-alignment encouraging the non-affiliation with both the World Federation of Trade Union (WFTU) and the ICFTU. Sensing the trends towards non-alignment, the WFTU urged support for the AATUF encouraging its affiliates on the continent to join wholeheartedly the Pan-Africanist formation. Those unions which rejected the concept of non-affiliation outside of Africa were subject to derision as Tom Mboya, the Kenya trade unionist and later government minister in Kenya, who was condemned by the AATUF as an agent of imperialism. The ICFTU had assisted in the establishment of the African Trade Union Confederation (ATUC) founded in 1962 as an attempt to counter the influence of the AATUF. (See this)

However, by February 1966, the CPP government under Nkrumah was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military and police coup. The unelected regime made a rapid turn to the West and sought to eliminate all of the former policies initiated over the previous decade-and-a-half by Nkrumah. Losing one of its key supporters politically and financially, the AATUF was plunged into a deepening crisis. (See this)

By 1973, the AATUF had collapsed due to its waning support from various governments and lack of funding. The Organization of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) was formed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the location of its secretariat.

Today OATUU has 73-affiliated labor organizations representing workers in 54 states across the continent and its headquarters is located in Accra, Ghana. Of course Ghana politics is far afield from the socialist and Pan-Africanist orientation of its early years under Nkrumah. The OAU was transformed into the African Union (AU) in 2002 in an attempt to move more urgently towards political unity, social sustainability and economic development.

An entry on its website says of the federation:

“The Organization of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) was founded in April 1973 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Prior to the founding of OATUU there existed three Pan-African Trade Union Organizations, namely: All-African Trade Union Federation (AATUF), based in Accra, Ghana; African Trade Union Confederation (ATUC), based in Dakar, Senegal; and, Pan-African Workers Congress (PAWC), based in Banjul, the Gambia. Each of the three organizations represented different trade union tendencies. The founding of OATUU put an end to the existence of the three Pan-African trade union organizations, having voluntarily dissolved themselves in Addis Ababa in April 1973. At the founding of OATUU, although the overwhelming majority of national trade union centers supported its creation, yet there were few national centers that had reservations. It was not until March 1975 at the first meeting of OATUU General Council in Accra, Ghana that all the national trade union centers in Africa eventually agreed to become fully-fledged members of OATUU, thereby ensuring the total unity of African workers.” (See this)

Conclusion: The Role of Workers in African Development and Unification

These events involving the evolution of trade unionism and organized worker activity in Africa mirrors the political trajectory of the continent since the rise of the independence movements during the post-WWII period. Although there have been fluctuations in the economic performance of independent African states over the last two decades, the continent remains largely dependent upon the exigencies of the world capitalist system.

Therefore, the plight of workers in regard to the distribution of real wages and national wealth is often overlooked in evaluations related to notions of growth and development. The individual wealthy of Africa and the rising salaries of the middle and upper income strata do not necessarily correlate with the status of the majority still made up of the working class, farmers and youth.

Africa can only achieve genuine development when the proletariat and farmers are empowered to make the necessary decisions guiding the future of the continent. Within the existing framework of neo-colonialism the people of Africa will remain second-class citizens to the dominant position occupied by the Western industrialized states utilizing their domination of the global markets and militarism.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

A supposed chemical weapons warehouse of Al Qaeda affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) near the city of al-Atarib in western Aleppo exploded on April 20. According to pro-government sources, the warehouse was one of the sites where militants were arming rockets and shells with toxic materials.

Members of the notorious propaganda organization “White Helmets” reportedly recovered the bodies of at least six people killed in the explosion. Three injured persons were evacuated to nearby hospitals.

The version of the events provided by pro-militant media outlets argues that the targeted facility was belonging to a local pharmaceutical company known as “al-Khalil” and stored “baby milk” only. Pro-opposition media added that the explosion was likely caused by an improvised explosive device. Nonetheless, it remains unclear who would need to blow up a baby milk storage facility.

Over the past few months, Russia and Syria have repeatedly warned that members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the White Helmets, with assistance from Western intelligence, are making preparations for staging chemical attacks that would be blamed on the Assad government.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Horas al-Din and several other radical groups have carried out a series of attacks on positions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) near the so-called Idlib de-escalation zone. The most successful attacks took place in al-Saraya, northern Lattakia, where 5 SAA troops were killed and in western Aleppo, where over 15 SAA soldiers died.

Additionally, pro-militant sources as well as several Kurdish outlets, linked with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), came with a new round of speculations about supposed clashes between “Russian” and “Iranian” forces in the provinces of Aleppo and Deir Ezzor. The SAA denounced these claims as fake news.

These claims appear to be a part of a well-coordinated military psychological operation that’s aimed to undermine the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance. Similar reports repeatedly appeared over the past few years, but every time they were not supported by any evidence.

The situation remains tense in the desert area between the cities of Palmyra and Deir Ezzor. The ISIS news agency Amaq claimed on April 19 that ISIS members had ambushed an SAA convoy near the al-Bishri mount killing at least 20 soldiers and destroying 4 vehicles.

SDF-linked Kurdish insurgents continued their attacks on Turkish forces in the region of Afrin. On April 19, Kurdish fighters targeted alleged Turkish positions near Maryamayn and Villat al-Qadi with anti-tank guided missiles. Pro-Kurdish sources claim that 6 Turkish soldiers were killed. However, the Turkish military released no statements regarding its casualties. Therefore, most likely the attacked positions belonged to Turkish-backed militants.

Syria’s naval port of Tartus will be given for lease to Russia for 49 years, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov told journalists on April 20 after meeting with Syria’s President Bashar Assad. Moscow will use the port for economic and logistical purposes.

Russia already has a naval facility in Tartus, which was set up at the second largest port. This military facility is currently undergoing modernization.

These developments took place amid the growing economic cooperation between Russia’s Republic of Crimea and Syria. According to official estimates, the cargo turnover between Crimea and Syria may reach 150,000t by the end of 2019. During the recent Yalta economic conference in Crimea, Syria and the local authorities reached even more agreements on the economic cooperation.

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After a nearly two-year investigation, culminating in a 448-page report, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election but found insufficient evidence to prove the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. Mueller did not decide, however, if Trump obstructed justice.

The special counsel detailed 10 acts that could constitute obstruction of justice. But based on a memo from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that says a sitting president can’t be indicted, Mueller refrained from concluding whether the evidence was sufficient to charge Trump with obstruction.

Mueller wrote:

If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Yet, in spite of the fact that Mueller did not say the attorney general should decide whether Trump obstructed justice, William Barr took it upon himself to exonerate Trump of obstruction, less than 48 hours after he received Mueller’s report on March 23.

When the special counsel’s redacted report was made public on April 18, it became clear that Barr had whitewashed Mueller’s analysis. Indeed, Mueller systematically and methodically laid out the case for obstruction of justice against Trump.

Barr Mischaracterizes the Probable Cause Standard

The standard a grand jury uses to decide whether to issue an indictment is probable cause. Grand jurors must determine whether “a federal crime has probably been committed by the person accused,” according to the Handbook for Federal Grand Jurors. Once an indictment issues, a jury decides whether the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a higher standard than probable case.

During the April 10 Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) asked Barr whether Mueller found probable cause that Trump committed obstruction of justice. Although Mueller didn’t conclude whether a crime had been committed, he stated in his report that he could not exonerate the president. That, Reed told Barr, “suggests that there’s a possibility that probable cause existed for a crime.”

Reed noted,

“If there was no evidence of probable cause, then I would presume [Mueller] could’ve said very clearly that there was no crime committed, that he could in fact exonerate the president, as he seems to have done with the allegations of conspiracy between the campaign and Russia.”

After a long pause, Barr responded,

“Probable cause is a very low standard for determining when you start investigating something. A lot of things have probable cause.”

Barr’s characterization of the probable cause standard is incorrect. If a grand jury finds probable cause the defendant committed a crime, it will issue an indictment. Probable cause is not required to open an investigation.

Mueller Finds “Substantial Evidence” That Trump Obstructed Justice

In several places, Mueller found “substantial evidence” of obstruction of justice by Trump. For example, Mueller wrote:

Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct — and, most immediately, to reports that the President was being investigated for potential obstruction of justice.

Substantial evidence is the standard of review appellate courts use to determine whether to uphold the findings of a lower court. If the appeals court finds substantial evidence to support the judgment, it will affirm the conviction.

Mueller cited the three elements necessary to prove obstruction of justice: 1) an obstructive act; 2) a nexus [connection] between the obstructive act and an official proceeding; and 3) a corrupt intent.

An obstructive act can be established even if there is insufficient proof of guilt of the underlying crime. It is not necessary that the defendant impede the proceeding directly, if it was foreseeable to the defendant that a third person would act on the defendant’s instruction to obstruct the proceeding. Acting with a corrupt intent means consciousness of wrongdoing, in order to obtain an improper advantage for himself or another person.

Here is one example where Mueller found substantial evidence of Trump’s obstructive intent:

Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct.

Mueller wrote that Trump’s intent can be judged by looking at all the evidence: “Judgments about the nature of the President’s motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.”

The offense of obstruction of justice is complete when the defendant corruptly tries to obstruct justice. A prosecutor does not need to prove that justice was actually obstructed.

Mueller’s report is replete with examples of Trump ordering his underlings to obstruct the Russia investigation. He asked for former FBI Director James Comey’s loyalty. He asked Comey not to pursue an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. He asked Comey to say that Trump wasn’t the subject of an FBI investigation. He asked former White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. And he asked Sessions to un-recuse himself and announce that the investigation would only pertain to meddling in future elections.

None of those people did what Trump asked. But the obstructive act is in the asking, whether or not those asked actually complied with Trump’s demands.

Trump also edited a statement for Donald Trump Jr., lying about the purpose of a June 2016 meeting between Russians and senior Trump campaign officials.

Mueller concluded,

“Taking into account that information and our analysis of applicable statutory and constitutional principles . . . we determined that there was a sufficient factual and legal basis to further investigate potential obstruction-of-justice issues involving the President.”

In 240 pages, Mueller’s report painstakingly analyzes the evidence of obstruction of justice by Trump.

“Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” he wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

Although Mueller doesn’t make specific findings of probable cause that Trump obstructed justice, that’s because the Justice Department’s policy is that sitting presidents are unindictable.

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” Mueller wrote.

If a prosecutor was inclined to bring criminal charges, there is abundant substantial evidence against Trump, which adds up to probable cause.

Mueller carefully analyzed Trump’s pattern of behavior and made a record for his post-presidency indictment. The special counsel also laid out a virtual road map for Congress to conduct impeachment proceedings. Obstruction of justice was one of the articles of impeachment charged against both former presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

As Mueller wrote,

“The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

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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.

You have certainly not heard much about this in the West. And it didn’t get a fraction of the media attention (and none of the hundreds of millions of Euro pledges by the perversely rich) that the Notre Dame fire did.

However, if disastrous floods had hit 28 out of 31 provinces and affected 10 million people in some European country or in the US, I believe you would have heard about it from Day One.

But now it is Iran. Only the Iranians.

The situation is disastrous but not so much because thousands have died. Rather, because floods of this magnitude are likely to have terrible long-term consequences for agricultural and other production, infrastructure, energy production, transport and daily lives (see pictures below and on the links).

The basic facts about 3 weeks into the disaster are:

28 of 31 provinces affected, the area around Shiraz the most. 78 people have died and 1076 have been injured. 10 million Iranians have been affected and 2 million seem to be in direct need of assistance. More can be studied at the UN OCHA’s Reliefweb.

Please enlighten yourself also by some Iranian media sources and Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif’s statements here. And here.

This comes on top of economic sanctions that have already hit virtually every single Iranian very hard when going about their daily lives. The author has seen how this was already bad in 2012-2016 – since then, everything has grown worse.

Here some data by the IMF.

Yes, the corruption is everywhere in Iran but the US sanctions are extremely tight, the loss of oil export income is severe (to benefit Saudi Arabia and others).

And now this flood disaster on top of it all (more background and pictures from Iran’s Fars News Agency here).

The cruelty of not helping in this situation can only be condemned from a humanitarian, human rights and moral perspective no matter what one may otherwise think about Iranian politics and leadership.

Sanctions make humanitarian aid much more difficult

It is well known that the Trump administration wants others to think about Iran and how it puts pressure and threats to bear on other countries to prevent them from cooperating with Iran and bringing humanitarian aid in violation of these US sanctions.

Reuters reports the statement of the Iranian Red Crescent three weeks into the disaster:

“U.S. sanctions have prevented the Iranian Red Crescent from obtaining any foreign financial aid to assist victims of flooding that has killed at least 70 people and inundated some 1,900 communities, the group said on Sunday.”

As of today, the only Europeans to deliver assistance are Russia, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany and France according to the UN OCHA’s Reliefweb.

The main reason, one may assume, is that the US has imposed sanctions on Iran since 1979 and now applies the toughest sanctions ever on the Iranian people (after having withdrawn from the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, in clear violation of international law, since it was embedded in a UN Security Council resolution).

Iran, you may say, is being punished for having fulfilled all its obligations of the JCPOA and accepting the most severe inspections ever.

 

The US also applies so-called secondary sanctions – sanctions against other countries which do not adhere to US sanctions but continue to deal with Iran. The US believes, it seems, that it can intimidate and financially punish countries – including NATO and EU – should they not adhere to US laws (and diktats) on their own territory

Such extra-territorial application of US laws should, of course, be unacceptable for any other sovereign states. And it goes without saying that the US would never accept foreign laws to be implemented on its territory. But the US seems to believe that it is so exceptional that others should make exceptional decisions in favour of this exceptionally unlawful US policy.

The Trump administration – also defiant of the UN Court ruling

What few have noticed is that Iran won a case at the UN International Court of Justice in October last year. Read Newsweek’s report here. The ICJ ruled and ordered that the United States remove sanctions that target humanitarian trade, food, medicine and civil aviation.

But instead of abiding by the ICJ’s decision, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo announces with what must be termed outrageous arguments that the U.S. couldn’t care less.

Mainstream US-obedient media of course politely refrained from putting such a law-defying US statement on their front pages – omission being much more important than fake as I have pointed out time and again before.

As if this should not be enough, the US announced on April 8, 2019 – i.e. also Pompeo – that the US places Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps on its list of terrorist organisations.

Listen very carefully to the justifications and the accusations. One doesn’t have to be psychologist or psychiatrist to get the thought that we are here witnessing a brilliant piece of psycho-political projection – projection of one’s own dark sides on somebody else.

This is also outrageous in the light of the fact that the Corps is a major agent in dealing with the flood disaster on the ground (as it has holds proportionately huge resources in the Iranian budget). Are we likely to soon hear the argument that no aid should go to Iran because it would go (also) to this “terrorist” organisation?

EU and NATO countries should practise civil disobedience in support of the Iranian people

One must wonder how much longer the United States will get away with such step-by-step measures and exceptional arrogance vis-a-vis the international “community” without loud and clear criticism and alternative action by EU and NATO countries.

As I say in the video above, it is high time that EU and NATO countries – and other countries for that matter – practise civil disobedience against US diktat. If only a few countries, companies and banks continue co-operating with Iran, it will be easy for US authorities such as US Treasury to pursue them legally and punish them in various ways.

But not so if some 25-30 countries, all their companies and banks simply ignored US policies and accelerated their civilian co-operation with Iran. It would, beyond the slightest doubt, be a win-win strategy on contrast to US policies which may look like win (US/West) and loose (Iran) but, sooner or later will – drag down these other countries in the decline and fall process of the US. That is – loose/loose

We can all do some little thing for fellow human beings. I voiced my criticism here with the Iranian PressTV:

And I made a small donation to the Iranian Red Crescent on this link, also to try my Swedish bank. It went through.

You can do it too.

Actions and words go best together.

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TFF Director Prof. Jan Oberg is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

All images in this article are from TMS unless otherwise stated

“The British public know there is something wrong here when the whistleblower is in jail while the perpetrators are on TV” says former MP George Galloway who talks to In Question’s Manila Chan as many in mainstream media stay mum on press freedom in Julian Assange case.

Watch the interview below.

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The American and Pakistani leaders independently took two very important and uncoordinated moves at almost the exact same time that might coincidentally have the same effect of ruining Iranian-Indian relations.

Iranian-Indian relations might be about to enter their worst-ever period in modern history as a result of two very important and uncoordinated moves undertaken at almost the exact same time by the American and Pakistani leaders. PM Khan just paid his first visit to Iran where he and his hosts announced that they’ll enter into a new era of anti-terrorist cooperation that geopolitical analyst Adam Garrie comprehensively analyzed in his recent piece on this breaking news event. The ball was indeed in Iran’s court to stop India’s anti-Pakistani Baloch terrorism like I wrote the other day, and to Tehran’s credit, its leadership finally understood this and decided to expand its military partnership with the global pivot state of Pakistan. This will greatly complicate India’s Hybrid War capabilities in clandestinely using Iranian territory to carry out terrorist attacks against Pakistan by proxy as it obsessively seeks to sabotage CPEC, meaning that PM Khan’s visit will have far-reaching and long-term geostrategic security consequences in the New Cold War.

In parallel with this, Trump decided that the US won’t renew its Iranian oil sanctions waivers and that Washington’s GCC partners of Saudi Arabia and the UAE will help the Islamic Republic’s energy customers replace their imports with Gulf resources instead. India was very vocal last year about its intent to defy the US’ unilateral sanctions against Iran, but as I wrote in my piece at the time about the “Indian Illusion“, all of this was just rhetoric to hide the fact that New Delhi was quietly implementing its new American patron’s will. Trump just put Modi on the spot, however, and it might augur negatively for the Indian leader during the ongoing month-long electoral process if he publicly capitulates to the US’ demands and replaces Iranian resources with Gulf ones like I suspected he’s been planning to do since late last year after his summit in Argentina with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. As such, this American move might also be yet another “bad cop” tactic against Modi to get more strategic concessions out of India.

It therefore wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Trump and PM Khan might have just ruined Iranian-Indian relations for good when considering the combined effect of their latest moves to that relationship. The Pakistani leader exposed India’s Hybrid War terrorist plot during his talks with the Iranian leadership which probably explains why the two neighboring nations decided to take their military cooperation with one another to the next level, while the American leader is forcing India to stop importing Iranian oil under the threat of potentially crippling “secondary sanctions” and to replace its resources with those from the Islamic Republic’s hated GCC foes. Although Iran and India still have shared strategic interests in the Chabahar Corridor and North-South Transport Corridor, the trust that formerly defined their relations is broken and their ties will never be the same. The end result is beneficial to the US and Pakistan for different reasons and might even interestingly be a tangential outcome of their recent diplomatic cooperation in Afghanistan.

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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.

As someone deeply embedded in a life of anti-nuclear resistance, I know the only way to get rid of these weapons is to never stop thinking about them.

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I want to offer you something different than the barrage of facts and figures around nuclear weapons. But let’s establish the basics. There are nine countries that possess them: France, China, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and — of course — Russia and the United States. Together these nine countries possess a total of 14,575 nuclear weapons, with the United States and Russia accounting for 92 percent of them.

Then there’s the outlandish nuclear weapons budgets and U.S. plans to modernize and upgrade current nuclear weapons stockpiles at egregious expense. According to a new government estimate, plans for modernizing and maintaining the nuclear arsenal will cost $494 billion over the next decade — an average of just under $50 billion per year.

All of this is happening with Donald Trump in the White House. With his recklessness and overriding need to win — or appear to win — at all costs, he is more dangerous than his predecessors. And that’s despite the fact that every president of the nuclear age played a part in extending the nuclear nightmare and increasing the threat of global annihilation.

Again, these are just the basics — things you already knew or aren’t terribly surprised to learn. That’s why I want to tell you a different story about nuclear weapons: My own.

It comes through the lens of the nuclear fire and my relationships to the people who serve as a sort of bucket-brigade — offering sense, responsibility and sacrifice in an effort to douse the inferno.

April 1, 1974

I am born. It’s a home birth to a nun and a priest — in the basement of a tall three-story row house full of anti-nuclear activists. On the day of my birth, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock stands at 12 minutes to nuclear midnight, moved back from 10 minutes in 1972 after the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and Soviet Union developed a road map for reducing nuclear arsenals.

A few months after I am born, the scientists move the clock forward again — this time to 9 minutes to nuclear midnight, “In recognition that our hopes for an awakening of sanity were premature and that the danger of nuclear doomsday is measurably greater today than it was in 1972.”

Richard Nixon is president. He’s a nuclear hothead who perfects the “madman” strategy of nuclear diplomacy. He tells a meeting of congressmen, “I can go in my office and pick up a telephone, and in 25 minutes, millions of people will be dead.”

I am blissfully unaware. A healthy baby — the first of three — born to parents, Elizabeth McAllister and Philip Berrigan, who had set themselves on a course that maybe should have precluded children: a course of robust, muscular, creative, risky anti-nuclear resistance.

Image below: Frida Berrigan next to a poem by her uncle, Danial Berrigan. (WNV / Berrigan family)

My uncle, Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and poet, writes a series of poems to welcome me into the world. One goes like this:

You came from Harrisburg pit
You came from Custom’s House blood
You came from Catonsville Fire
You came from jail
You came in spite of Judge Mace’s death’s head
Shaking “no” in its socket.
You came without regard to writs, torts, barbed wire
You came up from the least known
Phiz, China and beyond
Down from Dante’s crystalline
Paradise– a round eyed
Round trip freeloader.
You came from a nun
You came from a priest
You came from a vow
Yes and No and the Great Tao
That creeps. A vine
Claiming like two arms
The world’s rack for its own dismembering and flowering.

March 28, 1979

Three days before my fifth birthday, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant suffers a partial meltdown. It is decades before I learn what that term really means, but the terror is real. Three Mile Island is less than 90 miles from our house and radiation is headed our way. My parents take my little brother and I to West Virginia — as far away as they could figure — for the better part of two weeks.

We return to a changed diet: miso in hot water for breakfast every morning. My mother read that healthcare workers in Hiroshima drank the fermented soybean paste in water after the U.S. atomic bombing in 1945. They strengthened their immune systems and cleansed radiation out of their bodies with this ancient traditional Japanese food.

Miso is brown, salty and is disgusting to the 5-year-old palate. But we drink it every morning for years.

My parents start to look more deeply at the connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. There are nearly 100 nuclear power reactors across the United States, and they provide roughly one-fifth of the electricity produced in the country. Nuclear power is one of the dirtiest, most dangerous and most expensive sources of energy. Nuclear reactors in the United States and around the globe are plagued by accidents, leaks, extended outages, delayed construction and skyrocketing costs. Nuclear reactors produce highly radioactive waste that continues to threaten the environment and public health for thousands of years and for which no safe disposal exists.

There is a large scale movement to end the production of nuclear weapons and our dependence on nuclear power as well. Our father shouts at us every time we leave a light on: “Okay, now we are supporting Calvert Cliffs — our local nuclear power plant.”

September 9, 1980

I am 6 years old and my brother is 5 when our father and seven others gain access to General Electric’s Nuclear Missile Reentry Division plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

The Plowshares Eight, from left to right: Carl Kabat, Elmer Maas, Phil Berrigan, Molly Rush, Dan Berrigan, Anne Montgomery, John Schuchardt, Dean Hammer. (WNV / Berrigan family)

A few months earlier the Doomsday Clock had been moved from 9 to 7 minutes to nuclear midnight because the United States and Soviet Union are behaving like “nucleoholics — drunks who continue to insist that the drink being consumed is positively ‘the last one,’ but who can always find a good excuse for ‘just one more round.’”

Our dad and his friends hammer on two nose cones, pour blood and read from this statement:

We commit civil disobedience at General Electric because this genocidal entity is the fifth leading producer of weaponry in the United States. To maintain this position, GE drains $3 million a day from the public treasury, an enormous larceny against the poor. We wish also to challenge the lethal lie spun by GE through its motto, ‘we bring good things to life.’ As manufacturers of the Mark 12A reentry vehicle, GE actually prepares to bring good things to death. Through the Mark 12A, the threat of first strike nuclear war grows more imminent. This GE advances the possible destruction of millions of innocent lives.

This is a new kind of action, in the tradition of the Catonsville Nine (which two of the eight participated in) and the Hebrew prophets who enjoined peacemakers to beat swords into plowshares.

Our dad writes:

We love our children and all children — that is why we are in resistance; that is why we are in jail. We cannot abandon the children; cannot render them to caesar for our immunity and comfort. And that love for them, and for the God who blessed us with them, will enrich their lives. So runs our hope.

Fall 1980 finds us in school for the first time, at sea in a swirl of six-year-old politics that we do not understand. We are objects of fascination and derision to our mostly African-American classmates and regarded with pity by most of our teachers. They have been told what our father has done and — even though they know the details of the action and that he is a good person — they have less context for what he has done than we do.

Our father spends that Christmas in jail. Just before the holiday, we go and visit him and my brother Jerry says: “We want to thank you, Dad. You’ve given us the greatest Christmas gift anyone could.”

“What’s that, Jer?” our Dad asks. There were no presents from the Montgomery County Jail in rural Pennsylvania.

“Your action. You were making peace, just as Jesus was in coming to us at Christmas.”

This becomes an oft-told story in our household, used at various times to celebrate my brother’s thoughtfulness and sincerity or, at other times, to highlight our long downward spiral since that glorious apex of insight and righteousness.

Our dad faces years in jail. In a February 1981 jury trial, he is convicted of burglary, conspiracy and criminal mischief and sentenced to 5-10 years in jail. It isn’t until April 1990 (when I am 16) that the Plowshares 8 wins some overturning of charges on a hard fought (and almost forgotten) appeal.

Somewhere between action, trial and conviction, my sister Kate is conceived. My mom comes home from the doctor’s appointment — after finding out she was pregnant — and slugs a shot of scotch.

Liz McAlister turns 42 just two weeks after my sister is born on Nov. 5, 1981. The Doomsday Clock is at 4 minutes to nuclear midnight, moved in January in response to “the flat unwillingness of either the United States or the Soviet Union to reject publicly, and in all circumstances, the threat of striking the other first. Both sides willfully delude themselves that a nuclear war can remain limited or even be won. In 1980 both sides officially declared nuclear war ‘thinkable.’”

November 20, 1983

Image below: Frida Berrigan with her brother Jerry Berrigan. (WNV / Berrigan family)

I am 9 and my brother is 8. Our sister has just turned 2. As a general rule, we are not permitted to watch television, except for the nightly news. But on this random Sunday before Thanksgiving, we Berrigan children get a special treat. We watch a television movie with our parents. It is called “The Day After.”

More than 35 years later, before consulting Google, the details of the film were vague, but the outline is clear. The film imagines a nuclear attack on the United States and the lives of the people who survive its aftermath.

After the film, we sat with our parents while our mom told us that she was going to do an action soon that would try and keep what the film depicted from happening.

She later wrote about that conversation:

Our children have grown up with these [nuclear] realities as part of the air they breathe. They have seen many people in the community in which we live, including their mom and dad, imprisoned for resistance to nuclear annihilation. But to have mom do something like this and to face her possible absence from their day to day lives for an indefinite amount of time — this was a large step.

They were willing to accept the personal sacrifice of my absence as their part in trying to stop nuclear war from happening, as their part in trying to avoid the suffering that the movie displayed… They committed themselves to assuming more responsibility around the house, especially to be helpful dealing with the questions and fears of their little sister, who was not able to understand it as they were.

It was a moment of extreme closeness for the four of us — a moment of accepting together whatever might come, and we concluded our conversation with prayer and big big hugs.

Thirty-five years later, reconsidering this story as a parent myself, it strikes me as a very calculated move: a mom power play. But there we were.

President Ronald Reagan watched the film a few weeks before it hit TV screens and wrote in his diary that the film was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.” Nearly 100 million people watched “The Day After” on its first broadcast, a record audience for a made-for-TV movie. But very few followed it up with an action like our mom’s.

November 24, 1983

Mom is one of seven who enter the Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York in the early hours of the morning to hammer and pour blood on a B-52 Bomber.

We are in Syracuse with my dad’s brother and his family when it happens. It takes hours for the base security to learn of the breach and arrest them. They are initially charged with sabotage, conspiracy and destruction of government property — and face 25 years in jail. We are, as I said, 9, 8 and 2.

They are eventually tried in a federal court in Syracuse. Their trial is a strange mix of freedom and scrutiny for my brother, sister and me. Our mom and dad are caught up in the trial, and we are left to play and grapple largely unsupervised. But we are also in the media eye. People magazine calls us “troupers to the extreme” when it covered mom’s sentencing in July 1984.

Our dad tells the reporter, “They don’t cry. They’ve been raised in a resistance community, and they’ve seen their mother and father repeatedly brought to jail for nonviolent civil disobedience.”

Image below: Liz McAllister holding Kate Berrigan outside the Syracuse federal jail. (WNV / Berrigan family)

We did cry. Our mom serves 26 months in Alderson Federal prison in West Virginia. We fall into a rhythm of traveling there once a month for a long weekend. The powers that be conspire to make those weekends fall on every school field trip or fun excursion planned by our teachers. Our dad writes us long “please excuse my children from school” letters reminding our teachers every month that our mom is in jail for her anti-nuclear action. He sees it as an opportunity for education. We bypass this impulse and figure out a way to relate exclusively with the school secretary for early dismissals on these fraught Fridays. We are not the only kids with moms in jail, but we are the only ones whose dad writes polemics about it every month. We endure.

April 3, 1988

It’s Easter Sunday. I am 14, and it is two days after my birthday. My dad is one of four activists who board the battleship Iowa in Norfolk, Virginia as part of a public tour greeting the vessel on its return from service in the Persian Gulf. The four disarmed two armored box launchers for the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, hammering and pouring blood, and unfurled two banners: “Seek the Disarmed Christ” and “Tomahawks Into Plowshares.” It becomes known as the Nuclear Navy Plowshares action.

My dad is sentenced to six months in prison.

March 31, 1991

Another Easter Sunday. The day before I am to turn 17, and this time my father is in Bath, Maine, aboard the U.S.S. Gettysburg, taking part in the Aegis Plowshares action. The state declines to prosecute and charges are dismissed the day before the trial was scheduled to start.

December 7, 1993

While not close to any birthdays or special holidays, it is the anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. I am 19, in my second year at Hampshire College. The activists wade through marshes and over rough terrain to gain access to the tarmac at Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. There they hammer on an F-15 fighter plane before being surrounded by hundreds of armed soldiers who were engaged in war game exercises at the time. They call themselves the Pax Christi-Spirit of Life Plowshares.

The trial the next February was notable to some people because the judge enforced a gag order and refused any mention of the political or moral justification for their actions. It was notable to me because my college boyfriend was able to attend. I was trying to integrate the various pieces of my life and not just slip the letter to the school secretary any more.

Visiting him at the county jail in the midst of the trial, my dad says, “Was that Him in the courtroom?” I nod, nervous and proud at the same time. “Seems a bit of a hippie, doesn’t he?” my dad observes. And that was that.

February 12, 1997

My dad is one of 6 who boards the U.S.S. Sullivans, a nuclear-capable Aegis destroyer at Bath Iron Works in Maine. They hammer and pour blood on different parts of the battleship. As they read their action statement and unfurl a banner, armed military security forcibly push them to the deck and place them under arrest.

Image below: Cover of the Boston Globe Magazine from 1997 featuring (back row, from left to right) Steve Kelly and Mark Colville and (front row, left to right) Steve Baggerly, Phil Berrigan and Susan Crane.

They call themselves the Prince of Peace Plowshares, and they are tried in May and sentenced in October. My dad is sentenced to two years in jail and told not to associate with any other felons except for his wife. He pays this no mind. He is 74 years old at the time.

I had finished college the month before and moved home. In that brief time before his action, we spent our time building a composting toilet to collect our “humanure.” I help him out on less controversial projects around the house, while looking for a job. He doesn’t understand why I want a job.

“I have student loans, Dad.”

He is flabbergasted. His daughter is in debt?

“Yep, I owe $14,000 bucks, Dad.”

I went to the most expensive college in the country (with a great financial aid package) and nobody had any money to put down at the beginning.

I managed to get into college with encouragement from people outside of my nuclear family. Mom and Dad were not much help. It was hard to explain — to a man who went to college on the G.I. Bill after World War II and then graduated school as a Josephite priest — the real cost of a college education.

Awaiting trial after the action, Dad is in a county jail in Maine. Every time I go visit him, I upset the routine of local activists who visit him every week, and I feel awkward as they give me “private” time with my dad, grizzled and rumpled in his orange suit.

I walk with my class at Hampshire College in May 1997 on a frigid day. We go straight from the graduation ceremony up to Maine to see Dad in jail. My brother graduates a few weeks later. Our sister graduates from high school the next year. He misses it all.

I recently poured through my high school and college journals — thick, precious times that show how much time I had to process my experiences before social media or small children. I looked for hard evidence of the bereavement I tend to lay atop my parents’ absences. But it wasn’t there, or it was so between-the-lines that my 44-year-old eyes couldn’t see it.

Nowhere did I write: “I am distraught because my father is missing my graduation.”

Looking back now, forced to confront the patina of angst I’ve spread over all these memories, it occurs to me that we were deeply embedded in this life. It was who we were and what we did. We did not question it. And while we missed our dad (mostly) and our mom (earlier), we included them in everything. We recounted it all in letters and visits. We saved the best parts for them. In some sense, our experiences weren’t entirely real until we shared them with our dad or mom (whoever wasn’t physically there).

December 19, 1999

The group cuts through a fence at the Air National Guard Base in Essex, Maryland and pours blood, hangs a rosary and a banner, and hammers on two A-10 Warthog bombers. All were charged with malicious destruction of property and conspiracy. They call the action “Plowshares vs. Depleted Uranium.”

From left to right: Elizabeth Walz, Steve Kelly, Phil Berrigan and Susan Crane. (WNV / Berrigan family)

By this point, I am living in New York City. I have an apartment in Brooklyn and a boyfriend who is not a hippy. In fact, he has gained my dad’s grudging regard. I also have a job at the New School for Social Research, where I work for an arms analyst and public intellectual named William Hartung. At college, my friends and I had joked about becoming public intellectuals like Edward Said or Eqbal Ahmed, and now here I am earning money to pay attention to the military industrial complex. I feel incredibly lucky and very uncomfortable with my good fortune.

I know all about depleted uranium — the radioactive byproduct that is used as a covering on munitions to give them armor-busting capabilities. Some of my favorite times with my dad are trading bad news story for bad news story. He is reading (and enjoying) the many articles I am writing and publishing. He occasionally enjoins me to not have such a secular voice and to end my articles for In These Times or The Progressive with a Jesus quote. I demure.

I knew this action was coming, and I asked him to sit this one out. I did not offer to take his place.

He wrote in a statement before the action:

I am 76 years old, a married Catholic priest, with 35 years of resistance to the empire’s wars, nine years of imprisonment, numberless arrests, surveillance and ‘dirty tricks’ from the FBI… Enter my friends, sometimes brusquely: ‘Hey Dads!! Give it up to the young pups. It’s rocking chair time…’ But, but, but… I cannot forget the dying children of Iraq, and the two million Iraqis dead from our war, sanctions and depleted uranium… I cannot forget my country’s war psychosis — its obsession with better tools for killing, its mammoth war chest, its think tanks and war labs.

My dad is sentenced to 30 months in jail. “They were prepared for the worst,” my mom says outside the courthouse afterward, “and they got it.”

He serves some of his sentence in a youth facility in rural Maryland. My brother, sister and I visit him there often. (There is an outlet mall nearby). He is the only white person in the visiting room — save for some of the corrections officers. The visiting room was designed for discomfort. It has this chest-level barrier between the inmates and the visitors, and you can’t lean on it to be closer to your family member. It is brutally loud. The boys all call him Pops and show him concern and respect. At some point, he was moved to a jail in Ohio that is more age appropriate, where we visit as often as we can.

He is released right before Christmas 2001. Friends welcome him back to “minimum security.” He dies less than a year later, on Dec. 6, 2002.

The Bulletin of the Atomics Scientists’ Doomsday Clock stood at 7 minutes to nuclear midnight, the same time as when it was created in 1947. In the wake of September 11, 2001, the scientists wrote: “Moving the clock’s hands at this time reflects our growing concern that the international community has hit the ‘snooze’ button rather than respond to the alarm… More than 31,000 nuclear weapons are still maintained by the eight known nuclear powers, a decrease of only 3,000 since 1998. Ninety-five percent of these weapons are in the United States and Russia, and more than 16,000 are operationally deployed.”

Over most of the next decade and a half, our mom continues to live in the community she formed with my dad and others and continues to bear witness at the Pentagon, the White House and other sites of power. She keeps animals — goats, llamas, donkeys, even sheep for a while, and starts painting again. She is arrested repeatedly, but not for any big actions. I leave New York City for a small town in eastern Connecticut, get married and have three kids.

My brother and sister settle down too. My brother has three kids, lives in a Catholic Worker community in Michigan that he founded with his wife and another couple. My sister studies to be a physical therapist, becomes a doctor, falls in love with a doctor of English and lives in Grand Rapids. We are all arrested occasionally, but not for any big action. We march, we organize, we speak. We try.

As our mother approaches and passes 70, we — like many people our age — start encouraging her to take it easy, give up the rigors of community life and resistance, the constant hosting and demonstrating. We envision and invite her to live a life with her grandchildren, stories, bedtimes, sporting events and art projects. We have room, we all say.

She goes in the exact opposite direction. With others taking the reins at Jonah House, she feels free for the first time since our father’s death to be a Plowshares activist again, to conspire with her friends and to plan for a rigorous and daring action.

We don’t know the specifics, but as all her answers about the future muddle into a very specific kind of vagueness, we know exactly what is going on.

“Please don’t,” we say.
“You are too old,” we say.
“Think of your grandkids,” we say.

“I will. I’m not. I am. This is what I have to give.”

April 4, 2018

It was just three days after my 44th birthday, which was also Easter — again. We received word of a new plowshares action. Seven Catholic activists entered Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia. They went to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat swords into plowshares.” The seven chose to act on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who devoted his life to addressing what he called the “triple evils of militarism, racism and materialism.” Carrying hammers and baby bottles of their own blood, the seven attempted to convert weapons of mass destruction. They hoped to call attention to the ways in which nuclear weapons kill every day, just by their mere existence and maintenance. They are charged with three federal felonies and one misdemeanor for their actions. They could face 25 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

And there they still are. Three — my mom, Father Steve Kelly and Mark Colville — remain in county jail almost a year later. They still do not have a trial date. The other four are out on bond, wearing ankle monitors and are required to check in with their minders at regular intervals.

The Kings Bay Naval Station is home to at least six nuclear ballistic missile submarines. Each carries 20 Trident II D 5 MIRV thermonuclear weapons. Each of these individual Trident thermonuclear weapons contains four or more individual nuclear weapons ranging in destructive power from a 100 kilotons to 475 kilotons. To understand the massive destructive power of these weapons remember that the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton bomb.

My mother feels very useful in jail — generous, empathetic and calm in a place that encourages none of those qualities.

The wheels of justice grind very slowly in Georgia particularly because the activists are mounting a creative legal defense. They seek to portray their actions as protected under the freedom of religion, using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allowed the homophobic cake makers to not make a cake for a gay couple. They are seeking to demonstrate their “deeply held religious beliefs” and how the practice of their religion has been burdened by the government’s response to their actions. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires the government to take claims of sincere religious exercise seriously.

Please keep them in thought and prayer.

Just a few months before they acted, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsmoved the clock again — this time to 2 minutes to nuclear midnight, saying, “This is a dangerous time, but the danger is of our own making. Humankind has invented the implements of apocalypse; so can it invent the methods of controlling and eventually eliminating them.”

The clock has never been closer to nuclear midnight in my lifetime. All the work, all this sacrifice, and the clock keeps moving closer to midnight.

My mom’s action and extended incarceration pre-trial come as nuclear conflagration seems more likely. Nuclear weapons do not even rate in the list of top 10 fears that Americans are questioned about every year.

Putin and Trump have shredded the imperfect and imbalanced but nevertheless important fabric of nuclear arms control treaties. Putin claims that Russia is developing a new class of “invincible” nuclear weapons, including a cruise missile that can reach anywhere in the world.

The Pentagon signaled recently that the United States would begin tests on a couple of types of missiles. And just to make things truly terrifying, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says that in response to U.S. and Russian actions, China is improving its own nuclear arsenal.

Searching for signs of hope to counter as a bulwark against these mounting fears, I hold close the work of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN. It developed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and is now building a global civil society coalition to promote adherence to and full implementation of the nuclear weapons ban. ICAN received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” I draw hope from that movement.

Nuclear weapons ruined my life.

I am never not thinking about them. Nuclear weapons are present in my most mundane tasks. Nuclear weapons are present in all my major relationships. Every goodbye and hello is freighted with uncertainty.

They have shaped how I think about time. Nuclear weapons have caused me to honor and treasure the present. They have made the future provisional, muted, not taken for granted. I try to be present to the present and hold the future loosely, but with hope.

Nuclear weapons ruined my life. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, I hope they are ruining your life too. Because that is the only way we are going to get rid of them.

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Frida Berrigan is a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and the author of “It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood.” She lives in New London, Conn. with her husband Patrick and their three children.

One good comes from Assange’s arrest, as many have noted: Wikileaks revelations are in the news. We hear the sneering at “dead bastards”. We hear the disdain.

There are truths which, if understood intellectually, are not understood fully. Imperialism is one. We know it intellectually without knowing it. In the Wikileaks video (2010), we feel it.

Death is another such truth. Everyone knows everyone will die but no one believes they will. If they did, they’d live differently.

It happens to Pierre in War and Peace. He is lined up to be shot and is spared. The young man before him dies. Pierre wanted meaning but now “this sought-for purpose of life … did not and could not exist.” Its absence gave him “awareness of freedom which … constituted happiness”.

He’s Napoleon’s prisoner, a rich intellectual, walking with bloodied broken feet. The freedom Tolstoy refers to is known in many traditions. It’s about thinking. You don’t think clearly, about the world, driven by self-importance.

Or disdain. It’s why José Martí, in his famous “Our America” (1892), warned Latin Americans not to respond to US disdain with “futile hatreds”.  He knew that disdain. So did others: independistas. They wrote about it.  It wasn’t merely intellectual.

“The disdain of the formidable neighbour”, Martí wrote, is “our America’s greatest danger”.

But the response is for “our America to show herself as she is”. He urged Cubans toward “a discreet and unswerving pride, for its dignity as a republic”.

Dignity is valuing oneself as human. It is another idea – like death – that needs experiential, not just intellectual understanding. Some truths must be felt. The reason is: What is felt transforms, and when that happens, we see differently. Perspective changes. We see what we didn’t see before.

North American feminists know this. Audre Lorde describes “how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing”.[i] Through the body, we can go “beyond the encouraged mediocrity” limiting imagination.

It just won’t do, Lorde insists, for feminism to offer “a shift of characters in the same weary drama”.

Lorde convinced me, in the 80s, of feminism’s radicality. Poets Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde aimed for re-envisioning what it means to be human, not just what it means to be a woman.

That vision is elusive. A new book by radical feminist, Eve Ensler, shows “how to be free”.[ii]  It is an account of abuse: shocking and moving. About healing, though, it is a “shift of characters in the same weary drama”.

It is a letter from Ensler’s father, dead 31 years.  In imagination, Ensler gives him “the will and the words to cross the boundary … so that I can finally be free”. It is a “most thorough accounting” of abuse.

The abuser tells his victim her “trust, her force of light, her goodness, her beauty, were too much for me and so I violated, invaded, smashed and disfigured”. It is true that confessing, as Raskolnikov does in Crime and Punishment, is ultimately freeing. But Raskolnikov confesses hisown deeds.

Stories about abuse must be told. However, there is also a story about freedom that involves control. We control adversity like Ahab tried to control the whale: The individual stands tall, against the wind. Brecht found that image everywhere in European theatre. It’s seductive. But it’s not the only way.

Martí knew this story of individual freedom. He warned Latin Americans not to be “slaves of Liberty!”. He didn’t reject it for moral reasons. He rejected it because it’s not a way to know the world. He likened it to an oyster in its shell, mistaking the shell for the world. You build a story about yourself for an entire lifetime and when the story coheres, and fits your expectations, it’s called healing.

It doesn’t work for “dead bastards” sneered at from sophisticated helicopters. The abusers’ “most thorough accounting” can’t be imagined by the disdained because the abusers have no words for the disdained. They’re non-persons.

But that’s not the point. It is, instead, that such a view of individual freedom promotes ignorance. Ironically, from the realm of death, Ensler’s father has “nothing but the reflection of what lives inside me. What is hell? Hell is oneself”. So said countless philosophers, who cared about freedom, including Sartre, whose existentialism convinced many they only need to choose – whatever – to be free.

It doesn’t work, not even for the powerful.

“Everything is outside, everything, including ourselves: outside, in the world, together with others. It is not in I don’t know what kind of retreat that we discover ourselves”.[iii]

And it is not by looking inside finding words we want to hear, giving them to others.

It feels good. Philosopher, Charles Taylor, describes human flourishing as fullness: Life feels “fuller, richer, deeper … more what it should be’’. But Victor Hugo described the same feeling as “darkly radiant”. Hugo cared about freedom. He knew we feel “fuller, richer” etc. by ignoring truths: about ourselves and the society that makes us.

“Whoever doesn’t weep doesn’t see”, wrote Hugo. He and Martí shared a commitment: truth.  So, when the father apologizes: “Let me risk fragility. Let me be rendered vulnerable. Let me be lost. Let me be still”, he might speak for all. Martí urged Latin Americans in such a direction: Truth about the human condition and what that means for how we know others.

It is not by imagining words we want them to say.  We want truth, not dreams, said Martí. For freedom: of Tolstoy’s sort. And Adrienne Rich urged activists to “imagine and claim wider horizons . . . rather than rehearse the land-locked details of personal quandaries or the price for which the house next door just sold”.

Maybe North American feminism can get back to that. Maybe Assange will help.

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

Notes

[i] “Uses of the erotic”, Sister Outsider (Crossing Press, 1984).

[ii] The Apology (Bloomsbury, 2019). Review (May 9) https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/

[iii] Cited in Mészáros, István, The work of Sartre(Monthly Review Press, 2012) 98

Sunday exit polls showed political outsider/entertainer-comedian Vladimir Zelensky scored an overwhelming triumph over US-installed billionaire puppet Petro Poroshenko by a 73 – 24% margin. More on this below.

According to a March Gallup poll, only 9% of Ukrainians trust their ruling authorities, Poroshenko with single-digit support.

He’s widely reviled for heading an illegitimate/US-installed putschist regime, exploiting and persecuting ordinary Ukrainians, not serving them.

He sold out to the West, governed by brute force, wrecked Ukraine’s economy, waged war on Donbass citizens, committed horrendous civil and human rights abuses, causing millions to flee cross-border to Russia and elsewhere, and is accused of rampant corruption.

Ordinary Ukrainians suffer hugely from high unemployment, elimination of social programs, inadequate healthcare services, hardline fascist rule, and depravation harming countless millions.

Skilled workers and others fled to Russia and elsewhere abroad to escape intolerable conditions, including political repression, neoliberal harshness, a falling currency, high unemployment and inflation.

Ukraine under Poroshenko and majority parliamentarians supporting his regime is an economic, social, and political basket case – exacerbated by severe repression.

Human and civil rights abuses include arbitrary arrests, disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, violence against journalists, human rights activists, Russian nationals and ethnic minorities, as well as intolerance of Ukrainians against despotic rule.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry earlier accused Kiev of “political chaos, corruption, lawlessness (and) aggressive nationalism, (along with state-sponsored) violence and crimes committed for political and ideological motives,” adding:

Ruling authorities “declared an open season on everyone whose views deviate from the official ones.”

Under Ukrainian law, the nation’s Central Election Commission must publish official Sunday results within 10 days – by May 1 or earlier – Zelensky to be sworn into office by May 31.

He played a fictional Ukrainian president in a Servant of the People television sitcom, fighting corruption as a teacher-turned head of state. Now he’s the real thing once sworn into office.

“I’m not yet officially the president, but as a citizen of Ukraine, I can say to all countries in the post-Soviet Union – look at us. Anything is possible,” he declared.

His campaign eschewed public rallies, relying heavily on social media to reach millions of followers with his message.

When earlier asked how he differed from other candidates, he said:

“This,” pointing to his face. “This is a new face. I have never been in politics.”

“I have not deceived people. They identify with me because I am open. I get hurt. I get angry. I get upset.”

“I do not hide my emotions on camera. I do not try to look different. If I’m inexperienced in something, I’m inexperienced. If I don’t know something, I honestly admit it.”

How he’ll govern remains to be seen, given parliament controlled by pro-Western hardliners, new elections not until October 27, and certain heavy US pressure for pro-West/anti-Russia continuity.

On Sunday, he promised to “launch a very powerful information war to end the war in Donbass,” saying he’ll “act within the Normandy format” to resolve things diplomatically, involving Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine.

“(W)e will continue the Minsk process (for peace in Donbass). We will restart it,” he added.

“We have very serious acting generals who have authority in the army. You will definitely see them. I have no right to give the names of these people now as there is an agreement with the generals.”

It’s unclear what he meant. His agenda largely unknown, he promised to name members of his government “in the near future.”

Poroshenko conceded defeat, saying

“(n)ext month, I will leave the office…This is the decision of the majority of Ukrainian people.”

“…I want to highlight that I am not leaving politics. My team and I are ready to support the president in everything that gets us close to the European Union and NATO.”

Zelensky will surely be pressured to continue dirty business as usual, including governance serving Ukrainian oligarchs and Western interests, continuing war in Donbass, and hostility toward Russia.

How he’ll respond remains unknown. As long as hardliners control parliament, pressure for continuity will prevent positive change.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Multiple suicide bombers reportedly were behind deadly attacks on four hotels, three Christian churches packed Easter Sunday worshipers, and an apartment complex.

Targeted sites were in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, Negombo on the west coast, and Batticaloa in the country’s east, a major commercial city.

According to authorities, the death toll is at least 293, including 35 foreign nationals and three police officers, over 500 others injured.

Sunday incidents were the deadliest in Sri Lanka since the 2009 Mulivaikal massacre, killing 40,000 Tamils during the final days of civil war begun in 1983, and devastating December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsumani.

It was one of the most disastrous in recorded history, affecting 14 East Asian countries, including Sri Lanka, killing an estimated 228,000, causing vast destruction.

It left around 2.5 million regional residents homeless, including coastal Sri Lankans, villages washed away to “build back better” with upscale development for privileged interests and tourism.

With everything gone, Sri Lanka had a blank slate to develop pristine coastal areas, scrubbed clean from ordinary people, shoved into grim inland camps, prevented from returning home.

Sri Lanka’s coast was transformed into an upscale tourist destination with luxury resort hotels and chalets at the expense of their former residents.

What ruling authorities hesitated doing earlier, mother nature did for them, followed by privatization of water, along with other public utilities and enterprises.

Around 70% of Sri Lankans are Buddhists, 12% Hindus, 10% Muslims, and 7% Christians, mostly Roman Catholics.

No claim of responsibility for the Sunday attacks was made so far. Until 2009, decades of war was waged between ruling authorities and Tamil Tigers, a period during which bomb blasts and other violence happened often.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe held an emergency Sunday meeting with top Sri Lankan military and National Security Council officials.

A separate emergency session with parliament leaders convened on Monday. Around two dozen arrests were made, “local(s),” according to Wickremesinghe, investigators looking into whether detained individuals have “overseas links,” he said.

Defense minister Ruwan Wijewardene claimed all perpetrators were identified. They’ll be caught and prosecuted, he added.

A curfew was imposed until further notice. Social media and messaging apps were blocked on the pretext of preventing misinformation.

Secretary to the president Udaya R Seneviratne called it “a temporary measure” – a repressive action at a time Sri Lankans need freedom to communicate with relatives, friends, and others.

Security in Colombo and other cities was tightened, various holiday related events cancelled.

Local Christian groups complained of intimidation. Last year, clashes occurred between majority Sinhalese Buddhists and minority Muslims.

Sri Lankan Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, archbishop of Colombo, asked ruling authorities “to hold a very impartial strong inquiry and find out who is responsible behind this act and also to punish them mercilessly, because only animals can behave like that.”

According to the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka, there were scores of discriminatory, threatening, and violent incidents against minority Christians last year.

Easter Sunday attacks were clearly well planned and coordinated. Sri Lankan police and intelligence officials reportedly alerted ruling authorities about possible suicide incidents 10 days before the attacks.

The little known Islamist National Thowheed Jamath group was blamed for Sunday’s violence, no evidence cited proving it.

A Sri Lankan official reportedly said “the group…had not carried out any serious attacks before,” according to the NYT – raising an obvious red flag.

Was the group behind the Easter Sunday attacks, or are its members innocent patsies, falsely blamed for something they had nothing to do with?

This is a developing story, more on it when more information is known.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

Russiagate has three purposes.

One is to prevent President Trump from endangering the vast budget and power of the military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.

Another, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, is “to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign,” by focusing all public and political attention on a hoax distraction.

The third is to obstruct Trump’s campaign and distract him from his agenda when he won the election.

Despite the inability of Mueller to find any evidence that Trump or Trump officials colluded with Russia to steal the US presidential election, and the inability of Mueller to find evidence with which to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice, Russiagate has achieved all of its purposes.

Trump has been locked into a hostile relationship with Russia. Neoconservatives have succeeded in worsening this hostile relationship by manipulating Trump into a blatant criminal attempt to overthrow in broad daylight the Venezuelan government.

Hillary’s criminal conduct and the criminal conduct of the CIA, FBI, and Obama Justice (sic) Department that resulted in a variety of felonies, including the FBI obtaining spy warrents for partisan political purposes on false pretexts from the FISA court, were swept out of sight by the Russiagate hoax.

The Mueller report was written in such a way that despite the absence of any evidence supporting any indictment of Trump, the report refused to clear Trump of obstruction and passed the buck to the Attorney General. In other words, Mueller in the absence of any evidence kept the controversy going by setting up Attorney General Barr for cover-up charges.

It is evidence of Mueller’s corruption that he does not explain just how it is possible for Trump to possibly have obstructed justice when Muller states in his report that the crime he was empowered to investigate could not be found. How does one obstruct the investigation of a crime that did not occur?

As Kunstler puts it,

“The Special Prosecutor’s main bit of mischief, of course, was his refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to accept and make clear is that a prosecutor’s failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller’s duty to dishonestly present that failure as anything but that in his report — and possibly an act of criminal prosecutorial misconduct” on Mueller’s part.

But this is not the only dishonesty in Muller’s report. Although Mueller’s report clearly obliterates the Russiagate conspiracy theory peddled by the military/security complex, the Democrats, and the presstitutes, Mueller’s report takes for granted that Russia interferred in the election but not in collusion with Trump or Trump officials. Mueller states this interference as if it were a fact without providing one drop of evidence. Indeed, nowhere in the report, or anywhere else, is there any evidence of Russian interference.

Mueller simply takes Russian interference for granted as if endless repeating by a bunch of presstitutes makes it so. For example, the Mueller report says that the Russians hacked the DNC emails, a claim for which no evidence exists. Morever, it is a claim that is contradicted by the known evidence. William Binney and other experts have demonstrated that the DNC emails were, according to their time stamps, downloaded much more quickly than is possible over the Internet. This fact has been carefully ignored by Mueller, the Democrats and the presstitutes.

One reason for ignoring this undisputed fact is that they all want to get Julian Assange, and the public case concocted against Assange is that Assange is in cahoots with the Russians who allegedly gave him the hacked emails. As there is no evidence that Russia hacked the emails and as Assange has said Russia is not the source, what is Mueller’s evidence? Apparently, Mueller’s evidence is his own political indictment of Russian individuals who Mueller alleged hacked the DNC computers. This false indictment for which there is no evidence was designed by Mueller to poison the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin and announced on the eve of the meeting.

Indictments do not require evidence, and Mueller had none. Moreover, Mueller could not possibly know the identities of the Russian intelligence agents who allegedly did the hacking. This was of no concern to Mueller. He knew he needed no evidence, because he knew there would be no trial. The indictment was political propaganda, not real.

The myth of Russian interference is so well established that even Glenn Greenwald in his otherwise careful and correct exposition of the Russiagate hoax buys into Russian interference as if it were a fact. Indeed, many if not most of Trump’s supporters are ready to blame Russia for trying, but failing, to ensnare their man Trump.

The falsity of Russiagate and the political purposes of the hoax are completely obvious, but even Trump supporters tip their hats to the falsehood of Russian interference so that they do not look guilty of excessive support for Trump. In other words, Russiagate has succeeded in constraining how far Trump’s supporters can go in defending him, especially if he has any remaining intent to reduce tensions with Russia.

Russiagate has succeeded in criminalizing in the American mind any contact with Russia. Thus has the military/security complex guaranteed that its budget and power will not be threatened by any move toward peace between nuclear powers.

The Democratic Party and the presstitutes cannot be bothered by facts. They are committed to getting Trump regardless of the facts. And so is Mueller, and Brennan, and Comey, and a slew of other corrupt public officials.

A good example of journalistic misconduct is James Risen writing in Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept of all places, “WILLIAM BARR MISLED EVERYONE ABOUT THE MUELLER REPORT. NOW DEMOCRATS ARE CALLING FOR HIS RESIGNATION.” Quoting the same posse of “hang Trump high” Democrats, Risen, without questioning their disproven lies, lets the Democrats build a case that Mueller’s report proves Trump’s guilt. Then Risen himself misrepresents the report in support of the Democrats. He says there is a huge difference between Barr’s memo on the report and the report itself as if Barr would misrepresent a report that he is about to release.

Length is the only difference between the memo and the report. This doesn’t stop Risen from writing:

“In fact, the Mueller report makes it clear that a key reason Mueller did not seek to prosecute Trump for obstruction was a longstanding Justice Department legal opinion saying that the Justice Department can’t indict a sitting president.”

This is something Mueller threw in after saying he didn’t have the evidence to indict Trump. It is yet another reason for not indicting, not the reason. Risen then backs up his misreport with that of a partisan Democrat, Renato Mariotti who claims that Mueller could have indicted Trump except it is against US Justice Department policy. Again, there is no explanation from Risen, Mariotti, or anyone else how Mueller could have indicted Trump for obstructing what Mueller concludes was a crime that did not happen.

Just as Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents without evidence, he could have indicted Trump without evidence, but a case against a president that is without evidence is not one a prosecutor wants to take to court as it is obviously an act of sedition.

That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else.

Risen also alleges that the unproven Russian hacks were passed over by Barr in his memo on the report. Not only is this incorrect, but also Risen apparently has forgot that the investigation was about Trump’s collusion with Russia to do something illegal and the investigation found that no such thing occurred. Risen, like the rest of the presstitutes and even Greenwald himself, takes for granted that the unproven Russian hacks happened. Again we see that the longer a lie is repeated the more it becomes true. Not even Greenwald can detect that he has been bambozzled.

At one time James Risen was an honest reporter. He won a Pulitzer prize, and he was threatened with prison by the Department of Justice when he refused to reveal his source for his reporting on illegal actions of the CIA. But Risen discovered that in the new world of journalism, telling the truth is punished while lying is rewarded. Risen, like all the others, decided that his income was more important than the truth.

Journalists who lie for the Establishment have no need of the First Amendment. Perhaps this is why they have no concern that Washington’s attack on Julian Assange will destroy the First Amendment. They are helping Washington destroy Assange so that their self-esteem will no longer be threatened by the fact that there is a real journalist out there doing real journalism.

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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.

At precisely 1:00 Eastern time on the afternoon of April 11th, 31,000 workers at 253 Stop and Shop grocery stores throughout Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts walked off their jobs. The strike came after several months of failed negotiations in which Stop and Shop refused to retract an onerous set of demands for the elimination of premium pay for Sunday work, major cuts to pensions and dramatic increases in the amount workers would have to pay for healthcare.

The strikers are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Truck drivers, both union and non-union, have honored the picket lines by refusing to make their deliveries, according to strikers at four picket lines in Bridgeport and Fairfield, Connecticut. The workers at those stores also report that no union members have crossed the picket line. Most stores are open as supervisors and a small number of replacement workers have been stocking shelves and working cash registers but business has taken a big hit.

Solid Public Support

Public support has been high and sympathetic supervisors have told strikers that the take for one 16-hour day at a store in Fairfield was a meager $2,000, a fraction of a normal day’s business. Some stores have cut their hours because business has been so bad. Officials and members of other unions have joined with strikers for rallies at stores in a number of locations, including Bridgeport and Fairfield. Virtually every elected official in the Bridgeport area as well as both U.S. Senators are Democrats and many have visited a picket line and/or expressed their support for the strike, as have several Republicans from other parts of the state. An announcement was made at a picket line yesterday that community sympathizers and merchants have established a food bank where strikers can get free food.

From conversations with dozens of strikers, morale of union members is high eight days in. Worker after worker expressed special gratitude for the overwhelming public support they’ve received. Shoppers who know many of the strikers by name from years of shopping have joined the picket lines and many have brought coffee, doughnuts, pizzas and other food and beverages to the strikers. Media coverage on local television stations and in the Hearst dailies that dominate the newspaper market in Connecticut has been mostly positive.

$2-Billion Profits in 2018

Amidst the strikers’ enthusiasm, however, is an undercurrent of fear and resentment. There has been no strike at Stop and Shop for 30 years, and that one was of very short duration, so the vast majority of the chain’s workers are confronting the unbridled greed of their employers in such an open way for the first time. The Stop and Shop stores are among many owned by the Dutch conglomerate Ahold which reported $2-billion in profits in 2018.

Despite such profits and despite the fact that Stop and Shop is far and away the dominant grocery store chain in New England (and which also owns stores in New York and New Jersey that are covered by a different contract and thus not on strike), Ahold is demanding significant givebacks. The cuts in pensions and health coverage particularly rankle the strikers; the company’s current demands, for example, include a fourfold increase in the amount workers will have to pay in co-payments for doctor’s visits.

Minimum Wage Pay for New Workers

Picketers expressed a mix of astonishment and anger that a massive company that is doing so well would utterly refuse to share any portion of that wealth and instead demand significant givebacks. New hires, all of whom are part-time, start at $10.10 an hour. Stop and Shop has consciously cut the number of full-time positions, and stipulations that the company forced through in previous contracts make accepting a full-time promotion far less attractive than it could be.

“It takes years before you can even think about getting a full-time position,” said Rafael Quiles at the picket line outside one of the stores in Fairfield. “And if you do go full-time, the company has the right to transfer you to any store in the state that it wants to.” He and others said the company does precisely that in order to discourage others from seeking full-time.

“Many people who take full-time jobs go back to part-time a short while later because they don’t want to be moved to a store far away,” added Gin Palladino, a ten-year veteran who lives just a few blocks from the store where she works. “I’d rather work part-time here and get another part-time job close to home than have to travel a long distance to work full-time.”

Kizzy Lewis is a full-timer who has worked in 12 stores in her 25 years at Stop and Shop. “They had me working as far away as Stamford and at other stores all over Fairfield County,” she said. “After all these years, I hope this is my last one.” Lewis also ridiculed the gas allotment the company pays for those it transfers, pointing out that the worker is responsible for the first 15 miles both to and from work.

Workers Struggling Amidst Fabulous Wealth

For many workers, hourly wages that are equal to or just a little above the federal minimum do not go far. Consider that Fairfield County is one of the wealthiest and most expensive areas in the country where the contrast between the Super Rich who live in places like New Canaan and Greenwich and workers at Stop and Shop couldn’t be starker. A number of strikers live in Bridgeport, the least expensive housing market in the area, but even rents in Bridgeport can be as high as $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. For people making $10.10 per hour, that is out of reach. People spoke of co-workers well into their 20s who live with their parents or other family members because they cannot afford to live on their own.

As with so many workers in the United States today, some of the strikers have more than one job. One man on the picket line said he averages 65 hours a week between his two jobs and is still barely making ends meet. A woman striker said she’s negotiating with her boss at her other job about getting more hours if the strike lasts.

It’s important that the Stop and Shop strikers win, just as it was important that the tens of thousands of teachers around the country won their strikes in the last year. It’s also important, though, that workers, their supporters and allies and union staffers who are so inclined take a long, harsh look at the state of things. The Stop and Shop workers’ strike is essentially defensive; they are resisting the company’s attempts at more takebacks and the union, according to workers, is putting forward few demands of their own. So no noteworthy wage increases or other improvements await them even if they score a complete victory. In the short term at minimum, their lives will continue to get harder.

Winning and Seeds of Greater Possibilities

There are, however, seeds of greater possibilities and future victories in the strength and togetherness the workers are experiencing in their strike. By virtually every account including those by sources generally hostile to unions, workers and strikes, the Stop and Shop strike has been an overwhelming success. The company is losing money in a big way, for one, and the hard line it has drawn has raised the awareness of many strikers: about their relationship to their employers, about the power of collective action, about the power of an entire workforce withdrawing its labour, about how perilous life in the 21st century United States has become for the working class.

Speaking about the experience of the strike thus far, one worker said the following:

“Most of us like our jobs because we have so many regular customers who make it feel like a community and they far outnumber the customers who make our lives difficult. What really makes it hard to like your job is not the customers who give you a bad time but knowing that you’re getting a bad deal from the company. The pay is too low, the benefits aren’t enough, working on weekends is mandatory, all that stuff. And then to see that they want to cut our pensions even further, make us pay more if we go to the doctor, cut Sunday premium pay and give us nothing in return for all that … it’s too much. All these people you see on this picket line and all the other picket lines at all the other Stop and Shop stores, none of them is ever going to forget this.”

Asked if he meant the togetherness of the strikers or the conduct of the company, he said simply, “Both.”

Perhaps one big lesson that can reverberate far and wide beyond Stop and Shop is the power of the strike. After years and years where the number of strikes dwindled to a pitifully small number, accompanied by a barrage of negativity from media and political elites, workers are beginning to see that it is one of the most effective ways to fight back. That’s true of teachers, nurses and other healthcare workers, electrical workers at Wabtec in Erie, grocery store workers throughout southern New England. Equally large challenges will be to bring that fighting spirit and solidarity into the workplace and the union hall as well as for workers from a variety of workplaces both union and non-union to build organizations of mutual support where they can also strategize about how to build a different kind of society.

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Bridgeport native Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author whose most recent book is the novel In Motion.

All images in this article are from The Bullet

I have yet to see the MAGA cult turn on its hallowed leader, the leader of the “free world” (sic) who recently vetoed and left tire marks on a measure that would have put an end to US involvement in Saudi Arabia’s organized mass murder campaign on the impoverished nation of Yemen. 

Trump explained his veto in a letter sent to the Senate.

“This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future,” the Donald (or one of his handlers) wrote. 

Of course, the starving people of Yemen don’t pose a threat to America and wouldn’t threaten “brave service members” had Bush (actually his neocons) not descended on Iraq and Afghanistan like a host of rapacious scabies. 

Obama continued the agenda—destroy Arab and Muslim nations for the sake of tiny Israel and neoliberal vandals—with his arming of Syrian “rebels” and the attack that turned one of Africa’s most advanced nations into a failed state (the CIA asset Khalifa Haftar is taking care to crush the warring tribes of Libya and set the stage for a handover of its bounty of oil to transnational corporations). 

Back in 2011, I wrote:

As it turns out, Mr. Hifter is a CIA operative, which likely explains his lengthy stay in Virginia. In 1996, the Washington Post reported that a Col. Haftar (a variation on Hifter) had arrived in the United States and he was “reported to be the leader of a contra-style group based in the U.S. called the Libyan National Army,” the Wisdom Fund noted at the time. “This group is supported by the U.S., and has been given training facilities in the U.S. It’s a good presumption that Col. Haftar’s group operates in Libya with the blessings of our government.”

In short, the blessings of the national security state, of which the CIA is a vital component, and its current frontman, President Donald Trump. 

Trump praised the al-Qaeda associated Haftar. He talked with the long-time CIA asset by phone and lauded his effort to usher Libya back into the the neoliberal-corporatist fold. 

“In their phone call, Trump ‘recognized Field Marshal Haftar’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system,’” Al Jazeera reports. 

Trump is little different than his predecessors, never mind rhetoric from a zombified MAGA cult that he is taking on the “deep state” (Democrats) and “draining the swamp,” although we don’t hear much about that these days. MAGA supporters are obsessed with a porous border and the plan to flood America with third world immigrants, no shortage fleeing the violent result of neoliberal machinations in Latin America and the gross poverty it harnesses as part of the effort to turn the world into a giant corporate plantation. 

The editors of Breitbart (essentially established in Israel) took a break from bashing their liberal counterparts to provide an excuse for Trump’s decision to veto the measure and end US participation in the wanton murder of civilians in Yemen. 

The excuse for starving babies to death and bombing wedding parties? It’s all part of the US-Israeli effort to control access to oil and confront Iran. 

According to Breitbart’s Joel B. Pollak:

Yemen sits on the eastern side of the Bab el-Mandeb strait a key shipping lane for traffic through the Suez Canal. The U.S. Navy has a major base across the strait, in Djibouti—as do many other countries, including China. Allowing an Iranian proxy to command the eastern side of the strait, across from a crucial U.S. Navy asset that helps control piracy and terror, and where China is challenging U.S. dominance, would be foolish to the point of lunacy.

The late Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled it out:

To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together. 

Breitbart, Infowars, Drudge, and thousands of Trump partisans on social media—those not banned or suspended—are not concerned about neocons and CFR neoliberals pulling Trump’s strings like Edgar Bergen. Most are focused on the border and the endless running street battles of diversionary politics. They are not outraged by the accessory role the US plays in the Saudi religious war on a Shi’a faction in Yemen. MAGA cultists apparently have no problem with Trump flip-flopping on his promised troop withdrawal or his murder of untold thousands in Syria and Iraq during his phony war on the Islamic State, a Pentagon psyop hatched during the US occupation of Iraq. 

It’s safe to say the MAGA crowd is right up there with the neocons. They are enthusiastic about murder, theft, starvation, disease, and the destruction of societies. 

Boss Trump promised to “bomb the shit” out of civilians and steal oil from Iraq and Syria to pay for the wars of his predecessors. He acted as salesman of the month for the military-industrial-security complex. 

The takeaway from the Trump administration is clear—it hardly matters who is in the White House, the agenda remains the same: forever war, rendition and torture (the awaited fate of Julian Assange), neoliberal debt schemes and strip mining of natural resources, and the ability to convince a dumbed-down and politically illiterate public through interminable propaganda that mass murder and “creative destruction” are in their best interest and represent the hallmark of “democracy.”

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

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In 1830, British colonial administrator Lord Metcalfe said India’s villages were little republics that had nearly everything they could want for within themselves. India’s ability to endure derived from these communities:

“Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down but the village community remains the same. It is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence.”

Metcalfe was acutely aware that to subjugate India, this capacity to ‘endure’ had to be broken. Since gaining independence from the British, India’s rulers have only further served to undermine village India’s vibrancy. But now a potential death knell for rural India and its villages is underway.

There is a plan for the future of India and most of its current farmers don’t have a role in it. Successive administrations have been making farming financially unviable with the aim of moving farmers out of agriculture and into the cities to work in construction, manufacturing or the service sector, despite these sectors not creating anything like the number of jobs required.

The aim is to displace the existing labour-intensive system of food and agriculture with one dominated by a few transnational corporate agribusiness concerns which will then control the sector.  Agriculture is to be wholly commercialised with large-scale, mechanised (monocrop) enterprises replacing family-run farms that help sustain hundreds of millions of rural livelihoods, while feeding the urban masses.

So why would anyone set out to deliberately run down what is effectively a productive system of agriculture that feeds people, sustains livelihoods and produces sufficient buffer stocks?

Part of the answer comes down to India being the largest recipient of World Bank loans in the history of that institution and acting on its ‘advice’. Part of it results from the neoliberal-driven US-Indo Knowledge Agreement on Agriculture. Either way, it means India’s rulers are facilitating the needs of (Western) capitalism and all it entails: a system based on endless profit growth, crises of overproduction and market saturation and a need to constantly seek out and expand into new, untapped (foreign) markets to maintain profitability.

And as a market for proprietary seeds, chemical inputs and agricultural technology and machinery, India is vast. The potential market for herbicide growth alone for instance is huge: sales could reach USD 800 million this year with scope for even greater expansion. And with restrictions on GMOs in place in Europe and elsewhere, India is again regarded as a massive potential market.

A few years ago, influential ‘global communications, stakeholder engagement and business strategy’ company APCO Worldwide stated that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy in the years ahead.

Decoded, this means corporations moving into regions and nations and displacing indigenous systems of production and consumption. And where agriculture is concerned, this predatory capitalism hides behind emotive, seemingly altruistic rhetoric about ‘helping farmers’ and the need to ‘feed a burgeoning population’ (regardless of the fact this is exactly what India’s farmers have been doing).

Prime Minister Modi is certainly on board. He has proudly stated that India is now one of the most ‘business friendly’ countries in the world. What he really means is that India is in compliance with World Bank directives on ‘Ease of Doing Business’ and ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’: facilitating environment-destroying policies and forcing working people to take part in a race to the bottom based on ‘free’ market fundamentalism.

None of this is a recipe for national sovereignty, let alone food security. Renowned agronomist MS Swaminathan recently stated:

“Independent foreign policy is only possible with food security. Therefore, food has more than just eating implications. It protects national sovereignty, national rights and national prestige.”

Despite such warnings, India’s agrarian base is being uprooted. In a recent interview, Director of Food First Eric Holt-Giménez notes that when Cargill, Bayer or Syngenta say they need to expand the use of GMOs or the other latest technologies so they can feed the world, they’re really talking about capturing the market that’s still controlled by peasant agriculture. To get those markets they first must knock out the peasantry.

Looking at the Industrial Revolution in England, historian Michael Perelman has detailed the processes that whipped the English peasantry into a workforce ‘willing’ to accept factory wage labour. Peasants were forced to leave their land and go to work for below-subsistence wages in dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of industrial capitalists. Perelman describes the policies through which peasants were forced out of agriculture, not least by the barring of access to common land. A largely self-reliant population was starved of its productive means.

Today, we hear seemingly benign terms like ‘foreign direct investment’, ‘ease of doing business’, making India ‘business friendly’ or ‘enabling the business of agriculture’. But behind the World Bank/corporate-inspired rhetoric lies the hard-nosed approach of modern-day capitalism that is no less brutal for Indian farmers than early industrial capitalism was for English peasants.

GDP growth has been fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers: the gap between farmers’ income and the rest of the population has widened enormously. While underperforming corporations receive massive handouts and have loanswritten off, the lack of a secure income, exposure to international market prices and cheap imports contribute to farmers’ misery.

Farmers must also contend with profiteering seed and chemical companies, corrupt middlemen, high interest loans and debt and the overall impacts of the corporate-inspired US-Indo Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture that flung open the sector to US agribusiness. Up to 400,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and millions more are experiencing economic distress.

As independent cultivators are bankrupted, the aim is that land will eventually be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation. Those who remain in farming will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.

Even the scaling up of Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) across Andhra Pradesh is a cause for concern. For instance, the involvement of BNP Paribas Bank (which has funded numerous questionable projects, including in India), the Gates Foundation (with its staunch commitment to GMOs and gene editing technology and its cosy relationship with global agribusiness) and the potential illegal accessing of agrobiodiversity and traditional knowledge by foreign entities does not bode well.

There are also serious concerns about farmer’ interests being ignored. In effect, ZBNF seems to be focused more on global export chains, the further commodification of agriculture, facilitating consumerism and the involvement of unethical international finance. Even here it seems Western interests are being handed the reins.

If British rule, the impacts of the Green Revolution and neglect and mismanagement of the countryside since independence all served to undermine rural India and its inhabitants, Western agricapital now seems intent on delivering a knock-out blow. The timely reminder as voting in the 2019 Indian General Election gets underway is that certain leading politicians have been all too willing to facilitate the process.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Although this article was published in the original Spanish version last March, now that Julian Assange is in prison the analysis in this piece on “freedom of expression” is even more valid.

There is a wide-open debate/polemic 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. There are those who are in favour 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, they are trying to influence the situation in Cuba and, as discussed below, this orientation is widely inspired 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 endeavours. The campaign targets the sector of the Cuban society dedicated to culture, hoping to win over who 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 favour 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 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 in Cuba.

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 only 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 worshipped, 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, Fernando Rojas, one of Cuba’s vice-ministers of culture, retweeted and commented on one of my tweets. He mentioned UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressionsand the U.S. position counterposing this agreement to the free market.

(Translation: UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity: U.S. equated freedom of expression with the dictates of a “free market in art…”)

(Arnold August @Arnold_August: In capitalist countries such as the U.S. and Canada….)

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 a 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. Culture, 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 funnelled 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 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.

(Translation: “I do not believe that they care about Cuban artists. However, they do care about basing themselves on our possible errors in order to confuse. The ideological war is looking to be less and less in black and white.”)

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 American 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 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.

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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, including Global Research.  Twitter and Facebook. His website is www.arnoldaugust.com

Source

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Politics-of-Culture-in-US-The-Invisible-Hand-of-the-Market-20190415-0012.html

 

Introduction

By the end of the Obama regime, the US had gone through seven wars and was in the process of losing five of them. Washington was facing global challenges to its dominant economic and political role from Russia and China. The US adopted a dual response: to pursue a policy of reconciliation with regional adversaries – (Iran and Cuba) – and to promote a policy of confrontation toward China and Russia.

President Obama and Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton sought to encircle China in Asia and ‘rollback’ Russia’s influence and ties with neighboring countries (like the Ukraine) and Middle Eastern allies (Syria).

The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, competed with the Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton for global supremacy but through subterfuge, cloaking their drive for world power with a ‘nationalist agenda’ (‘make America strong’) . . . Donald Trump and Clinton shared the strategic goal focused on weakening and destroying rivals and competitors in China, Russia and EU.

The problem is that the US public, having suffered through three decades of losing and costly wars, was in no mood to opt for more of the same.

Candidate and subsequent President Donald Trump pursued a double discourse; talking of peace negotiations while pursuing aggressive wars, following essentially the Obama-Clinton line.

Since both parties followed similar unpopular policies which threatened to deepen inequalities and multiply wars, they both adopted a policy of strategic deception by focusing on clearly peripheral issuesthat served to intensify electoral conflictand deflected public attentionfrom their essential convergence on imperial goals.

The Democrats could not defeat or discredit President Trump by acknowledging the continuities in policy.  Hence the Democrat embraced a bizarre conspiracy that the Republicans and Trump were colluding with the Russians to steal the elections and betray democracy and the American people.  The Republicans responded by pursuing and deepening the Obama-Clinton program by adopting and radicalizing their anti-Russian, China, Iranian, Venezuela, Cuban policies. President Trump embraced the Democratic globalist agenda but cloaked it with a bellicose pseudo ‘nationalist’ ideology.

In a word, the Democratic Party and President Trump engaged in prolonged shadow boxingover whom and how they would direct the US global power grab.

The key to the party-partisan shadow boxing was the Mueller Report; specifically, the Democratic Party’s attempt to oust Trump without exposing their imperial convergence.

The Mueller Report (MR)

After a two-year investigation no Russian conspiracy was discoveredand no one cared– the public have other concerns.

According to a compilation by foreign policy analyst Steve Lendman, Mueller’s “Report” employed ‘40 FBI special agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants and other professional staff for over 2 years and spent $25 million dollars’. According  to Lendman they issued 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, interviewed over 500 individuals and made 34 indictments in search for  evidence .

None of which pertained to the Russian-Trump plot..

Was the Money and Resources Wasted by the Mueller Report?

According to most critics of the Mueller Report (MR) it was a ‘big waste of money’.  That would be true if the purpose of the MR was designed to discover a politically partisan case to impeach Trump.

However, if the deeper meaning of the MR was to distractpublic attention from large-scale, long-term issues of climate change, living standards, trade wars, economic sanctions, wars and the declining economy, then the money allocated to the MR was well taken.

Twenty-five million dollars spent to distract citizens from a war budget of nearly a trillion dollars was a bargain – very cheap entry fee for witnessing an inconclusive bi-partisan shadow boxing match.

In particular the Democratic Party could burnish their ‘fighting powers’ without risking their alliance and ties with donors on Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, Big Pharma etc.

President Trump could engage the MR by fighting and winning and not have to face his bigger problems with disenchanted supporters over  the massive tax handouts to the corporate elite, his opposition to peaceful relations with Cuban, Iran, Venezuela and Syria and the popular wrath induced by Trump’s craven submission to Israel’s land grabs in Palestine and Syria.

The public still awaits the so-called bi-partisan trillion-dollar spending legislation for infrastructure reconstruction. Instead the Democrats move from Trump-Russia conspiracies to investigating Trump’s ‘obstruction of justice’.

Two Centuries of US ‘Meddling’ in Latin American Elections

Since the early 19^th century when the US self-appointed their right to intervene in Latin America (the Monroe Doctrine), the US has invaded, overthrown, occupied and dictated Latin American economic, political and military policies.  Since WWII the US overthrew democratic governments in Guatemala, Chile, Grenada, Honduras and the Dominican Republic.  More recently the US plotted the overthrowing of governments in Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

Neither the Republican or Democratic parties have spoken up to condemn USmeddling in the politics of other free and independent countries.. Instead both parties selectively invented fake plots of Russia controlling US voters in place of recognizing that voters were fed up by the Obama-Clinton trillion-dollar bank handouts, Middle East wars and… voted for Trump.

Needless to say, the voters are not impressed by Trump’s ‘victory’ in defeating the Democrats Russian plot.

Fewer and fewer voters are being attracted by the bipartisan shadow boxing – they are no longer distracted and deceived by palace conspiracies.  They want trade agreements with China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Russia that create jobs. They want trillion-dollar infrastructure investments not handouts to war contractors and Israeli lobbies.

The MR is not read by the public; it is ignored and disposed as toilet paper. They wantreal political and class warfare (not shadow boxing) on health care,  student debts, joint ventures with China and Russia and North Korea that increase jobs and avoid wars.

If we go to elections on the basis of four years of public chatter by Wall Street look a-likes, the majority of the American people will not collude in perpetuating their decline and death through wars, drugs and air and water pollution.

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Award winning author Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Amid the threats of war with Iran, the U.S. Air Force has forward deployed Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jets to the Middle East, reported Air Force Times. 

Air Force Central Command (AFCENT) announced last week that F-35s from the 388th and 419th Fighter Wings at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, have arrived at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates to continue air superiority missions across the region.

It’s the first time Air Force F-35s have been sent to the Middle East.

“We are adding a cutting-edge weapons system to our arsenal that significantly enhances the capability of the coalition,” Lt. Gen. Joseph T. Guastella, commander of AFCENT, said in the release. “The sensor fusion and survivability this aircraft provides to the joint force will enhance security and stability across the theater and deter aggressors.”

“The F-35A provides our nation air dominance in any threat,” added Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein. “When it comes to having a ‘quarterback’ for the coalition joint force, the interoperable F-35A is clearly the aircraft for the leadership role.”

The F-35’s deployment comes one month after Rockwell B-1 Lancer bombers completed their deployment at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which left an operational gap of planes in the Middle East. The F-35s will support regional allies in airstrikes against the Taliban and Islamic State in Afghanistan.

The F-35 is expected to replace aging airframes such as the F-15, F-16, and A-10. The stealth jet’s advanced sensor package is designed to integrate and share data with other assets on the modern battlefield.

“The F-35A provides our nation air dominance in any threat,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein said in the release. “When it comes to having a quarterback for the coalition joint force, the inter-operable F-35A is clearly the aircraft for the leadership role.”

AFCENT spokeswoman Maj. Holly Brauer told the Air Force Times that upcoming missions would be on behalf of Operation Inherent Resolve.

“During their deployment, the Airmen will fly operational and other missions as assigned,” she said. “Consistent with operations security, we will not discuss employment details in advance. The F-35A and their crews will bring the advanced capabilities to the CENTCOM commander’s wide range of options.”

The deployment comes as the Trump administration formally designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. Thus setting the stage for potential escalation with Iran.

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge

The drama that has played out in the mainstream media over the release of the Mueller report had us at the Black Alliance for Peace asking the question we always come back to: What are the ruling-class minions in media and government not discussing?

We’ll tell you: Congress is about to hand the president a $750 billion budget increase for “national security.” Trump also vetoed the congressional bill that attempts to stop U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

Folks, don’t let the Democrats play you.

These people—especially our mis-leaders in the Congressional Black Caucus—had the power to stop the war in Yemen when Obama was in office. (Indeed, this was Obama’s war, as was the attack on Libya and the destabilization that destroyed parts of Syria.)

That’s why it is so important we as African/Black internationalists attempt to re-develop our people’s historic anti-war and anti-imperialist positions. Because when our folks are clear, we don’t stand for these media charades.

BAP members have been in the streets and in alternative media broadcasts doing propaganda work to bring the message to our people.

For example, watch BAP member Jacqueline Luqman interview BAP Coordinating Committee members Vanessa Beck and Netfa Freeman on the connection between the U.S. militarization of Africa and the militarized occupation of African/Black communities in the United States. Watch part 1 and part 2.

BAP member Bilal Mafundi Ali joined more than 300 activists on a bus to Sacramento to lobby the California state legislature to pass the California Act to Save Lives (AB 392). The bill proposes easing the process of filing criminal charges against police officers when they use force in cases where de-escalation techniques could have been used. The bill passed the state Assembly’s Committee on Public Safety and has moved to the Appropriations Committee. The Bay Area chapter of BAP spoke with activists about the connection BAP makes between U.S. wars abroad and the war on our people in the United States. People took to our message, as you can see from the collage below.

The U.S.-instigated crisis in Venezuela continues to morph. That is why BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka gave interviews to TeleSUR’s “From Washington” and “From Caracas”, as well as to Mayadeen Programs.

We’re proud BAP member organization Pan-African Community Actionparticipated last week in securing the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C. Brothers Netfa and Garrett and Sister Queshia gave a presentation on how the U.S. militarization of Africa is the flip side of the repression of U.S. African/Black communities.

We ask those of you in Washington, D.C., and those who can travel to the city, to help occupy the Venezuelan embassy. The opposition has announced they plan to seize the embassy this week, as they have done with other Venezuelan buildings in the United States.

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All images in this article are from BAP

We are writing to you from inside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC where we are taking action against a US coup of the independent and sovereign Bolivarian Republican of Venezuela. The Embassy Protection Collective (Colectivos Por La Paz) is here with the permission of the Venezuelan government to show our solidarity with the Venezuelan people. The upcoming week will be a critical one, as we explain below.

The opposition, with its illegal, pretend government, say they will attempt to take over the embassy this week after the diplomats leave on Wednesday, as ordered by the US State Department. If they do, it will be a theft from the Venezuelan people who own the building. As we describe in some detail below, the opposition is acting in violation of the Venezuelan Constitution and the US is acting in violation of international law.

US and Canadian Peace Delegation organized by US Peace Council in Venezuela, 2019.

Guaido’s Power Shrinks, The Roots of Opposition are Based in Violence and US Coup Attempts

The opposition leader, Juan Guaido’s power is shrinking in Venezuela and he is often ignored. He has no transitional government, even Elliot Abrams admits he is not in power, and Guaido has been barred from running for office for financial improprieties after being investigated for illegally taking money from a foreign government. Guaido’s immunity from prosecution has been removed and he has been forbidden from leaving the country. He has announced major protests multiple times to support his takeover of the Venezuelan government on behalf of the US government, but the protests are often canceled or have small turnouts.

Mision Verdad, in “Guaido, A Laboratory Product That No Longer Works,” describes how the coup was designed in meetings in the Organization of American States (OAS) in December and January that included the convicted criminal, Leopoldo Lopez, and his protegé Juan Guaido by video link.

Lopez was convicted for his role in inciting fatal violent protests and road blockades in 2014 and 2017 that killed almost 200 people in an attempt to take over the government. He is currently under house arrest. While Lopez has tried to distance himself from the unpopular failed 2002 coup of Hugo Chavez, video and news from that time show he was one of the leaders of the Chavez coup. Lopez participated in the illegal detention of then-Minister of the Interior and Justice Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, as this video shows, as well as violent attacks against Caracas’ Cuban Embassy.

Chavez pardoned Lopez for his role in the coup in 2007, but Lopez was barred from holding political office from 2008 to 2014 for his misuse of public funds while mayor. Guarimba victims have pursued new charges against Leopoldo Lopez. Just two weeks ago, Lopez was implicated in a terrorist plot, funded by the United States and organized by Guaido’s chief of staff, where mercenaries from Central America, trained in Colombia, planned to attack infrastructure, government buildings, and assassinate political leaders, including President Maduro.

People gather at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC to prevent takeover by the opposition..

What You Can Do to Show Solidarity With the Venezuelan People and Protect Venezuelan Solidarity

In mid-March, the opposition took over the Venezuelan consulate in New York and the Military Attaché office in Washington, DC. People feared the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC would be next and so they mobilized to hold space at the embassy in support.

Since then, people have been staying at the embassy 24/7. During the day, we work, and in the evenings, we hold public events. Yesterday, the ANSWER coalition held a national webinar and then we had an art build for people of all ages and light projection provided by the Backbone Campaign. See the list of events here. We are calling ourselves the Embassy Protection Collective and people in Venezuela are referring to us as Colectivos Por La Paz (Peace Collective).

We view the struggle to prevent the takeover of the embassy as fundamental to stopping this new phase of US imperialism in which the US attempts a coup and fails, but goes ahead and acts like it succeeded. President Maduro remains in power and is actively serving as the president. Juan Guaido has no power, yet the US is giving Venezuelan assets to him. It is truly Orweillian. If the US succeeds in this farce, then no country is safe. Where will the US turn next to appoint a president and give them power and assets? Nicaragua? Cuba? Iran?

You can be an Embassy Protector by doing any or all of the following:

1. Sign on in support of the Declaration of the Embassy Protection Collective.  Hundreds of people and organizations have already signed. Show your solidarity with Venezuela. The Declaration is reprinted below.

2. Spread the word through your communities by forwarding this on email, sharing content from our Facebook page and using the hashtag #ColectivosPorLaPaz.

3. Contact your member of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand they intervene to stop the State Department from giving the embassy to Guaido’s hateful, violent forces and to investigate the US-led coup and ongoing war on Venezuela. Let them know that US citizens are staying in the embassy to defend the rule of law.

4. Join us in person during the day, evening and night. We are particularly looking for people who can join us on Wednesday night April 24 and Thursday morning April 25 because that is the earliest that the opposition will try to seize the building. There are different roles to play and different levels of risk. We need people who can video, photograph, share on social media, call media, rally on the sidewalk (all very safe), sit in on the steps (you can leave before they announce they will arrest if you need to), block the front door (you can still likely leave without arrest) or join us inside the building where we will peacefully resist their trespass (highest risk of arrest). A number of us are committed to staying in the building to defend it.

We are building for the day we anticipate the Guaido forces will try to take over the embassy. If you are interested in being an Embassy Protector, please complete this form and we’ll be in touch. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP.  The upcoming week of April 21, 2019 is a critical week. Come and join us.

Please let us know if you can join us on by writing [email protected].

The Embassy Protection Collective after a forum on Africom, April 15, 2019. From the Embassy Protection Collective.

Declaration Of The Embassy Protection Collective (Colectivos Por La Paz)

We have joined together as the Embassy Protection Collective to show solidarity with the people of Venezuela and their right to determine their elected government. We are staying in the Venezuelan embassy with the permission of the legitimate Venezuelan government under President Nicolas Maduro. We seek to provide a nonviolent barrier to the threatened opposition takeover of their embassy in Washington, DC by being a presence at the embassy every day of the week for 24 hours a day.

The Collective is working from the embassy, located in the heart of Georgetown in Washington, DC during the day and holding seminars and cultural events in the evenings, as well as sleeping in the embassy. Events include forums on Venezuela, its government, economy and the ongoing attempted coup. We are also holding seminars on US foreign policy toward Africa, Honduras and Iran, the prosecution of Julian Assange and other issues.

There is great cause for us to be concerned about a hostile takeover of the DC Embassy. On March 18, 2019, the Venezuelan opposition took over the military attaché building on 2409 California St in Washington DC, with the help of the DC Police and Secret Service. On that same day, the opposition also took over the Venezuelan Consulate in New York City. They have publicly threatened to take over the embassy itself.

International Law Protects Foreign Embassies Located In The United States

According to Article 22 of the 1961 Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations, foreign embassies should be protected by the United States government and their space should not be violated by the US government. Specifically, international law requires:

• The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
• The receiving State is 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.
• The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.

The Trump Administration is violating the Vienna Convention by not only allowing the illegal seizure of diplomatic premises but by facilitating it. The Election Protection Collective is supporting the people of Venezuela by taking responsibility to ensure that Article 22 of the Vienna Convention is followed.

The Elected Government of President Maduro Remains In Power

The government of President Nicolás Maduro was re-elected on May 20, 2018 in response to the opposition demanding an early election. The election was held consistent with the Venezuelan Constitution, in consultation with opposition parties and as determined by the National Electoral Council, an independent branch of the Venezuelan government.

Sixteen parties participated in the election with six candidates competing for the presidency. President Maduro won by a wide margin, obtaining 6,248,864 votes, 67.84%; followed by Henri Falcón with 1,927,958, 20.93%; Javier Bertucci with 1,015,895, 10.82%; and Reinaldo Quijada, who obtained 36,246 votes, 0.39% of the total. A total of 9,389,056 people voted, 46% of eligible voters.

The electoral process was observed by more than 150 election observers. This included 14 electoral commissions from eight countries among them the Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America; two technical electoral missions; and 18 journalists from different parts of the world, among others. , “the elections were very transparent and complied with international parameters and national legislation.”

In a letter to the European Union correcting some of the false statements made about the election, election observers wrote: “We were unanimous in concluding that the elections were conducted fairly, that the election conditions were not biased, that genuine irregularities were exceptionally few and of a very minor nature.”

Voting machines were audited before and immediately after the election. Venezuela does something no other country in the world does, of a random sample of 52 to 54% of voting machines. The Citizen’s Audit is observed by the media, the public, and all opposition parties, who sign the audits.

The Invalid Self-Appointment of Juan Guaidó Violated Venezuelan Law

Juan Guaidó’s self-appointment as interim president violated the Constitution of Venezuela. The language of the Venezuelan Constitution is clear regarding when the president of the National Assembly can become president and none of the conditions in the Constitution have been met.

The opposition relies on Article 233 of the Constitution, which allows the National Assembly president to serve as interim president only if the president-elect has not yet been inaugurated. Guaidó’s self-appointment occurred after President Maduro had been inaugurated.

Article 233 allows the president of the National Assembly to become president only if the president-elect:

“become[s] permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; removal from office by decision of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice [equivalent of impeachment]; permanent physical or mental disability certified by a medical board designated by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice with the approval of the National Assembly; abandonment of his position, duly declared by the National Assembly; and recall by popular vote.”

None of these conditions were met.

If Guaidó had met the above conditions, Article 233 allows him to serve for only 30 consecutive days pending election and inauguration of the new President. Guaidó’s self-appointment and fraudulent inauguration occurred more than 30 days ago and no election has been scheduled.

In a press briefing, Elliot Abrams, the US Special Representative for Venezuela, could not explain these violations of law by Guaidó and admitted that Guaidó is not “able to exercise the powers of the office because Maduro still is there.” Even Abrams admits that Guaidó is not the president. Therefore, he has no authority over the Venezuelan embassy.

The Role of the Embassy Protection Collective

The Embassy Protection Collective is in the embassy with the permission of the Venezuelan government. We are upholding international law and the Venezuelan Constitution and opposing a coup attempt against the legitimate government of Venezuela on behalf of the people of Venezuela who elected their government.

The Embassy Protection Collective is made up of civilians, United States citizens, who are peacefully defending the embassy. If the opposition enters, they will be trespassing. We call on the DC police, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security and any other law enforcement agency to uphold the law and prevent the opposition from trespassing.

The Collective feels a responsibility to hold our government to a standard of respecting the rule of law as well as a responsibility to stand in solidarity with the people of Venezuela.

Signed
The Embassy Civilian Protection Collective

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

All images in this article are from Popular Resistance; Featured image: Activists gather in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC in March, 2019. (Source: Popular Resistance)

With the landslide victory of Volodymyr Zelensky, who won 73 percent of the vote, the comedian will become the president of Ukraine. Understanding how this occurred becomes easy when people review US government documents published by Wikileaks about the outgoing president.

Who is “OU”? Our Ukraine. In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as “Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko.” “Our Ukraine” has been in the pocket of the US government for 13 years.

The US government knew he was corrupt. A separate cable also released by Wikileaks makes that clear. The May 2006 cable states

“Poroshenko was tainted by credible corruption allegations, but wielded significant influence within OU; Poroshenko’s price had to be paid.”

The US government knew he was corrupt, but allowing his corruption was a price the US was willing to pay to have Our Ukraine serving as president.

The document also describes the “bad blood” between Poroshenko and  Yuliya Tymoshenko. This bad blood continues to this day as Tymoshenko came in third in the first round of the elections, and it seemed to continue through the General Election, as those who voted for her, voted for Zelensky — or against Poroshenko. The memo describes the Tymoshenko-Poroshenko relationship writing, “there is a thin line between love and hate,” and describing how  “Tymoshenko and Poroshenko might appear in public, shake hands, agree to ‘do business’ together” but a coalition between them was unlikely to last.

Joe Biden, who is expected to announce a run for president, is emblematic of the corruption of the US in Ukraine. Wikileaks reports, Biden pledged US financial and technical assistance to Ukraine for “unconventional” gas resources (i.e. fracking). And, not only was his son Hunter put on the board of the largest private gas company in Ukraine (along with a long-time Kerry family friend and financier) but when that gas company was threatened with investigation, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 saying that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion. Biden claimed he gave the country six hours to fire the prosecutor before he left Ukraine or he would bankrupt the country. OU fired him.

Why did Biden want him fired? The prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into the natural gas firm – while Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors. Corruption is a major problem in Ukraine, and Biden contributed to it, bringing US corruption to Ukraine. After Poroshenko replaced the prosecutor with one to Biden’s liking a Wikileaks document shows he was prepared to move forward with the signing of the third $1 billion loan guarantee agreement.

Now the two pro-US politicians, Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, have been replaced by a political unknown in Zelensky, or “Ze,” as he’s more popularly known. The incoming president has been vague on what policies he will pursue but says he wants to negotiate peace with Russia over eastern Ukraine, saying he was prepared to negotiate directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine is sick of corruption. Adding to Poroshenko’s corruption, the US brought more corruption. Not surprisingly, corruption under Poroshenko worsened. The country is tired of the conflict between Kiev and East Ukraine and Zelensky said he would try to end the war. And, the country has become the poorest in Europe as the promise of close ties with the US have not resulted in the benefits promised.

While the country has gotten poorer, Poroshenko remains one of the wealthiest men in Ukraine. He has been surrounded by corruption scandals as various businessmen close to him have been caught up in scandals involving corruption. The common view is Ukraine has gotten poorer as Poroshenko has gotten richer.

All this was predictable with what the US knew about OU, and thanks to Wikileaks should not be a surprise to anyone.

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Kevin Zeese is a co-director of Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

More than 200 killed and at least 500 injured as eight explosions rocked Catholic churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka while Christians began Easter Sunday celebrations.

Media report said:

The blasts started at around 8:45am local time at St. Anthony’s Church in Colombo and St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, a Catholic-majority town outside of the capital. The Zion Church in Batticaloa on the eastern coast was also targeted. At around the same time, the Shangri-La, Cinnamon Grand and Kingsbury five-star hotels were also hit.

Two more explosions happened later in the day, targeting two more locations in Colombo. All attacks appear to have been coordinated.

At least 207 people were killed, Reuters reported, citing police.

An earlier report cited the number of wounded as more than 450.

The five-star Shangri-La, Kingsbury and Cinnamon Grand hotels in the heart of Colombo were also targeted.

Congregations were taking part in Easter Sunday services at the churches when the blasts hit.

The death toll could rise significantly as hospitals report casualty figures.

At least nine foreign nationals are known to have died.

A curfew has been imposed from 18:00 to 06:00 local time (12:30-00:30 GMT).

Seven arrests have been made.

The government also said there would a temporary block on the use of major social media networks.

No-one has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks but the defense minister said they were probably carried out by one group.

St Sebastian’s church in Negombo was severely damaged. Images on social media showed its inside, with a shattered ceiling and blood on the pews. Dozens of people are reported to have died there.

There were heavy casualties too at the site of the first blast in St Anthony’s, a hugely popular shrine in Kochchikade, a district of Colombo.

Hospital sources in Batticaloa said at least 27 people had died there.

A hotel official at the Cinnamon Grand, near the prime minister’s official residence, told AFP the explosion there had ripped through a restaurant, killing at least one person.

A seventh explosion was later reported at a hotel near the zoo in Dehiwala, southern Colombo, with police sources reporting two deaths. The zoo has been closed.

An eighth explosion was reported near the Colombo district of Dematagoda. Media said it was suicide bomber and that three people, believed to be security personnel, were killed during a police raid.

Citizens formed long queues as they joined in front of blood donation centers or hospitals to donate blood.

Police advised people to stay inside their houses and remain calm.

There is a heavy military presence in front of all major state buildings. No-one was expecting this, it was a peaceful Sunday morning – everyone was going to Easter services.

Priests were shocked as they have not imagined such attack.

Announcing the curfew, Defense Minister Ruwan Wijewardane said:

“We will take all necessary action against any extremist group that is operating in our country.”

He also said that “all the culprits” had been identified and would be “taken into custody as soon as possible”.

Another minister, Harsha de Silva, described “horrible scenes” at St Anthony’s Shrine in Kochchikade, saying he had seen “many body parts strewn all over”.

Pope Francis, in his traditional Urbi et Orbi speech at the Vatican, condemned the attacks as “such cruel violence” which had targeted Christians celebrating Easter.

Cardinal Archbishop of Colombo, Malcolm Ranjith, told the BBC:

“It’s a very difficult and a very sad situation for all of us because we never expected such a thing to happen and especially on Easter Sunday.”

BBC Sinhala reporter Azzam Ameen informed that two suspects have been detained in the Dematagoda area of Colombo and seven suspects arrested in total.

He quoted Sri Lanka’s defense minister as saying most of the blasts were suicide attacks carried out by one group. No group has not claimed responsibility of the attacks.

A report said:

“A foreign intelligence agency has reported that the NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) is planning to carry out suicide attacks targeting prominent churches as well as the Indian high commission in Colombo.”

The NTJ is a radical Muslim group in Sri Lanka that came into the spotlight after it was linked to vandalism of Buddhist monuments in the country, where Buddhism is the predominant religion.

The million dollar question is why did the agencies allowed this atrocity to happen even though there was clear intelligence warnings of terrorist attacks.

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I’m glad Benjamin Netanyahu won reelection. Since I realize that saying this won’t sit well with many folks, let me explain:

As the election developed, it became clear that Benny Gantz, the leader of the opposition “Blue and White” coalition, for a number of reasons, had come to be seen as the darling of the liberal set – especially here in the United States.

Some, for example, were justifiably upset by Netanyahu’s gross corruption or unnerved by his authoritarian actions designed to intimidate the press, silence non-governmental organizations, and strip the courts of their power. Others were optimistic that should Gantz win, Israel’s image would improve in the United States and there would be the possibility of a “reset” in the U.S.-Israel relationship. One publication described a Gantz victory as creating “a fresh slate and an opportunity to re-energize support for Israel.”

Driving this support for Gantz was the concern of liberal Democrats who have been troubled by recent polls showing a significant erosion of support for Israel among core Democratic constituents – especially millennial and minority voters – including American Jewish millennials. This growing alienation from Israel has in part been due to both Netanyahu’s repressive policies and his close relationship with Donald Trump. There could be no doubt that Trump had been excessive in his support for his Israeli partner: canceling the Iran Deal; moving the US embassy to Jerusalem; the “gift” of the Golan Heights; cutting all U.S. aid to the Palestinians; and remaining silent in the face of settlement expansion and Netanyahu’s declared intent to apply Israeli sovereignty to West Bank settlements. This virtual Trump/Netanyahu marriage most certainly had a role to play in the embrace of Gantz by many liberals.

Because American liberals have embraced the mantra of a “two-state solution” and see Netanyahu’s aggressive settlement construction and his pledge to “annex” the settlements as obstacles to that goal, they also fretted that a Netanyahu victory might spell the end of their idea of two states – one “Jewish and democratic” and one for the Palestinians. At the same time, American Jews had an additional frustration with Netanyahu as a result of his accommodation of the illiberal policies of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox religious community on issues of marriage, conversion, and women’s rights.

It was in this context, that Gantz became the “great hope.” I, however, never believed that he was.

In the first place, on the issue that mattered most to the future of peace – the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories – there was little that separated Netanyahu from Gantz. In fact, Gantz’s opening campaign advertisement featured Gaza in rubble (Gantz had been in charge of the most brutal and devastating of the Gaza wars), boasting the he had reduced parts of Gaza “back to the Stone Age.” And right before the election, an American Jewish publication reported on a Gantz speech laying out his “seven pillars” for peace with the Palestinians: “he said his priority was to ensure a Zionist ‘end state’ – Jewish and Democratic – and not a binational state, while keeping the Jordan Valley, a united Jerusalem, and modifying the 1967 lines…I don’t want to rule the Palestinians.” In addition to these goals, he added keeping the settlements and maintaining security control west of the Jordan River.

In other words, Gantz might have been a “fresh face,” but, on the central issue of dealing with Palestinians and the occupied territories, he was no different than the prime minister he was seeking to replace.

In addition to the positions he espoused, I felt that it was important to look at the composition of the governing coalition Gantz would have assembled had he emerged victorious. Although the press routinely referred to Gantz as the “center-left” candidate, in reality, only a small fraction of his potential partners could be seen as “left.” In fact, most of his eventual partners were quite comfortable with Gantz’s “seven pillars.” And because Israeli politics have moved so far to the right, even if he had won the opportunity to form a government, Gantz never could have assembled a coalition of 61 Knesset Members without adding the parties representing the Palestinian citizens of Israel – something that, early on, Gantz had said he would never do.

This avoidance of Arabs was in response to the negative anti-Arab campaign waged by Netanyahu. Recognizing that Gantz couldn’t have formed a government without Arab support or acquiescence, Netanyahu advanced the slogan that the voters’ choice was “Bibi (Netanyahu’s nickname) or Tibi” (referring to Ahmed Tibi, the leader of one of the Arab parties). Instead of pushing back against this patently racist Arab-baiting, Gantz made a pledge not to consult with the Arab parties in the Knesset or include them in his government. 

With Netanyahu back for his fifth term as prime minister, liberals must now face reality. They can no longer see Israel as a romanticized “idea” of a progressive state governed by liberal values. Rather it has demonstrated that it is an illiberal ethno-nationalist society that has applied an apartheid-like repressive system to enable their continued rule over a captive Palestinian people.

Liberals may continue to say that they oppose settlements and seek a two-state solution. But here too they will now have to confront reality. The settlement expansion that occurred on their watch, and which they took no concrete steps to curtail, has made a two-state solution impossible to implement. And, they must now admit that Netanyahu, who for years they tolerated and even feted, has in reality “played them like a fiddle.” This won’t come easily.

It was interesting to watch how a few leading liberal pundits and Democratic elected officials reacted during and after this election. When it appeared that Gantz might win, they felt that it was safe to denounce Netanyahu and even call him a racist, now with Netanyahu emerging as the victor, they have flipped on a dime, congratulating him on his victory and pledging to work with him to implement the two-state solution – some illusions do die hard.

But with Netanyahu expected to continue his extremist anti-Palestinian, anti-peace, anti-rule of law, and pro-Trump agendas, the debate about Israel here in the United States will intensify. Because the base of the Democratic Party has awakened to the realities of the occupation and is deeply offended by everything both Netanyahu and Trump stand for, several developments can be expected.

The rift between the base of the Democratic Party and its elected officials will continue to grow. This will take the form of candidates for higher office increasingly being called to account for their failure to challenge Israeli behaviors.  The debate within the American Jewish community will also intensify, with liberal Jews forced to reexamine their views of Israel and their support for the policies of that state. As a result of these developments, the Democratic Party is moving toward becoming the anti-Netanyahu, anti-settlements, anti-annexation party – with an increasing number of Democrats even voicing support for cutting aid to Israel and advocating for the rights of citizens to support the BDS movement.

We are on the threshold of a major change in how Israel will play out in American politics. I’m afraid that it has come too late to save the two-states that were envisioned by the long dead Oslo Accords. But it is a good thing that we will now finally be able to have an honest debate about the dreadful situation created by American complicity in enabling Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinians. This debate might have been aborted for a time had Gantz won. The occupation and settlements would have continued – but liberals would have been less inclined to challenge him. With Netanyahu back, the debate will be energized. It might be late in the game, but better late than never.

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James Zogby co-founded the Arab American Institute in 1985 and continues to serve as its president. He is Director of Zogby Research Services, a firm that has conducted groundbreaking surveys across the Middle East. For the past 3 decades, he has served in leadership roles in the Democratic National Committee and served 2 terms as a President Obama appointee to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. He writes a weekly column published in 12 countries. He is featured frequently on national and international media as an expert on Middle East affairs. In 2010, Zogby published the highly-acclaimed book, Arab Voices.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

A stalemate of sorts has developed in Venezuela.  The pretender, Juan Guaidó, as head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, continues as faux interim president, noisier than ever, but no more effectual than the time he declared his intentions to overthrow the incumbent.  President Nicolás Maduro, despite winning in 2018, is still cited as the illegitimate one, holding the reins of a ruined country.  Guaidó, despite being in permanent campaign mode, has yet to convince the military to take his side.  The Constituent Assembly, directed by the Supreme Court, have also stripped the pretender of parliamentary immunity, leaving the way open for arrest.  

To date, the political support Guaidó can count on, leaving aside his well wishers in the country, has been externally sourced; Washington and a range of European capitals have decided to turn their noses up at the UN Charter, though all are offering differing measures of encouragement.

The strategy on the part of the opposition has been one of triggering a broader popular insurrection.  While the protestors number many, to date, they have not been sufficient to oust Maduro.  This has led to calls for rallies and marches of such scale that they cannot be ignored.

“We,” Guaidó hopes, “call on all the people to join in the largest march in the history of Venezuela to demand the end to the usurpation so this tragedy can end.”

Maduro, for his part, is making a fist of it, attempting to stem the bite of US sanctions, notably those targeting the state oil company PDVSA.  This is being done by getting cash via Venezuelan oil sales through Russian state energy giant Rosneft, which is one of PDVSA’s largest creditors. Once obtained at a discount rate, Rosneft on-sells the oil at full price.

Interest has now shifted to a provision in the country’s constitution that offers the opposition a snifter of hope.  It is a fitting, discomforting echo to past instances where cabals and groups of officials would beg a foreign power to do the job of retrieving their positions or undermining those of others.  To that end, interest in Article 187(11), governing the powers of the National Assembly to authorise foreign interventions in the country, has spiked.

To hook to hang the argument upon has been that world weary Trojan Horse to state independence, humanitarian intervention.  How far does such generosity for a downtrodden populace extend?  Maduro’s opposition felt they could make much of the February 23 announcement to bring such aid into the state with the assistance of sympathetic foreign powers.  If they could do it, then surely, their virtue demanded reward?  Predictably, Maduro loyalists blocked the effort, leading to a parliamentary faction by the name of Bloque 16 de Julio urging the deployment of the article.

Vente Venezuela chief Maria Corina Machado is a key proponent, seeking to use the article to open the door for the international community to meddle and salvage.  The bricks and mortar behind the intervention would be that most troubling of doctrines, the Responsibility to Protect, a point expressly endorsed by former Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma.

“Maduro,” he exclaimed, “dances over the ashes of a destroyed country.”

For his part, Guaidó is more cautious, demonstrating the imaginary limits about how such a doctrine can be deployed. First, authorising such an intervention was not a decision to be “taken lightly” (read, potentially catastrophic); second, operational logistics, boundaries and protocols of engagement had to be specified.  As the blood spattered record of R2P shows, these limits are often the stuff of boardroom nonsense rather than military reality.  Once the bombs fall, the law falls silent.

The dress of humanitarian intervention is already looking very worn, and its tattered coverings will come off in any traditional invasion or toppling common in the Americas.  But things are bound to get more interesting with Russian counters, suggesting that President Vladimir Putin is ready for his next gambit.  Russia’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta has already made the point that Moscow is considering the deployment of strategic bombers on an ongoing basis in Venezuela to add to recent deployments of personnel in Caracas on March 23.  It is also said that an agreement has been reached between Moscow and Caracas to permit the deployment of Russian aircraft at La Orchila, where Russian advisors already find themselves.

An Ilyushin Il-62 plane carrying some hundred personnel and an accompaniment of 35 tons of material aboard an Antonov An-124 military cargo plane were already troubling additions to the picture for Washington.  It seemed to have, in its template, a Syrian-style propping up, and is nothing less than an act of niggling molestation for the US security establishment.  The official line, predictably enough, is that the deployments are there to shield non-military Russian personnel and provide assistance in maintenance of Venezuela’s Russian designed air-system.

On Moscow’s part, Washington’s intentions are clear enough.

“Now when the Americans keep saying that all options remain on the table,” suggested Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Glavnoye with Olga Belova, “I have no doubt that they are calculating the consequences of a military adventure.”

The spoiling measure on President Putin’s part, with all the grit that comes with such calculation, is a simple admission that any overthrow of Maduro will be, at best, a messy affair and distinctly non-humanitarian in nature.  Washington, for its part, will simply do what it does worst: attempt, if it can, to deploy force clothed in translucent principles under the guise of realpolitik.

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

Remember the famous taxicab  scene from the great film On the Waterfront? Ex boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) telling his older brother Charlie (Rod Steiger), who is second in command to a crooked union boss, that he didn’t look out for him enough. Borrowing from that scene, and from that film, this writer has taken ‘poetic license’ a bit: 

“You are my government Uncle Sam, you shoulda looked out for me a bit… You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum which is what I am… Let’s face it. It was YOU Uncle Sam!”

Only a certifiable fool would miss the fact that the majority of we Americans are either knee deep  in ****, financially, health wise and even spiritually, or very close to it.

The smell of war, phony war, and the smell of greed has fogged up the thinking of most of us. Where do I begin? Come on, how many times that Uncle Sam ‘Bangs the drums for war’ before the truth will sink in? One needs not go back further than the dawn of this new century to see and smell the ****. September 11th, 2001 was the shock the puppet masters wanted, and so far it still works. With all the diligent and comprehensive research done by so many scientists and investigators (some mainstream and some not) the stain of that lie will always paint over the truth. Connecting 9/11 to what followed is easy: The excuse to not only destroy and occupy oil rich Iraq, and mineral rich, key pipeline area Afghanistan, was part of the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) plan. The real ‘Deep State’ has continually hoped  to dominate the Middle East before the Chinese and Russians get too deeply involved there. As the late General Smedley Butler put it in his 1935 essay War is a Racket, the money people (banks) and contractors make a fortune on ANY war we get into… anywhere and at anytime! Just ‘Follow da money!’

On the subject of money, we probably always were, as a nation, obsessed with those of great personal wealth. Working stiffs should have been angered by such a notion; instead too many of us became enthralled by it. The ‘Roaring 20s’ were replete with media celebration of the super rich. Perhaps because of the Great Depression many who at one time accepted the power of those having excess wealth now began to get pissed off. As things loosened up economically so did mindsets. Onetime labor strikers and ‘Eat the rich’ working stiffs began to settle in as good Democrats under the tent of a strong labor movement. Then, during the 70s and into the 80s the ‘owners of capital’ slowly regained control of our culture with the emphasis on consumerism  and Greed is Good. Look where we are now: The workforce has union representation in the TEENS! Labor unions themselves are run  in many instances by leaders who ‘suck up’ to management with too many concessions.

All facets of society are filled with mega millionaire professional sports owners, players and of course their media partners. The movies and television shows we watch (even the news shows) are filled with mega millionaires on airwaves that ‘We the people’ rightly own. Yet, through our ‘bought and paid for’ elected officials we allow the billionaires to control what comes out of the boob tube. Did you ever notice how all our television programming has more and longer commercials? Watching a New York Giants football game on a Sunday afternoon in 1960, a ‘time out’ was literally one minute and then right back to the field. Now you can literally make a sandwich and begin eating it during one commercial break! How about our infamous Wall Street?

The investment class is now and always has been filled with the super rich. Remember, when Henry Paulson became Treasury Sec. under Junior Bush? Before being appointed Paulson retired from the predatory ‘Palace on Wall Street’ Goldman Sachs… at a single year compensation package worth.. ready for this… $ 500 million! And he stood there in front of the cameras and looked like Sad Sack as he told all the suckers out there that we had to ‘Bail Out’ the banks. True conservatives and true progressives were shouting ‘NO, place those toxic firms in Receivership, buying their lousy assets at 10 or 20 cents on the dollar’! Yet still, with all the unnecessary suffering by so many of us, after the ‘smoke cleared’ many of my fellow citizens still admire those super rich ‘makers and shakers’ of fortune.

Folks, as long as the suckers out there pay homage to the war makers, the super rich celebrity class and of course the phony ‘Free market’ Wall Street con job…. and Uncle Sam represents THEM and not us…. we will continue to be a nation of Terry Malloys.

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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].

During the last decade of 20th century, leading “analysts” of the New World Order were presenting the Kosovo’s issue as a democratic matter rather than a historical and geopolitical dispute. It was perceived as a political case in which one ethnic minority (Albanians) was oppressed by a “non-democratic regime” of Slobodan Milošević. The refusal of the Rambouillet Accords by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, served as a justification for the unilateral action against Yugoslavia in March, 1999. The Rambouillet Accords called for:

1) NATO administration of Kosovo as an autonomous province within Yugoslavia;

2) A force of 28,000 NATO troops to maintain order in Kosovo;

3) Referendum on independence in Kosovo to be held after 3 years;

4) Free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access for NATO troops throughout Yugoslav territory including associated airspace and territorial waters;

5) Immunity for NATO personnel to Yugoslav law.

In other words this was a classical ultimatum designed intentionally by the USA in order to force the Yugoslav leadership to refuse the Accords, thus NATO would have a justification to wage a “humanitarian” war on the FR Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared that:

“The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing. Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form”.

During the negotiation talks in Paris, Americans removed Kosovar Albanian leader Mr. Rugova from the talks (he was supporting the independence of Kosovo but with peaceful non violent means) and imposed a new leader Hashim Thaci-commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organization officially listed and recognized as a terrorist organization by the US Department of State until 1998, when the USA suddenly declared them as a “freedom fighters” and used them as NATO ground troops against the Yugoslav Army, Police and Serbian civilians. This action conducted by USA was not surprising at all knowing that even today USA and its allies are creating various terrorist movements across the world to start civil wars in order to achieve regime change in certain countries. Just in the last 30 years, USA and its allies followed this pattern in the case of Yugoslavia, Somalia, Russia (Chechnya), Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen…

Repeatedly violating jus ad bellum and jus in bello, including UN Chapter, its purposes and principles (e.g. article 2, 3, 4), and avoiding UN Security Council mechanism (articles 52, 53), under the auspices of NATO, the US led an international coalition, made a devastating precedent in international relations, by committing the largest NATO aggression in its history, in violation of NATO’s Charter.

After 78 days of criminal bombing against the FR Yugoslavia, involving 19 NATO member countries aided by at least 7 non-member countries, combined with air attacks and land invasion from Republic of Albania and FYR Macedonia, the Yugoslav leadership was forced to sign Peace Accords (Agreement from Kumanovo, 1999), which resulted in the absolute withdrawal from Kosovo of  the Yugoslav administration (civilian and military) and the establishment of the UN international interim administration over the province of Kosovo (civil and military missions are officially led by UN, but in practice both missions are under the patronage of the USA and NATO).

Damaged houses in the village of Pavlovac, Vranje, Serbia, with the body of Mijalko Trajkovic who was killed by a NATO cluster bomb on 14 April 1999

On the 27th of April 1999 in the city of Surdulica, Serbia, NATO targeted civilian houses killing 10 civilians including all members of the family Milić

April 27, 1999, Surdulica, Serbia, in the series of  NATO’s civilian bombing, the house of Milić was hit by projectile and the whole family was killed: Milorad (15 years), Stamenka (65), Aleksandar (35), Miljana (14), Vladimir (11), Vesna (35) and three more neighbours who sheltered in the house were killed as well

Despite the Yugoslav withdrawal from the province, UN Resolution 1244 (1999) combined with the Rambouillet Accords, established an international protectorate in the southern Serbian province, guaranteeing the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the FR Yugoslavia in Kosovo, but at the same time, directed international presence towards the creation of the independence of Kosovo, which was formally declared in 2008.[1]

Today, the international community remains divided in regards to Kosovo’s status. The US, UK, Germany, France and EU (without Slovakia, Greece, Romania, Cyprus and Spain) are using diplomatic pressure on countries across the globe to recognize the independence of Kosovo. So far, the Republic of Kosovo has been recognized by around 102 countries. The US and EU are putting a tremendous political pressure on Serbia to recognize its own occupied province as an independent state using EU membership accession as a “stick and carrot”, combined with various subversive covert activities.

After 19 years of absence of the Serbian authorities in Kosovo, despite the overwhelming international presence with its ambiguous efforts towards democratization of the society and creation of the independence of Kosovo, it has been proved that Kosovo’s issue was not a democratic matter as it was presented to the public, it is a typical historical and geopolitical dispute.

Let us remind ourselves of the little know secret ultimatum from 1991. made by USA, given to President Milošević and to Minister V. Jovanović (Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs) by former US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann: if there would be a conflict in Kosovo (1991), The US would consider Serbia to be responsible for such a conflict, and we will start bombing Belgrade.

This fact proves that America was determined to bombard Serbia in 1991, well before 1998/1999  when the open armed conflict in Kosovo began. John Norris, chief of staff for the International Crisis Group and the director of communications for U.S. Deputy Secretary of Stateduring the Kosovo’s crisis, wrote in his book why was FR Yugoslavia  attacked in 1999:

“it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of the political and economic reform-not the plight of Kosovar Albanians-that best explains NATO’s war. Milosevic had been a bur in a side of transatlantic community for so long that the United States felt that he would only respond to military pressure“.

The Kosovo issue is only one part of the old historical confrontation between Serbs and Albanians, therefore it cannot be understood without tracing a pattern of historical developments and it must be observed through broader regional and global geopolitical perspective.

Both Soviet and American secret plans for the forcible dissolution of SFR Yugoslavia targeted the province of Kosovo as the most vulnerable place to start the breakup of the country due to Albanian numerousness and their historical enmity towards Slavs and particularly towards Serbs.

Although Yugoslavia would be torn apart even without foreign interference, due to its inherited ethnic tensions and separatist aspirations, the separatist republics would have lacked military power to achieve independence forcefully.

Considering that only the Yugoslav Army possessed such a power, it could have guaranteed a peaceful and gradual separation as in the case of Czechoslovakia. Both Czechs and Slovaks had similar historical animosities like South Slavs, but in their case the West did not plan a violent destruction like in Yugoslavia, because both countries are projected to be integrated into NATO and the EU very soon upon the separation and both political leaderships agreed to direct their future towards Euro-Atlantic integration.

In the case of Yugoslavia, from Western perspective, Serbs bear a historical countermark as a disobedient, freedom loving, militant “small Russians” of the Balkans, through which Russia will always project its influence in the South East Europe. This historical stance of the Serbs as a “small Russians” has a permanent character among Western strategic thinkers. Consequently, every great or regional power, even former Soviet Union, tends to suppress Serbian factor in the Balkans.

Taking into account that the Western foreign policy agenda, via American influence, is dominated by paranoid obsession with Russia as a global competitor and opponent to Western interests (mainly American national interests), it was deemed  necessary to incapacitate and control all countries which might not serve the interests of the West and which might even be used by Russia to project Russian national interests (e.g. South Stream Project).

During the existence of Yugoslavia, particularly during the Cold War, this country represented an important international actor where both super powers have had limited influence over SFR Yugoslavia. Serbs as creators and defenders of Yugoslavia and defenders of diminishing Old World Order, were targeted as the main regional obstacle in implementation of the New World Order doctrine in  Southeast Europe. As American and NATO politicians often repeat: we have an unfinished business in the Balkans, meaning that USA led coalition, hasn’t established a full spectrum control of the Balkans due to incapability to forcefully integrate Serbs into Euro-Atlantic community.

Western strategic thinkers and ideologues of the Euro-Atlantic neo-liberal/neo-colonial doctrines, are still trying to integrate Serbs into their “league of extraordinary gentlemen” by using completely wrong means.

Suppressing and destroying Serbia’s national interest will not result in Serbia surrendering to their so-called Western “partners”. A new approach is needed ?

Let’s start fulfilling, instead of suppressing, legitimate and legal Serbian national interests in accordance with international and domestic law, this might be the key for integrating Serbs into the “league of extraordinary gentlemen”?

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[1] UN resolution 1244 reaffirmed sovereignty and territorial integrity of the FR Yugoslavia, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act, and established substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo under supervision by international civilian and security presence. All Yugoslav administrative, military and police personnel were withdrawn from the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija.     

All images in this article are from the author

The US-engineered proxy war against Syria, beginning in 2011 and the crescendo of the so-called “Arab Spring,” has ended in all but absolute defeat for Washington.

Its primary goal of overthrowing the Syrian government and/or rendering the nation divided and destroyed as it has done to Libya has not only failed – but triggered a robust Russian and Iranian response giving both nations an unprecedented foothold in Syria and unprecedented influence throughout the rest of the region.

Lamenting America’s defeat in Syria in the pages of Foreign Affairs is Brett McGurk – a career legal and diplomatic official in Washington whose most recent title was, “Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” He resigned in protest over alleged plans for a US withdrawal from its illegal occupation of eastern Syria.

McGurk’s lengthy complaints are full of paragraph-to-paragraph contradictions – illustrating the lack of legitimate unified purpose underpinning US policy in Syria.

In his article titled, “Hard Truths in Syria: America Can’t Do More With Less, and It Shouldn’t Try,” McGurk would claim (emphasis added):

Over the last four years, I helped lead the global response to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS)—an effort that succeeded in destroying an ISIS “caliphate” in the heart of the Middle East that had served as a magnet for foreign jihadists and a base for launching terrorist attacks around the world.

McGurk would also claim (emphasis added):

Following a phone call with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump gave a surprise order to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, apparently without considering the consequences. Trump has since modified that order—his plan, as of the writing of this essay, is for approximately 200 U.S. troops to stay in northeastern Syria and for another 200 to remain at al-Tanf, an isolated base in the country’s southeast. (The administration also hopes, likely in vain, that other members of the coalition will replace the withdrawn U.S. forces with forces of their own.)

Yet if anything McGurk says is true, then ISIS is undoubtedly a threat not only to the United States, but to all of its coalition partners – mainly Western European nations. Why wouldn’t they eagerly commit troops to the coalition if ISIS truly represented a threat to their security back home? And why would the US withdraw any troops in the first place if this were true?

The answer is very simple – ISIS was a creation of the West – a tool explicitly designed to help “isolate” the Syrian government and carry out military and terrorist operations the US and its partners were unable to do openly.

It was in a leaked 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memo (PDF) that revealed the US and its allies’ intent to create what it called a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria. The memo would explicitly state that (emphasis added):

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).

On clarifying who these supporting powers were, the DIA memo would clarify:

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

This “Salafist”[Islamic] “principality” [State] would show up on cue, placing additional pressure on an already besieged government in Damascus and eventually creating a pretext for direct Western military intervention in Syria.

Only through Russia’s own intervention in 2015 were US plans overturned and its overt war against Syria frozen in limbo.

McGurk and others throughout the Western establishment have attempted to compartmentalize what is essentially their own collective failures by linking them exclusively to both former-US President Barack Obama and current US President Donald Trump.

Whether President Trump maintains troops in eastern Syria or not, nothing will change or reverse the significant strategic and geopolitical defeat Washington has suffered.

Instead, troops levels and deployments in not only Syria, but also neighboring Iraq, serve to contribute to the next phase of US interference in the Middle East – spoiling reconciliation and reconstruction.

Washington’s War of Terror

This most recent episode of US military intervention in the Middle East – fighting terrorists it itself created and deliberately deployed specifically to serve as a pretext – is an example of US “slash and burn” foreign policy.

Just as farmers burn to the ground forest that serves them no purpose so that they can plant what they desire in its place – the US deliberately overturned an emerging political and economic order in the Middle East that served them no purpose in a bid to replace it with one that did.

McGurk all but admits this in his article, claiming – as he gave his version of ISIS’ defeat – that (emphasis added):

Over the next four years, ISIS lost nearly all the territory it once controlled. Most of its leaders were killed. In Iraq, four million civilians have returned to areas once held by ISIS, a rate of return unmatched after any other recent violent conflict. Last year, Iraq held national elections and inaugurated a new government led by capable, pro-Western leaders focused on further uniting the country. In Syria, the SDF fully cleared ISIS out of its territorial havens in the country’s northeast, and U.S.-led stabilization programs helped Syrians return to their homes.

He also claimed:

Iraqis and Syrians, not Americans, are doing most of the fighting. The coalition, not just Washington, is footing the bill. And unlike the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, this campaign enjoys widespread domestic and international support.

In other words, it was a redesigned regime-change campaign spanning both Syria and Iraq, designed to attract domestic and international support by using an appalling – but artificially engineered – enemy to destroy both nations and allow the US and its “coalition partners” to rebuild the region as it desired.

And while McGurk enumerates the accomplishments of his US-led coalition – what he omits is the existence of a vastly more effective and powerful coalition in the region led by Russia and Iran.

While McGurk boasts of taking back empty desert in eastern Syria, it was the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah allies who took back Syria’s most important, pivotal, and most populated cities.

In Iraq – Iranian sponsored Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) carried out a large percentage of the fighting against ISIS there – and in the process have created a permanent nationwide network of militias that will better underwrite Iraqi security than compromising US defense partnerships and expensive US arms contracts, and the hordes of terrorists sponsored by the US itself to justify both.

McGurk eventually admits further into his article that the US presence in Syria has little to do with ISIS – and more to do with “great power diplomacy.”

He talks about the “US zone of influence” in Syria and brags about America’s ability to “enforce” it by killing Iranians and Russians who entered it in pursuit of terrorists the US was all but openly harboring.

McGurk also repeatedly decries “Iranian military entrenchment” in Syria, a geopolitical development made possible only by America’s many categorical failures amid its proxy war in Syria.

ISIS was eradicated first and foremost in areas under the control of the sovereign governments of Syria and Iraq in cooperation with Russia and Iran.

ISIS remnants have clung – without coincidence – to territory within the “US zone of influence.”

The US continues citing “ISIS” as its pretext to remain in Syria – while simultaneously admitting its presence in the region aims at reasserting Western domination over it and containing Russian and Iranian influence – Russia which was invited by Damascus to assist in counter-terrorism operations – and Iran – a nation that actually resides within the Middle East.

This incoherent, conflicting narrative contrasts with Russia and Iran’s clear-cut agenda of eliminating terrorists and preserving the territorial integrity of Syria, and their decisive, clear-cut actions to implement this agenda. Russia and Iran are also offering all shareholders in the region amble incentives to get behind this agenda – including the economic and political benefits that normally accompany national and regional peace and stability.

Washington’s War on Peace

Washington’s illogical and contradicting narratives undermine any notion of unified purpose in the Middle East. Even if its goal is regional hegemony, its multitude of failures and lack of incentives for allies undermine any chance of success.

In the absence of a sensible, unified purpose, attractive incentives, or a coherent strategic plan, the US has instead turned to spoiling reconciliation and reconstruction through attempts to divide the region along ethnic lines, preserve what few terrorists remain by shuffling them between Iraq and Syria through territory US forces occupy, and by targeting nations and their allies with sanctions to hinder reconstruction efforts.

Sanctions on Iran directly impact Tehran’s efforts to assist Syria and Iraq in reconstruction and the rehabilitation of their respective economies. So do US sanctions on Moscow.

The US is also targeting fuel shipments attempting to reach Syria – with Syria’s own oil production hamstrung by the ongoing illegal US occupation of Syria’s east where much of its oil resides.

AP in an article titled, “Syria fuel shortages, worsened by US sanctions, spark anger,” would report that:

Syrians in government-controlled areas who have survived eight years of war now face a new scourge: widespread fuel shortages that have brought life to a halt in major cities.

The article also reported that:

The shortages are largely the result of Western sanctions on Syria and renewed U.S. sanctions on Iran, a key ally. But they have sparked rare and widespread public criticism of President Bashar Assad’s government just as he has largely succeeded in quashing the eight-year rebellion against his rule.

The combination of sanctions and deliberate attempts to prolong the proxy war in Syria illustrate Washington’s true attitude toward any notion of “responsibility to protect.”

Fuel will still reach Syria’s government and military where it is needed most – but will cause extraordinary suffering among Syria’s civilian population – as Washington explicitly intends.

Washington is not attempting to remove the government in Damascus to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people – it is causing immense suffering among the Syrian people to remove the government in Damascus.

While Washington has lost its war against Syria, it continues its war on peace. It will spoil attempts by Syria to move forward – and by doing so – and more than anything else – illustrating to the world that its own malign interests and agenda wrecked the region – not “ISIS” and not “Iranians” or “Russians.”

The US campaign of spite will continue onward both in Syria and across the rest of the region until an alternative regional and global order can be established that allows nations to sufficiently defend against US aggression and interference and enables the world to move on without those special interests on Wall Street and in Washington driving America’s current battle for hegemony.

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

Featured image is from NEO

The images of six Metropolitan police officers dragging Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London have provoked rage by citizens around the world. Many have warned that his extradition to the US for trial on conspiracy charges – and possibly much more if federal prosecutors have their way – will lead to the criminalization of many standard journalistic practices. These scenes were only possible thanks to the transformation of Ecuador’s government under the watch of President Lenin Moreno.

Since at least December 2018, Moreno has been working towards expelling Assange from the embassy. The Ecuadorian president’s behavior represents a stunning reversal from the policies of his predecessor, Rafael Correa, the defiantly progressive leader who first authorized Assange’s asylum back in 2012, and who now lives in exile.

While Ecuador’s Foreign Minister, Jose Valencia, blamed his government’s expulsion of Assange on the Australian journalist’s “rudeness,” the sell out is clearly a byproduct of Moreno’s right-leaning agenda.

Political instability has swept across Ecuador since revelations of widespread corruption in Moreno’s inner circle emerged. The scandal coincided with Moreno’s turn towards neoliberal economic reforms, from implementing a massive IMF loan package to the gradual and total embrace and support for the US foreign policy in the region. In his bid to satisfy Washington and deflect from his own problems, Moreno was all too eager to sacrifice Assange.

The INA Papers scandal and growing political instability

WikiLeaks’s decision to re-publish the details of Moreno’s use of off-shore bank accounts in Panama, infamously titled INA Papers after the name of the shell corporation at the centre of the scandal (INA Investment Corporation) appear to be the main cause for the president’s decision to expel Assange from the embassy.

Ecuadorian Communications Minister Andrés Michelena event went as far as claiming that the INA Papers were a conspiracy plot between Julian Assange,  the former president Rafael Correa and the current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The INA Papers scandal has cast a long shadow on Moreno’s regime and shattered its pledge to fight against institutional corruption. The scandal reveals that a close associate of Moreno, Xavier Macias, lobbied for the contract of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric power plant (valued at $2.8 billion) as well as the ZAMORA 3000 MW plant to be awarded Sinohydro, a Chinese state-owned construction company.

Screengrab from El Confidencial

The financial trail from the Chinese corporation passed through bank accounts in Panama belonging to INA Investment Corporation – a shell company originally founded in Belize, a notable tax haven, by Edwin Moreno Garcés, the brother of the current President. The most crucial pieces of evidence indicate that the INA Investment funds were used for the purchase of a 140 m² apartment in the city of Alicante, Spain, and a number of luxury items for President Moreno and his family in Geneva, Switzerland, during his time as a special envoy on disability rights in the United Nations.

As the pressure mounted on Moreno, the Attorney General of Ecuador issued a statement on March 19th, indicating that it had commenced an investigation into the INA Papers scandal involving the president and his family. Next, on March 27^th, the National Assembly of Ecuador approved a vote in favor of investigating Moreno’s alleged off-shore bank dealings in Panama. According to Ecuador Inmediato, 153 public service officials, along with all members of the National Assembly, were also included in the initial public hearing scheduled for April 1^st.

The corruption scandal came amid a number of other prominent crises disrupting both the Moreno administration and the Ecuadorian economy. The local and regional elections of March 24^th, as well as the election to the Council of Citizens’ Participation and Social Control (CPCCS) on March 24th, have been riddled with a series of controversies and irregularities with regards to vote counts and allegations of fraud, including the attempts to invalidate null votes, disqualify and smear the candidates endorsed by ex-President Rafael Correa. The stunning lack of transparency and legitimacy was highlighted by a report of the mission of electoral observers of the Organisation of American States. 

In an unusual twist, the US ambassador, Todd Chapman, was spotted visiting the headquarters of Ecuador’s National Electoral Council during the March 24^th elections and allegedly participated as an official electoral observer in the elections. This display of interference was widely condemned on social media as illegal under the current electoral rules, which forbid foreign powers from playing any active role in the observing or interfering the electoral process. But in Moreno’s Ecuador, it was a perfect symbol of the new status quo.

The IMF Deal and a turn towards the US

During the recent meeting of the Executive Board of the IMF, the financial body approved a loan package of $4.2 billion to the government of Lenin Moreno for what it called a “ more dynamic, sustainable, and inclusive economy for the benefit of all Ecuadorians.” The agreement coincided with layoffs of over 10,000 public sector workers, in addition to the ongoing policy of slashing in public and social spending, a decrease in the level of minimum wage and the removal of secure work protections that marked the sharp neoliberal turn of the Ecuadorian government under Moreno.

The IMF deal coincided with the intensifying attempts by the Ecuadorian government to proceed with the expulsion of Julian Assange from its London embassy. His arrest therefore stands as a sign that Moreno is willing to give up any part of his country’s sovereignty – political, diplomatic, or economic – to comply with the demands of international finance. 

The same pattern has been seen in Moreno’s increasing level of collaboration with the Trump administration and its foreign policy in Latin America. From holding private meetings with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, to publicly hosting Mike Pence in the Ecuadorian presidential palace, to authorizing the opening of a new “Security Cooperation Office” in place of the old US military base in Manta, Moreno’s embrace of Trump’s “Monroeist” policy towards Latin America has become all too apparent.

At the same time, Moreno has gone to great lengths to undo the progress of Latin American unity and integration initiated by his predecessor and other progressive leaders in the region.

On March 13^th, Lenin Moreno announced that Ecuador would leave the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) international agreement originally founded in 2008 by leaders of South America’s so-called pink tide like Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Lula Da Silva of Brazil. The project was inspired by the long-standing vision of Simon Bolivar who envisaged South America as a federation of various republics, and was meant to consolidate the growing economic and political integration among the increasingly progressive governments across the region, ultimately emulating the current structure of the European Union.

Moreno complained in his press release that UNASUR has been compromised by the lack of participation of the right-leaning governments in the region, as well as what he called, “irresponsible actions of certain leaders that replicated the worst vices of socialism of the 21^st Century.”

In a manner similar to Francisco Santander and the project of Gran Colombia during the 1820s, Moreno has opted for a pro-US foreign policy and commercial relations based on free trade and economic liberalization. He has also followed the path of other right-wing leaders in the region such as Jair Bolsonaro and Mauricio Macri in officially recognizing Juan Guaido as the President of Venezuela. Moreno was even among the attendees of the founding summit of Prosur, a newly convened regional block of US-aligned neoliberal governments.

“Who will trust in ECUADOR again?”

Moreno’s decision to silence Julian Assange and expel him enabled the president to gain the trust of the Trump administration while distracting the Ecuadorian public and international media from his mounting crises at home. From corrupt dealing in off-shore bank accounts, the fraudulent elections of March 24^th and his mishandling of the Ecuadorian economy, Moreno is in a world of trouble. 

This has not escaped the notice of Correa, the former President of Ecuador who first authorized Julian Assange’s asylum back in 2012. After having his page blocked on Facebook, Correa stated that

“In his hatred, because Wikileaks published corruption of INA papers, Moreno wanted to destroy Assange’s life. He probably did it, but he has also done a huge damage to the country. Who will trust in ECUADOR again?”

Overall, Ecuador has come to resemble the neoliberal regimes of the 1990s across the continent, with IMF-sanctioned austerity, increasingly unstable state institutions and an almost complete obedience to the US foreign policy in the region becoming the new policy standard. Handing Assange over for possible extradition to the US was the inevitable result of Moreno’s turn to the right, but it is hardly the end of his sell out.

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Denis Rogatyuk is a Russian-Australian freelance writer, journalist and researcher. His articles, interviews and analysis have been published in a variety of media sources around the world including Jacobin, Le Vent Se Léve, Sputnik, Green Left Weekly, Links International Journal, Alborada and others.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

Whereas:

• Wi-Fi systems and 5G technology have very harmful effects on human, animal and environmental health;
• Wi-Fi systems and 5G technology seem to be especially harmful to newborns, children, people who are ill and seniors;
• 5G technology is similar to, but worse than, the problems that have already been linked to early generations of telephones because it uses pulses of waves;
• On January 1, 2019, 247 scientists in 42 countries recommended a moratorium on the deployment of 5G technology in the telecommunications sector;
• A major study by the National Toxicology Program in the United States showed that rats exposed to waves developed cancers;
• The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) opposes the installation of cellular towers and antennas on their firehalls for health reasons;
• The precautionary principle is not implemented seriously or rigorously; and
• Since 5G technology was deployed in New York City, a number of people and their pets have fallen ill.

The richly disastrous mess that is Libya has been moving into another phase of inspired aggression at the hands of General Khalifa Haftar.  As he does, UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Al-Sarraj is anxious.  For some three weeks, the General’s eastern forces, known as the Libyan National Army (LNA) have been edging towards the capital of the fractured state in a hope to remove the “remaining terrorist groups” in the region.

The government of national accord (GNA) is not getting the voices of support in foreign capitals it might have once enjoyed.  In early April, Al-Sarraj was keen to stress his view on how Libya would return to a state of strife-free normalcy. “We will not give up our principles and peaceful solutions to reach a civil state, to ensure that totalitarian rule or militarisation of the state will not return.”

Much stock was placed in having a national dialogue that would lead to “the unification of institutions and the holding of right presidential and parliamentary constitutional elections to allow people to have their say.”

General Haftar, veteran of the Libyan war in Chad during the 1970s and 1980s and touted past collaborator with the CIA, has preferred to spoil the party with his own effort to besiege the capital, despite efforts on the part of Western diplomats to discourage him.  His argument in attacking Tripoli since the chaos of 2011 has been directed at the feeble efforts of Libya’s interim figures, whom he accuses of being oblivious to the Islamist militia problem.  His response to the militia problem has been to create his own ragtag grouping of militias.  It takes one to get rid of one.

Al-Sarraj is doing everything he can to assure that his forces will play by the rules of international humanitarian law, hoping that this will keep him in the good books and add him to others.  A counter-offensive has begun, and clashes have been reported in Wadi Rabea, Airport Road, Ain Zara and Khalit Al-Furjan.

As the recognised government struggles, old formulae of accusations and suspicions are also playing out.  Al-Sarraj and his colleagues are convinced the general is getting support from external sources, though their finger pointing is somewhat awry.  Of little doubt is the assistance Haftar is receiving from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which have done their bit to add some polish in terms of equipment to the LNA.

Russia is keen that Haftar not receive all the blame for the new round of spoliation; the United States seemed confused on the matter in the UN Security Council, though President Donald Trump has done much to confuse the issue.  (Previously, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had called on Haftar to halt his attack.)  In conversations with Haftar, Trump seemed to give his nod of approval to the efforts on the part of the LNA leader to restore order.  In a phone call, Trump “recognised Field Marshal Haftar’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system.”

With the regime in Tripoli isolated, the Libyan Interior Minister, Fathi Bashagha, has led the recriminations.  France, despite having supplied six patrol boats to Al-Sarraj’s forces as early as February, not to mention training for the presidential guard, has been singled out as arch villain. The interior ministry has suspended “all relations between the ministry and the French side… due to the position of the French government in support of the criminal Haftar.”

European politicians are observing the latest round of violence with concern less for the humanitarian consequences to Libya than the clouded security picture that will follow.

“If the war persists,” warns former Italian Interior Minister Marco Minitti, “all those fleeing the clashes will turn into refugees per the international conventions, thus bringing among them foreign fighters from Syria and Iraq who usually use chaos to transport from one place to another.”

How inconsiderate of them.

The French response has been one of shrugged shoulders, and some regret.  But the final picture here is one of typical, undermining indifference. It was France who, helped by the United Kingdom and the United States, led the campaign to oust Muammar Qaddafi with catastrophic consequences for a state that has ceased to be.

Since 2011, to call Libya a functioning political entity has been a charade of grotesque proportion assisted by forced theatre on the diplomatic stage.  The post-2014 civil war in the aftermath of the ejection of the internationally acknowledged Libyan parliament by forces working with the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, has seen continuing, crippling conflict.  What is distinctly not a charade are the deaths and refugees that are growing in number, meaning that this failed state is on track to become the next blood soaked Syria.

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

Worried constituents in Oakland are wondering, “Does Barbara Lee still speak for me?”

“Lee recently voted to approve a $17 billion increase in military spending.”

Veterans for Peace has issued a press release in support of both Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, and East Bay Veterans for Peace, Chapter 162, want to talk to Congresswoman Barbara Lee about it. Opponents of US wars have idealized Lee, California’s District 13 Congresswoman, for her antiwar record, and might therefore expect her to defend Manning and Assange for exposing US war crimes.

“Barbara Lee speaks for me” became a popular slogan both in and outside California’s District 13 after she voted against the Patriot Act and the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the “War on Terror,” right after 9/11. She has demanded a new AUMF every time the US has started a new war since, and she usually votes against military spending bills, as her constituents demand. However, she recently cast a deciding vote in the House Budget Committee to approve a bill with a $17 billion increase in military spending for next year and another such increase for 2021.

“Military and civilian leaders were lying to the US people.”

I spoke to Daniel Borgstrom, a member of East Bay Veterans for Peace, Chapter 162.

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Ann Garrison: Daniel, I understand that you are requesting a meeting with Barbara Lee to talk about the federal indictment and extradition request for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Daniel Borgstrom: Yes, we are.

AG: And what has her East Bay office said in response?

DB: We submitted our request in writing this week. Then we called her Oakland office to ask how long we might expect to wait for a response, but they couldn’t give us an estimate.

AG: Could you summarize the Veterans for Peace statement in support of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange?

DB: It says,

“What Chelsea Manning released through WikiLeaks was evidence of the routine killing of civilians by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the routine cover-up of these war crimes. The Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diaries also revealed that military and civilian leaders were lying to the US people when they presented rosy assessments of the progress of those wars. If more people had paid attention to these revelations, many thousands of lives could have been saved.”

We also include one of Chelsea Manning’s statements at her court martial:

“I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. It might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day….I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience.”

AG: And what else do East Bay Vets for Peace plan to do about this besides talk to Barbara Lee?

DB: Talking to Barbara Lee is our top priority right now, but we also plan to join emergency protests, initiate our own protests, contact our other elected representatives, talk to our friends, and write op-eds and letters to the editor. Defending Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange is as essential to the antiwar movement as opposing US wars in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and whichever country the US and NATO bomb, invade, or economically strangle next.

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Daniel Borgström is a member of East Bay Veterans for Peace, Chapter 162, and a member of the KPFA Radio-Berkeley Local Station Board. He spent 4 years in the US Marine Corp, from 1959 to 1963. In 1971, four years before the end of the Vietnam War,he was arrested occupying the South Vietnamese consulate in San Francisco. He and 12 other ex-GIs were acquitted of all charges at the end of a 4-week trial. He can be reached at [email protected].

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

Featured image is from BAR

I once read an interview with legendary fiction writer Stephen King in which he told the interviewer that he simply reads the newspaper to get ideas for his novels, declaring that truth was far scarier than fiction. After reading about the latest development in the lawsuits against Monsanto, I’m inclined to agree with him.

As part of the 3rd cancer trial facing Monsanto (now owned by Bayer AG), new emails were released that showed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials may have colluded with Monsanto to help slow the release of the dangers of the pesticide from the public. According to the documents and testimony, Monsanto apparently asked the government agency to slow down their safety review of the company’s top-selling herbicide, RoundUp. According to the documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, not only did the government agree to slow the safety review, EPA officials also helped the company by giving them consistent updates.

In early 2015, the government agency seems to have started working in conjunction with Monsanto to stall toxicology tests on glyphosate (the main ingredient in RoundUp) conducted by a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This isn’t the first time that the EPA may have thwarted efforts to keep the public safe from toxic glyphosate and other harmful pesticides. An earlier court case against Monsanto revealed evidence that the Environmental Protection Agency knew glyphosate was a probable carcinogen nearly thirty-five years ago but approved it for use anyway.

Even outside of the alleged collusion, there has been doubt as to whether the EPA has actually been doing enough to protect the public from the chemical that has been dubbed a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization.

That’s because a recent study called The Global Glyphosate Study, found that the so-called “safe” amounts of glyphosate set by the United States government agency aren’t actually safe at all. Instead the EPA’s “safe” levels were found to damage genetic material and cause harmful imbalances in the microbiome, according to the study authors: Italy’s Ramazzini Institute in partnership with the University of Bologna, the Genoa Hospital San Martino, the Italian National Institue of Health, Mount Sinai in New York and George Washington University.

The term “microbiome” refers to the total of all microbial life that live in a human being, which is largely made up of beneficial bacteria and other beneficial microbes. Every person and living thing has a unique microbiome, similar to a microbial fingerprint.

And, that’s just the beginning of the government agency’s seeming collusion with chemical corporations. Two years ago, the agency reversed its plan to ban another toxic pesticide known as chlorpyrifos after a meeting with Dow Chemical’s CEO, Andrew Liveris.

Finally, a federal court intervened and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos, yet even after the court order, the agency in its seeming egomania simply declared that it was reviewing the decision. The judge admonished the EPA for “having stalled on banning chlorpyrifos,” and ordered that all commercial registrations for chlorpyrifos be cancelled or revoked within 60 days.

Once again, the agency demonstrated a lack of integrity and decency, while abdicating its responsibility to the public in keeping them safe from brain-damaging pesticides like chlorpyrifos and probable carcinogen, glyphosate.

Why does the EPA seem hell-bent on allowing chemical corporations to run roughshod over the human right to health and safety, while the same corporations rack up billions in profits? The only answer I can think of is: cold, hard cash. Of course, I can’t prove it, but I can’t think of any other reason why the EPA would shirk its basic responsibility to Americans—a responsibility that couldn’t be any clearer than the name it sports: “Environmental Protection Agency.” After all, human beings constitute part of the environment that warrants protection.

It’s time the EPA was held accountable. Their current stall tactics and unwillingness to protect the public make them complicit in the deaths and suffering of countless people exposed to these toxic chemicals. Perhaps the agency should be named in the lawsuits alleging that glyphosate caused peoples’ cancer? It’s sad that the people who have alleged that Monsanto’s RoundUp caused their terminal cancer are forced to use their dying days to hold the company accountable, when there is a government agency that should have protected them in the first place.

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Dr. Michelle Schoffro Cook, PhD, DNM shares her food growing, cooking, and other food self-sufficiency adventures at FoodHouseProject.com. She is the publisher of the free e-newsletter World’s Healthiest News, founder of Scent-sational Wellness, and an international best-selling and 20-time published book author whose works include: Be Your Own Herbalist: Essential Herbs for Health, Beauty, & Cooking. Follow her work.

Thousands of Christian followers of the Orthodox and Catholic faiths from all over the world gathering at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City celebrated Easter Holy Saturday with the emergence of the holy fire from the location of the tomb of Jesus Christ.

However, only a few privileged Palestinian Christians, mainly those living in East Jerusalem or Israel, were able to attend the celebrations. Thousands of their brethren from the locked West Bank and Gaza Strip, only few kilometers away from Jerusalem, were not able to attend them.

Israel does not allow Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to reach the walled-in East Jerusalem without special army issued permits.

As in every year, Israel issued a ed number of permits for West Bank and Gaza Christians to enter Jerusalem during Easter. But then it imposed a week-long closure on the occupied territories for the Jewish Passover holiday, which coincided with Easter celebrations, thus deeming all permits void for this week.

At the same time, Israeli police set up blockades around the Old City of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher preventing thousands of pilgrims from reaching their holy sites.

Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III emerged from the recently renovated Edicule, Jesus tomb, with lit candle sticks indicating the appearance of what Christians of all faiths believe is the holy light.

Once the patriarch has emerged from the tomb, the thousands waiting since the morning hours and carrying candles lit them from the holy fire. The light is then taken to churches around the country and the world.

Christians marked on Friday the annual Easter Good Friday procession with thousands of pilgrims from all over the world congregating on Jerusalem to walk the path Jesus Christ had walked to his crucifixion.

Easter will be celebrated on Sunday.

The Orthodox and Catholic churches mark Easter this year at the same time, when usually each mark it a different time from the other.

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Featured image is from If Americans Knew Blog

The California Fish and Game Commission today voted to formally oppose the Trump administration’s proposal to end federal wolf protection across the country.

“We commend the Fish and Game Commission for taking a stand against the Trump administration’s assault on wildlife by opposing its move to strip protection from wolves nationwide,” said Jenny Keatinge, California wildlife policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Trump’s plan threatens wolf recovery in California and would set a dangerous precedent that undermines recovery of many other federally endangered species statewide.”

More than 30 people spoke in defense of wolves before today’s vote. The commission meeting was preceded by a rally for wolves with more than 40 wildlife advocates in wolf masks.

In early March the Trump administration announced its proposal to remove Endangered Species Act protection from nearly all wolves in the lower 48 states. The move would end 40 years of wolf recovery across the country and leave many wolf populations vulnerable to more hunting, trapping and poisoning.

Although wolves in California would remain protected under state law, the removal of wolves’ protection in other states could leave California’s packs isolated and susceptible to inbreeding, essentially preventing the species’ state recovery.

“Wolves are just beginning to return home to California, and they still need federal protections to truly recover across the country,” said Keatinge. “There’s fierce opposition to Trump’s disastrous proposal, and we’re proud California has joined those ranks.”

Background

A 2013 study found that wolves may have once been widely distributed in California. The animals have been part of the state’s cultural heritage for thousands of years. They were driven to extinction in California by the mid-1920s.

In late 2011 a wolf from Oregon, OR-7, entered the state, beginning the return of wolves to the area. Wolves are protected under California’s Endangered Species Act. Today fewer than a dozen known wolves live in Northern California.

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Featured image is from Jeff Lepore via the earthly report

More than 10,000 people have been reported killed in Yemen over the last five months, bringing the war’s total death toll to over 70,000 since 2016 according to data collated by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). While overall reported fatalities have trended downward this year amidst the UN-backed peace process, lethal fighting continues across the country and has even intensified in key governorates like Taiz and Hajjah.

Total conflict fatalities:

• ACLED records over 70,200 total reported fatalities¹ from 1 January 2016 to 13 April 2019
• More than 7,600 have been reported so far in 2019:
  • Approximately 2,350 in January; 1,930 in February; 2,330 in March; and 1,000 so far in April
• Fatality rates have shifted significantly across multiple governorates between the last quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019:
  • Reported fatalities increased most dramatically in Al Jawf and in Hajjah, though also in Taiz, Sadah, and Ad Dali
  • They dropped most significantly in Hodeidah, though also in Marib, Sana’a, and Al Bayda

Civilian fatalities:

• ACLED records 3,155 direct attacks targeting civilians resulting in over 7,000 reported civilian fatalities² since 2016
• The Saudi-led coalition and its allies are responsible for the highest number of reported civilian fatalities from direct targeting: over 4,800 since 2016
• The Houthis and their allies are responsible for over 1,300 reported civilian fatalities from direct targeting
• Notably, so far in quarter one of 2019, reported civilian fatalities are at their lowest point since the third quarter of 2017
  • Still, nearly 380 civilian fatalities have been reported this year stemming from direct targeting

Flashpoints (spotlight on three governorates):

Hodeidah

• Reported fatalities continue to decline dramatically in Hodeidah:
  • Reported combat fatalities dropped 89% from the last quarter of 2018 to the first quarter of 2019 thus far (from nearly 2,500 reported fatalities to fewer than 300)
  • Reported civilian fatalities dropped from nearly 250 to approximately 100

Taiz

• Deadly fighting has spiked in Taiz:
  • Reported combat fatalities have risen from approximately 850 in the last quarter of 2018 to over 1,000 in the first quarter of 2019, a more than 20% rise
  • Reported fatalities from civilian targeting have risen from approximately 40 to over 60 in the same period

Hajjah

• In Hajjah, violence is reaching record highs:
  • Over 1,100 combat fatalities have been reported in the first quarter of 2019 — the highest numbers ACLED has recorded in Hajjah since the start of 2016
  • Over 80 fatalities from direct civilian targeting have been reported in the same quarter — the second-highest number of reported civilian fatalities recorded for the governorate

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Notes

1 Fatality numbers are often the most poorly reported component of conflict data. While ACLED codes the most conservative reports of fatality counts to minimize over-counting, this does not account for biases that exist around fatality counts at-large. As such, these figures should be considered estimates, rather than exact counts. Find more information about ACLED’s methodology for coding fatalities here.

² This figure includes only civilians killed as a result of direct civilian targeting. It does not include collateral civilian fatalities. As such, the number is assumed to represent an underestimate of total conflict-related civilian fatalities in Yemen.

Repeat broadcast originally airing January 11, 2019. – [MAW]

“We’re not going to stop this train wreck. We are not even trying to slow down the production of CO2, and there is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere. We are going to see the consequences, and they will be significant.” – Bruce Wright, senior scientist with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association. Quoted in The End of Ice [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

 Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The battle to protect human civilization and life on this planet from the ravages of global warming has taken on a renewed urgency following the October 8th release of a stunning report from the world’s greatest authority on the state of the climate.

The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C was approved by the revered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on October 6 in Incheon, Republic of Korea, just weeks in advance of last December’s Katowice Climate Change Conference. [2] Among other dire warnings, the report concluded that:

• The global mean surface temperature of Earth has increased 0.87°C during the period from 1850-1900 to 2006-2015.
• ocean acidification and changes to carbonate chemistry stemming from the absorption of 30% of anthropocentrically produced carbon dioxide are unprecedented for at least the last 65 million years.
• the probability of extreme drought, precipitation deficits, and risks associated with water availability in some regions increase dramatically with the internationally agreed upon limit of 2°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels versus the more ambitious target of 1.5 °C.
• Overshooting the 1.5 °C target would pose large risks for natural and human systems because some of those risks could be long-lasting and irreversible, such as the loss of some ecosystems.
• ecosystems such as kelp forests and coral reefs that are relatively less able to move are projected to experience high rates of mortality and loss. For example, multiple lines of evidence indicate that the majority (70–90%) of warm water (tropical) coral reefs that exist today will disappear even if global warming is constrained to 1.5°C.
• Ecosystem services from Earth’s oceans will be compromised due to 1.5°C warming and changes to ocean chemistry (e.g. acidification, hypoxia and dead zones) with more pronounced affects beyind 1.5°C of warming.
• Projections overwhelmingly indicate that restricting global temperature rise to 1.5 °C would require a 40-50% reduction below 2010 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. [3]

While it has been pointed out that a thermonuclear war would likely have even more devastating impacts on life on Earth, at least humans have the power to decide not to use nuclear weapons. In the case of climate change, we are told that once critical thresholds have been crossed, no human actions, no matter how valiant and self-sacrificing, will be enough to prevent runaway warming.

On a week when youth around the planet are mobilizing strikes for ‘climate action,’ the Global Research News Hour highlights the major indicators of a natural world in crisis due to global warming.

In the first half hour, following a short report on a local (Winnipeg) youth activist event, University of Ottawa based climate systems scientist Paul Beckwith outlines some of the more worrying signs that even the October 2018 IPCC Special Report on Climate Change failed to adequately address, he looks at the threats to the polar ice caps and the role they play in regulating familiar weather patterns, and he assesses some of what needs to be done to avoid multiple ‘tipping points’, and a ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario.

In our second half hour, mountaineer, independent journalist, former Iraq War correspondent, and Truthout staff writer Dahr Jamail navigates listeners through The End of Ice, his recently published book on climate change. His latest publication is a tour through various locations around the globe from Mount Denali in Alaska to Florida, to the Amazon Rainforest and marks the changes climate change have already made and projects to the changes yet to come.

Paul Beckwith is a physicist, engineer, and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. His research focus is on Abrupt Climate System Change. He has an archive of Youtube videos in which he shares the most up to date information on the climate threat. His website is paulbeckwith.net.

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). He is also the co-author with William Rivers Pitt of The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible (Truthout, 2014). Jamail is recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards. Dahr Jamail is also the author of the recently published book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (The New Press, set for release January 15, 2019.) He lives and works in Washington State.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 244)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time.

Notes:

1. Dahr Jamail (January 2019), p. 73, ‘The End of Oil: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption’, The New Press, New York, NY
2. https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/
3. Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 °C, Chapter 3: Impacts of 1.5°C  of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems, pg. 177-181; https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/SR15_Chapter3_Low_Res.pdf

 

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received today in Damascus Mr. Alexander Lavrentiev and accompanying delegation which included Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Mr. Lavrentiev is an active Russian career diplomat with more focus on Astana talks between the Syrian state and representatives of al-Qaeda, NATO, and regional stooges.

President Assad reminded the visiting delegation of Syria’s priorities: Ridding Syria of terrorism and restoring peace and stability to all the Syrian land.

President Assad pointed the need to address the above issues in order to achieve the Syrian people’s aspiration in restoring their lives. ‘There’s a need to work on overcoming the obstacles impeding the execution of the Idlib military de-escalation zones agreement’, the agreement which the Turkish party has been failing to implement their obligations in it.

‘Terrorist organizations must be eliminated in the Idlib region which is carrying out daily assaults against civilians in Idlib province and the neighboring Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia countrysides.’ the visiting delegation were reminded.

However, the Russian President’s special envoy Mr. Lavrentiev first raised the matter of the ‘constitutional committee,’ the priority of the P3 imperialists — who want to decide on a new constitution for Syria, despite Syria having drafted a new one which passed by public referendum in 2012, and despite the UK not having one of its own. China and Russia, unfortunately, capitulated to the demands of the world leaders in genocide, in the passage of UNSCR 2254 (2015).

Mr. Lavrentiev then added the need to eliminate terror, find out the fate of the missing Syrian citizens, the plight of the internally displaced Syrians and the Syrian refugees abroad, in addition to rebuilding what terror has destroyed.

Some initiatives of exchanging Syrians kidnapped by terrorists with al-Qaeda ‘Moderate Rebels’ were discussed in the meeting which was attended by Chief of the National Security Bureau Major General Ali Mamlouk, Assistant Foreign and Expatriates Minister, Ayman Sousan and Russia’s Ambassador in Damascus.

Syria News comment: Hopefully this time Mr. Lavrentiev would set the priorities right, even Russian top officials have stressed that their patience is growing very thin with delays of implementing Turkey’s part in the Idlib Agreement. The Russian and Iranian guarantors of the Turks have been very generous with Erdogan and his terrorists continuously extending the deadline to fulfill Erdogan’s obligations in the Idlib Agreement since October 15th, last year, on the account of the Syrian people.

The Russian Ambassador to China’s latest statement of intent to pursue the integration of Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) with the Moscow-led economic and security structures in Central Asia strongly hints at the Eurasian Great Power’s interest in N-CPEC+ as the most viable way for bringing this about.

The Russian-Pakistani Strategic Partnership might soon enter a qualitatively new phase if the Russian Ambassador to China’s latest statement is anything to go by. His Excellency Ambassador Andrey Denisov said that Russia intends to pursue the integration of Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) with the Moscow-led economic and security structures in Central Asia, which strongly hints at his country’s interest in N-CPEC+ as the most viable way for bringing this about. This aforementioned initiative refers to the global pivot state’s northern branch route to the Central Asian Republics that might also one day include the RuPak Railway proposal via Afghanistan as well, which could altogether connect Russia to the Afro-Asian Ocean through China’s flagship series of BRI megaprojects in Pakistan collectively referred to as CPEC. For reasons of political sensitivity pertaining to its parallel strategic partnership with India, Russia can’t openly endorse CPEC but can still nevertheless participate in it so long as it clothes its efforts in non-CPEC language about integrating the Eurasian Economic Union (EAU) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with BRI like the Ambassador just did.

Important groundwork is already being made on this front at the policymaking level after three interconnected events that recently took place between Russia and Pakistan. Mr. Oleg Barabanov – a programme director at the Valdai Club (Russia’s most prestigious think tank), a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO, which is run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and a professor at the Russian Academy of Sciences – confirmed Russia’s “Return to South Asia” in the wake of the Pulwama incident and subsequent “surgical strike” fiasco by the rogue state of India in a thought-provoking piece that he published at his influential think tank in early March. This was soon thereafter followed up by Pakistan’s Strategic Vision Institute hosting a conference on bilateral relations with Russia where Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua unveiled a seven-point roadmap for taking ties to the next level, which evidently made progress a lot faster than most observers could have expected after the President of Pakistan’s National Defence University just shared his viewson bilateral relations at the Valdai Club last week.

Quite clearly, Russia has surmounted its “deep state” divisions over South Asia despite public optics to the contrary by the increasingly desperate Indophile faction, unafraid to move forward with its newfound strategic partnership with Pakistan because it understands the game-changing significance of this relationship in regards to its broader return to the region. It would therefore be very symbolic if Russian President Putin met with Pakistani Prime Minister Khan on the sidelines of next week’s Belt & Road Initiative Forum in China to casually discuss this and other aspects of their countries’ strategic partnership with one another, but even if that doesn’t happen, there’s no doubt that Ambassador Denisov’s latest statement broadly framed how both leaders envision their relations developing in the future. What all of this portends is that Russia will very likely succeed in its centuries-long mission to reach the warm waters of the Afro-Asian Ocean, but in an historic twist, it’ll do so peacefully and with the active assistance of its Chinese and Pakistani partners in the new Multipolar Trilateral as it simultaneously makes progress on the Golden Ring geopolitical project that they’re all a part of.

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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.

Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and Moreno are world’s apart.

Correa expelled the Pentagon from his country, shutting down its Manta airbase, the region’s largest. Moreno invited what no country should tolerate on its territory to return.

Economist President Correa opposed IMF debt bondage. Moreno went the other way. Correa opposed privatization of oil, gas, water, electricity, and other government enterprises, what Moreno wants handed to corporate predators, most likely for self-enrichment.

Correa’s agenda included investing in public healthcare, education, and other social programs. Moreno believes anything government can do, business does better so let it, no matter how exploitive of and harmful to ordinary people.

According to Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) Solidarity Committee member Stansfield Smith, Ecuador for a decade under Correa was “transformation(al).”

His predecessors (and Moreno) “instituted neoliberal austerity and privatization programs, prompting inequality, poverty and unemployment to soar.”

Correa went the other way,

“carr(ying) out programs that peoples in progressive social movements have advocated throughout the West if not the world.”

“Ecuador’s Citizens Revolution…arose from a popular repudiation of neoliberalism and neocolonialism, similar to Chavista Venezuela…”

A new constitution was overwhelmingly approved by national referendum. Correa called its adoption “a day of national celebration, a victory for the people, for democracy.”

Its provisions included progressive social policies, including respect for Ecuador’s indigenous people and natural resources.

Correa rejected predatory IMF and World Bank debt entrapment, demanding structural adjustment harshness. He renounced nearly $4 billion in toxic debt he called illegitimate, wanting the funds directed to popular needs.

He raised taxes on wealthy Ecuadorians to make them pay their fair share, along with instituting a tax on capital flight.

The nation’s central bank repatriated billions of dollars in assets held abroad, bringing them back where they belong. He renegotiated oil contracts with foreign companies on more favorable terms to Ecuador.

He tripled investments in infrastructure spending and public services for housing, along with free education and healthcare for all Ecuadorians.

He diversified the economy away from dependence on oil, increasing its exports in other areas. Throughout most of his tenure, Ecuador’s economy grew by over 4% annually.

He reduced poverty, unemployment, and socioeconomic inequality – an agenda Washington opposes wherever it exists.

During his tenure, Ecuadorian indebtedness to foreign creditors was among the lowest in Latin America.

He called universal healthcare and “quality, free public education…the basis of a real democracy” – what Moreno destroyed after taking office in May 2017, spurning every populist promise made, why he’s widely reviled.

On Tuesday, Ecuadorians marched en masse in Quito toward the Presidential Palace. Police accosted them violently, supporters of Rafael Correa’s Citizen Revolution party involved, along with others opposing hardline Moreno policies.

According to provincial coordinator for Loja of the Citizen Revolution Movement Marck Iniguez,

“we are here against the misgovernment that exists, as well as (Moreno’s) betrayal of the government plan for which he was elected.”

“Ecuador has been sold to the IMF, taking measures against the Ecuadorean people.” Progressive MP Jota Lloret added: “The government’s orders are ‘shut up and attack those who demonstrate against us.’ ”

“Repression is what we live now, but we can not be silenced and stopped. We are the people and together we will recover our homeland.”

Protesters displayed banners, saying: “Out with Moreno. Out with the traitor.”

In cahoots with the US and UK, Moreno invented phony reasons to rescind Assange’s citizenship and asylum status – agreeing to hand him over to UK authorities for extradition to the US, flagrantly violating international law.

Betraying Assange was in exchange for a $4.2 billion IMF loan (with onerous loan shark of last resort terms) and other favors granted him, selling his soul for the right price.

Ecuadorian attorney general’s office issued an Interpol red notice on former Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, an Assange supporter/vocal critic of Moreno’s hardline rule.

Out of the country, he wants him detained and extradited to Ecuador for the “crime” of supporting truth-telling journalism the way it should be, calling his actions instigation and incitement — what police state rule is all about.

Interpol rejected a separate red notice for Correa’s arrest and extradition from Belgium where he’s living, calling it incompatible with human rights, the same true for wanting Patino prosecuted.

On Wednesday, he left Ecuador for Peru. It’s unclear if he’s there or headed to another country.

Ecuador under Moreno in cahoots with US, UK, IMF, and World Bank hardliners is unsafe and unfit to live in.

*

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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.

According to Canadian analyst Ken Stone, member of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War the power of the US Congress has been “effectively diminished” as it failed to override President Trump’s veto of a bipartisan bill to end US military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s murderous war against Yemen.

“US Senator (and presidential candidate) Bernie Sanders and other senators succeeded in passing through the US Senate the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which was, in turn, passed as well in the House of Representatives and sent to President Trump to sign into law. However, he used his veto to kill the bill and, unfortunately, there was not the 66% majority of legislators in Congress to over-ride Trump’s veto. There are two results: one is that the war in Yemen will go on for a while yet; the other is that the power of Congress has been effectively diminished in relation to the US president,”

Ken Stone told Tasnim in an interview.

Ken Stone is treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, an executive member of the Syria Solidarity Movement.org, a former National Steering Committee member of the Canadian Peace Alliance, and an occasional contributor to GlobalResearch.ca.

The following is the full text of the interview.

Tasnim: US President Donald Trump on Wednesday vetoed a bill Congress passed to end US military assistance in the Saudi Arabia-led war on Yemen. What’s your take on the veto by Trump?

Stone: I agree with my colleagues in the US peace movement who argue that US participation in the illegal and brutal Saudi war on Yemen is unconstitutional according to the US Constitution and the War Powers Act of 1973. They argue that, unless the US has been directly attacked, the US president can only make war on another country with the explicit prior consent of Congress. Yemen has not attacked the US. Exactly the opposite is the case. So US peace activists lobbied their elected representatives to invoke the War Powers Act of 1973 to force President Trump to stop aiding and abetting the Saudi Coalition in waging its illegal and very brutal war on Yemen. US Senator (and presidential candidate) Bernie Sanders and other senators succeeded in passing through the US Senate the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which was, in turn, passed as well in the House of Representatives and sent to President Trump to sign into law. However, he used his veto to kill the bill and, unfortunately, there was not the 66% majority of legislators in Congress to over-ride Trump’s veto. There are two results: one is that the war in Yemen will go on for a while yet; the other is that the power of Congress has been effectively diminished in relation to the US president.

In our anti-war activities, we recognize the participation of the USA in the Saudi war on Yemen is significant. US (and UK) military officers sit in the command room of the Saudi Coalition. They sell and service the military aircraft and other military equipment. They provide the bombs and the intelligence to plot missions. They rescue downed pilots from the sea. US ships help the Saudis enforce an illegal embargo of food and humanitarian aid that has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen. It is, in effect, a US-Saudi war on the people on Yemen.

The situation in Yemen is indeed so dire – according to UNICEF, a Yemeni child dies on the average every ten minutes due to malnutrition and lack of medicine – that, a few days ago, an official of the UK government (whose hands are also stained with the blood of Yemeni children) called on the United Nations to put more pressure on Saudi Arabia to live up to the truce it signed on January 7, 2019, brokered by the UN, to withdraw from Hudaydah, the port through which most of the humanitarian aid, destined for Yemen, enters the country. There are, in fact, several ways that the UN could increase pressure on Saudi Arabia to abide by the terms of the January 7 truce and indeed to end its war on Yemen, both through the Security Council and the General Assembly. It remains to be seen if anything will come of the UK initiative. Up to now, with the war entering its fifth year, the UN has been relatively ineffective in stopping the naked aggression by Saudi Arabia, the richest state in the Arab world, against Yemen, the poorest.

Here’s the thing. When the organs of governments and international organizations fail to do the job for which they were created, it’s incumbent on ordinary people around the world to step up to the plate. The USA, like Canada and other NATO countries, shamefully sells massive amounts of arms to Saudi Arabia. These sales are like a license to kill Yemeni men, women, and children. We, ordinary folks in all these NATO countries, need to do more to urge our governments to end these arms sales and effectively remove from the despotic Saudi regime its license to kill Yemenis. I note that Germany banned arms to Saudi Arabia last year following the Khashoggi Affair, followed by Denmark, which also cited the war on Yemen, and Finland, which cited ONLY the war on Yemen. Momentum to end the war on Yemen is building.

Peace movements in the West should redouble our efforts to stop these arms sales through lobbying our elected officials, demonstrating, waging social media campaigns, making the sales an election issue, and so on. This is what ordinary people can do to end the US-Saudi war on Yemen.

Tasnim: According to media reports, the US Congress has grown uneasy with the president’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia. The lawmakers have criticized Trump for not condemning Riyadh for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. What is the reason behind this close relationship?

Stone: The US empire, like the British empire before it, has always maintained close relations with the Saudi regime. In fact, the British empire put the dissolute Saudi family in power in Riyadh in the first place to manage the oil fields in its interest. And it’s unlikely that the anti-democratic and barbaric Saudi regime would have remained in power this long were it not for the solid support of the USA. The Saudi regime provides many services for its present imperial masters: it banks its billions in New York and London financial institutions; it buys lavish arms systems it doesn’t have the capability to operate; it supplies bribes and loans to western politicians; it provides funding and terrorist mercenaries as the foot soldiers in western regime change operations from Libya to Syria to Afghanistan. The Saudi government is one of the pillars – the other is Israel – by which the USA seeks to dominate the Middle East (and the world).

During the Obama years, in which the US-Saudi war on Yemen began, the US Congress mounted no significant opposition to President Obama over this murderous and illegal aggression. This was because Obama was a Democrat and his co-partisans in the US Congress were in agreement with their Republican colleagues that the war on Yemen coincided with US interests.

However, once the killing of Khashoggi was widely reported in the media, there was widespread public revulsion, fanned by the mainstream media, among the electorate that the US government was in bed with such a despotic Saudi regime, which showed no respect even for its own domestic laws. In effect, the people of the USA were led to sympathize more with the murder of one man that the whole Yemeni nation.

President Trump stuck by his Saudi friends, however, for the same old reasons. The class of billionaires he represents makes trillions of dollars through arms sales and war and through exploiting the resources of all the countries in the US sphere of influence. Trump even managed to squeeze more out of the compliant Saudi client state since the Khashoggi Affair.

But the Democrats now hold a slim majority in Congress and now the president is a Republican. In the cynical world of US politics, the same people who previously supported or were silent on the US-Saudi war on Yemen are today more vocal against it and against President Trump.

In the meantime, public opinion has turned massively against the slaughter in Yemen. And so it’s time that anti-war activists took advantage of the public’s growing awareness of Yemen to push for an end to arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the war on Yemen itself.

Tasnim: Sen. Tim Kaine, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement that the veto was “part of an alarming pattern of Trump turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s actions that fly in the face of American values” and accused the administration of “deference to Saudi Arabia at the expense of American security interests.” Do you believe so?

Stone: Senator Kaine’s statement of April 16 makes some good points. He notes the humanitarian crisis created by the US-Saudi war. He mentions the murder of Khashoggi, the jailing of women’s right activists, and the acquisition of nuclear technology by the Saudi regime, “despite the Saudi regime’s threats to create a nuclear program and refusal to agree to nonproliferation rules that would prevent the development of nuclear weapons.”

However, it’s difficult to ascertain for certain what are “American values” today. The US government, whether under a Democratic or Republican administration, shows no regard for international law and uses its domestic law increasingly to pauperize and jail its own citizens. It’s increasingly an oligarchy run by the 1%.

As for US security interests, the Saudis fit in perfectly with the increasingly anarchic world order in which rogue states such as the USA and its client regimes such as Israel and Saudi Arabia run amok all over the planet, threatening the peace with military bases, nuclear weapons, and regime change operations.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is not the body that will address the increasing insecurity of the USA or all the other nations of the world. I think that’s the job ultimately of the people of the world in demanding a new, non-nuclear peaceful world order.

*

Originally published by Tasmin News Agency

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.

Interesting how on the week before Easter, around Palm Sunday to be exact, they came in and forcefully arrested Julian Assange. Some short time before that the US government once again arrested Chelsea Manning. She was told to ‘ fess up’ and implicate Assange in her release of some ( so called ) secret transmissions that threatened ‘ National Security’. Let me see. You mean like Manning’s release in 2007 of the 39 minute video of US military personnel playing a real life video game with their massacre of a group of unarmed and unthreatening Iraqi civilians ( including two Reuters newsmen) from their ‘ killer ‘ Apache Helicopter ? She gave the film to Assange’s Wikileaks and soon after the whole planet could see how criminally insane and immoral our occupation of Iraq was. Folks, that was the gist of the rest of this Sad Black Comedy that Manning, Assange and even Snowden have been made players in. This writer never has enjoyed ‘ Black Comedies’ in film, and now I know why: They never are, to me, very amusing!

One surmises that our high schools and even colleges do not stress enough, in whatever type course this falls under, of both the need and service to justice of Whistle blowing. Imagine if whistleblowers were able to release to the public ( and world ) the fact that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was created by our government, and had absolutely nothing to do with the North Vietnamese? Just perhaps , maybe, just maybe, that might have pushed back the agenda of the empire’s war makers. Now, imagine this for a moment: If whistleblowers like Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, and his boss Hans Blix, who actually told everyone who would listen that they could not find, or think there were, WMDs held by Iraq in 2002… the invasion of that country may never had occurred. Factor all this with the slew of facts that were out there for public record which were overlooked by an embedded US and UK media. Why? Well, like with Groucho Marx in the film Duck Soup , when he takes an innocent slight by an adversarial nation’s minister to shout ” This means War!”  The Bush /Cheney cabal did just that in , as Chomsky and Herman explain the process in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. With a mostly compliant media ( excepting the Mcclatchy newspapers) those gangsters took out another gangster and set off a chain of evil that still exists today in the Middle East. If only Wikileaks was vibrant then!

Here’s the ‘skinny’ on all this: Too many of our wonderful friends and neighbors, people mostly of good conscience, have lost their moral compass.  We know how ‘dumbed down’ our nation has become over time. Sadly, many good folks still believe the ‘ fairy tales ‘ that are presented to them by what is called news , from both the electronic and print media. This is how the aforementioned LBJ and Bush/Cheney cabals sold us twice on phony wars. Of course, we can shoot back to the whole Iran Contra scandal, the  Noriega /Panama mess, and the ‘ made for TV’ Granada one day war. Once again, we did have whistle blowers like the late Robert Parry and late Gary Webb during those times, but to have a Wikileaks, with the capability to transmit ‘ evil sins and plans of sins’ through the ethers at speed of light, those behind such actions may ( and should have ) been held accountable.

When people stop questioning authority, authority wins… many times for bad and not good. This Easter season we all should remember that without whistle blowers and men and women of justice, we regress back to the jungle of ignorance and greed. Did not Jesus of Nazareth speak out for truth and fairness? They crucified him NOT for wishing to take over, rather for pointing out the flaws of society and of his own religion at that time. Did not Chelsea Manning , Julian Assange and Eric Snowden do the same? To sit back and forget the essential good of those three and do and say nothing reminds one of the old Easter Sunday joke:

On Easter morning Mary Magdalene goes to the room where the 11 remaining apostles are hiding. ” Fellows, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that the master has resurrected like he said he would. The bad news is he wants to know what happened to you guys.”

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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. 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].

What is the ‘Monroe Doctrine’? In brief, it is a document which defines the entire Western Hemisphere as a ‘backyard’ of the United States. It ‘philosophically’ justifies Washington’s neo-colonialism, and the most barbaric coups it has been triggering, as well as covered and open interventions in the Caribbean, and in Central and South America.

And now, National Security Advisor John Bolton, is using this term in connection with Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, outraging those who are opposing the US foreign policy in the region. What he means is clear, although it is never pronounced as bluntly as that: Countries in the Western Hemisphere should never be allowed to go socialist, and they should be prevented from disobeying Western dictates.

In Doha, Qatar, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, expressed his outrage over Bolton’s evoking of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ now, when the West is doing all in its power to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government of Venezuela:

“The theory and the practice of “backyards” is generally insulting…

Sergei Lavrov also added that:

“Since 1945, when the UN was founded, the international law is being regulated by this universal and the most legitimate organization.”

This is, obviously, not how the United States sees the world. Maybe it never even considered such an approach.

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But back to the ‘notorious’ Monroe Doctrine.

Surprisingly, it was not always intended to intimidate and brutalize independent and progressive Latin American nations.

According to the definition of the United States Department of State:

“The Monroe Doctrine was a United States policy of opposing European colonialism in the Americas beginning in 1823. It stated that further efforts by European nations to take control of any independent state in North or South America would be viewed as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

So, in theory at least, this policy was supposed to be putting the brakes on European colonialist expansionism. This may sound almost unbelievable now.

How very unfortunate that it has evolved into one of the most unscrupulous tools of oppression in modern history!

Contradictory to its original meaning, the United States used the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ in order to overthrow basically all patriotic, progressive and left-wing governments in the Western Hemisphere; governments that resisted the selfish geo-political interests of Washington, or the interests of US corporations, including the infamous United Fruit Company which was notorious for treating virtually all Central American countries as if they were its private plantations.

Then during the Cold War, US foreign policy towards Latin America was built on the belief that the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ should be invoked in order to prevent the spread of Soviet-backed Communism in the region.

What followed is well known: massacres in Central America, brutal coups and fascist dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and elsewhere; tens of thousands of men, women and children ‘disappeared’. Death squads murdering, raping and torturing everywhere, from Guatemala and Salvador to Argentina and Chile.

The fight for US hegemony was basically and cynically named as a ‘fight for democracy’. Slavery was defined as ‘freedom’. The ‘Monroe Doctrine’ became synonymous with Plan Condor, with monstrous torture chambers and with people being thrown alive into the sea from helicopters.

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Now the Trump administration is re-deploying those old and fatal Cold War warriors, elevating them to high positions. The same people who were murdering, plotting and cheering assassins. The list reads like a “Wanted for Genocide” catalogue: Elliott Abrams, Michael Pompeo and yes: John Bolton.

These individuals are, of course, unapologetic.

Just recently, John Bolton declared:

“In this administration we’re not afraid to use the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’. This is a country in our hemisphere and it’s been the objective of American presidents going back to Ronald Reagan to have a completely Democratic hemisphere.”

He was talking about Venezuela, of course.

And so, the almost 200 year old ‘Monroe Doctrine’ has been revitalized; put to deadly work once again.

As reported by the Daily Star:

“Mr. Bolton said the Donald Trump administration was “not afraid to use the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’,” when asked why it was targeting Venezuela while maintaining close alliances with tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia. The doctrine, dating back to the 1820s, denoted the Western hemisphere as a zone of US influence.”

It is clear that this time, what Mr. Bolton envisions under the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ has nothing in common with the fight against European colonialism. It is a bellicose ‘modern-day’ interpretation of the doctrine: the justification for Western imperialism all over the Hemisphere. And perhaps, all over the world.

Sergei Lavrov correctly defined Bolton’s remarks as ‘insulting’. They are also deadly. As they are indicative of what Western foreign policy may soon become, or has already become: an unapologetic and uncompromising return to the harshest form of expansionism.

What the US tried to avert (perhaps) some 200 years ago, it at some point joined, and then ‘perfected’. Now, it is trying to bring it to an absolute extreme.

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Originally published on New Eastern Outlook

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Four of his latest books are China and Ecological Civilization with John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Israel is not preparing a military adventure against Gaza, Syria, Hezbollah or Iran because it is in fact already attaining its objectives both internationally and domestically. 

Its military apparatus regularly hits targets in Syria with a calculated risk of retaliation from Damascus and its allies. Israel willingly risks a Syrian reprisal. If Syria were to respond to Israel’s continuous violations of its sovereignty, it would help Israel attract world attention.

The world powers would then do their best to try and stop an escalation between Israel and all its enemies gathered in one place in the Levant, rather than looking in meticulous detail at Israel’s wrongdoing in Palestine, and its violations of UN and Oslo agreements. Israel is aware that its enemies will evaluate the timing, benefits and reaction to any military response. Syria and its allies believe a war will slow its recovery from 8 years of war. The potential consequences of a war with Israel on the Syrian economy – at a time of ongoing economic crisis – would be devastating. Syria’s allies are not willing to be dragged into a confrontation at Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s whim. They are also aware of Trump’s unlimited support for Israel at all costs and by any means. An Israeli-US war on Syria would be disastrous.

Netanyahu feels very confident, given Trump’s unlimited support and the confirmation of his domestic support in recent legislative elections. He holds the initiative and has managed to concentrate global attention on Iran rather than Palestine. Demonization of Iran as the head of the “Axis of Evil” diverts attention from the Jewish Nationalist law, the dislodging of the Palestinians from the West Bank-Zone C, and the Israeli attempt to wipe out any trace of Palestinians in the occupied Israeli territory.

Saudi Arabia’s record of militant hatred against Iran’s wide influence in the region is nothing new. It dates back to 1981 when Saddam Hussein declared war on Iran. Moreover, Saudi’s extremist Wahhabite Islamic doctrine leaves little room for tolerance towards any other practice of Islam or towards any other religion. Saudi’s takfiri Wahhabist doctrine is the same creed as that of al-Qaeda and ISIS, who consider secular, Shia, Druse, Isma’ili and Zaidi men, women and children as deserving to be killed at sight, and Yazidi and secular women and children as subject to enslavement.

The Israeli Defence Minister has said that he would prefer to have ISIS on Israel’s borders than the Syrian army and its allies; he publicly acknowledges Israeli military and non-military support to jihadist terrorists during the war against Syria. At the same time Saudi Arabia generously invested in support to Jihadists and opened its prisons and borders for Jihadist-tourists to leave the Kingdom in direction of the Levant. Israel and Saudi Arabia agreed and still agree today that their common enemy is Iran not ISIS.

Netanyahu plans to keep up his aggressive rhetoric against Iran while at the same time domestically pushing the one million Palestinian refugees from Gaza towards the Egyptian Sinai territory, so that he can later divide Gaza into parts A-B-C as his predecessors did to the West Bank through the 1993 Oslo agreement. The Israeli Prime Minister is also aiming to normalise Israeli-Arab relationships and establish overt diplomatic and commercial ties with Arab states, isolating Iran and its allies, i.e. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza and Yemen.

The Israeli Prime Minister was happy to share with the world that “more than two Arab Leaders rushed to congratulate him for his victory in the last legislative elections”, when a coalition of the far-right wing overwhelmingly defeated more conventional right-wing elements.

Gaza Strip:

Gaza is the cornerstone of what Israel calls the “Deal of the Century”. Netanyahu cannot, any more than Hamas, deal with one million refugees and another million inhabitants – when he or his successors decide to move on Gaza. These people need water, electricity, medical care, infrastructure, schools, universities, security, and links with the outside world. The economic situation in Gaza is critical and Hamas is suffering from the sanctions imposed on its administration of the Strip.

Gaza was under Egyptian administration from 1948-1959. This inspired Netanyahu’s idea to relocate the Palestinians to Sinai. In the 1950s, President Abdel Nasser sent to Gaza his General Mustafa Hafez who in 1955 created “the Palestinian Fedayeen Forces”. Abdel Nasser visited al-Arish with Abdel Hakim Amer and Salah Salem and considered Hafez commander of the “Army of Palestine”. The Egyptian President considered it important not to rely on any UN resolutions, but he proved incompetent to give the Palestinians back their territory. Hafez was confronted with the  Israeli unit 101 led by Ariel Sharon and was assassinated by the Israeli intelligence service.

David Ben Gurion decided to join the British and the French in their  war against President Abdel Nasser following his decision to nationalise the Suez Canal. Israel saw in the charismatic Egyptian President an existential danger; Israel wanted control of Gaza and demanded that France build its  nuclear military facility in Dimona.

Ben Gurion entered Gaza, Rafah and al-Arish and attacked the 200,000 Palestinian refugees (the population in those days). They had come from Haifa, Yafa, Gallilea, Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine. The Israelis killed in cold blood between 275 to 900 civilians during the nine-day massacre. In the 50s, Ben Gurion already wanted to implement the “Deal of the Century”. Israel was also responsible for another massacre, in Kfar Qassem, killing 49 farmers returning to their home because they hadn’t heard about a sudden curfew imposed by the Israeli army, as ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak later acknowledged.

Israel adopted the “open door” policy, encouraging or intimidating Palestinians to leavetheir country. But the Israeli massacres didn’t persuade the Palestinians to leave their territory, like those who left in 1948. These were no longer affected by the Israeli “Ironing policy” and decided to stay even in wretched conditions.

These days, Israel is using Trump to try and twist the Palestinians’ arms. He gave Jerusalem (and the Golan) to Netanyahu and will probably give him the West Bank-zone C too. Trump also halted fundingfor the UN agency helping Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), in an attempt to force the Palestinians to accept Netanyahu’s objectives.

This is pushing the Palestinians to adopt what now appears the only solution–to join the resistance, to fight for their land. Those who have decided to stand up to Israel believe it is “weaker than the spider’s web”. Despite the murder of children, the elderly and women by Israeli bullets, Palestinians demonstrate weekly for the right of return. The Palestinian resistance (for the first time 14 groups have united in one military operational room joining their decisions, military actions and capabilities against Israel) has shown its capability to bomb Tel Aviv, forcing Netanyahu to positively respond to some Palestinian demands.

“Netanyahu said he will allow the re-opening of the passage between Gaza and Egypt; he will allow money to reach Hamas; he has agreed to enlarge the fishing space and allow trucks to supply Gaza with most needed goods. The Palestinian resistance agreed to stop using “rough methods” (flying burning kites) and managed to bring out of Israeli jails 1027 prisoners in the Gilad Shalit  exchange deal. The Palestinian resistance has now halted all negotiations with Netanyahu in regard to the 5 Israelis detained by the Palestinian resistance. In turn the Israelis have re-arrested 56 prisoners who were released during the Shalit deal. Unless these are first released unconditionally, negotiations between the resistance and Israel will not be resumed”, said the Palestinian source.

The Palestinians find it difficult to reconcile amongst themselves to unite against Netanyahu’s “deal of the Century”. President Abbas wants to control Gaza, and Hamas is happy to pass on political leadership to him provided the armed resistance keeps its autonomy. Hamas is in organisational and economic trouble in Gaza and would like to take such responsibilities off its back. Hamas didn’t learn from the Hezbollah experience in Lebanon. Despite its huge military power Hezbollah wisely refuses to exert political control, thus avoiding blame for bad administration. Abbas believes in verbal resistance rather than armed resistance. Netanyahu supports the Palestinian President’s peaceful methods because he believes that talking has never won back any territory for the Palestinians. Abbas wants Hamas to retain control of Gaza if it won’t give up its weapons. This condition has been rejected by all resistance groups in Gaza.

Hamas has made many mistakes in the past. In Iraq and Syria, many ex-Hamas joined al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State” (ISIS) with the aim of establishing an Islamic State. Many of them had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon but reappeared later as suicide bombers and on the battlefield, fighting against the Iraqi and Syrian governments for a purpose unrelated to Palestine. The political leadership jumped from one alliance to another and declared enmity to President Bashar al-Assad who still today refuses reconciliation with Hamas. Other Palestinian groups acted as a “guns for hire” in the service of Muammar Ghedaffi, Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad.

Netanyahu has failed to tame the resistance because he has no intention either of giving the Palestinians any territory, or of giving back territories Israel is currently occupying or has received from Trump. Netanyahu’s policies vindicate Hezbollah’s raison-d’être, justify Iran’s continued presence in the Levant, and provide strong motivations for President Bashar al-Assad to reject any future negotiations with Israel and to stick with the “Axis of the Resistance” for good. He is also offering to Iraq a motive to sympathise with the cause of the Levantine peoples and is dooming Israel to a state of ongoing war with its close neighbours.

The last word does not belong to Netanyahu or Trump. It belongs to the Palestinians. The wealth of the Middle East is being invested in Middle Eastern wars and is now being used in the service of Netanyahu – through Trump – to divide and reshuffle the Middle Eastern map. But the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Also read:

The“Deal of the Century”won’t go through: Split among Palestinians supports Israel1/3

https://www.globalresearch.ca/deal-century-wont-go-through-split-palestinians-supports-israel/5674734

The “Deal of the Century”: The US wants Iran to forget about Palestine and accept negotiations. 2/3

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-deal-of-the-century-the-us-wants-to-enable-netanyahu-to-officially-occupy-the-west-bank/5674898

Proof-read by:  Maurice Brasher & C.G.B

In 2018, Nicaragua suffered its worst political violence and upheaval since the end of the US backed Contra war of the 1980s. Extremely polarized controversy persists about what caused last year’s conflict, how it developed and what it means for Nicaragua’s people now.

This book makes available material completely excluded from mainstream coverage of events in Nicaragua. Produced by people with an unquestionable, long demonstrated commitment to grass roots democracy and community development in Nicaragua and the region, based on an anti-imperialist vision of peace and justice for all, the book challenges the mainstream and much alternative media coverage of events in Nicaragua over the last year.

It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the events of 2018. As Gabriela Luna notes in her foreword to the book “The attempted coup was intended to eradicate not only the Sandinista Front from political power in Nicaragua but also to tear Sandinismo from the heart and historical memory of the people.”

A Message from Brian Willson

The book is available free online :

For the PDF version click here

For the e-book version

On April 12 Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau released a statement congratulating Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu on his fifth electoral victory.  Two statements stood out for their misleading role in creating a contrived narrative.  

The first statement concerns democracy, “During the conversation, the two leaders spoke of the underlying democratic values shared by both countries. “  Indeed, there is a common democratic sharing between the countries.  Both are colonial settler countries, one has successfully sidelined/cleansed its indigenous population, the other is still working on settlements in order to create a racist apartheid state.  There is a strong possibility that the first was a model for the second.

Democracy also involves the acceptance and application of the”rule of law”, a mantra used by all nominally democratic countries in order to keep the populace acquiescence in the face of some hidden transgression.  Canada has demonstrated the abrogation of “rule of law” on many occasions:  its bombing of Libya and Yugoslavia/Serbia;  its extraterritorial arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou;  its declaration of regime change in Venezuela and the support given to the U.S.’ illegal sanctions there;  domestically, its application of a hastily written new law so that a large corporation, known for its insider dealings (SNC-Lavalin) could escape criminal charges.  As a supporter of the ‘White Helmets’ in Syria, Canada is also in abrogation of international humanitarian law as that group was funded by the west in order to provide media bias in support of fanatical terrorist groups in Syria.   The list could go on….

The second statement carries even larger implications for democracy and “rule of law”, “The Prime Minister expressed Canada’s continued and strong support for Middle East peace efforts leading to a two-state solution while standing firmly with Israel in its right to live in peace and security with its neighbours. Canada and Israel cooperate closely on matters of regional security.”

Okay, sure, but there never will be a two state solution. It was never intended to happen and Israel’s history makes that very clear.  A very well written recent work, “Preventing Palestine” (Princeton University Press, 2018) by Seth Anziska, (a lecturer in Jewish-Muslim Relations at University College, London) demonstrates that a two state solution was never in the works.  What was in the works was continual dialogue about ‘autonomy’ while settlements were built and expanded in order to prevent the very fact of a Palestinian state.  This comes from both the Camp David Accords and on through the Oslo Agreements.

The current situation is such that a Palestinian state is impossible with all the small apartheid style containments – or in some cases virtual open air prisons – disallowing any contiguous entity to be made.  It is about time that Trudeau, his Liberal party, and indeed all other Canadian federal parties supporting the two state solution – as they all do – apprise themselves of the real history and actual situation in Palestine/Israel.  Neither democracy nor “rule of law” – other than extemporaneous military law – exists in occupied Palestine, and it is all designed to remove and restrict indigenous Palestinians within their homeland – always has, always will…perhaps.

As for regional security, Canada certainly supports that as its sale of military vehicles and weapons to Saudi Arabia – Israel’s de facto ally – and its pathetic pretense at attacking ISIS under U.S. patronage all attest to.   And once again it rolls around to “rule of law” as Canada breaks international criminal law, war law, and humanitarian law in its support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Gulf States – all supplying material and service support to ISIS – a U.S./Saudi spawned group – in their war against Syria.

I hold no great expectations for Canada as a leading light for global affairs, for its self proclaimed status as “peacemaker” operating under “rule of law.”   It has nestled itself comfortably into the western narrative framed by the Washington consensus and enjoys all the perks and problems that come within that configuration.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Analysts, including commentators sympathetic to Chavismo, are understandably offering a mix of explanations for Venezuela’s tragic and worsening predicament this year. With a debate as urgent as this, it is tempting to contrast the US success in crushing the Latin American nation with the resilience of a more irritating adversary, Iran. The Islamic Republic has more than angered US administrations regularly by punching above its weight. Until Russia re-asserted itself in recent years, top American policy makers, and their think tank and media allies, for almost a generation declared Iran the most urgent foreign policy headache more consistently than they did any other foe.

Venezuela never rose nearly to that level of concern. There is, for example, nothing in its recent history to rattle Washington as did Israel’s expulsion from Arab land in 2000 by Lebanese Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, something even combined Arab armies have never accomplished. Yet Venezuela is paying a much steeper price than Iran for insubordination. Some of us may be wondering what wisdom Iran will draw from the uneven outcomes.

The first lesson Tehran will see as counter-revolution appears close to swallowing Venezuela confirms what Iran’s strategic planners have known all along. They believe that making concessions makes no sense because no American administration will reliably accept co-existence with Iran as an independent player with legitimate security interests. So they argue that resisting Washington’s demands is the only option. Venezuela does not have a nuclear or missile program and is not accused of sectarian expansionism, but is on the brink of US-orchestrated regime change anyway, which seems to prove Iran’s point. There will therefore be no softening of Iran’s defense doctrine in the foreseeable future. More in a moment on what the Venezuela racket is teaching Iran.

There’s good reason to compare Venezuela and Iran. Except for Iran’s larger population size and military muscle, and allowing for Venezuela’s extreme dependence on food imports, the two nations’ key strengths and liabilities are comparable. They depend equally on (uncertain) oil exports and both have been targeted with crippling sanctions and capital flight and seen their access to international finance evaporate. Their late 20th century revolutions relied equally on charismatic leadership and overwhelming participation of popular classes. Both have vastly increased services to their mass base and counted on high voter turnout ever since. Although both would welcome friendship with the United States, Washington demonizes them for (realistic) fear that their mass mobilization models and stubborn self-determination be contagious in Latin America and the Middle East.

The forces arrayed against Iran are, to say the least, formidable. The country has endured wrath and subversion from America’s client regimes on its borders longer than has Venezuela. Furthermore, containing Iran or worse has long been declared top priority by well-connected wealthy lobbies affiliated with AIPAC, whose bipartisan influence is unsurpassed.

If the US and its regional allies have not managed to destabilize Iran, it hasn’t been for lack of trying. They even instigated civil war in Syria to bring Iran to its knees and failed. With the Islamic Republic still standing and stable, how to explain the fragility of Venezuela? Could it be that the two anti-imperialist revolutions are more different than they are similar?

It’s a question worth exploring. In what follows, I will look beyond Iran’s 1978-79 Islamic revolution for answers. I will suggest that the key years in Iranian history that most closely parallel the rise and forced decline of the Bolivarian revolution were 1952-53, when secular nationalism rose and collapsed in a US-engineered coup in Tehran. I will finish by positing that, if today a parallel to Iran’s hardheaded national security doctrine is to be found in the Western Hemisphere, it’s in Cuba rather than Venezuela.

Historic Ups and Downs

Desperation similar to Venezuela’s is not unfamiliar in post-revolutionary Iran. Much like Venezuela this year, Iran was abandoned by world powers and reactionary neighboring states in 1980, who threw their weight behind Iraq’s eight year war on Iran. When Saddam invaded (with a wink and a nod from Washington), Iran was in the grip of infighting and raised expectations of a revolution’s first year. Its military was already decimated by plundered arms depots, a ban on arms imports, desertion and purges. Not to mention that Iran’s assets, worth tens of billions of dollars, were ordered frozen in the US.

Food staples, fuel, and foreign exchange were strictly rationed and military hardware needs were procured on the international black market, laying the groundwork for future corruption that continues today. Untold thousands of skilled minds slipped on foot into Turkey and Pakistan in search of asylum in Europe and beyond. Under those circumstances, revolutionary Iran should have been easy prey for hostile Western powers that wanted their old privileges back.

But the national emergency came with its own game changer, a military innovation powerhouse named the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guard, whose mature version today improves Iran’s odds of withstanding forced regime change. Sworn to expand Iran’s wartime self-reliance, IRGC has grown into a sophisticated network of defense and infrastructure industries that have largely evaded privatization. I have it on good authority that Venezuela has nothing that functions like IRGC’s parallel national economy to help beat back foreign economic and military pressure. Washington designated the Guard a “foreign terrorist organization” earlier this month.

When the war ended in 1988, no one expected Iran, with hundreds of thousands maimed or killed and its treasury depleted, to emerge more stable than what Venezuela is looking like in April, 2019. But it was able within fifteen years to organize effective resistance to US occupation forces in Iraq, followed by a major role in obliterating Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Venezuela has been far less adventurous, but has nevertheless succumbed to US-sponsored counter-revolution.

In 1953 a similar fate befell Iran’s wildly popular movement to restrict dictatorial monarchy and wrestle control of its oil industry from a British monopoly. The revered secular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, inspired and rode an unprecedented wave of popular demands for social justice and national rights. He argued Iran’s case before the World Court and won while the UK organized an international boycott of Iranian oil. Within months, Mosaddegh’s empowerment and reform program was cut short by a CIA coup. His nemesis, the young Shah, returned from brief exile and launched a 25 year dictatorship in which thousands lost their lives or livelihoods. (A few years after the regime change, I was among thousands of school children ordered to cheer for the motorcade of the visiting American dignitary behind the coup, President Eisenhower. My father, a ranking officer in Iran’s royal army counter-intelligence, approved. Years later, less than a week after His Majesty fled the country again, never to return, my father was arrested and very nearly executed in retirement.)

Beware of Good Intentions

Unlike Washington hawks bent on re-conquering Venezuela today, Cold Warriors of yesteryear never claimed that brutalized Iranians needed to be rescued from their government. Rather, American propaganda against Mosaddegh’s Iran centered on ostensible territorial integrity worries, as it does now. In 1953, underestimating the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet giant next door was the prime minister’s declared principal sin. Fast forward to our time and Iranian exporters of revolution, not military intervention by the US and its Gulf allies, are conveniently faulted for Iraq’s and Syria’s instability. Nationalist Iran endangered Western civilization by ignoring Soviet agents in every Persian closet. The Islamic Republic is doing the same, according to secretary of state Mike Pompeo, by harboring Al-Qaeda sleeping cells.

While in office, Mosaddegh was by all accounts a genuine social democrat who believed firmly in civil society, pluralism and rule of law. He was fond of diplomacy and even traveled to Washington to naively ask for help against the British. Except in egregious rare cases, he largely respected freedom of assembly and opposition press, much like President Hugo Chavez would do years later in Venezuela. The world learned when it was too late that Britain had been paying more than a few media and parliamentary opponents to undercut Mosaddegh. There is every reason to believe that, had Western-funded “democracy promotion” and “human rights” NGOs been global in his era, Mosaddegh would have tolerated their in-country operations, too, as Venezuelan revolutionary authorities did for too long.

(With the shattering of Mosaddegh’s National Front overnight, Iran’s other secular major political force, the disgraced Tudeh communist party, also disintegrated, leaving religion as the next generation’s hope for mass mobilization. Many frustrated opponents have since 1979 complained that the Islamization of government was itself a counter-revolution. Others, most notably reformist cleric and former speaker of parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, have not been shy to advocate privatization of oil to de-fund “undeserved” social spending. He has lived under house arrest for other reasons since 2011.)

The Islamic Republic’s reform faction has for years argued that freedoms modeled by Mosaddegh would, if applied today, result in a strengthening of national unity and therefore advance Iran’s sovereign defense. Their case is, sadly, not helped by the central role played by so-called “independent” opposition media and “civil society groups” in Venezuela’s unsuccessful 2002 coup and catastrophic events this year.

Similarly, critics of vetting of candidates for elected office by Iran’s Guardian Council now have Venezuela’s counter-revolutionary parliament as proof of what can happen in a country targeted by the global superpower when privileged subversives are free to form a legislative majority. We can be sure that Iran’s elections officials feel vindicated.

If Cuba were to model its politics after Venezuela’s more tolerant system, or if the Islamic Republic were to adopt Mosaddegh-style liberalism that it flirted with two decades ago under reformist President Khatami, risks of regime change could increase substantially. That’s what Venezuela’s devastation teaches Iran.

The horrible and worsening suffering of Venezuela’s working majority in the hands of US-backed coup plotters will, alas, be seen in Tehran as one more reason to consider expanded civil liberties a luxury that Iran can ill afford. As far as Iranian authorities are concerned, there is apparently no better way to promote the common good than to be ever more vigilant and take no chances. If Mosaddegh were alive today, he might hesitate to disagree.

Rostam Pourzal is a former board member of the London-based Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran. From 2004 to 2007 he co-sponsored “citizen diplomacy” delegations of concerned Americans to Iran on peace missions. He also co-organized a US speaking tour for Iranian victims of chemical weapons and medical specialists who later founded the Tehran Peace Museum. He is based in Washington, DC.

A recently declassified CIA document has revealed that members of the intelligence agencies of France, the United Kingdom and West Germany discussed how to establish “an anti-subversive organization similar to [the CIA’s Operation] Condor” in their own countries. Described by the CIA as “a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion,” Operation Condor was a campaign of state terrorism originally planned by the CIA that targeted leftists, suspected leftists and their “sympathizers” and resulted in the forced disappearances, torture and brutal murders of an estimated 60,000 people, as well as the political imprisonment of around half a million people. Around half of the estimated murders occurred in Argentina.

The document, released last Friday as part of a release of newly declassified U.S. government documents related to the U.S.-backed military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, states that:

Representatives of West German, French and British intelligence services had visited the Condor organization secretariat in Buenos Aires during the month of September 1977 in order to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversion organization similar to Condor” due to their view that “the terrorist/subversive threat had reached such dangerous levels in Europe.”

Declassified: A Brief Look … by on Scribd

The representatives from the three countries then stated that they felt that pooling “their intelligence resources in a cooperative organization such as Condor” would be an important way of combating the “subversive threat.” Notably, England at the time was already involved in an international “intelligence sharing” program known as ECHELON, a program between the “Five Eyes” intelligence pact between the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand that continues in a different form today.

The document, which was written in 1978, came two years after Operation Condor targeted left-wing Latin American exiles living in Europe. Several other documents in the recent release discuss a decision made by Condor member countries in May 1976 to train and send a military unit to “conduct physical attacks” against left-wing Latin American exiles and their supporters in France, in what was codenamed “Teseo.” Several Condor countries, aside from Brazil and Bolivia, were eager to participate and the training of the “Teseo” unit did occur, though the CIA was apparently unaware whether the unit was actually sent to France.

Operation Condor: Made in the West

European interest in bringing home a state-sponsored terror campaign may seem shocking, given Europe’s publicly stated concerns at the time regarding Condor member countries’ mind-boggling human rights abuses and state-sponsored murders. But it will hardly surprise those who have studied Operation Condor, as the operation itself was a Western invention that was imposed on Latin America through a series of military coups, which again were backed by Western governments.

Operation Condor officially began in 1975, though CIA documents in this recent release suggest that the inter-country intelligence-sharing aspect had likely begun a year earlier in 1974. The countries involved — Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia — were all backed and supported by the U.S., which was also incidentally the largest weapons dealer to these government over this same time frame. During the latter portion of Operation Condor, one of the recently declassified documents claims that Israel took over key roles played by the U.S. in Operation Condor, including the “training of local personnel and sales of certain types of advanced military equipment,” despite the many innocent Jews murdered by several of the Condor dictatorships.

Several of the Condor countries had seen their military dictatorships installed with U.S. government involvement, as was the case in Chile and Brazil, with the U.S. government suspected in other coups that preceded Operation Condor by only a few years, such as the 1971 coup in Bolivia and the 1973 coup in Uruguay. After the 1976 coup in Argentina — Argentina’s sixth and final coup of the 20th century — it too joined Operation Condor.

The U.S. provided planning, training, funding and arms for Operation Condor, and European nations also provided a significant number of weapons. France — one of the countries interested in creating a Condor-style program for Europe — was noted in one of the recently declassified documents for its “excellent prospects for sales of jet aircraft and air defense systems” to Condor dictatorships; while West Germany, another country interested in a European Condor, “should be able to market missiles, ground force equipment and submarines.”

U.S. and European intelligence agencies were well aware of what Condor dictatorships were doing with those weapons, as indicated by past and recent document releases that detail horrific descriptions of the torture and murder of those suspected of being left-wing and those suspected of sympathizing with the left, as well as those who opposed the neoliberal economic policies imposed by all of the U.S.-backed Condor dictatorships.

Some of the more infamous tactics used by Condor nations had also been inspired by past European and U.S. war crimes. This includes the “death flights,” where victims were drugged, bound and placed in plastic body bags, and/or had their stomachs cut open before being thrown out of a plane or helicopter over the ocean. This tactic was said to have been inspired by the actions of French armed forces during the Algerian war and, according to the 2003 documentary The Death Squads: The French School, French intelligence had taught these and other methods to Argentine military officials during the dictatorship.

Whitewashing away the full horror of Condor

Notably, much of the recent coverage of Operation Condor and the CIA releases has sought to whitewash the program’s horrific legacy, with The Guardian describing Operation Condor as “a secret programme in which the dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador conspired to kidnap and assassinate members of leftwing guerrilla groups in each other’s territories.” This, of course, implies that those targeted were guerilla members and thus combatants.

However, many — and one could convincingly argue the majority — of those killed, tortured and imprisoned were not members of guerilla groups, as there are thousands of documented cases of college students, musicians, writers, journalists, priests and nuns, pregnant women, teachers, indigenous leaders, union members and others who were subject to the extreme prejudice of Operation Condor despite not being combatants in any capacity. The Guardian also dramatically downplayed the program’s death toll, claiming that “the conspiracy led to the deaths of at least 100 people in Argentina,” while the actual figure is around 30,000. The Guardian also failed to mention the intimate role of the U.S. and other Western nations in facilitating and arming the program.

Such poor reporting is offensive to those who lost their lives and to their families, many of which have never stopped looking for their lost loved ones. Many of those families, such as Argentina’s “Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo,” have spent the last several decades looking for the estimated 500 children and babies separated from their disappeared and murdered parents and given to dictatorship-supporting families.

In a clear testament to how the effects of Operation Condor are still felt today, one of those babies — now over 40 years old — was identified on April 9 and is set to be reunited with her father, who survived the dictatorship and has spent the last several decades looking for his lost daughter. The mother was kidnapped while pregnant, allowed to give birth to the baby and killed immediately afterwards.

The very idea that European countries wanted to bring such a horrific terror campaign to their continent to target “subversives” should serve as a cautionary tale to Europeans who trust their government’s professed interest in promoting democracy and human rights, all while exporting terror overseas.

Top photo | Former Argentina’s president Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, left, talks with Paraguay’s dictator Gen. Alfredo Stroessner. Videla, led the military dictatorship and the so-called Dirty War against political dissents between1976-83, more than 12,000 people died or disappeared, the vast majority have never been found or identified. Eduardo Di Baia | AP

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 deployment of THAAD missiles to Romania and increased naval activity in the Black Sea show that NATO intends to continue its militarization of this strategic space at the expense of Russia’s security.

The Black Sea became a global flashpoint after Russia’s 2014 reunification with Crimea catapulted the region’s strategic significance to the world’s attention and drew the consternation of Moscow’s NATO foes who had speculatively hoped to occupy the peninsula and eventually evict the Russian naval base there in the aftermath of the EuroMaidan coup. The majority-Russian people of this former part of Ukraine prevented that from happening by staging a democratic referendum to reunite with their ancestral homeland that they were arbitrarily separated from by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in 1954, which therefore retained the balance of power in the Black Sea region that the West had tried to disrupt through its post-coup plans for Crimea. Nevertheless, the US and its allies aren’t easily convinced to abandon a strategy once they set their minds to achieving it, ergo the latest military escalations that they’re planning in the area.

NATO’s European Command (EUCOM) just announced that the alliance will deploy THAAD anti-missiles systems in Romania sometime this summer, while the organization also previously said that it’ll launch more patrols and military drills in the Black Sea too. Russia is very concerned about these two interconnected developments because it believes that the bloc’s belligerence in the Black Sea region is a bad sign of things to come. It’s evident that NATO is trying to increase pressure on Russia in this strategic space, which is part of the New Arms Race that it’s trying in vain to provoke Moscow to participate in. Russia is especially concerned about the THAAD element of NATO’s plans since it’s long suspected that those supposedly “defensive” systems can be clandestinely outfitted to have offensive cruise missile capabilities, which in the current context would make their deployment a disturbing development in the post-INF world after America recently decided to withdraw from that arms control agreement.

Russia’s most obvious responses would be to deploy similar weapons to Crimea and its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, but as with every defensive move that Moscow makes, these too would predictably be misportrayed by the West as “offensive” steps taken by a “resurgent” and “aggressive” Russia that’s seemingly “hellbent” on “taking over Europe”. The resultant Mainstream Media-driven fake news hysteria would in turn be used to “justify” further “containment” actions by NATO, but there’s apparently no way for Russia to stop this from happening. As such, the country must accept that its side of the story will never be told to the Western masses by their media unless curious individuals decide to check out what Russia’s international media outlets like RT and Sputnik are saying about it, which the average person isn’t interested in doing. This shouldn’t dissuade Russia from doing what’s necessary to protect its national security, but should nevertheless be kept in mind because of its relevance to the infowar being waged against it.

Returning to the most likely consequences of these dynamics, it’s clear to see that the Black Sea is being divided into “spheres of influence”, with Russia being the predominant power in its eastern half while NATO fulfills this role in is western one. Although there are plans for making Georgia a member of the alliance, this has yet to happen, though its possible inclusion in the bloc would be a game-changing development that could undercut Russia’s security in the corner of the Black Sea that it regards as “its own”. Interestingly, the planned expansion of TurkStream through the Balkans could do something similar vis-a-vis the way in which NATO regards its strategic (and specifically, non-military) security. As for the southern shores of this sea, the Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership has all but neutralized any threat coming from this direction, making Turkey a de-facto neutral force in this larger competition despite being a formal member of the bloc.

Taken together, the Black Sea region is becoming increasingly militarized, though a “balance of power” has hitherto prevailed over this strategic space in maintaining a sort of equilibrium between NATO and Russia. That, however, is at risk of being undermined through the bloc’s plans to deploy THAAD systems to Romania (which could also have clandestine offensive capabilities) and launch more patrols and military drills in the Black Sea. Russia’s defensive response of predictably fortifying Crimea will be misportrayed to the Western masses as an “aggressive” development in order to “justify” the rolling out of NATO’s other preplanned moves in this larger region. Considering the most likely trajectory that events will proceed along, it’s very possible that a future crisis is brewing, whether of a “manageable” sort like last year’s Kerch Strait incident or something much more uncontrollable, which means that Russia must exercise the utmost caution in how it responds to NATO’s provocations in order to avoid inadvertently worsening the situation and falling into one of the many traps that are being set for it.

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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.

In a sharp reversal of longstanding US policy which recognizes only the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli as the legitimate authority over Libya, the White House on Friday said President Trump spoke by phone this week to Benghazi based commander Kalifa Haftar, pledging support to the general and his Libyan National Army (LNA) as it lays siege to the capital. 

The White House statement said Trump “recognized Field Marshal Haftar’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system.”

The call took place on Monday, but was only revealed at the end of this week amid ongoing fighting in and around Tripoli, under assault for the past two weeks by Haftar’s forces, which early this month led to the withdrawal of a contingency of US Marines, citing the deteriorating security situation.

The White House readout said the two discussed “ongoing counterterrorism efforts and the need to achieve peace and stability in Libya.”

Interestingly in early April Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had urged in a statement for Haftar to halt his advance: “We have made clear that we oppose the military offensive by Khalifa Haftar’s forces and urge the immediate halt to these military operations against the Libyan capital,” Pompeo said at the time.

Haftar — who solidified control of Eastern Libya  over the past two years and swept through the south in January, seeks to capture Tripoli and seize military control of the entire country, and has over the past weeks made inroads into the capital.

NEW: #Haftar’s advance into #Tripoli threatens not only the stability of #Libya’s largest city, but of the entire country.@mel_pavlik, @MENASTREAM, @a_carboni, and Kars de Bruijne map the offensive and unpack ACLED’s latest data on the fighting: https://t.co/AgZC3lb5A7 pic.twitter.com/0JCS1Q0vmq

— Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (@ACLEDINFO) April 19, 2019

He’s long been described by many analysts as “the CIA’s man in Libya” — given he spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during Gaddafi’s rule.

On Thursday the US and Russia blocked a UN Security Council effort to call for a ceasefire in Libya — this as air power has recently been used during increasingly intense fighting in Tripoli. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), fighting between the LNA and GNA has resulted in 205 deaths and 900 wounded, with about 20 civilians among the dead.

Given Trump’s praise of Haftar for “securing Libya’s oil resources” in the telephone call this week, it appears that the renegade Libyan general has indeed been “the CIA’s man in Libya” this whole time.

As we celebrate Earth Day in 2019, we need to recognize that more than climate change threatens our environment and our very existence. We have passed or are approaching several Planetary Boundaries outside of which human society may not survive.

Environmental scientists have developed the concept of Planetary Boundariesto identify Earth system processes that human activity is disrupting. They have tried to identify boundaries beyond which that disruption will trigger radical planetary environmental changes that endanger the survival of human society.

Of the nine planetary boundaries these scientists have identified, they say that we have already passed four of them:

Climate Change: At 412 ppm atmospheric carbon last month, we have already passed the safe zone of below 350 ppm that would keep global temperature rise to under 1ºC and within the range of the current interglacial Holocene climate in which agriculture, the material foundation for human civilization, developed.

Biogeochemical Cycles: Earth’s biogeochemical nitrogen and phosphorus cycles have been disturbed even more than the carbon cycle. Nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers pollute waterways and coastal zones overwhelm ecosystems’ capacity to absorb and recycle them, resulting in ecosystem collapse and low-oxygen dead zones.

Biodiversity: The 6th Mass Extinction in Earth’s history is underway and threatening to collapse ecosystems and hence agriculture and food production. For example, scientists recently reported that insects have declined at a 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years, a reduction of 80% of insect biomass. Insects are at the base of every terrestrial ecosystem food web and energy pyramid. Agricultural pesticides, along with climate change and habitat destruction, are killing off the insects.

Land Use: Forests, wetlands, and biomes have been converted to industrialized agriculture and urban sprawl to the degree it is disrupting biogeochemical cycles and reducing biodiversity.

The other five boundaries these scientists identify are:

Ocean Acidification: Oceans are acidifying as atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves into the water as carbonic acid. Acidification is already killing off the corals, threatening the ability of shellfish to form their shells, and thus threatening the stability of ocean ecosystems. The greatest danger is posed by the threat of acidification to phytoplankton. Recent scientific reports warn that by 2100, ocean heating and acidification could so reduce phytoplankton, the source of two-thirds of atmospheric oxygen, that it may result in the suffocation of animal life on Earth. If we have not passed this planetary boundary, we are fast approaching it.

Stratospheric Ozone Depletion: We have good news here thanks to the Montreal Protocol adopted in 1987 by the world’s nations to ban the production of the chemicals that depleted stratospheric ozone. This ozone layer that protects life from excessive ultraviolet radiation (UV) from the Sun is recovering. The Montreal Protocol is a model for the kind of binding international agreements we must forge to address climate change and other environmental threats

Freshwater: Intense water use by industrialized agriculture and urban systems is depleting fresh water faster than it is naturally replenished. Pollution, aquifer depletion, and water-conserving habitat destruction are the causes. At present trends, half of the world’s people and agriculture will face water shortages by 2050.

Atmospheric Aerosols: Microscopic particles in the atmosphere affect the climate and living organisms. Some aerosols warm and others cool the planet, with a slight net cooling affect so far, though it is far from overriding the warming effect of greenhouse gases released by human activity. But aerosols have a negative affect on human respiratory organs, resulting in an estimated 4 million premature deaths annually.

Novel Chemicals and Materials: These include chemical pollutants, heavy metals, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics. Barry Commoner, the late environmental scientist and Citizens Party presidential candidate in 1980 (which German Green Petra Kelly called America’s Green Party), warned us in his book Making Peace with the Planet (1990) that these novel entities disrupt the biosphere in which every new chemical created in the course of evolution co-evolved with enzymes to break them down to be recycled in the web of life. Without these enzymes for biodegradability, these novel entities bioaccumulate in the ecosystems and organisms, with potentially dangerous consequences to ecosystems and human health. While it is debatable how close we are to overshooting this planetary boundary, there is no debate that microplastics, for example, are now in our food and our organs.  Of the over 80,000 novel chemicals created for commercial use, only 200 have been tested for safety by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Expanded Green New Deal

What the Planetary Boundaries analysis means is that a Green New Deal must do more than build a clean energy system by 2030. It must be expanded into a full-scale Green Economy Reconstruction Program that not only transforms energy production to renewables, but transforms all our production systems to ecological sustainability. We can’t even get to 100% clean energy without reconstructing all of our production systems, from agriculture to transportation.

Industrial corporate agriculture must be converted to regenerative organic agriculture to eliminate pesticides and draw atmospheric carbon into living soils. Manufacturing must be converted to processes that rely on biodegradable or recyclable chemicals and materials. Transportation must be electrified, powered by clean renewables, with more emphasis on freight rails, high-speed rails, and urban light rails than trucking, personal vehicles, and air travel for intermediate distances. Urban systems must be reconfigured around walkable communities where homes, work, shopping, and mass transit are within a short walk of each other.

The vast majority of the military-industrial complex must be converted to ecological civilian production. The U.S. should be the world’s humanitarian superpower, not its sole military superpower. We should be helping poor countries meet basic needs and jump over the fossil fuel age into the solar age. We should be making friends with a Global Green New Deal instead of enemies with endless wars and a military empire of over 800 military bases placed in other countries to make the world safe for exploitation by global corporations instead of safe for the world’s peoples.

Ecosocialist Green New Deal

Conversion to an ecologically sustainable and just economy cannot happen under the capitalist system. Capitalism’s competitive structure drives blind, relentless growth that is consuming and destroying the biosphere. Its competitive international structure breeds wars for resources, markets, cheap labor, and geopolitical military advantages. With the nuclear weapons of the nuclear powers on hair-trigger alert and a new nuclear arms race now underway, the capitalist system will annihilate us if we don’t replace it with an ecosocialist system first.

We need an ecosocialist Green New Deal in order to coordinate the conversion of all production systems to sustainability. We need social ownership of key industries, like the energy sector. Exxon and the Koch Brothers are not going to reinvest their fossil fuel earnings in renewables. We must nationalize big oil. We need a bottom-up democratic process of economic planning so the public sector—public enterprises, infrastructure, and services—is responsive to the people in their communities.

We need a Just Transition to a green economy so no one is harmed in the process. The Green New Deal must include an Economic Bill of Rights that guarantees to all a living-wage job, an income above poverty, decent housing, comprehensive health care, and a good tuition-free public education from pre-K to college.

We need system change, not business as usual.

Howie Hawkins in 2010 became the first person to run for office on the Green New Deal. He is now exploring the possibility of running for president as the Green Party nominee.

Summarized, redacted or in full doesn’t matter. House, Senate and Mueller probes ended with a whimper, not a bang. They laid an egg, discovering nothing connected to the mandate of what was probed.

Russiagate has been and remains a colossal hoax. Cooked up by Obama’s Russophobic CIA director John Brennan, it’s one of the most shameful chapters in US political history.

Since the US intelligence community falsely accused Russia of US election meddling in October 2016 — presenting no evidence because there is none — Mueller’s report was much ado about nothing.

His 19-lawyer team, 40 FBI special agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and other professional staff spent around $25 million.

They issued 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, over 230 orders for communication records, interviewed about 500 individuals, and made 34 politicized indictments on dubious charges unconnected to his mandate.

The Mueller team discovered nothing connected to phony allegations of possible Trump team/Russia collusion to triumph over Hillary, no collusion or obstruction of justice. See below on the latter.

From inception in May 2017, Mueller’s politicized probe lacked legitimacy – a colossal waste of time and millions of dollars spent for nothing. He never should have been appointed special counsel in the first place.

Accusations of Russian US election meddling persist, “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” according to the Mueller report – despite no evidence suggesting it, nothing but baseless accusations.

Why would Russia or any other country interfere in America’s political process?

The outcomes are always the same. Dirty business as usual wins every time. Republicans and Dems are two sides of the same coin. Not a dime’s worth of difference separates them on major issues mattering most.

They’re two right wings of one-party rule. The war party runs things – beholden exclusively to Wall Street, the military, industrial, security, media complex, and other corporate interests, along with high-net worth individuals.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Mueller report “is not an issue for us. It is not a thing that interests us or causes us concern,” adding:

“All the reports on the matter that have been released so far contain nothing but cursory statements. We have more interesting and important things to do.”

DNC/Podesta emails were leaked by a Dem insider, not hacked by Russia, any other country or individual. No evidence suggests otherwise.

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray earlier explained that “(t)he source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all,” adding:

“I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam’s whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow.”

“WikiLeaks has never published any material received from the Russian government or from any proxy of the Russian government. It’s simply a completely untrue claim designed to divert attention from the content of the material.”

Big Lies repeated enough get most people to believe them. Polls show most Americans believe Russia interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. They believe Russia hacked DNC/Podesta emails – despite no evidence proving either allegation.

Around half of Americans believe Trump colluded with Russia to triumph over Hillary. Again no evidence suggests it. The House, Senate, and Mueller reports debunked the notion.

The Mueller report states the following:

“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency (sic) and worked to secure that outcome (sic), and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts (sic), the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

According to Common Cause, “(t)here is no federal law making collusion a crime.” US law prohibits “the solicitation or receipt of a contribution from a foreign national” or government.

“Federal law prohibits candidates from cooperating or consulting with a foreign national (that) is spending money to influence a US election.”

No evidence suggests Russia contributed to or in any way tried to influence the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election – or any other US elections. Claims otherwise are baseless because nothing supports them.

No evidence suggests Trump and/or his team engaged in a conspiracy as defined in US law – an agreement between two or more parties to commit an illegal act, along with intent to achieve a stated goal.

The Mueller report includes 11 instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump and his campaign staff – short of accusing  anyone of this crime.

According to Law Professor Jonathan Turley, “(c)rimes must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They cannot be purely matters of perception. That has been the case regarding the obstruction allegations made against the president.”

“(O)bstruction theories against (Trump) far outstrip the available evidence of the crime…Trump appears more guilty of obsessive rather than obstructive conduct” – the former a personality trait, not a crime.

Following release of the Mueller report, Turley said the following:

Trump “did not fire anyone involved in the investigation. He did not destroy any evidence. He did not end the investigation prematurely.”

“He took no actual obstructive acts. To charge him would have amounted to a virtual thought crime.”

“…Trump not only ordered senior staff to cooperate with Mueller, but he did not withhold evidence. Most important, he waived executive privilege over the entirety of the report in an unprecedented degree of transparency.”

There’s plenty about Trump to criticize and hold him accountable for, including high crimes of war and against humanity, along with serving monied interests at the expense of the general welfare, and much more.

No evidence suggests he or his team engaged in collusion with Russia to triumph over Hillary or obstruction of justice.

Debunking the colossal Russiagate hoax by House, Senate and Mueller reports should close this ugly chapter in US history.

The politicized show will go on as long as Trump remains in office – Dems wanting it used for political advantage in the 2020 race for the White House.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

On April 5, the United States revoked the visa of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, for her attempts to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. in Afghanistan. A week later, judges at the ICC rejected Bensouda’s request to open a probe into U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

While rights advocates condemned this move as amounting to U.S. interference in the workings of the ICC, it’s more alarming than mere obstruction — and is rooted in the pre-existing hierarchy and embedded colonial structures in international legal order.

Bensouda’s visa revocation underscores the existing systematic inequality in international legal order. This is rooted in the presumed hierarchy by a group of elite nations that have dominated international order from a position of assumed racial, cultural, political, historical, material, economic and legal superiority.

These developments come in light of comments made by the Trump administration’s national security advisor, John Bolton, who delegitimized the role of the ICC in a speech he delivered in September 2018. He said that “the U.S. will take any means necessary” to overcome “unjust prosecution by this illegitimate Court.”

Countries like the U.S. have always enjoyed dominance through this presumed superiority, enabling them to suggest other nations are like-minded when it comes to the international legal order.

The U.S. and other powerful nations have not only been successful in maintaining the status quo of imbalance inherent in international law, but have also been instrumental in establishing the rules governing that legal order.

With tectonic political shifts across the world, the ICC’s representatives — and jurists like Bensouda — represent some of the last vestiges of resisting the dominant global legal order by attempting to hold the West accountable for their transgressions in the global South.

Unfortunately, however, the Court’s unwillingness to move beyond its imperial roots is evident from the decision to reject Bensouda’s request. The ICC has blatantly redefined the notion of “justice” and has been preoccupied with African states while turning a blind eye to equally serious crimes committed by the U.S.

Meddling is routine

Needless to say, U.S. interference and intervention in dozens of sovereign nation states is commonplace. Meddling with the functioning of one of the highest judicial bodies in the world is therefore a familiar pattern of American supremacy in the international legal order.

The move by the U.S. to revoke Bensouda’s visa is an expression of that supremacy through intimidation and bullying of representatives of international institutions. However, it also points to the U.S. wielding power in the age of its new-found sense of self-alienation, which manifests into ongoing imperialist tendencies that influence the decisions made by international institutions.

This perpetuates the West’s practice and tendency to use global legal institutions such as the International Criminal Court to continuously persecute and demonize the global South.

Bensouda’s efforts have certainly not been halted by the U.S. government’s move against her. However, the revocation of her visa and the Court’s validation of such a move by rejecting Bensouda’s request raises questions on broader justice issues, what is being considered within the purview of the ICC, and the legitimacy of international law.

Such tactics should not come as a surprise. The U.S. has had a long history of supposed “exceptionalism” facilitated by international law when it comes to its participation in the global legal order and its violations of international humanitarian and human rights law with impunity.

For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006 qualified the so-called war on terror as a form of armed conflict. However, as Jeremy Waldron, a professor at New York University School of Law, pointed out, the U.S. consistently violated the Geneva Conventions during the war through extraordinary rendition techniques and unlawful detention. This was done under the pretext that the particular category of armed conflict that the U.S. was involved in lacked explicit mention in the Geneva Conventions.

Disregarding international law

Bensouda’s role in investigating these alleged war crimes has the potential to shine a spotlight on the historical American practice of disregarding international law.

By engaging in bullying tactics, the U.S. is now reaching a new level of abrogation of international legal order. This could not only prevent the Court from being able to investigate the alleged violations, but also has the potential to reinforce its hegemonic selective power when it comes to the implementation of international criminal law.

U.S. dominance in the global legal order does not stop at its borders. It has a ripple effect, compelling other major powers with military, economic and political clout to follow suit.

We’ve witnessed similar practices by Israel as it denies United Nations Human Rights Council investigators entry to the occupied territories of Palestine as they investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. And in some cases there has been systematic pressure from the highest offices in the UN pushing for withdrawal of scholarly reports on the situation in the Middle East.

While past incidents have often resulted in the resignation of the individuals who have been blocked by these forces, it’s refreshing to see Bensouda’s resistance “without fear or favour.”

The U.S. and Israel have been particularly effective in resisting the legitimacy of the global legal order. By recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of Golan Heights, the U.S. administration under President Donald Trump is legitimizing contempt towards international legal principles.

At the heart of this lies international law’s deep connections to structures of power and inequality. Thankfully, international legal order is a contested space in which committed jurists like Bensouda are still fighting oppression through their unapologetic acts of resistance.

It is now up to the ICC to change its role from a mechanism that facilitates inequality in international law to one that perpetuates and supports resistance for justice.

Alcune immagini del Convegno internazionale “I 70 anni della NATO: quale bilancio storico? Uscire dal sistema di guerra, ora”, svoltosi a Firenze il 7 aprile 2019.

FIRMA PER NO GUERRA NO NATO

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A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Reached by email Wednesday, Alston said that as of 2010 — the most recent data he had — U.S. officials hadn’t responded to his request for information and that Iraq’s government also hadn’t been forthcoming. He said the lack of response from the United States “was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period,” when fighting in Iraq peaked.

Read the entire article here

Featured image: This cell phone photo was shot by a resident of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006, of bodies Iraqi police said were of children executed by U.S. troops after a night raid there. Here, the bodies of the five children are wrapped in blankets and laid in a pickup bed to be taken for burial. A State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks quotes the U.N. investigator of extrajudicial killings as saying an autopsy showed the residents of the house had been handcuffed and shot in the head, including children under the age of 5. McClatchy obtained the photo from a resident when the incident occurred.

Julian Assange continues to ripple and roam as a cipher through the political and media scape of the world.  Detained in Belmarsh maximum security prison, the sort of stately abode only reserved for the most dangerous of criminals, many with indeterminate sentences, he electrifies and concerns. 

The US political classes continue to simmer with an obsession that has gone feral.  Some moderation can be found in the efforts of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky), who is seeking a bartering solution. “I think he should be given immunity from prosecution in exchange for coming to the United States and testifying.”  The question of causing harm or otherwise was less significant than what Assange had to offer in terms of information “probably pertinent to the hacking of the Democratic emails”. 

It is precisely the issue of harm that obsessives on the Hill fantasize about.  Their rage is that of Caliban before the mirror, and rather than taking issue with US foreign policy, see Assange as an imitator.   Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speaks of WikiLeaks and its “destructive role by directly interfering in democratic elections and referendums around the world, most troubling of which is WikiLeaks’ collaboration with Russia to directly interfere in the United States presidential election in 2016.”

But Assange’s formalised incarceration has enabled some scrutiny to be cast over the indictment in question. Dell Cameron from Gizmodo is constructively quizzical, suggesting a few holes in the US case against the publisher.  “Assange indicated that he had been trying to crack the password by stating that he had ‘no luck so far’.”  This raises two questions: Did he even venture to do so?  If so, can that very fact be proven?

Cameron goes on to do an admirable job of demonstrating how much of a journalist Assange actually was in engaging Chelsea Manning.  Far from being a freak cavalier with convention, the conduct squared with the more risqué tradition of investigative reporting.  The “acquisition and transmission of classified information” is standard bread and butter stuff for the fourth estate.  “If you have material you believe is newsworthy, please visit our SecureDrop page to learn more about how to safely transmit it to Gizmodo.  We’d be happy to receive it.”

Others are not so confident, and continue to struggle with the label of Assange as journalist, nail bitten that he has been awarded a title that somehow treads on holy ground.  Only some will be admitted; the rest can be dismissed and banged up, deemed the unwashed. 

One is Peter Greste, a particularly troublesome case given the work he did for Al Jazeera that landed him, for a time, in an Egyptian prison. “As someone who has been imprisoned by a foreign government for publishing material that it didn’t like, I have a certain sympathy with Assange.  But my support stops there.”

As happens with practitioners, his admission to the world of establishment academe softens both cortex and conviction.  From the summit of UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland, he lords: 

“To be clear, Julian Assange is not a journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.  There is an argument to be had about the libertarian ideal of radical transparency that underpins its ethos but that is a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”

Greste falls for the prosecution effort to play the hacker card, tagged to conspiracy.  This stands to reason: the organisation and its publisher are to be refused entry into the pantheon of journalism.  Perhaps this stands to reason, given how WikiLeaks has demonstrated with devastating effect that the journalist, as a term, has been rented into vacuity.  Greste also tut tuts Assange for not “sorting through the hundreds of thousands of files to seek out the most important or relevant and protect the innocent”.  Again, that hoary old chestnut, ignoring the inordinate lengths that WikiLeaks has gone to protect those who have, in fact, disclosed the secrets while blowing the cover on the less savoury elements of power. 

As one goes through Greste’s views, a feeling of engaging a dinosaur awaiting the museum comes through. He is incapable of understanding the digital upending that WikiLeaks has encouraged.  The “digital revolution has confused the definitions of what journalism is and its role in a democracy.”  In attempting to treat Assange and the outfit as exceptional, he dangerously endorses wide ranging efforts that can just as easily justify the incarceration and punishment of journalists of all shades.  Greste can confidently split hairs.

The feeble nonsense that passes for intellectual comment on the fourth estate can be gathered in the following remark fromjournalist hacks turned academic hacks (one, Kathy Kiely, holds the Lee Hills Chair of Free Press Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia, which must be a source of much mirth):

“But granting Assange journalist status is beyond problematic: It’s likely to draw more attacks on press freedom such as the Georgia lawmakers’ thinly disguised attempt to sanction and ostracize journalists whose work they don’t like.”    

Too hard a basket, is the Assange case.  Don’t call him a journalist, because doing so might incite retribution, which is the sort of twisted rationale produced by pro-establishment airings.  The only standard retribution that should follow in such cases is a swift removal of their “chairs” in journalism, upon which they have become very firmly affixed too.  The moulded establishment has a habit of doing away with independence, and Assange’s seizure has merely reaffirmed it. 

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

Days earlier, Trump said a third summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would be a good idea.

Two earlier ones achieved virtually nothing toward stepping back from the brink on the Korean peninsula toward regional peace, stability, and normalized bilateral relations.

Pyongyang knows what it’s up against in dealing with the most hardline regime in US history. It doesn’t negotiate. It demands, notably what extremists Pompeo and Bolton are all about.

In early April, Kim Jong-un said a third summit with Trump like failure in Hanoi “is not inviting to us.” It ended abruptly with no resolution of major differences, no final statement.

Negotiations broke down because of unacceptable Trump regime demands in return for hollow promises alone, no show of good faith against the backdrop of DLT’s pullout from the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran and 1987 INF Treaty with Russia – based on Big Lies when announced.

Kim asked Trump for partial sanctions relief alone, wanting only those affecting North Korea’s economy lifted – yet was turned down because Pompeo and Bolton rejected the concession, showing the futility of negotiating with US hardliners.

Following the failed Hanoi summit, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said “(w)e have no intention to yield to the (one-sided) US demands in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind,” adding:

Pompeo and Bolton “created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States.”

Kim accused Trump regime officials of aborting a chance to resolve differences between both countries, expressing deep disappointment over failed talks, adding personal relations between him and Trump are “still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful.”

On Monday, Pompeo said a third Kim/Trump summit could take place this year, adding DLT “is determined to move forward diplomatically.”

On Wednesday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called Pompeo “reckless,” wanting him replaced if further talks with Trump are held, saying if he’s involved, “the table will be lousy once again and the talks will become entangled.”

They achieved nothing “whenever (he) poke(d) his nose in.” If talks with the US are resumed, Pyongyang “wish(es) our dialogue counterpart would not be Pompeo” – instead, someone “more careful and mature” to deal with.

Last July, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry accused Pompeo of pursuing “unilateral and gangster-like demands for denuclearization,” calling his unacceptable actions “deeply regrettable,” sabotaging normalization efforts.

According to North Korea’s Department of American Affairs director general Kwon Jong-gun, Kim insists the Trump regime’s attitude has to change, Pompeo an obstacle to evenhanded talks, adding:

“We cannot be aware of (his) ulterior motive behind his self-indulgence in reckless remarks; whether he is indeed unable to understand words properly or just pretending on purpose.”

Kim and other DPRK officials are open to further talks only if US officials are willing to show the “proper attitude.”

What’s entirely reasonable to demand is impossible to achieve in dealing with US hardliners – demanding everything, offering nothing in return but empty promises to be broken.

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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.