Global Research

Latvia is presently building a metal fence, 90 kilometres long and 2.5 metres high, along its frontier with Russia. It will be finished before the end of the year, and will be extended in 2019 along more than 190 kilometres of the frontier, for a planned cost of 17 million Euros.

A similar 135 kilometre fence is being built by Lithuania along its frontier with the Russian territory of Kaliningrad.

Estonia has announced the impending construction of a wall, also along the frontier with Russia, 110 kilometres long and also 2.5 metres high. Planned cost – more than 70 million Euros, for which the Estonian government intends to ask for finance from the European Union.

The objective of these walls, according to goverment declarations, is to “protect the exterior frontiers of Europe and NATO”. If we leave aside for a moment the idea that they need to be “protected” from massive migratory flows from Russia, there is only one motive left – the exterior frontiers of the EU and NATO now need to be “protected” from the “Russian menace”.

Since the fences built by the Baltic countries along their frontiers with Russia have a military efficiency approaching zero, their objective must be fundamentally ideological – a physical symbol that just beyond the fence, there lurks a dangerous enemy who is threatening us.

In this context, the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, visited Latvia twice – the first time in July on the occasion of his tour of the Baltic countries and Georgia. Then, at the official dinner in Riga, he congratulated Latvia for having chosen “integration with NATO and the European Union” and for having decided to “adopt the model of an open society, founded on the respect of the rule of Law, democracy, and the central place of human rights”.

Source: PandoraTV

He addressed this comment to Latvian President Raymond Vējonis, who, in April, had already approved the project for a law forbidding the teaching of Russian in Latvia, a country whose population is composed of almost 30 % of ethnic Russians, and where Russian is the main language of 40 % of its citizens. A liberticide measure which, by forbidding multilingualism – which is recognised by the European Union itself – will later discriminate against the Russian minority, accused of being ” Russia’s fifth column”.

Two months later, in September, President Mattarella returned to Latvia to take part in an informal summit of the heads of state of the European Union, where, amongst other subjects, they dealt with the theme of cyber-attacks by “states which have a hostile attitude” (a clear reference to Russia).

After the summit,the President of the Republic visited the military base of Ᾱdaži, where he met with the Italian contingent included in the NATO battle group deployed in Latvia as part of the “advanced forward presence” at the frontiers with Russia. “Your presence is an element which reassures our friends from Latvia and the other Baltic states”, he declared – words which substantially bolster the psyop by suggesting that there exists a threat from Russia to the Baltic nations and the rest of Europe.

On 24 September, Pope Francis will also be arriving in Latvia on a visit to the three Baltic countries. We don’t yet know if, by repeating “we must build bridges, not walls”, he will have something to say about the new iron curtain which divides the European region and is preparing people’s minds for war. Or whether in Riga, laying flowers on the “Monument to Freedom”, he will demand the freedom for young Russian Latvians to learn and use their own language.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Translated by Pete Kimberley

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The US is looking to establish a permanent US military base in Poland. This is what President Donald Trump said on Tuesday following a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda at the White House. Sputnik discussed the potential establishment of a military base in Poland with Rick Rozoff – manager of the Stop NATO website.

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Sputnik: Why is the Polish government willing to have a US military base? Will it obtain the security guarantees it is looking for?

Rick Rozoff: Poland has no choice in the matter. I’m not trying to exculpate President Duda and others who are fanatically beholden to Washington and Brussels, but when they were incorporated into NATO as full members in 1999 these were the obligations, the sort of the obligations that the US Pentagon and NATO obligates, compels member states to do.

We should remember first of all, this may be the most radical example of we’re talking about, but within months of Poland being welcomed into NATO in 1999 NATO shifted from Germany something called Multinational Corps Northeast to Poland, and it became the Eastern most military command that NATO has.

Shortly thereafter they also put a NATO Joint Force Training Center in Poland in 2010 which, for the most part, coordinates activities of the NATO Response Force, which is a global force by the way.

There’s also, as of last year, NATO opened a Counter Intelligence Center of Excellence in Poland. About eight years ago the US moved a battery of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles into the city of Morag, which is only 25 miles from Russian territory, from Kaliningrad.

They are also now as of this year and next going to be moving in Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) interceptors. It may well be the case of Poland becoming the next nation to shoot down a Russian military plane.

Poland ordered 48 F-16’s shortly after joining NATO, which would give it one of the largest fleets of warplanes in the world. To believe any of this is for the self-defense of Poland is really straining credulity; it’s quite evidently part of US-NATO plans to extend its military hardware along Russia’s western border. This is maybe one of the more dramatic examples of it, but it’s part of a pattern that I just documented that goes back almost 20 years.

Sputnik: It’s interesting you’re giving these facts and figures. It’s mind-boggling, it’s breathtaking the amount of hardware, military hardware, that’s being pumped into Poland. I was having a discussion with an expert about the US geopolitical position, we were talking about the industrial military complex and that it’s probably more of a complex than it was in Eisenhower’s range and President Kennedy, would you agree with that assumption?

Rick Rozoff: Yes, right you are. Not only that, but the US has been luxuriating, if you will, triumphantly in what it considers its unipolar moment since the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1991.

That’s given them the entire world to sell arms to, the entire world to wage war in, as we’re seeing. We’re talking about NATO in relation to Poland: they’ve waged wars in three continents since 1999, since the war against Yugoslavia; subsequent to that, of course, Afghanistan, Libya. None of those countries are anywhere near the area of responsibility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so what’s happened now, you’re correct, it’s the military-industrial complex and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization…and we must keep in mind that NATO is the world’s only military bloc, it’s the longest-lived military bloc in human history. It was formed in 1949. It went from 16 members at the end of the Cold War to 29 members, now that’s over a 75% increase. It now has members and partners, 70 of them, in all six inhabited continents.

This is what’s happened in the post-Cold War period. I’ve neglected to mention that the US moved in a brigade of Abrams tanks into Poland recently, and the Americans moved in Raptor warplanes. Poland is considering, by the way, updating one of those bases I just talked to you about. So it’s clear that with the expansion of NATO that began in 1999, everything, and I’m quoting, practically, the State Department officials in the United States, everything pushes into the East and the South.

The East I don’t even have to tell you, it’s the Russian border. You know, what we’re talking about in Poland has analogs in nations like Bulgaria and Romania where the US acquired seven major military bases. Three air bases, two of them fairly substantial, and after they joined NATO earlier in the century, and this seems to be the general plan, the question is who is going to call a stop to this.

Sputnik: That’s an interesting question, it’s also a rhetorical question, I don’t think anyone can answer it, even probably the elitists and the people running the industrial military complex. I think they’ve lost sight of what their endgame is by the sound of things. Obviously, Russia is seen as the threat, are they going to start pushing in and moving hardware into China’s border? What do you believe is the end game of the American strategy with regard to this? And is there going to be an end to it or is it just going to continue because of this thirst for arms sales and the requirement to build these armaments to keep these elitists in control and retain their revenue that these armaments being built gives them?

Rick Rozoff: You’ve summarized various factors quite accurately and insightfully. Notwithstanding the fact that the global arms trade is unconscionable, but lucrative, in that sense I suppose the US merchants of death would prefer not an all-out war but a continuation of military escalation that gives them a consistently predictable, profitable rate.

However, these are factors that are very dangerous by their very nature. It is easy to miscalculate; something occurs, as with the downing of the Russian surveillance aircraft a few days ago, that could create an international crisis. We have to remember they’re playing with fire, quite literally.

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Rock Rozoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research 

The views and opinions expressed by the speakers do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik where this article was originally published.

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On the first grim anniversary of Hurricane Maria making landfall, as Puerto Rico remains in tarp-strewn ruins, many survivors lack reliable power or water, and scores of the hundreds of thousands who fled now face homelessness, a determinedly amnesiac White House press release boasted that “President Donald J. Trump‘s Administration Has Helped Lead a Historic Recovery Effort in Puerto Rico” in “the largest and longest Federal response to a disaster in the history of the United States.” As part of that yuge effort, they sent Ben “I Am Also Under Investigation” Carson to Puerto Rico, where he failed to mention the 3,000 people who died, maybe because his boss think they’re faking it, but did offer the island $1.5 billion in recovery funds, or slightly below the $94.4 billion they have said they need to rebuild. He also bragged about “how we have pulled together as one, island and the mainland alike.”

Many disagreed with all this pulling together gibberish, including those on social media who vowed, “We will mourn…and we will vote,” Amnesty International, who projected the death toll on Trump’s hotel; and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who furiously slammed Trump’s recovery effort as, in truth, “a historic failure…He can spin it any way he wants, but this is his Katrina.” Still, the clown leader didn’t notice because he was busy going to Las Vegas to rally his sheep, where his opening speaker was a batshit wingnut conspiracy theorist he had requested. After the crowd chanted “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” – yes, still – Trump said he is taking care of veterans “for the first time in a long time” and called Brett Kavanaugh “a fine fine person…one of the finest human beings you will ever have the privilege of knowing” and happily imagined when Dean Heller, the guy he was selling, would come to him and say, “Mr. President, stop winning so much. The people of Nevada can’t take it any longer.” Actually….Mr. President, none of us can take it any longer. Are we almost done?

Hey @realDonaldTrump!

You seem to be confused about the death toll of Hurricane Maria, so we put the number up on your hotel in Washington DC. Here's a reminder in case you forget.

We #StandWithPuertoRico.

Sincerely,

Amnesty pic.twitter.com/djkConYlHr

— AmnestyInternational (@amnesty) September 20, 2018

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Featured image is from the author.

An open letter to Jason Greenblatt, Assistant to the US President and Special Representative for International Negotiations

In June 2017, during the month of Ramadan, you unexpectedly attended an “Iftar” meal with some of the very sick Palestinian children and their families at Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem. The Iftar, arranged by the Hospital in conjunction with Mr. Donald Blome, the American Consulate General in Jerusalem, was to be a message to East Jerusalem Hospitals and their vulnerable patients from Gaza and the West Bank, that nothing much has changed after President Trump has been installed at the helm, that the new US administration sympathises with their plight and will not abandon them.

Being the CEO of the Hospital at the time, I remember welcoming you but politely explaining how, as Palestinian citizens of Arab East Jerusalem, we felt about the continuous aggressive attempts to “Judaise” our part of the City and how our Arab tertiary-level Hospitals in East Jerusalem, including the Lutheran-run Augusta Victoria, the Catholic-run St. Joseph and St. John’s Eye Hospitals, were barely surviving in the midst of very difficult financial and political circumstances in order to continue to serve the very sick and vulnerable Palestinian patients who crossed the heartless Israeli checkpoints in order to get life-saving medical treatment at prices they can afford.

I also remember taking you on a tour to visit some medical departments. And when you went into the 30-bed Neonatal Unit and saw those little infants who weighed mostly under 1,000 grammes, you told us, with your eyes filling with tears, how that scene reminded you of the birth of your triplet children – Noah, Julia and Anna – who years ago were placed in a Neonatal Unit in a New York Hospital due to their tiny birth weight.

You seemed to be full of praise of the Hospital’s work especially with the very sick children who came from Gaza and “sort of” pledged to lobby on the Hospital’s behalf.

Alas…The tears we saw were those of crocodiles! For instead of your visit being a blessing for the Hospital and its patients, it turned out to be a curse! For one month after your visit, in July 2017, the Israeli forces brutally stormed Makassed Hospital including the Neonatal Unit you visited, wreaking havoc and claiming to be looking for a corpse of a young man they had shot dead outside of the Hospital gates. On that day, 21 July 2017, a massacre was avoided at the last minute when the heavily armed police, who turned the corridors of the Hospital into a battlefield, encountered families and friends of more than 100 youngsters injured while peacefully protesting at the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque – the third holiest shrine in Islam – against the installation of electronic gates at the Mosque’s entrances, a decision later rescinded by the Israeli Government for fear of a full-blown third Intifada.

Moreover, four months after your visit, I was denied entry to Israel, including East Jerusalem, although I (and both my parents and grandparents to the twentieth generation) were born and raised there. Unfortunately, Israel’s Law of Return only applies to Jews (including you of course) but not to the native Arab population of Palestine (Christians and Muslims) who made up more than 90 per cent of the population on the day Palestine was occupied by the British in December 1917. Unfortunately for us Palestinians, that is to say if you or any of your triplet children wish to live in Jerusalem although you were all born and lived in New York all your lives, you will be welcome with open arms but if I wish to return and live in my birthplace, the discriminatory laws of the State of Israel will deny me that “wish/right”.

And to add insult to injury, your esteemed Government recently decided to cancel the $25 million grant that were allocated to support the treatment of very sick and poor patients in six East Jerusalem Hospitals, denying many poor children their right to life, including the pre-mature babies who brought tears to your eyes!

For Makassed and the rest of East Jerusalem Hospitals, your visit was a bad omen… an empty gesture that was full of smiles and tears but you were really contemplating how to pursue your Government’s ruthless political agenda of aiming to bring the Palestinians to their knees even if you starve their pre-mature babies of intravenous injections!

Mr. Greenblatt, I would like to end my open letter with a word of advice to you and your President (and also to Messrs. Kushner, Friedman, Haley, Bolton and the other entourage): No amount of starvation and misery you impose on the Palestinian people will work! On the contrary, our reaction will be like a cat “entrapped in a corner” forced to defend its vulnerable kittens. Regardless of moving the US embassy to Jerusalem or cutting aid to our Hospitals, we will resist, defy and stand steadfast in defence of our usurped rights and stolen land. Please rest assured that your aggressive policies may have brought a silent response from a few leaders but the Arab people are dead against your “Deal of the Century” and will not succumb to your futile attempts that are based on the old colonial principle of “Divide and Rule”.

And standing with us will be all the peace – and justice – loving people in the world, including, in increasing numbers, many Jewish people living in the US, Israel, Europe and elsewhere, who are progressively being alienated from the American Machiavellian Mideast policies and the atrocious Israeli actions of killing unarmed civilian protesters in Gaza and the West Bank while passing a new racist Nation State Law.

For, in the end, Mr. Greenblatt, Palestine/Israel shall be a place where each of us may practice their beliefs without trodding on the rights and beliefs of others… a secular democratic state with equal rights and equal obligations for all its citizens regardless of race, religion, colour or creed. You may dismiss this as utopian but you must agree that this is the only plausible, just and democratic solution if no one is to be thrown in the desert or the sea!

Mr. Greenblatt, Please let the President know that we have existed in Palestine and Jerusalem for over 5,000 years and we do not intend to leave. The Palestinians today feel like Rocky Balboa after Round One… But it is still Round One!

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Dr. Rafiq Husseini is Former Coordinator of East Jerusalem Hospitals Network.

Decades of deceit have been thrown overboard with the new nuclear sales pitch, argues JIM GREEN. The new sales pitch openly links nuclear power to weapons and argues that weapons programs will be jeopardised unless greater subsidies are provided for the civil nuclear industry.

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In 2015, Nuclear Monitor published a detailed analysis of the many ways nuclear industry insiders and lobbyists trivialise and deny the connections between nuclear power – and the broader nuclear fuel cycle – and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Since then, the arguments have been turned upside down with prominent industry insiders and lobbyists openly acknowledging power-weapons connections. This remarkable about-turn has clear origins in the crisis facing nuclear power and the perceived need to secure increased subsidies to prevent reactors closing and to build new ones.

The new sales pitch openly links nuclear power to weapons and argues that weapons programs will be jeopardised unless greater subsidies are provided for the civil nuclear industry. The US Nuclear Energy Institute, for example, tried in mid-2017 to convince politicians in Washington that if the only reactor construction projects in the US ‒ in South Carolina and Georgia ‒ weren’t completed, it would stunt development of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex.

The Nuclear Energy Institute paper wasn’t publicly released. But in the second half of 2017, numerous nuclear insiders and lobbyists openly acknowledged power-weapons connections and called for additional subsidies for nuclear power. The most important of these initiatives was a paper by the Energy Futures Initiative ‒ a creation of Ernest Moniz, who served as energy secretary under President Barack Obama.

The uranium industry jumps on the bandwagon

Even the uranium industry has jumped on the bandwagon, with two US companies warning that reliance on foreign sources threatens national security and lodging a petition with the Department of Commerce calling for US utilities to be required to purchase a minimum 25 percent of their requirements from domestic mines.

Decades of deceit have been thrown overboard with the new sales pitch linking nuclear power and weapons. However there are still some hold-outs. Until recently, one nuclear lobbyist continuing to deny power-weapons connections was Michael Shellenberger from the ‘Environmental Progress’ pro-nuclear lobby group in the US.

Shellenberger told an IAEA conference last year that “nuclear energy prevents the spread of nuclear weapons”. And he claimed last year that “one of FOE-Greenpeace’s biggest lies about nuclear energy is that it leads to weapons” and that there is an “inverse relationship between energy and weapons”.

Shellenberger’s backflip

In two articles published in August, Shellenberger has done a 180-degree backflip on the power-weapons connections.

“[N]ational security, having a weapons option, is often the most important factor in a state pursuing peaceful nuclear energy”, Shellenberger now believes.

A recent analysis from Environmental Progress finds that of the 26 nations that are building or are committed to build nuclear power plants, 23 have nuclear weapons, had weapons, or have shown interest in acquiring weapons.

“While those 23 nations clearly have motives other than national security for pursuing nuclear energy,” Shellenberger writes, “gaining weapons latency appears to be the difference-maker. The flip side also appears true: nations that lack a need for weapons latency often decide not to build nuclear power plants … Recently, Vietnam and South Africa, neither of which face a significant security threat, decided against building nuclear plants …”

Here is the break-down of the 26 countries that are building or are committed to build nuclear power plants according to the Environmental Progress report:

• Thirteen nations had a weapons program, or have shown interest in acquiring a weapon: Argentina, Armenia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Japan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, UAE.
• Seven nations have weapons (France, US, Britain, China, Russia, India and Pakistan), two had weapons as part of the Soviet Union (Ukraine and Belarus), and one (Slovakia) was part of a nation (Czechoslovakia) that sought a weapon.
• Poland, Hungary, and Finland are the only three nations (of the 26) for which Environmental Progress could find no evidence of weapons latency as a motivation.

Current patterns connecting the pursuit of power and weapons stretch back across the 60 years of civilian nuclear power. Shellenberger notes that “at least 20 nations sought nuclear power at least in part to give themselves the option of creating a nuclear weapon” ‒ Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, France, Italy, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Libya, Norway, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, West Germany, Yugoslavia.

Shellenberger points to research by Fuhrmann and Tkach which found that 31 nations had the capacity to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium, and that 71% of them created that capacity to give themselves weapons latency.

Nuclear weapons ‒ a force for peace?

So far, so good. The pursuit of nuclear power and weapons are often linked. That’s a powerful reason to eschew nuclear power, to strengthen the safeguards system, to tighten export controls, to restrict the spread of enrichment and reprocessing, and so on. But Shellenberger has a very different take on the issues.

Discussing the Fuhrmann and Tkach article (and studiously avoiding contrary literature), Shellenberger writes:

“What was the relationship between nuclear latency and military conflict? It was negative. “Nuclear latency appears to provide states with deterrence-related benefits,” they [Fuhrmann and Tkach] concluded, “that are distinct from actively pursuing nuclear bombs.”

“Why might this be? Arriving at an ultimate cause is difficult if not impossible, the authors note. But one obvious possibility is that the “latent nuclear powers may be able to deter conflict by (implicitly) threatening to ‘go nuclear’ following an attack.” …

“After over 60 years of national security driving nuclear power into the international system, we can now add “preventing war” to the list of nuclear energy’s superior characteristics. …

“As a lifelong peace activist and pro-nuclear environmentalist, I almost fell out of my chair when I discovered the paper by Fuhrmann and Tkach. All that most nations will need to deter military threats is nuclear power ‒ a bomb isn’t even required? Why in the world, I wondered, is this fact not being promoted as one of nuclear powers many benefits?

“The answer is that the nuclear industry and scientific community have tried, since Atoms for Peace began 65 years ago, to downplay any connection between the two ‒ and for an understandable reason: they don’t want the public to associate nuclear power plants with nuclear war.

“But in seeking to deny the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the nuclear community today finds itself in the increasingly untenable position of having to deny these real world connections ‒ of motivations and means ‒ between the two. Worse, in denying the connection between energy and weapons, the nuclear community reinforces the widespread belief that nuclear weapons have made the world a more dangerous place when the opposite is the case. …

“Nuclear energy, without a doubt, is spreading and will continue to spread around the world, largely with national security as a motivation. The question is whether the nuclear industry will, alongside anti-nuclear activists, persist in stigmatizing weapons latency as a nuclear power “bug” rather than tout it as the epochal, peace-making feature it is.”

Deterrent effects

Shellenberger asks why the deterrent effect of nuclear power isn’t being promoted as one of its many benefits. Nuclear weapons can have a deterrent effect ‒ in a uniquely dangerous and potentially uniquely counterproductive manner ‒ but any correlation between latent nuclear weapons capabilities and reduced military conflict is just that, correlation not causation.

On the contrary, there is a history of military attacks on nuclear facilities to prevent their use in weapons programs (e.g. Israel’s attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007). Shellenberger points to the same problem, asking whether latency could “also be a threat to peace?” and noting Israeli and US threats to take pre-emptive action against Iran. He doesn’t offer an answer or explore the issue further.

Shellenberger argues that Iran should be encouraged to develop nuclear weapons. He cites long-term nuclear weapons proliferation enthusiast Kenneth Waltz, who claims that the “decades-long Middle East nuclear crisis … will end only when a balance of military power is restored”. He cites a German academic who argues that a nuclear-armed Germany “would stabilize NATO and the security of the Western World”. We “should be glad that North Korea acquired the bomb” according to Shellenberger. And on it goes ‒ his enthusiasm for nuclear weapons proliferation knows no bounds.

‘Shellenberger has gone down a rabbit hole’

Nuclear Monitor has previously exposed the litany of falsehoods in Shellenberger’s writings on nuclear and energy issues. In his most recent articles he exposes himself as an intellectual lightweight prepared to swing from one extreme of a debate to the other if that’s what it takes to build the case for additional subsidies for nuclear power.

A dangerous intellectual lightweight. Environmental Progress attorney Frank Jablonski writes:

“From Shellenberger’s article you would conclude that, for any “weak nation”, or for the “poor or weak” persons within such nations, things are bound to improve with acquisition of nuclear weapons. So, for humanitarian reasons, the imperialistic nations and hypocritical people standing in the way of that acquisition should get out of the way. No. The article’s contentions are falsified by … logical untenability, things it got wrong, and things it left out. While Shellenberger’s willingness to take controversial positions has often been valuable, a “contrarian” view is not always right just because it is contrarian.”

Sam Seitz, a student at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, argues that Shellenberger’s argument is “almost Trumpian in its incoherence”. He takes issue with Shellenberger’s claims that no nuclear powers have been invaded (“a pretty misleading statistic” and “wrong”); that battle deaths worldwide have declined by 95% (“fails to prove that nuclear weapons are responsible for this trend … as we are frequently reminded, correlation and causation are not equivalent”); that Indian and Pakistani deaths in two disputed territories declined sharply after Pakistan’s first nuclear weapons test in 1998 (“doesn’t account for non-nuclear factors like the role of outside mediation and domestic politics”); and that Nazi Germany invaded France because the French lacked a credible deterrent (“makes very little sense and conflates several things … also silly”).

Hostile response

Responding to Shellenberger’s more-the-merrier attitude towards nuclear weapons proliferation, pro-nuclear commentator Dan Yurman puts it bluntly:

“Here’s the problem. The more nations have nuclear weapons, the more dangerous the world will be. Sooner or later some tin pot dictator or religious zealot is likely to push a button and send us all to eternity.”

Shellenberger’s about-turn on power-weapons connections provoked a hostile response from Yurman:

“Shellenberger has crossed a red line for the global commercial nuclear industry, which has done everything in its power to avoid having the public conflate nuclear weapons with commercial nuclear energy. Worse, he’s given opponents of nuclear energy, like Greenpeace, a ready-made tool to attack the industry. …

“In the end he may have painted himself into a corner. Not only has he alienated some of his supporters on the commercial nuclear side of the house, but he also has energized the nonproliferation establishment, within governments and among NGOs, offering them a rich opportunity promote critical reviews of the risks of expanding nuclear energy as a solution to the challenge of climate change. …

“Shellenberger has gone down a rabbit hole with his two essays promoting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Given all the great things he has done to promote commercial nuclear energy, it is a perplexing and disturbing development.

“It’s ok to be contrarian, but I fear he will pay a price for it with reduced support from some of his current supporters and he will face critical reviews from detractors of these essays. In the end public support and perception of the safety of nuclear energy may be diminished by these essays since they will lead to increased conflating of commercial nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. The fatal attraction of the power of nuclear weapons has lured another victim. It’s an ill-fated step backwards.”

Power-weapons connections

No doubt there will be more acknowledgements of power-weapons connections by nuclear industry insiders and lobbyists. As Shellenberger notes, the nuclear ‘community’ today finds itself in an increasingly untenable position denying the connections.

There is a degree of domestic support for nuclear weapons programs in weapons states … but few people support generalised nuclear weapons proliferation and few would swallow Shellenberger’s arguments including his call to shred the non-proliferation and disarmament system and to encourage weapons proliferation.

Understanding of the power-weapons connections, combined with opposition to nuclear weapons, is one of the motivations driving opposition to nuclear power. According to Shellenberger, the only two US states forcing the closure of nuclear plants, California and New York, also had the strongest nuclear disarmament movements.

There is some concern that claims that the civil nuclear industry is an important (or even necessary) underpinning of a weapons program will be successfully used to secure additional subsidies for troubled nuclear power programs (e.g. in the US, France and the UK). After all, nuclear insiders and lobbyists wouldn’t abandon their decades-long deceit about power-weapons connections if not for the possibility that their new argument will gain traction, among politicians if not the public.

The growing acknowledgement ‒ and public understanding ‒ of power-weapons connections might have consequences for nuclear power newcomer countries such as Saudi Arabia. Assuming that the starting point is opposition to a Saudi nuclear weapons program, heightened sensitivity might constrain nuclear exporters who would otherwise export to Saudi Arabia with minimalist safeguards and no serious attempt to check the regime’s weapons ambitions. Or it might not lead to that outcome ‒ as things stand, numerous nuclear exporters are scrambling for a share of the Saudi nuclear power program regardless of proliferation concerns.

More generally, a growing understanding of power-weapons connections might lead to a strengthening of the safeguards system along with other measures to firewall nuclear power from weapons. But again, that’s hypothetical and it is at best some way down the track ‒ there is no momentum in that direction.

And another hypothetical arising from the growing awareness about power-weapons connections: proliferation risks might be (and ought to be) factored in as a significant negative in comparative assessments of power generation options.

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Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where a longer version of this article was originally published.

Featured image: The Osirak research reactor site in Iraq after it was bombed by Israel in 1981. (Source: Creative Commons)

Painful sanctions on Iran have demonstrated the long reach of the U.S. Treasury, forcing much of the globe to fall in line and cut oil imports from Iran despite widespread disagreement over the policy. Yet, we are only in the first few chapters of what may ultimately be a long story that ends with the erosion of the power of the U.S. dollar.

The role of the greenback in the international financial system is the reason why the U.S. can prevent much of the world from buying oil from Iran. Oil is traded in dollars, and so much of international commerce is based in dollars. In fact, as much as 88 percent of all foreign exchange trades involve the greenback.

Moreover, multinational companies inevitably have some commercial ties to the U.S., so when faced with the choice of business with Iran or losing access to the U.S. financial system and the American market, the choice is an easy one.

That means that even if European governments, for instance, support importing oil from Iran, the dominance of the U.S.-based financial system leaves them with very few tools to do so. European policymakers have scrambled to try to maintain a relationship with Iran and have tried to convince Iran to stick with the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal – and Iran is still complying – but that doesn’t mean that European refiners, who are private companies, will run the risk of getting hit by U.S. sanctions by continuing to import oil from Iran. In fact, they began drastically cutting oil purchases from Iran months ago.

The dollar is supreme, it seems.

But that isn’t the end of the story. In several ways, the Trump administration is contributing to a growing threat to the dollar, even if that is hard to see right now. After all, the dollar has strengthened this year, U.S. GDP has grown faster than other industrialized economies, and the world has had to adhere to U.S. sanctions on a growing list of countries and entities, the most notable of which are Russia, Iran and Venezuela.

However, the “America first” foreign policy, the trade wars and seemingly arbitrary nature of tariffs, trans-Atlantic tension and other geopolitical rivalries are all factors that could push the dollar off of its perch. Related: The Altay Pipeline: A Geopolitical Game Changer

But it is the extensive use of sanctions that stands out as arguably the most important factor that may ultimately undermine the dominance of the U.S. dollar, some experts say. That is especially true in the case of Iran.

“In the Iran case, the United States is damaging sanctions as a tool of statecraft,” Kelsey Davenport, an Arms Control Association analyst, told the Washington Post in August. “The United States has put a lot of states between a rock and a hard place.”

The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said a few days ago in a speech that the euro should be elevated as a reserve currency in order to break European dependence on the U.S. dollar. Juncker noted that the EU paid for 80 percent of its energy imports in dollars even though only 2 percent of imports come from the U.S.

“There’s no logic at all in paying energy imports in dollar not euro,” an EU diplomat told Politico.

For instance, most dollar-denominated imports actually come from Russia and the Middle East. It speaks to the U.S.-oriented nature of the international financial system that a European refiner who wants oil from Iran, or Iraq, or Russia, has to buy that oil in U.S. dollars, and is subject to demands from Washington, even though no American entity has any role in that transaction.

Obviously, so long as European and American interests were aligned, that arrangement worked just fine. But their interests have diverged on a range of issues, including NATO, the Paris Climate agreement, and most significantly on the Iran nuclear deal.

The demands by the Trump administration that Europe cut imports from Iran to zero seems to have been the final straw. Some in Brussels are now calling for a departure from the Trans-Atlantic relationship.

The inability of Europe to blunt the impact of U.S. sanctions on Iran has demonstrated the dominance of the greenback, and has pushed European officials to look for solutions. Some have proposed a rival international payments system, others have suggested buying Iranian oil in euros. In August the EU announced an 18-million euro aid package for Iran.

Most recently, the EU – led by France, Germany and the UK – are working on setting up a “special purpose” financial company to help Iran skirt U.S. sanctions and continue selling its oil. The company would exist to process payments for transactions with Iran, bypassing the typical financing channels, as reported by Spiegel. The U.S. has a great deal of influence over and access to existing money-transfer systems.

There are plenty of reasons why this initiative may not get off the ground, or have only a limited impact. Private companies, for instance, would need to agree to play along and there is little evidence so far to suggest that European refiners are willing to take that risk. And the attempt to elevate the euro to the same status of the dollar will be extremely difficult, and would be a long-term project.

But a growing effort at elevating the euro, or conducting euro-denominated oil sales, combined with a smattering of other initiatives intended to weaken the influence of Washington’s financial dominance, could chip away at the dollar over time.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, for its own reasons, China launched a yuan-denominated oil contract based in Shanghai. The move was intended to bolster China’s currency, reduce foreign exchange risk, and in a broader sense, gain geopolitical and economic leverage at the expense of the dollar.

The dollar remains all-powerful, but the Trump administration’s aggressive use of sanctions, crystallized by its zero-tolerance sanctions campaign against Iran, could undermine the greenback over the long-term if more countries begin to look for workarounds.

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Nick Cunningham is a freelance writer on oil and gas, renewable energy, climate change, energy policy and geopolitics. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.

While a crisis has been prevented in Idlib through a deal between Russia and Turkey, the deal in itself also contains sufficient substance that brings America’s role in Syria down to zero. This becomes particularly evident when we compare the same kind of deals made regarding Aleppo in 2016 when the US was a party to it and its officials did sit across the table from their Russian counterparts. But the Idlib deal saw no US officials, marking the continuing exit of US influence from the region, particularly its role in influencing the Syrian end-game. With Idlib being the last major terrorist stronghold in Syria and with the US having no say in it, there is little gainsaying that the US will have little to no say on the final outcome of the war it had orchestrated 6 years ago.

While it is also a fact that America’s exit from Syria was partly due to its own reluctance and inability to deepen its military involvement, and its heavy reliance on proxy groups to serve the US interest, there remains little doubt about the importance of Russian military’s involvement in Syria as the deciding factor, defeating not only the “rebels” but also insulating Syria from the US influence.

The deal also means the final exit of all foreign funded “rebels”, which had been the main ground force for the advocates of “Assad must go.” As Erdogan confirmed,

“we will ensure that radical groups, which we will designate together with Russia, won’t be active in the relevant area.”

While western political pundits have been pointing out as to how this deal could fail like the many deals made in the past, this analysis does hardly take into account how Russia-Turkey relations have already changed into strong enough ties to fulfill these deals. Turkey and Russia are increasingly becoming trade and diplomatic partners, and Russia is building Turkey’s first nuclear reactor. On top of it is the fact that Turkey’s own relations with the US and EU countries aren’t strong enough to allow for greater protection of its interests in and outside Syria.

For the US, however, the deal means that there will not be any serious military escalation, certainly not serious enough to allow for another staged chemical attack and thus use that attack to launch yet another missile strike on Syria and use this trick as an excuse to increase the stakes and get a chance to have a seat on Sochi and Astana processes. As it stands, chance of having itself present in Syria is a lost game for the US.

With this deal, chances of direct military confrontation between Russia and Turkey or between Turkey and Syria have also significantly scaled down, allowing Russia to not only to keep Turkey on its own side of the war but also keep the Sochi and Astana processes intact. This way, Russia has made sure that Turkey finds no reason to normalize its relations with the West.

That the Sochi and Astana processes remain alive is evident from the fact that the deal has been called “Sochi deal” and the other member of the processes, Iran, has also hailed it as a great diplomatic success. Keeping these processes alive is significant for Russia not only because it gives Russia a very crucial diplomatic edge over its western competitors, but also because it legitimizes its presence in Syria to engage with Turkey and other countries, including Israel, to protect both Syrian and Russian interests.

And while the deal has already received support from countries like Germany and even received a cautious support from the UNO, Russia has nothing to lose out of it even if it fails. For one thing, majority of the tasks laid out in the deal fall on Turkish rather than Russian shoulders. The crucial question was of how to convince their respective partners of the deal.

While Russia has already convinced Syria, it remains to be seen how Turkey would convince the opposition armed groups, which include Islamist radicals of former Al-Nusra front now called Tahrir al-Sham, to withdraw from the province. And, even If Turkey fails to do so and instead ends up having to launch a military operation against the radicals, Turkey will still have to rely on Russia to obtain its permission to use Syria’s airspace for its fighter jets to do air strikes. During the Afrin operation, Moscow initially allowed the Turkish air force to operate above Afrin and then disallowed it.

Convincing or even forcing the rebels and the radicals is, therefore, a crucial task that Turkey has to perfume. If it succeeds in doing so, it will make Idlib’s return to Syria’s control relatively peaceful; if it fails, Turkey will hardly be in any position to ask for another deal, leaving the ground open for the Syrian and Russian military to clear Idlib through hard military means.

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Salman Rafi Sheikh is research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from the author.

The North Carolina Department of Agriculture said Wednesday that the historic flooding from Florence has killed about 3.4 million chickens and turkeys and 5,500 hogs.

“This was an unprecedented storm with flooding expected to exceed that from any other storms in recent memory. We know agricultural losses will be significant because the flooding has affected the top six agricultural counties in our state,” said agriculture commissioner Steve Troxler in a press release.

The footprint of flooding from this storm covers much of the same area hit by flooding from Hurricane Matthew in 2016, which only worsens the burden on these farmers.

When Matthew hit the state, it flooded more than 140 hog and poultry barns, more than a dozen open hog waste pits and thousands of acres of manure-saturated fields, the Environmental Working Group and Waterkeeper Alliance reported.

Poultry is the number one agricultural industry in North Carolina, with a statewide economic impact of $36.6 billion a year, according to the North Carolina Poultry Federation.

Sanderson Farms, the third largest poultry producer in the country, issued a statement on Monday that 1.7 million of its broiler chickens “were destroyed as a result of flooding.” Sixty of its 880 broiler houses in North Carolina flooded and another six broiler houses experienced damage. Four breeder houses out of a total of 92 in the state flooded.

Additionally, Sanderson said about 30 Lumberton-area farms, housing approximately 211,000 chickens in each, have been isolated by flood waters. More chickens could die if the company is unable to reach those farms with feed trucks.

“Losses of live inventory could escalate if the company does not regain access to those farms,” the statement read.

The state is also the nation’s second leading producer of hogs, with more than 2,100 farms that raise about 9 million hogs each year, according to the North Carolina Pork Council.

The 5,500 hog deaths from Hurricane Florence have already exceeded the 2,800 killed during Hurricane Matthew, the industry trade group wrote in a statement Tuesday.

“Our farmers took extraordinary measures in advance of this storm, including moving thousands of animals out of harm’s way as the hurricane approached,” the statement read. “We do not expect the losses to increase significantly, though floodwaters continue to rise in some locations and circumstances may change.”

Animal rights group PETA called the animal deaths a “tragedy.”

“These millions of deaths were preventable, but as long as a market exists for animal flesh, some people will turn a profit at the expense of animals,” a spokesperson told EcoWatch in an email. “PETA urges everyone to take personal responsibility, not shrug this tragedy off, and actually help stop future suffering by going vegan so that animals are no longer forced to endure the many types of cruelty inherent in the meat industry.”

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) was similarly “heartbroken” over the deaths.

“HSUS is heartbroken by the reports of the catastrophic numbers of farmed animal deaths resulting from the flooding related to Hurricane Florence,” the organization told EcoWatch via email, adding that the animals “needlessly lost their lives.”

“Having an emergency plan, regardless of the numbers of animals at your home, facility, or farm, is the responsibility of the humane steward caring for their welfare,” HSUS added. “If the sheer number of animals makes evacuation extremely difficult or impossible, then a hard look needs to be taken at the number of animals being cared for and the opportunity for them to be considered in an emergency plan. The cost of not doing so, as we can see here, has a devastating impact on the community, the environment and the animals, and are further examples of why we need to reduce the reliance on these massive factory farms.”

Meanwhile, as of Tuesday, at least 77 pig waste lagoons have either breached or are at risk of breaching, the New York Times reported, citing data from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

North Carolina’s hog and other concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, produce almost 10 billion gallons of fecal waste a year, according to the Environmental Working Group and Waterkeeper Alliance. Flooded CAFOs could release a potent mix of pollutants that can potentially harm human health and the environment.

Waterkeeper Alliance has conducted overflights at some of the industrial sites and agricultural operations impacted by Florence and is investigating the possible hazards left in the storm’s wake.

“We’ve been working to address environmental hazards caused by industrial waste mismanagement in North Carolina for over two decades,” said Will Hendrick, Waterkeeper Alliance staff attorney and manager of the Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign in a statement received by EcoWatch. “As defenders of the state’s rivers, lakes and streams, we’re committed to documenting conditions and alerting the public to threats to public health and environmental quality stemming from Hurricane Florence.”

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Featured image: A North Carolina concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, on Sept.18, 2018, Larry Baldwin / Crystal Coast Waterkeeper.

Foreign mercenaries, trained covertly at secret IDF camps in the Negev desert, are now leading the new assault on the Yemen port city of Hodeida, an assault that observers warns threatens to dramatically worsen Yemen’s already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

A new report from the Emirati news website Al-Khaleej Online has revealed that many of the mercenaries leading the assault against the Yemeni port city of Hodeida were trained in Israel by Israeli soldiers, shedding light on Israel’s covert role in the war in Yemen.

According to U.S. officials close to the House Intelligence Committee with knowledge of the operation, hundreds of mercenaries from various nationalities that fight on behalf of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Yemen had recently received “instance combat training” at training camps in the Negev desert that were created through a secret agreement was reached between the UAE and Israel. Mercenaries at the camp were trained under the “personal supervision” of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The camp’s creation was spearheaded by UAE Security Adviser Mohammed Dahlan, who has personally overseen the recent hiring of a fresh force of foreign mercenaries, the majority of whom are Colombian or Nepalese, to fight on the UAE’s behalf in Yemen.

Dahlan, a Palestinian, was a central figure in the U.S.-backed plot funded by the United Arab Emirates to arm and train militias to overthrow Hamas after they won Gaza elections in 2007. Dahlan has since lived in exile in the UAE where he has developed a close relationship to the Emirati royal family and now serves as one of their advisers. Dahlan also has close ties to Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

The report noted that Dahlan had personally visited the training camps in Israel on more than one occasion in order to supervise the training received by mercenaries from the IDF. Al-Khaleej’s sources also stated that Dahlan had chosen the Negev desert as the site for the camps due to the similarities the region shares with Yemen in terms of its climate, environment and tribal structure.

These mercenaries, trained at IDF-led camps in Israel and funded by the UAE, are now leading the renewed assault on the Yemeni port of Hodeida, which began earlier this week on Tuesday. The UAE/Saudi Arabia coalition had previously launched an assault in Hodeida in June but that effort failed to make headway despite the coalition’s superior firepower. The new assault was launched after the coalition recently succeeded in cutting off the main road between Hodeida and the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

Over 90% of Yemen’s food is imported through Hodeida, prompting  the UN and several NGOs to warn that any disruption to food and fuel supplies coming through the Hodeida port “could cause starvation on an unprecedented scale” as the country’s humanitarian crisis – a direct consequence of the coalition’s actions – is now more dire than ever.

An Open Secret: Israel’s Covert Involvement in Yemen’s War

Notably, the revelation of the Israel-based UAE mercenary training camps is not the first indication of covert Israeli involvement in the Yemen conflict. Indeed, when the war first began in 2015, the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE were known to use Israeli-made weapons.

In addition, paperwork seized by the Saudi Embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a that same year revealed that the U.S. was seeking to build a military base near Yemen’s Bab al-Mandab strait in order to “ensure the security of Israel,” suggesting a strong motive for the U.S.’ and Israel’s support for the coalition.

More recently, rumors about new Israel-Saudi weapons deals, including alleged plans to sell Saudi Arabia the Iron Dome missile defense system, have received press attention, suggesting that the covert sale of Israeli weapons to the Saudi-led coalition continues to the present.

Al-Khaleej Online had previously reported that Israel had covertly sold weapons and ammunition to the Saudis, including internationally prohibited weapons that have since been used in the coalition’s brutal bombing campaign in Yemen that consistently targets civilian infrastructure. Just last month, 43% of the coalition’s targets were civilian structures, despite the fact that the U.S. now directly aids the coalition in choosing its strike targets as part of an alleged effort to reduce civilian casualties in the war.

While Israeli involvement in the war in Yemen has thus far been covert, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated last month that he would consider sending Israeli troops to Yemen to fight on behalf of the Saudi-led coalition if the Yemeni resistance gained control over the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait, which serves as a chokepoint on Saudi oil exports and other important Red Sea commerce.

Given Israel’s support for countries involved in genocidal wars in the past and its own treatment of Palestinians, it is unlikely that Israel’s government would feel constrained by any moral dilemmas if it chose to formally join the coalition’s war in Yemen despite the humanitarian crisis that war has provoked.

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen, considered the worst in the world, has brought 17.8 million Yemenis to the brink of starvation including 5.2 million children. In addition, 66,000 children in Yemen die annually from preventable diseases due to the coalition’s blockade of Yemen which has also allowed the worst cholera outbreak in history to proliferate.

Despite the huge death toll that has resulted from the coalition blockade and airstrikes, the “mastermind” of the conflict, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has vowed to continue to target Yemeni civilians, including women and children, in order to “leave a big impact on the consciousness of Yemenis [for] generations.”

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Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

Featured image: UAE has hired Colombian soldiers to fight its war in Yemen. (Source: author)

HHS lost track of another 1,500 immigrant children

For the second time this year, the Department of Health and Human Services has notified Congress that it cannot locate about 1,500 children taken into custody by immigration authorities and transferred to the jurisdiction of HHS to provide the needed care. HHS officials told Senate staffers that case managers could not locate 1,488 children when they called placement centers and foster families between April and June. The figure represents 13 percent of all unaccompanied children processed by the federal government during that period.

In April, HHS revealed that it had lost track of 1,475 children in late 2017, in a scenario reminiscent of the current one. These children too were unaccompanied minors placed with foster families or foster care agencies through the United States.

“The fact that HHS, which placed these unaccompanied minors with sponsors, doesn’t know the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 of them is very troubling,” Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, chairman of the Senate committee overseeing HHS, said, stating the obvious. “Many of these kids are vulnerable to trafficking and abuse, and to not take responsibility for their safety is unacceptable.”

An HHS spokesman claimed that most of the children had been placed with family members, and that these adult sponsors had not responded or could not be reached. Left unstated was that many of the “sponsors” are themselves undocumented immigrants, who could have been seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or have moved to avoid ICE persecution. An ICE official told the committee that 80 percent of the sponsors are themselves undocumented.

Portman and Democratic Senator Tom Carper are cosponsoring largely cosmetic legislation that would give HHS authority and legal responsibility for the welfare of these children even after they are released from custody. Currently the HHS can wash its hands of the children once it classifies them as “lost,” which could be nothing more than a disconnected telephone.

Funds diverted from AIDS and cancer research to jail immigrant children

A September 5 letter from HHS Secretary Alex Azar to Democratic Senator Patty Murray, obtained and made public by The Hill after its existence was reported by Yahoo News, reveals that the department is planning to reallocate about $180 million in health care funds to pay for the detention and processing of immigrant children. All detained immigrant children are transferred by immigration agencies to the jurisdiction of HHS.

Despite having this notification for more than two weeks, Murray’s office did not make any public announcement to alert the public and especially those opposed to the Trump administration’s persecution of immigrants.

HHS wants to divert $80 million from other refugee support programs, and research programs at the National Cancer Institution, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some $5.7 million would be diverted from the Ryan White HIV-AIDS program, which has already had $16 million diverted this year. NIH would lose the most, $87.3 million overall, while $16.7 million would be cut from CDC, $16.7 from Head Start, $9.8 million from Medicare and Medicare operations, $13.3 million from the National Cancer Institute, and $2.2 million from maternal and child health programs.

The number of children held by federal officials and transferred to HHS skyrocketed this spring, after the implementation of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which effectively means that all undocumented immigrants, including those claiming refugee status, are imprisoned and held in custody until their status is determined.

ICE held nearly 1,500 US citizens as “aliens”

A lengthy feature report in the Los Angeles Times Monday night revealed that Davino Watson, the American citizen held illegally in the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement for 1,273 days, was far from the only citizen subjected to such horrific abuse of power. More than 1,480 people detained by ICE since 2012 have been released from custody after their citizenship claims were confirmed, according to agency figures.

The newspaper wrote:

“Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time even though her husband had brought her U.S. passport to a court hearing.”

The Times investigation confirmed that there is no presumption of innocence for those detained by ICE, but rather the opposite, “a presumption that pervades U.S. immigration agencies and courts that those born outside the United States are not here legally unless electronic records show otherwise.” Several victims were arrested despite being in possession of their passports, and one was actually arrested on two different occasions, each time on suspicion of being undocumented.

Among the cases detailed was that of Sergio Carrillo, a 39-year-old landscaper born in Mexico, who became a citizen as a teenager in 1994 when his mother became a citizen. He has a certificate of citizenship and a passport, which would have been evident in any ICE search of federal databases. He was arrested in Rialto, California and held for nearly a week.

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Featured image is from public domain.

US marines have held eight days of unprecedented military exercises with US-backed militants in southern Syria in an attempt to send a “strong message” to Iran and Russia, a senior military official said.

Colonel Sean Ryan, a US military spokesman, described the drills as “a show of force,” saying that the Pentagon had notified Russia through “deconfliction” channels to prevent “miscommunication or escalate tension”.

“The exercise was conducted to reinforce our capabilities and ensure we are ready to respond to any threat to our forces within our area of operations,’” he noted.

The eight days of drills ended this week at the US military outpost in Tanf, located 24 km to the west from the al-Tanf border crossing between Syria and Iraq in Homs Governorate, said Colonel Muhanad al Talaa, the commander of the US-backed Maghawir al Thawra militant group.

He told Reuters the war games were the first such exercises with live-fire air and ground assault, involving hundreds of US troops and militants operating against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Thawra claimed the drills were meant to send what he described as “a strong message to Russia and Iran” that the Americans and the militants intended to stay and confront any threats to their presence.

The US presence in Tanf military base is illegal and lacks the permission of the Syrian government. Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran have repeatedly denounced the American military presence in Syria and called on the US to withdraw its marines from the base. However, the US has so far refused to pull its forces out, and even moved to deploy hundreds of more marines in Tanf earlier this month.

The new forces have reportedly joined “special operations troops already based in the garrison” and are going to participate in the drills amid an escalation of US-Russian tensions in Syria and Russia’s military exercises in the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the CNN cited several US military officials as saying last Friday that Russia had warned the Pentagon twice in the past weeks that its forces, together with Syrian troops, were prepared to wage an attack on terrorists in the area where dozens of US troops are stationed – including those in Tanf garrison.

Reacting to Moscow’s warnings, US military officials “bluntly warned Russia and Syria not to go forward with an attack within a 35-mile-wide security zone that the US maintains around Tanf,” Task & Purpose further reported.

The US illegally built the military outpost in early 2016 under the pretext of fighting Daesh terrorists, but it has declared a 55 km-radius “deconfliction zone” off-limits to others, providing a safe haven for at least 50,000 militants and their families in the Rukban camp that lies within it.

This is while US President Donald Trump had previously stated that he wanted American troops out of Syria as soon as possible and has also called for redirecting millions of dollars meant to help rebuild Syria to other military projects.

Russian and Iranian military forces are in Syria at the official request of the Syrian government. This is while the US has involved itself in the Syrian conflict through an overt campaign meant to train and support anti-Damascus terrorists.  The government of President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly denounced the American military presence in the country and called on Washington to end what it has described as an “uninvited aggression” against Syria.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

This article first appeared on 7th August 2015 – Since this article was published, the stockpiling and distribution of nuclear weapons around the world has significantly worsened. The United States maintains an arsenal of about 1,650 active, ready to fire strategic nuclear warheads deployed on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs), and Strategic Bombers and some 180 tactical nuclear weapons at bomber bases in five European countries.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published a major report in October 2017 that estimates the nuclear weapons spending plans President Donald Trump inherited from his predecessor will cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion between fiscal years 2017 and 2046. According to a projection by the Arms Control Association, America will, in fact, spend closer to $1.7 trillion.

The Trump administration, as outlined in its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) released on Feb. 2, 2018, intends to continue the modernization plan laid out by the Obama administration, and also develop several new nuclear weapons capabilities that will add to the price tag for nuclear forces

In response, other nuclear-armed states, notably Russia and China, are upgrading their arsenals and have tested, produced, and deployed more brand new systems than the United States over the past few years.

In the meantime, nuclear weapons are currently in use in the battlefield, which goes unreported.

A thermonuclear weapon weighing little more than 2,400 pounds (1,100 kg) can produce an explosive force comparable to the detonation of more than 1.2 million tons of TNT.^‪ A nuclear device no larger than traditional bombs can devastate an entire city by blast, fire, and radiation. Nuclear weapons are considered weapons of mass destruction, and their use and control has been a major focus of international relations policy since their debut.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT, is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.

Five states have signed up to NPT, the US, UK, Russia, France and China. Between them, they have declared 22,000 nuclear weapons in stock. These five Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) have made undertakings not to use their nuclear weapons against a non-NWS party except in response to a nuclear attack. India, Pakistan and N.Korea have also declared stocks of nuclear weapons. Israel is widely known to have nuclear weapons but does not declare it and has therefore not signed up to the NPT treaty.

As of 2009, only the US is known to have provided nuclear weapons for sharing. Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Turkey are still hosting U.S. nuclear weapons as part of NATO’s nuclear sharing policy. Canada and Greece withdrew and no longer participate.

However, the USA sticks to the old policy that goes back to 1945 – to monopolise the right to use nuclear weapons by making their non-proliferation part of international law in combination with new restrictive measures against others.

In his book Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War, Michel Chossudovsky tells us about the interconnection between the Pentagon and US corporations. The book says the US Congress okay’d the use of tactical nuclear weapons in non-conventional wars in 2003. According to congressmen, it was quite “safe for civilians”.

In intensive warfare conditions, up-to-date tactical nuclear weapons can create an illusion of their absence on the battlefield when used together with conventional weapons. For instance, according to Russian military experts, nuclear munitions of a new generation were used in Lebanon in 2006 during the operation against the Hezbollah.  The soil samples taken from craters had traces of enriched uranium. At the same time, there was no gamma radiation and isotope of caesium 137 resulting from radioactive decay. The radiation level was high inside the craters but went down approximately by half at the distance of just a few meters away.

According to U.S. military sources, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon against another country since 1945 took place approximately 11 miles east of Basra, Iraq sometime between February 2 and February 5, 1991.

By then, Iraq’s former capitol had been declared a “free fire on zone” – open to carpet-bombing by high-flying formations of eight-engine B-52s. “Basra is a military town in the true sense,” military spokesman General Richard Neal told the press. “The infrastructure, military infrastructure, is closely interwoven within the city of Basra itself.”

Though the soon-to-be fired General Neal claimed there were no civilians left in Basra, the city was actually sheltering some 800,000 terrified residents. In direct violation of Article 51 of the Geneva Protocols, which prohibits area bombing, the B-52s commenced saturation grid-bombing of the city. Mixing fuel-air bombs with shrapnel-spraying cluster bombs, the bombers levelled entire city blocks, the Los Angeles Times reported, leaving “bomb craters the size of football fields, and an untold number of casualties.” [Washington Post Feb 2/91; Los Angeles Times Feb 5/91]

With the city of Basra resounding to gigantic explosions and engulfed in “a hellish nighttime of fires and smoke so dense that witnesses say the sun hasn’t been clearly visible for several days at a time,” a 5-kiloton GB-400 nuclear bomb exploding 11 miles away under the desert attracted no notice.

Under the cover of massive Depleted Uranium tipped bombs that raised dirty mushroom clouds in thunderous explosions that rained radioactive dust over Jalalabad and nearby villages, the first nuclear bombs dropped since Basra in 1991 were detonated by American forces in Afghanistan beginning in March 2002.

Before their field tests were concluded, United States forces would explode four 5-kiloton GBU-400 nuclear bombs in Tora Bora and other mountainous regions of Afghanistan and was so powerful that it actually created an earthquake there.

The use of such lethal weapons by US military, which is a gross violation of the Geneva Convention, has been sanctioned by both US presidents Bush and Obama; thus they should be prosecuted for war crimes, as it is nothing less than a nuclear war.

The classification of DU munitions as weapons of indiscriminate effect is defined in the 1st Protocal additional to the Geneva Conventions. Their use is a war crime.

The US military contends that “mini-nukes” are “humanitarian bombs” which minimize “collateral damage”. According to scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon, they are “harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground.”

The B61-11 is a bon fide thermonuclear bomb, a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) in the real sense of the word.

Military documents distinguish between the Nuclear Earth Penetrator (NEP) and the “mini-nuke”, which are nuclear weapons with a yield of less than 10 kilotons (two-thirds of a Hiroshima bomb). The NEP can have a yield of up to a 1000 kilotons, or seventy times a Hiroshima bomb.

This distinction between mini-nukes and the NEP is in many regards misleading. In practice, there is no dividing line. We are broadly dealing with the same type of weaponry: the B61-11 has several “available yields”, ranging from “low yields” of less than one kiloton, to mid-range, and up to the 1000-kiloton bomb.

In all cases, the radioactive fallout is devastating. Moreover, the B61 series of thermonuclear weapons includes several models with distinct specifications: the B61-11, the B61-3, B61- 4, B61-7 and B61-10. Each of these bombs has several “available yields”.

The latest in the series, the B61-12 is classed by many as the most dangerous nuclear weapon ever due to it being the first guided missile with dial-in yields making proliferation a real threat.

What is contemplated for the theatre of war use is the “low yield” 10 kt bomb, two-thirds of a Hiroshima bomb. What allows it to happen is the disinformation and propaganda issued that these weapons are somehow not really nuclear weapons – they are.

Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and has thus earned the title “The silent killer that will never stop killing”.

These weapons are called ‘micro-nukes’ as if somehow that makes it better or legal. We know that tactical nuclear weapons or mini-nukes are part of the US-NATO arsenal and that they were cleared for use in the conventional war theatre by the US Senate in 2002. Rather bizarrely, these weapons can be used without the approval of the Commander in Chief.

As Prof. Chossudovsky from Global Research asserts “the “evidence” of a nuclear attack against Yemen (see video) remains unconfirmed, the use of mini-nukes against countries in the Middle East has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board for almost 20 years. In 1996 under the Clinton administration, the B61-11 tactical nuclear weapon was slated to be used by the US in an attack against Libya.”

Nuclear weapons will now proliferate as a direct result of American use. It is known that Israel enjoys the luxury of around 80 nuclear weapons, deliverable with great precision to any spot in Iran from land, air or sea. This is especially so considering it is not a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

As the conflict in Syria rages on, concerns emerge as a result of the use of depleted uranium shells (DU) in Iraq. This from bandepleteduranium.org – 1/2/2015 – Citizens of Raqqa in Northern Syria, are concerned over the long-term impact of the growing number of strikes by Coalition forces on their city and nearby villages.

In a report to the United Nations on DU, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned that: “in a post-conflict environment, the presence of depleted-uranium residues further increases the anxiety of local populations”. The collective experience of communities grappling with the public health and environmental legacy of conflict, and the known or suspected presence of radioactive materials, is a contagious cocktail that can have a lasting psychological impact on the memory of people. These concerns have now spread to Syria.

It appears that Israel has used DU rounds as widely reported in Jamraya, Syria. It is just a matter of time before we find out which other country has been contaminating Syria. So awful are these weapons the international community has tried, in vain, towards an outright ban of their future use.

The collapse of Russia’s relationship with the West in the last five years has ended hopes of further progress of non-proliferation as the super-powers intend on upgrading and increasing their weapons systems and nuclear arsenals.

Pakistan is now deploying short-range battlefield nuclear weapons designed to deter Indian tank columns. Only four months ago, General Khalid Kidwai, the former director of Pakistan’s powerful Strategic Plans Division, the country’s main nuclear planning body, declared that Pakistan’s nukes “are not seen as separate weapons”, but are “very much integrated” with conventional forces.

To recap – nuclear weapons, whether under the guise of ‘depleted uranium munitions, ‘mini-nukes, ‘bunker busters’ are quite simply nuclear weapons that leave a legacy of long-term death and destruction.

The UN used nuclear weapons in Libya HERE – The use of Depleted Uranium in Libya has been certified by a group of independent scientists.

Nuclear weapons use and it’s deadly effects HERE.  Nuclear weapons use in Iraq is already devastating families experiencing profound congenital birth defects HERE and HERE

NATO itself, refuses to cooperate with investigations of war crimes and indiscriminate use of illegal weapons systems HERE and HERE

Type “congenital birth defects nuclear weapons Iraq” into Google images for a truly horrific gallery of misery emerges.

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Featured image is from TruePublica.

The Last Earth is a masterful weaving of personal stories into the full tapestry of a people, of individuals, torn from their homes and homeland. It is the kind of history not bound up in sequential dates, political theories, or geopolitical imperatives, but is the story of the people who are living the history.

From that it is a compelling read that moves the emotions through a range of feelings. A sadness derived from the suffering of the individual stories grouped to represent a whole people. Despair at the inhumanity and suffering imposed on individuals who simply wish to live a comfortable life – a comfort not represented by material goods and possessions, but by family, friends, hard work, and the land. Disbelief and incredulity – not so much an emotion as a numbness at the psychological and physical tortures endured by each individual, family, village as their lives are shattered, as they attempt to escape and rebuild, knowing they have no homeland, no Last Earth. A reflective melancholy when each story ends, wondering when the story really will end, when a personal peace, if ever, would arrive.

Is insanity an emotion? Where one group of people without care attempt to eliminate the presence of another? Where drunkenness, anger, pornography, violence, death threats, and cigarette burns and electric shock and other kinds of torture highlight the treatment under detention for lies coerced from collaborators? Where other people refuse to accept and understand the story itself, and those living the story often appear to not understand it? How does one understand the inhumanity – the insanity – of human savagery and human uncaring against itself?

At the same time the bond between individuals, the love of family, children, spouses, parents, and grandparents ranging over distances and time never fades, seldom loses hope. The ties to homeland, the soil, the rocks making the houses, walls, and enclosures, the gardens, pastures, are all held dear. Perseverance, stubbornness, directed anger, steadfastness sustain those bereft of loved ones, family, of homeland.

Seldom do I feel raw emotion when reading contemporary historical works, but the powerful writing style of Ramzy Baroud’s The Last Earth brought to the surface the emotion I try to suppress when advocating for a particular event or occurrence that strikes me deeply in one manner or another. The success of this book is in that emotion, an emotion wrapped around the tragic trajectories of individual lives caught up in a struggle imposed on them from the outside.

It is a must read for anyone caring to understand the tragedy and steadfastness of the Palestinian situation, while also being reflective of the larger human condition.

Title: The Last Earth. A Palestinian Story

Author: Ramzy Baroud

ISBN: 9780745337999

ISBN: 9780745338002

ISBN: 9781786802880

Click here to order.

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Jaysh al-Izza, one of the biggest Free Syrian Army groups in northwestern Syria has welcomed an implementation of the de-escalation zone agreement in Idlib, which was reached by Turkey and Russia earlier this month, the pro-opposition media outlet Enab Baladi reported on August 20.

In a released statement, the group also thanked to Turkey for preventing a military operation by the Syrian Army and its allies in the province of Idlib and nearby areas.

Jaysh al-Izza, which operates in northwestern and northern Hama, is widely known for being one of the key allies of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda). This may be an indication that Turkey has enough influence and willingness on militant groups in the area to force them to obey the demilitarized zone agreement, which is set to be fully imposed by October 20. However, the situation remains complicated.

During a weekly press briefing on September 20, Maria Zakharova warned that a threat of staged chemical attack in Idlib province is still high. According to Zakharova, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is supplying its allied militant groups with chemical agents with this purpose.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) killed 31 ISIS members and destroyed two vehicles, several mortars and five vehicle-borne improvised devices (VBIEDs) during their advance on ISIS positions near Baghuz al-Fawqani and Hajin in the Euphrates Valley.

Recently, the SDF established a full control of Baghuz and started advancing on the ISIS-held village of al-Fawqani al-Susah.

On September 19, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah stated that a part of Israeli strikes on Syria was aimed at preventing the Syrian military from boosting their missile capabilities.

“Israel lies when it says that the purpose of the attack was weapons intended for Hezbollah. The Israeli aggression in Syria is intolerable and must be stopped immediately,” he said, adding that Hezbollah would remain in Syria until further notice

“The quietness of the fronts and less number of threats… will naturally affect the current numbers [of Hezbollah members],” Nasrallah said. “No one can force us out of Syria,” he added.

The movement leader further noted that Hezbollah would leave Syria only upon request from the Damascus government.

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The provocations that Putin invites are now escalating. Peter Ford, former British ambassador to Syria, points out that Washington has quickly taken advantage of Putin’s hesitancy in Syria to escalate the pretexts on which Washington will launch a military attack on the Syrian forces. Formerly Washington’s pretext was to be a false flag “chemical attack” that would be blamed on Syria.  Washington’s new pretext precludes the liberation of Idlib as Washington has declared that any attempted liberation of the province from Washington’s terrorist allies will result in a US military attack on Syria.  Indeed, even a refugee flow whether or not caused by a Syrian attack is deemed to be a “humanitarian issue” that justifies a US military attack on Syria. President Trump’s Special Envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, just announced that the United States will not tolerate an attack, period.  (See this) 

Clearly, the Syrian/Russian liberation of Idlib from Washington’s terrorists cannot now happen, unless Putin is willing to establish such air superiority over Syria, backed up by Russian weapons, that the US would be incapable of launching an attack.  Washington’s escalation of its provocations means that Putin would have to accept the risk of destroying any US attack forces that were sufficiently reckless to test the defenses.

Another puzzle is Putin’s decision to pacify Erdogan by substituting a demilitarized zone in Idlib instead of liberating the province. How did Putin and Erdogan reach the fantasy conclusion that the US and its terrorist allies in Idlib province would cooperate with their demilitarization plan?  Has Russian foreign policy dissolved into self-delusion? (See this) 

We are watching unfold my concern that the acceptance of provocations results in more provocations and that the provocations escalate in their danger.  What will Putin do now?  If he backs down again, he can expect a yet more dangerous provocation until the only choice becomes surrender or nuclear war.

Washington’s provocations would not have reached the current level of intensity if Putin had put his foot down several provocations ago.  Indeed, the entire Syrian crisis would have been over except for the repeated hesitations and premature withdrawals of Russian forces.

Does the Russian government not understand that Washington is conducting war against Russia, not against terrorists?

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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.

The tragedy that transpired earlier this week over Latakia led to a lot of questions about what exactly happened on that fateful night, but answers won’t be forthcoming until the conclusion of the investigation. 

The whole world is already aware that the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) mistakenly downed a Russian plane over Latakia when responding an Israeli attack against the city, one which the Russian Ministry of Defense said was carried out recklessly against the spirit of cooperation between the two countries because the aggressors’ jets used the Russian plane as cover to evade their target’s defenses, thereby making them responsible for the killing of 14 servicemen. Israel, while expressing “sorrow” and “regret”, nevertheless expectedly pinned the blame for what happened on Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran, putting forth the argument that the strike wouldn’t have happened in the first place had Iran not been about to imminently transfer arms to Hezbollah on Syrian territory that were ultimately destined for use against the self-proclaimed “Jewish State”. As for the Russian Ministry of Defense’s claims about Israeli recklessness, the IDF refuted them and said that it will fully cooperate with the Russian investigation into the matter.

About that, one of the first things that Russia will seek to establish is whether Israel is telling the truth, be it in full or only in part, because the Ministry of Defense spared no words in unambiguously laying the blame on them for the tragedy even though President Putin’s official remarks on the event were much milder. Relatedly, Russia will also have to determine the veracity of whatever evidence they’re handed by their Israeli counterparts, since the possibility exists that Tel Aviv might try to cover its tracks by faking flight data and other such details. It’s too early to say whether this will happen, though one must always keep in mind the Ministry of Defense’s stance on the issue and the evidence that it presented on Tuesday which Moscow claims is proof of Tel Aviv’s responsibility for the tragedy. Even if this is the case, as it does seem to be at this point, the investigation obviously wouldn’t stop there but would continue in order to obtain as comprehensive of an understanding as possible of the total context in which this took place.

Specifically, Russia needs to find out exactly why Israel carried out the attack that it did and whether it was assisted in some capacity by France, as was initially reported and has since given rise to actual conspiracy theories because that tangent of the story hasn’t been followed up on with any official commentary. If, as the narrative goes, France was the one that actually shot down the Russian spy plane, then it sounds implausible that Israel would tacitly take the blame for this by unprecedentedly acknowledging “sorrow” and “regret” for what happened, as Tel Aviv has hitherto shied away from ever expressing such sentiments about any ‘collateral damage’ that its military operations have wrought. Returning back the realm of reality but recognizing that the French conspiracy theory does have a certain logic to it (however farfetched it may be without any collaborating evidence other than hunches), attention will surely be paid to Iran’s suspected activities in Syria.

Unlike Israel, Russia doesn’t regard Hezbollah as a terrorist group, but it still passively facilitated over 200 of the former’s strikes against the latter and their Iranian partners in the past 18 months alone via the so-called “deconfliction mechanism” between Tel Aviv and Moscow, the same channel of communication that supposedly failed during the tragic night of 17 September. The Russian Ministry of Defense expressed shock that Israel would only present a minute’s notice prior to their attack, which caught Russia off guard and was supposedly the reason why its spy plane couldn’t leave the area of operations in time. Although President Putin did in fact accuse Israel of violating Syria’s sovereignty with these sorts of attacks, the Russian military never did anything to stop them and, as was written, passively facilitates them through the “deconfliction mechanism” aimed at preventing an inadvertent clash between the two.

Given the circumstances, this is pragmatic, but it’s obviously not fool-proof, as was seen. The point, however, is that Russia doesn’t have enough of a problem with Israel striking Hezbollah and Iran in Syria that it would risk war with another nuclear-armed military to stop it, and since Israel said that the whole tragedy was caused by Iran being on the brink of transferring arms to Hezbollah for future use against it, this claim will undoubtedly be investigated. At this point, it’s worthwhile to recall what President Putin told his Syrian counterpart during their surprise Sochi Summit in mid-May when he said that “We proceed from the assumption that…foreign armed forces will be withdrawing from the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic”, which his Special Envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentiev soon thereafter confirmed does in fact “include the Americans, Turks, Hezbollah, and of course, the Iranians.”

If Russia discovers that there’s any truth to Israel’s claim that it was acting against an imminent Iranian arms shipment to Hezbollah, then it would enable Tel Aviv to weave the narrative that Tehran and its surrogate’s refusal to leave Syria after President Putin’s public hint in that direction is “more responsible” for prompting the circumstances that led to the latest tragedy than Israel’s reaction to this “provocation”. After all, Russia has been passively facilitating Israeli strikes against these same targets for almost exactly three years already, and Tel Aviv could claim that its failure to adequately notify Moscow of its operation was because it had received intelligence about this arms transfer at the very last minute and had to act right away in order to stop it. The so-called “Iranian trace” in this tragedy might even be larger than that too, which is why it’s another topic that will certainly be investigated.

For example, it’s acknowledged by Iran itself that it’s dispatched “advisors” to Syria, and considering that the Islamic Republic also has its own S-200s, it wouldn’t be unbelievable to imagine that it might have even sent some “advisors” for handling Syria’s systems as well. That’s why Russia will need to find out exactly who pulled the trigger, who advised/trained them both before and possibly during that fateful night, who gave the order, and whether there was any foreign presence involved (Iran). It’s not at all to imply that this friendly fire tragedy was actually a deliberate attack, but just that all facts pertaining to it must be known, and if Iranian’s indirect involvement is discovered, then it would obviously lead to Russia “actively encouraging” its Syrian partners to curtail that state’s involvement in the conflict just like President Putin implied should have already happened in mid-May.

As of now, however, everyone is bound to speculate on what may or may not have happened, but the full truth won’t come out until the conclusion of Russia’s investigation. Until then, there are way too many questions but not enough answers, which naturally gives rise to some of the storylines mentioned in this analysis. There’s no shame in engaging in guesswork, especially over something as high-profile as this week’s tragedy, though it needs to be recognized that many of these ideas are just plausible explanations at best and conspiracy theories at worst. Even so, they nonetheless point in the direction of the most pressing questions that need to be answered, such as the veracity of Israel’s claims and the possible indirect involvement of Iran, to say nothing of the mysterious allegations of French involvement that have since seem to have been swept under the rug.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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

Featured image is from South Front.

During a recent tour in Brazil, I visited the Rocinha Favela in Rio de Janeiro. Rocinha is the largest favela in Brazil and runs up a very steep hill near the centre of Rio. It is believed at least 70,000 people live in Rocinha (some estimates suggest more than double that number), living in houses made from concrete and brick. It is officially described as a neighbourhood and has very basic sanitation, plumbing and electricity. Rocinha also has shops, hairdressers, banks, art galleries and many other businesses. The word favela itself is derived from a skin-irritating plant of the spurge family: removing these plants to live in these areas was not easy so the people called the hills after the plant.

History

The favelas go back to the late 1800s when soldiers, brought in for a local war, had no place to live and so settled in the hills. After the end of slavery and the growth of city life many people moved to the cities and the favelas spread. A later industrialisation drive in the 1940s brought many more people to the cities and the favelas expanded dramatically. In the 1970s there were public housing projects but these too disintegrated into new favelas. As the drugs trade increased in the 1980s so too did the growth of gangs and gang warfare. In Rocinha, like many slums, it also has an ongoing conflict between police and drug dealers.

UPP and BOPE

The state began a war on the drug gangs in 2008 with the Pacifying Police Units (UPP) moving in, usually after an initial operation by BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion) who scour the area for heavy weapons and drug caches. The main purpose of the UPP is to stop armed men from ruling the streets and end drug trafficking. However, there seems to be an uneasy peace between the UPP and the drug gangs. While walking through the narrow ‘streets’ of Rocinha, a man with a revolver pointed in the air walked through our group and twice we were asked to refrain from taking photographs as we walked past armed groups of men.

Image on the right: Cemented-over bullet holes

Cinema

If you look at any listicle of Brazil’s best films you will probably see two films, Elite Squad (2007)  and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010) contained within. These films follow the actions of a BOPE squad in a the favelas and does so without pulling any punches. Different, conflicting elements of society are portrayed in both Elite Squad films. The BOPE and police are shown to have corrupt elements, ultimately manipulated by political figures. The middle class are shown in the discussions about the nature of power in university lectures (with particular emphasis on Michel Foucault) and the students are shown working in charitable organisations in the favelas with the nod from drug gang leaders. The main narrative of the films is the idea of corrupt police making financial deals with the drugs gangs – Elite Squad (2007), and changing to corrupt politicians making money by taxing the whole community after the drug gangs have been pushed out – Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010).

Image below: Overhanging wires on telegraph poles

Tourism

The global success of these two films have probably been one of the factors in encouraging tourism in the favelas. While the drug gangs generally do not appear to target tourists there have been incidents where tourists have been injured or killed by both the police and the drug gangs usually as the result of some accident or misunderstanding. In general tourism, like in many other places, is quick-fix solution for local businesses but does little in the way of any real social or economic development of the favela neighbourhoods.

While slums became common in Europe and the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries they are predominantly found in developing countries today. The Little Ireland slum in Manchester, for example, became a source for social scientist Friedrich Engels’ book titled The Condition of the Working Class in England published in Germany in 1845. According to the UN World Cities Report 2016: Urbanization and Development – Emerging Futures:

“The percentage of slum  dwellers in urban areas across all developing regions has reduced considerably since 1990, but the numbers have increased gradually since 2000 except for a steep rise of 72 million new slum dwellers in sub-saharan Africa.”

Also, according to one article on the world’s five biggest slums:

“Around a quarter of the world’s urban population lives in slums. And this figure is rising fast. The number of slum dwellers in developing countries increased from 689 million in 1990 to 880 million in 2014, according to the United Nations World Cities Report 2016.”

Image on the right: Favela mural

The biggest slums in the world today are: Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa (Population: 400,000), Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya (Population: 700,000), Dharavi, Mumbai, India (Population: 1 million), Ciudad Neza, Mexico City, Mexico (Population: 1.2 million), and Orangi Town, Karachi, Pakistan (Population: 2.4 million).

The development of industrialised farming has been one of the major reasons for the the flight from the land.  There is also the perceived view that economic opportunities are greater in the cities. Governments invest less in rural communities because of lower population densities and this creates a vicious cycle. In Ireland today, for example, friends of mine in rural areas still can’t get broadband speeds fast enough to play video clips on their computers and in August the government announced the closure of over 160 post offices nationwide. Meanwhile the urbanisation of Dublin has extended into neighbouring counties while pubs and shops in the rural areas close due to a lack of footfall. While the pressure on Dublin has not produced slums it has created huge increases in rents and a growing homelessness problem.

So what can be done about slums? There appears to be three main approaches to the question of the future of slums around the world today: (1) Renovation: top-down and bottom-up approaches, (2) Demolition for rehousing and rebuilding, and (3) Demolition for parkland.

Around the world slum upgrading has consisted of concrete paths, sanitation, safe drinking water, water drainage systems and public transport. The Brazilian state has done some top-down upgrading in the favelas putting in basic sanitation and social services but much more needs to be done with masses of wires on telegraph poles and cabling bundled along the side of the paths. However, with the global neo-liberal move towards privatisation of public housing there doesn’t seem to be much hope for governments doing serious renovation of slums in the near future. More importantly, in my opinion, has been the bottom-up slum upgrading, for example, in Orangi Town, Karachi in Pakistan where the residents installed sewers in 90% of 8,000 streets and lanes, digging them by hand themselves. This kind of community spirit builds solidarity which is more important for the residents in the long run in their struggle against uncaring states:

“In 1980, the development expert and entrepreneur, Akhtar Hameed Khan, observed how many communities were self-organising to fill the gap in services – from building homes and schools to water delivery – and launched the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP). Now globally renowned, the project has not only led the DIY sewerage projects which continue to expand to this day, but has built a network to manage a plethora of programmes that range from micro credit to water supply, to women’s savings schemes. OPP’s director Saleem Aleemuddin told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that when activists began working in the area in 1980, the lack of sanitation was the most “obvious” and “problematic” area for residents. While it took the OPP around six months to convince local residents to invest and pay for the installation of the first sewerage line on their street, it was not long before people were taking their lead and organising themselves. “Since the government gets almost nothing in revenue from the slum, it therefore pays the least interest to its [slum] developments too,” Aleemuddin said. “In fact, people in the town now consider the streets as part of their homes because they have invested in them and that’s why they maintain and clean the sewers too.””

Others argue that the slums should be seen as similar to the medieval towns and parts of cities preserved all over Europe:

“The tight-knit structure of settlements built in the Middle Ages serves as an important lesson on making modern developments compact and keeping key services easily accessible to the people using them.”

Thus, they argue, slums could be converted into a form of green, eco-friendly living areas such as Cambridge where people walk everywhere now instead of driving. However, it is more likely to become a form of gentrification as usually it is wealthier people who can afford to do the extensive and detailed building and repairs (not to mention the demands of state preservation policies in the case of medieval buildings).

Government plans for Rocinha

Demolition for rehousing and rebuilding

The demolition of slums for rehousing projects does not have a great history. It tended to shift the social problems of the slums to other parts of the city. In Ireland in the 1960s, Dublin’s slums had reached a breaking point as urbanisation and the collapse of slum houses put pressure on the government to move people out to suburban Ballymun into high-rise 15-storey flat complexes. However, by the 1980s Ballymun was seen as a social sink and had to be regenerated itself in the 2000s and the blocks demolished. Also, this strategy can be a cynical ploy as the flats built on the sites of the former slums are sold as properties on high-value city-centre land.

Demolition for parkland

A prime example of a slum demolition is the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong which eventually became the Kowloon Walled City Park. What started off as a Chinese military fort in the 1800s became one of the most densely populated slums in the world. It was extended upwards in the 1960s to become a city of over 30,000 people in 300 buildings occupying little more than 7 acres (2.8 ha). The residents were compensated (with some being forcibly evicted) and demolition was concluded in 1994. Today it is a 31,000 m2 (330,000 sq ft) park which was completed in August 1995.

In Brazil, this is always a possible future for the favelas in Rio. Not many realise that the sculpture of Christ the Redeemer on top of Corcovado mountain is in the middle of the Tijuca Forest – a massive reclamation project of land which had suffered from erosion and deforestation caused by intensive farming of sugar and coffee in the nineteenth century. The whole area was replanted with plants and trees of the rainforest and is one of the biggest urban forests in the world today.

Climate change and the future of urbanism

The future of slums around the world seems tied to a kind of trendy belief in the necessity of planning for an urban future. However, there are those that believe that an alternative to the constant growing urbanisation is to create a model that would attract a part of the urban population back to the rural environment. The potential for creating jobs in the agricultural sector in the future must be seen in the context of sustainable soil management and the difficulties that will be facing food production in future projected changes in temperature, ultraviolet radiation, soil moisture and pests which are expected to decrease food production.

Image on the right: Malcolm X mural

Governments would be better off to develop projects to modernise the rural areas with the type of facilities and services that can be obtained in the cities to attract people back to the land. Collapses in various crops or crop destruction around the world due to unexpected frosts, drought, hurricanes, floods etc can only be expected to increase, leading to food insecurity and the potential for global food price increases and food riots.

The very existence of a slum shows a government’s inability or reluctance to deal with mass population shifts. It reveals a fundamental structural problem in democratic processes and redistribution of tax wealth. For a government to allow a section its own citizens to live a Hobbesian existence exposes the rhetoric of a government for all. How can this be changed and slum issues be resolved? As the Orangi Town example above shows, solidarity and activism can solve practical problems efficiently even if it is letting the government off the hook of responsibility. As has been seen in the past, the social contract only operates when both government and people keep their sides of the bargain. When or if it breaks down the anger constantly bubbling underneath can spill over. While revolutionary changes around the world in the past, in general, are often attributed to their great leaders, the fact is that it is usually down to the most expropriated and alienated people in society to get the great social change juggernaut moving in the first place.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

All images in this article are from the author.

Kosovo is today one of the most disputed territories in Europe and a real Balkan powder keg which can explode again at any time. It is a province within the Republic of Serbia, recognized as such by both Serbia’s constitution and the Resolution 1244 by the Security Council of the United Nations (the UNSC Resolution 1244, June 10^th, 1999). However, Kosovo parliament with a clear Albanian majority proclaimed the independence of Kosovo (without a referendum) in February 2008 that was recognized by the majority of the Western countries followed by their puppet clients all over the world (in reality, today around 90 states). Nevertheless, since Serbia received the status of a candidate-state for the full EU membership in March 2012, the intensive negotiations between Belgrade and Prishtina about the ultimate status of Kosovo are going on under the umbrella of EU and today they are, in fact, entering the final stage.

Kosovo is the birthplace of the first independent Serbian state in the Middle Ages, a center of Serbian state authorities, church, culture and civilization, and the location where Serbia fought a decisive battle (Kosovo Battle) in 1389 against the Muslim Ottoman invaders, protecting Christian Europe from the Orientalization and Islamization. What, in fact, the EU requires from Serbia in the current negotiations between Belgrade and Prishtina on the final status of the province is to recognize the independence of self-proclaimed Republic of Kosova for the very foggy promises about faster (in 2025) Serbia’s EU membership.

In order to make clear historiographical and political picture on the Kosovo issue, in the following paragraphs we are going to correct the basic Western misconceptions about Kosovo which are present in the mass media, popular literature but as well as in the academic publications even by the most prominent Western universities, institutes, and other organizations. In particular, the text is a critical contribution to one of the most misleading (quasi)academic publications on the Kosovo issue with a very bombastic title: Judah T., Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford University Press, Oxford−New York, 2008.

Basic Western misconceptions on the Kosovo issue and their corrections

1. Kosovo issue is a conflict between ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs over the territory

Wrong. It is a part of the conflict between Balkan Albanians and the surrounding populations, in Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece (for instance, clashes between Albanians and Macedonians in Macedonia from 1991 onward including an open rebellion in 2001).

2. The issue is a fight of Albanians for their rights

Wrong. The crux of the matter lies at the biological level. The real rationale is a demographic explosion which is going on within the Albanian population for a century or so (rate of growth by Albanians four to five time faster than the average rate in other European countries) and the ensuing expansion for Lebensraum and the creation of a Greater Albania.

3. Southern Serbia’s province is called Kosovo

Wrong. It is Kosovo and Metohia, abbreviated KosMet. Kosovo itself is an abbreviation of Kosovo Polje, what in the Serbian language means Blackbird Field (in German Amselfeld). Metohia is a corrupted Greek name for Metohi, meaning dependency to the monastery, referring to the land bestowed by Serbian kings and other rulers to the monasteries and churches in KosMet like of Pecka Patrijarshija, Dechani, Grachanica, etc. (the 13−14 century). Therefore, Albanians are omitting the term Metohia from the name of the province in order to hide its historically Serbian character.

4. Ethnic Albanians at KosMet (Shqipetars in the following, as they call themselves) constitute a majority of 90% out of total KosMet’s population

Wrong. In the last reliable census carried out at KosMet in 1961, Shqipetars constituted 67% of the overall population, with (predominantly) Serbs and others sharing the rest. As for the subsequent censuses (1971, 1981, 1991), Shqipetars refused to take part in them. All figures quoted for the period after 1961 are estimates only.

5. Shqipetars are an autochthonous population at KosMet

Wrong. In the Middle Ages, KosMet was the central part of Serbian state, culture, and civilization. Shqipetars were a tiny minority (about 2%, according to the Ottoman census in 1455), nomadic herdsmen mostly. They came to KosMet from North and Central Albania mainly after the First Great Serb Migration in 1690 from KosMet to Vojvodina (at that time part of the Habsburg Empire), after an abortive uprising against the Ottoman rule in 1689. When KosMet was liberated from Ottoman rule in 1912, by Serbia, Serbs and Shqipetars shared equally the overall population there (50% versus50%). All original toponyms (place names) at KosMet were and are Slavonic-Serb, except for a very few of them (contrary to the case in Central and South Albania). The Albanians even do not have their own name for Kosovo that is coming from their own language and, therefore, they are using a modified Serbian origin (Kosova or Kosovë). The word Kos (as the foundation of the toponym) does not exist in the Albanian language. However, since 1999, many original toponyms in KosMet are deliberately Albanized or renamed in order to lose a Serbian character.

6. KosMet is an undeveloped, poor region

Wrong. It is the most fertile land in Serbia (apart from Vojvodina). The average DNP per family is the same as in the rest of Serbia. It is low only if counted per capita since the Shqipetars’ family has six times more children than Serbian family (and former Yugoslavia’s one, for that matter. We are referring to a proper family here, not to the so-called fis, extended Shqipetar family, which may comprise hundreds of members). In fact, accounting for the fact that proportionally more Shqipetars are working in West Europe, their incomes are not accounted for when estimating family earnings and KosMet appears better off than the rest of Serbia. That KosMet is a prosperous region can be verified by direct inspection at the spot. KosMet is the biggest coal reservoir in Europe.

7. The aim of Shqipetars is an independent Kosova

Wrong. It is a common goal of all Albanians to live in a single (unified) national state of (a Greater) Albania. The political program of a Greater Albania is designed in 1878 by the Albanian First Prizren League (1878−1881). This aim has been practically already achieved. KosMet has been practically annexed by Albania as there is no real border between KosMet and Albania. As for West Macedonia, it is a matter of the near future. The next step is Cameria, as South Epirus (today in Greece) is called by Albanians followed by East Montenegro.

8. The expulsion of Serbs from KosMet after June 1999 is an act of retaliation

Wrong. The process of Shqipetar’s committed ethnic cleansing of KosMet goes on for the last century and refers to all non-Shqipetars (Roma, Turks, Croats, etc). It is a clear case of well-planned ethnic cleansing whose rationale is an extreme xenophobia. As a matter of fact, Albania appears the purest ethnic state in Europe, 98%, with Greeks, Slavs, Jews, Roma, etc. banished in one or other way. After NATO’s occupation of KosMet in 1999, the ethnic “purity” has reached the figure of 97%.

9. KosMet used to be economically supported by the rest of former Yugoslavia

Wrong. Since Serbia’s contribution to the Yugoslav Federal Fund for the undeveloped regions matched exactly the amount donated by the Fund to KosMet, it was, in fact, Serbia which helped KosMet to construct the infrastructure, schools, the Prishtina University, hospitals, factories, mines, etc. Further, since the Shqipetar population consists mainly of children and teenagers, who used to get children allowance, it was another source of enormous income from the rest of Serbia, which had on average less than 1.5 children per family (as compared with 8 with Shqipetars).

10. There is no such an entity as a Greater Albania

Wrong. Although they are not publicized, the maps of that projected unified national state of all Albanians do appear occasionally in the Western press, either explicitly, or as the region with a predominant Albanian population. The point with the latter is that these regions exceed the (semi) official maps of the future united Albanian state, and even include regions without Albanian population at all.

11. Albanians are autochthonous Balkan population descending from the ancient Balkan Illyrian tribes

Wrong. They appear in the mid-11th century in the Balkan history and their origin appears uncertain (most probably they came to the Balkans from the Caucasus Albania via Sicily, according to one Byzantine sources, in 1043: Ataliota M. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantine. Bonn: Weber, 1853). As for the claims of Illyrian heritage (which is more a political wishful thinking than a very historical fact), distinguished English linguist Potter wrote: “Some would associate it with extinct Illyrian, but with so doing they proceed from little known to the unknown”.

12. The rebellion and protests in South-East Serbia at Preshevo valley is due to Belgrade repression on the Shqipetar population there

Wrong. This region was not included into the KosMet (autonomous) region after the WWII, for the simple reason that Shqipetars were a tiny minority at that time there. Now, many villages, which were purely Serb, are inhabited exclusively by Shqipetars. The influx from KosMet, plus the enormous natural birth rate, made this population to be a majority in two of three rebellious counties. Due to this fast change in the ethnic structure, and due to the large percentage of young people not eligible for voting, Shqipetars’ representatives there are not proportional to the overall share of the population in the region. In fact, the Preshevo issue is a paradigm of the Albanian syndrome, as conspicuous at KosMet, and at Macedonia. First comes land occupation, then fight for the “political rights” and finally secession. It is the system which Henry Kissinger called “Domino Game” (referring to the Communist tactics in spreading over the borders). What Slobodan Miloshevic did at Kosmet in 1998 was much the same as J. B. Tito did in 1944−1945, after the Albanian rebellion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA) at Drenica (February 1998), when the military rule had to be imposed in the province.

13. Shqipetars used to be friendly with their neighbors. They were protecting Orthodox monasteries there

Wrong. After the World War II, more than 250.000 non-Shqipetars moved from KosMet due to the “demographic pressure”, not to mention violence. After NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” in 1999 at least 200.000 (according to some claims up to 300.000) non-Shqipetars fled away from massacres (including and Muslim Turks, Muslim Gorani, Muslim Roma population, etc.). At the same time, more than 200.000 Albanians moved to KosMet after the WWII (most probably even more than 300.000), and about 300.000 after the expulsion of non-Shqipetars in 1999. As for the shrines, they are protected in the same manner as the synagogues in Germany by the NSDAP party members. Only from 1999 to 2001 about 100 monasteries and churches have been leveled to the ground at KosMet. The peak of KosMet Albanian organized ethnic cleansing and destruction of Serb Orthodox shrines came in March 2004 (the „March Pogrom“, March 17−19th, 2004). In sum, during the last 20 years, up to 150 Serbian shrines are ruined by local Muslim Albanians in KosMet followed by erecting of many new mosques as a part of the project to transform the province into the Islamic Caliphate of Kosovostan.

14. The “blood feud“ has been extinguished among Albanians

Wrong. It was much reduced during the communist regimes in the area (Albania, Montenegro, KosMet), but has been revived after the “democratic governments” have taken power in Albania. It is widely spread at KosMet, despite the opposite claims by the local politicians. In fact, the persecution and expulsion of non-Shqipetar population in 1999 was experienced by Shqipetars as a collective blood feud as it is, for instance, recognized by Shqipetar girl Rajmonda from KosMet in the British Channel 4 documentary movie „Why Rajmonda Lied“ (June 1999).

15. The KFOR holds control at KosMet and helps the region reestablish the order and law

Wrong. It has no control whatsoever over the local population, in particular the irregulars of the KLA, turned into mock police forces. The whole region, y compris North Albania (and Montenegro for that matter) is the European center for drug traffic and smuggling of arms, tobacco, humans, etc. There is no proper juridical system, no effective police, prisons, etc. What KFOR/EUFOR can do the most is to protect itself, but it is well aware that when Shqipetars conclude the UN/EU presence is a nuisance for them, international forces will be expelled easily. A single step from “protection force” to hostages would be sufficient, and everybody at the spot is aware of that.

16. Americans are siding with Albanians in the current Balkan affairs

Wrong. They are directly involved, at all levels, from financing, organizing, training, arms supplying, diplomatic supports, etc. Training camps at North Albania, KosMet, and Macedonia are lead by American instructors, who are engaged even at the front line, as several years ago the case with Arachinovo near Skopje illustrated, for instance.

17. The rationale for American interference into Albanian issue is a humanitarian concern for human rights in the area

Wrong. All events that lead to the violation of human rights and massacres were induced by Americans and (to a lesser extent) by Germans. Nothing of those would have happened had not the NATO (sic) intervened in the region. The USA is interested in the peace, not in the justice. Since Albanians do not appear convenient interlocutors for political discourse, Americans insist to the rest to submit to the Albanian demands, who have made their political goals their political rights! As a “collateral gain”, USA has an important stronghold in the region (like the military base Bondsteel at KosMet), a secure (sic) passage for the oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea, via Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania, to the Adriatic coast, etc. Another “collateral gain” is, of course, a free traffic of heroin from Afghanistan (occupied and controlled by the USA in 2001) through the area, right to American schools, colleges, etc. (among other destinations). It is a claim that even 90% of the West European drug market is controlled by Albanian narco-dealers.

18. It was Slobodan Miloshevic who was to blame for the NATO’s intervention in 1999

Wrong. It was a responsibility of the government of Serbia to protect the interest of the state of Yugoslavia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – Serbia and Montenegro), in face of a violent rebellion. The manners these state affairs have been conducted, including all eventual misdeeds committed over civilians is a matter of humanitarian concern and should be cleared up at the Hague Tribunal (or other international tribunals for the war crimes). But it does not justify the bombing of Yugoslavia nor deprivation of a state to conduct its internal affairs. We have to keep in our minds the fact that the ideas of “Humanitarian Intervention” and “Right To Protect” (R2P) do not assume the act of a military intervention, at least not without a formal sanction by the UNSC.  KosMet issue is much older than Slobodan Miloshevic and much deeper than disputes over political rights and state borders. The affairs in Macedonia in 2001 (open Albanian rebellion against the central government in Skopje) clearly demonstrate this.

19. Former Yugoslavia disintegrated because of Slobodan Miloshevic

Wrong. His political (sic) manners only provided an excuse to Slovenia and Croatia for leaving Yugoslavia. The real rationale for this understandable decision was to leave the state that was burdened with the time bomb called KosMet, which the federal police hardly dismantled in 1981. And, of course, Slovenia and Croatia decided to leave Yugoslavia, a country in which they could not enjoy any more a privileged economic and political position as they used to have after the WWII. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the dispute between Montenegro and Serbia from 1999 to 2006.

20. It is the duty of the international community to help the Albanian issue settled down

Wrong. The international community does not comprehend the nature of the problem, for good reason, since it is not a political one, but a clash between a Middle Age (tribal) mentality and a (quasi) modern European standard of civilization. The only reasonable way towards a permanent and rational solution would be an agreement between Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, and Albania, on mutual responsibilities and a civilized settling down of this Balkan affair, without interference from the outside, certainly not from the USA. If the USA wants to compete for a role of an arbiter, they should first qualify by helping a permanent settling down of the Palestinian issue in the Middle East.

21. Kosovo is a disputed territory claimed by Serbia and Albania, which both nationalities regard as central to their cultural identity

Wrong. Kosovo is not disputed land between Serbia and Albania as Albania’s officials never officially claimed this province to be included into Albania. It is disputed land just between Serbia’s authorities and Kosovo Albanian separatists. The Albanians never claimed Kosovo to be either central or very much important region to their cultural identity as it was never a reality in the Balkan history. Kosovo (KosMet) is central to Serbian cultural identity but for the Albanian cultural or/and national identity Kosovo (Kosova) was all the time just a periphery territory on which up to the beginning of the 18^th century Albanians have been a very tiny minority.

22. Kosovo is the site where the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg held back the armies of the Ottoman Empire in the 15^th century

Wrong. Skanderbeg (George Kastriot Skanderbeg) was not of the Albanian origin but of the Serb. His family coat of arms, that is today Albania’s coat of arms, was of the Serb feudal family but not of the Albanian one. The Albanians, therefore, simply appropriated the Serbian feudal family and their insignia as their own.

23. Kosovo was occupied by Serbia before WWI

Wrong. This is the biggest falsification of historical truth followed by a dirty political propaganda by the West. Serbia simply liberated her own land during the First Balkan War in 1912−1913 that was occupied by the Ottoman Empire since 1455. KosMet was up to the Ottoman occupation part of Serbia, even known as Serbia proper, but it was never part of Albania. In the mid-14^th century, Kosovo’s city of Prizren was Serbia’s capital, known as Serbian Jerusalem, and Kosovo’s town of Peć was a center of an independent Serbian Patriarchate. However, after the Balkan Wars in 1913, present-day territory of KosMet was divided between Serbia and Montenegro – West KosMet (Metohija) went to Montenegro and East KosMet (Kosovo) went to Serbia. Subsequently, if Kosovo was “occupied” before the WWI it was “occupied” by both Serbia and Montenegro but not only by Serbia.

24. Kosovo’s Albanians were repressed after WWII under the Serb-dominated secret police

Wrong. After the WWII the Yugoslav authorities forbade by the law to all expelled Kosovo’s Serbs (100.000) during the WWII, when KosMet was a part of Mussolini/Hitler’s established Greater Albania, to return back to their homes which were occupied by Albanians. It was repressed the Albanian policy of secessionism and the continuation of a terror against the Serbs but not Albanians as a nation or ethnic group in Kosovo. Moreover, the Yugoslav authorities after the WWII very welcomed Albanian migration from Albania to KosMet when around at least 200.000 Albania’s Albanians were settled in KosMet who were getting quickly a Yugoslav citizenship. Nevertheless, at that time, Kosovo’s Albanians enjoyed much more human and minority rights in comparison with, for instance, Croatia’s Serbs, Albania’s Slavs, and Greeks or Turkey’s Kurds. It was not recorded any single case that any Kosovo’s Albanian after the WWII emigrated to their motherland Albania where they would enjoy a complete set of protected national rights. The military bunkers build up by Albania’s authorities after 1945 on the border with Yugoslavia had the purpose not to protect Albania from the Yugoslav invasion but rather to stop the massive migration of Albania’s citizen to Yugoslavia.    

25. Kosovo’s prospects improved with the dismissal of the hardline Minister of the Interior of Yugoslav federal government in 1966, Aleksandar M. Rankovic, and its distinctiveness was recognized in the new constitution in 1974, which gave Kosovo an autonomous status

Wrong. By dismissal of Aleksandar M. Rankovic in 1966 (“Briuni plenum” of the communist party of Yugoslavia held in Croatia), it was deliberately opened the doors for the decomposition of Yugoslavia including and Kosovo separation from Serbia. The consequences of such anti-Serbian policy by the central government of Yugoslavia (occupied primarily by the Croats and Slovenes) was a new destructive constitution of Yugoslavia in 1974 according to which, KosMet de facto became a separate territory from Serbia. Autonomous status for KosMet was not given in 1974 but rather in 1945 – in 1974 the Albanian-run KosMet administration received tremendously higher level of autonomy that was, in fact, a republican status within Yugoslavia having its own parliament, government, police security forces, Academy of Sciences and Arts, press, University of Prishtina (with the Albanian language study programmes), constitution, and the presidency. Such a level of autonomy did not enjoy, for instance, any of autonomous regions in the USSR. Furthermore, under A. K. Rankovic’s authority, the Yugoslav security forces (OZNA) exterminated at least 70.000 civilians in Serbia immediately after the WWII that was 3,5 times higher grade in comparison to the number of killed Kosovo’s Serbs by Albanians during the WWII.

26. Soon after the death of Josip Broz Tito (May 1980), Kosovo’s Albanian population staged a series   of public protests against continued discrimination

Wrong. After the death of a Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito (1982−1980), who was of the Slovenian-Croatian origin and who was supporting Kosovo’s separation from Serbia, Kosovo’s Albanians were protesting for the purpose to separate this province from Serbia and Yugoslavia. Some of the protesters required Kosovo’s incorporation into Albania. However, at that time there were ethnic Serbs and Montenegrins who were discriminated by Kosovo’s administration (governed by the Albanians) followed by a massive exodus of the Serbs and Montenegrins from the province due to the Albanian-run policy of the terror.

27. Serbian minority in KosMet had decreased from around 30% in 1946 to 10% in 1991, as a result of higher Albanian birth rates and Serbian emigration to Central and North Serbia

Wrong. The last reliable population census in KosMet is of 1961 as censuses of 1971, 1981 and 1991 are arbitrary estimations by Yugoslav authorities as KosMet’s Albanians boycotted them in order to present the fake population structure of the province. Therefore, the Albanian majority in KosMet is estimated as higher as possible while the Serb minority is presented as lesser as possible. Albanian extremely high birth rate in KosMet after the WWII up to 1999 was primarily a product of political design to claim the province on the bases of ethnic rights. Today, when KosMet de facto is separated from Serbia, the birth rate of ethnic Albanians is the same as of the Serbs for the very reason that political necessity for the extremely high birth rate of the Albanians disappeared. After the WWII, the Serbs were leaving KosMet not because of the economic reasons but rather as they were discriminated, terrorized and/or brutally expelled from their homes by the local Albanians including and by the neighbors who were immediately appropriating their lands. It is true that many Serbs sold their homes and land to the Albanians but it was done under the pressure and even direct threatening of the physical extermination.

28. The KosMet’s autonomy was cancelled by S. Milošević in 1989 and, therefore, Albanians lost their minority rights        

Wrong. The autonomy was not canceled as it was just reduced from the political independence to the national-cultural rights in order to prevent further separation of the province from Serbia and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs. The level of autonomy which KosMet’s Albanians, as a national minority, enjoyed before 1989 in Serbia is not recorded in world history of the protection of the rights of national/ethnic minorities. However, for the matter of comparison, at the same period of time and even today, the Kurds of Turkey, the Corsicans of France or the Sardinians of Italy were/are not even recognized as ethnic minorities in their countries. The Albanians of Macedonia or Montenegro within ex-Yugoslavia did not enjoy any kind of national/ethnic territorial/political autonomy as it was also the case with the Serbs in Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina who could only dream to get the autonomy status enjoyed by KosMet’s Albanians in Serbia. To be honest, at the same time, there was no any migration of KosMet’s Albanians to Albania where they would enjoy a full scale of national rights, but it was rather the opposite way that Albania’s Albanians were coming (illegally) to KosMet where they were “oppressed” on national/ethnic basis.

29. The Kosovo War started in 1998 by ethnic Albanian revolt for the reason that Serbia oppressed KosMet’s Albanian rights as did not recognize elections in 1998

Wrong. The war started at the very beginning of 1998 as a consequence of Albanian-led terrorism actions against Serbia’s state authorities and non-Albanian civilians followed by counter-terrorism operations by Serbia’s security forces being in no connections with the elections which came later. Legitimate Serbia’s central authorities did not recognize the 1998 KosMet’s parliamentary and presidential elections as they were organized by Albanian-led underground provincial quasi-state authorities who boycotted previously organized legal elections by Serbia’s government. The illegally elected Albanian parliament in KosMet was dissolved by Serbia’s police in 1998 when “elected” quasi-President of Kosovo Ibrahim Rugova was sworn in the parliament of neighboring Albania. However, the core of the problem starts, in fact, when the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) broke up but no agreement was achieved in changing of the borders. One-sided separation of some federal unites – republics was allowed to occur and that was the principle that was respected from the beginning till the end of the Yugoslav crisis. Since Kosovo enjoyed in SFRY the status of territorial-national autonomy within Serbia (likewise Vojvodina) the demands for independence have not be supported by the international community. However, encouraged with Slovenian, Croatian, Macedonian and Bosnian independence (internationally recognized) the greatest hard-liners within the Albanian national movement in KosoMet – followers of Redzep Cosja, a member of the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Art, championed Kosovo’s independence with a final task of joining Kosovo to Albania (the wish publicly confirmed in 1997 by Kosovo’s Albanian leader – Dr. Ibrahim Rugova). Actually, according to the idea and the things this line pleads for in politics, the mother state of Albania would gather together all “Albanian lands” or the territories populated by the Albanian inhabitants who are there in majority.

30. During the 1998−1999 Kosovo War, Serb army and police units did not fight only the rebellious Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), but also carried out programmes of ethnic cleansing and, therefore, the US-led NATO was obliged first to act and then to continue military actions against Serbia and Montenegro for the sake to prevent human (Albanian) catastrophe

Wrong. No single evidence that Serbian authorities had any plan or developed programme of ethnic cleansing of the ethnic Albanians in KosMet. That such plan and/or programme existed (the so-called “Horseshoe”) it was a dirty propaganda and fake news launched by German intelligence service later proven to be a pure lie (for instance by in 1999 a German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder). The NATO did not act in order to protect Albanian civilians from Serbian police and Yugoslav army but it intervened in order to save already heavily beaten terrorist KLA whose members fled to neighboring Albania and Macedonia and to pave a ground for its own occupation of KosMet after the war. The NATO’s airstrike campaign (March 24^th−June 10^th, 1999) was not a humanitarian intervention as it was rather a brutal military aggression (even using the rockets with forbidden depleted uranium) on a sovereign country by the breaking international law as it was done without any permission by the UN. If we can speak about humanitarian intervention in KosMet than it was rather the intervention by Serbia’s security forces and Yugoslav army in 1998 in order to prevent further ethnic cleansing of the Serbs by Albanian separatist KLA. Nevertheless, the Kosovo War and NATO’s aggression on Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) were permanently covered by the Western corporate mass media lies based on the false flags (for instance, the so-called “Rachak Massacre” in January 1999) and fake news. The fundamental lie was that KosMet’s Albanians are taking refugee (up to 700.000 according to CIA’s sources) in order to avoid massacres by Serbia’s security forces and Yugoslav army as, in fact, the refugee crises was inspired by two fundamental reasons: 1) the NATO’s airstrikes and massive bombardment, and 2) to present (fake) cases of Serbian alleged “ethnic cleansing” in order to win political propaganda in the Western mass media which supported Albanian case at the full extent. After the war, it became quite clear that the Western propaganda claims about 100.000 killed Albanians during the war was a lie as only the bodies of 3.000 victims are found of all nationalities and ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the Western propaganda did not report neither any single case of Serbian victims and refugees during the war or about criminal activities and war crimes committed by Albanian terrorist KLA that was well equipped, supported and financed by the NATO and especially the US (similar case was in Afghanistan in the 1980s with the Taliban rebels).

31. After the war, KosMet was occupied by the international community, sanctioned by the UN (KFOR) for the fundamental purpose to prevent violence between the Albanian majority and the Serb minority      

Wrong. KosMet was, in fact, occupied after the Kosovo War not by “international community” but exactly by five NATO’s member-states (France, USA, Germany, UK, and Italy) which each occupied different sectors of the province. Therefore, the US plan before the war was fully accomplished: the NATO occupied the province that was before evacuated by Serbian police and Yugoslav army leaving non-Albanian population at the mercy of the KLA which took the full scale of terror, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide on KosMet’s Serbs and to a certain degree on other non-Albanians. The mission of KFOR and later EULEX is not to bring stability, democracy, and prosperity to the province but rather to transform KosMet into the ethnically cleaned region of a Greater Albania. Finally, Kosovo is today one of the most ethnically homogeneous territories in Europe, a center of drug smuggling and human trafficking to Europe from the East and governed by the corrupted Albanian client politicians, former members of the KLA.

32. The best and most democratic solution of the Kosovo knot is to recognize Kosovo’s self-proclaimed independence from Serbia

Wrong. This is the worst solution of all possible combinations which already directly provoked a chain reaction by numerous separatist movements around the world. The first of them were of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008 followed by the Crimean separatists backed by Russia’s federal government who well exploited the case of “Kosovo precedent” for the re-inclusion of the Crimean Peninsula into Russia in 2014. The Catalan separatists proclaimed a formal independence from Spain in 2018 exploiting the Kosovo case too. As a matter of fact, the creation of independent Kosovo was a long-time option among the Yugoslav Albanians which was not rejected by the Western part of international community as thoroughly unacceptable. However, in this case, it should be respected the principle that the borders could be changed only by peaceful means and with the agreement of the parties concerned – the principle already adopted by the EU in the case of the bloody destruction of ex-Yugoslavia in 1991−1995. However, taking into consideration the public opinion as well as the opinion of the most important political factors in Serbia, who decisively were rejecting such possibility, the realization of this option was possible only by a war (the Kosovo War in 1998−1999) between Serbia’s central authorities and Kosovo’s Albanian extremists (KLA). Considering this reality, the moderate Albanian separatists from Kosovo advocated the strategy “step by step” (from the 1990s) by supporting the modality of achieving the status of republic or confederal unit under international protection, what would in the future open the possibility for a less painful secession. However, KosMet with the status of a highest autonomy (the “Hong Kong” or “Scandinavian” models) within Serbia can be also dangerous as there would be created a precedent that would encourage minority communities in other states which make a compact majority in some territory to follow the same way (Kurds in Turkey) – this would turn the ethnic issue into the global issue of security. The danger of creation of independent Kosovo does not only lie in the fact that the official Belgrade is opposing this idea (likewise, for instance, Cypriot government), but also in the danger that the newly-created state would strive to get united with the neighboring areas populated by the Albanians (South Serbia, West Macedonia, East Montenegro). Thus would, by itself, endanger the security and stability in the region.

Solution

Finally, the optimal solution for the Kosovo status is a “normal” autonomy within Serbia according to the international standards of protection of the rights of ethnic minorities but without any political-administrative prerogatives as it was the case in the SFRY from 1974 to 1989.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former University Professor, Director of Democracy Rooting Centre, Founder & Editor of POLICRATICUS-Electronic Magazine On Global Politics Since 2014 (www.global-politics.eu). Contact: [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

The original idea and first draft version of the text came from Prof. Petar V. Grujić (Zemun, Serbia).

The text is written according to the orthography of the American (US) English spelling.

In this exclusive interview Syrian Nationalist/Outspoken Activist/Artist Mr. Nidal Rahawi a Qamishli native and resident, provided us with crucial direct insight into the most recent tragic events that have taken place in his hometown in north eastern Syria. An Arabic version of this interview will be available on The Rabbit Hole.

Mr. Rahawi discussed how life has drastically changed under the illegal rule of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and their military wing the People’s Protection Units (YPG) which is the Syrian arm of the Turkish PKK who are considered a terrorist organization by the US, Turkey and other countries. The YPG was later rebranded into the Syrian Democratic Forces under the guidance and suggestion of US forces that wanted to distance their allies from the PKK association.

Mr. Rahawi spoke about the concerted effort by separatist Kurds and their western backers to establish Kurdish nationalist sovereignty in north eastern Syria.  In a must-read article titled Romancing Rojava: Rhetoric vs. Reality by Max J. Joseph and Mardean Isaac refer to this as the “Rojava Project”.

As I have noted in previous articles, Kurds as an ethnicity are not a homogenous or collective group and therefore should not be painted with a broad stroke paint brush. The focus of this and other articles has primarily been on the actions of Kurdish militias and their political councils not the people themselves, who are located around the world, nor the ones that live in the four countries that some Kurds inaccurately claim historically belongs to them (Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran). Some Kurds do not agree with the aspirations of their political or military leaders. It’s important to keep in mind that tribal identities and political interests often supersede a unifying national allegiance.

In Part I of this II part article, Mr. Rahawi explains what the past, present, and future may look like for Qamishli. Part II will discuss some of these items in more detail along with videos from the demonstration that took place on August 28th against the Kurdish militias latest wave of school closings.

***

Sarah Abed: It’s my understanding, that you are responsible for organizing a demonstration in Al Qamishli in northeastern Syria that took place on August 28th 2018. What prompted the demonstration? What was the outcome?

Nidal Rahawi: In fact, I was not behind the uprising, but the frustration that the people of Hasakah governorate in general and Christians in particular had felt, accumulated over the past six years because of the actions of the so-called (Kurdish) self-administration against citizens at all levels, and their takeover of the state institutions including schools, and shutting them down, was the main motive behind this demonstration, which was called upon by all the people of the city, especially the Christians.

This demonstration was after the Kurdish self-administration conducted an armed attack –  through members of the Syriac Union party that works under the cloak of the separatist plan – on the (Private) Christian Church Schools and shut them down. Afterwards, they deployed their gunmen in the yards of schools and churches from the inside on 28/8/2018. And then we the people of Qamishli city with representatives from the Arab Tay tribe arranged a sit-in in front of our churches and schools to get them back from these gangs, and we were led by some clerics and representatives of a number of religious communities such as the Syriacs and Evangelists.

But the initiative of these gangs to use live bullets in our face just because they saw us, despite the presence of clerics at the forefront of our march contributed to turning our sit-in into a real uprising, and we were able to get back our schools and churches and our inherited right which we have earned through generations.

(I’d like to make a quick note here that multiple local sources had notified me about Mr. Rahawi’s brave involvement in organizing the demonstration that took place on August 28th. As you will read later in the interview he references this demonstration again and his involvement) – Sarah Abed

Sarah Abed: What changes has the Kurdish PYD self-administration implemented in the area? Do they have the authority to make these changes and demands? Can you tell us more about the school closures, and what they are trying to achieve? How long has Kurdish self-administration prevented education in Arabic? Are state schools still open?

Nidal Rahawi: The changes implemented by the so-called “self-administration” in all the lands that they have seized, while taking advantage of the state’s preoccupation with other fronts, in addition to the endless support that they receive from the US administration, these changes have affected everything: such as changing the names of towns, villages and public utilities, rejecting all the licenses that belonged to citizens, and their properties and their activities, imposing taxes as they like, and even issuing a Military Service document of their own alongside the official requirements and daily life need … etc. in addition to the issuance of personal status laws that do not match the religious beliefs of the Syrian people.

Of course, all of this was imposed by the administration with the power of arms because it does not have a legitimate authority and the people did not and will not accept them – this is what was proven by the reality on the ground during the last (few) years of the war and until now, and most of their leaders are either Turks or Iraqis and this means that all the decisions they make against the citizens in our region are being issued by non-Syrians. The biggest evidence of this is the pictures of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan (Turkish), that they are putting in all the institutions they have seized, in addition to the PKK flag they carry everywhere. And even their curriculum, which they want to impose on schools, we note that the main purpose is to Kurdify the region and close any school that does not recognize this curriculum (which is unrecognized by anyone) and therefore we see that they closed all the schools of the state, perhaps there are no more than four or five schools that are still opening their doors within the security blocks of the state authority in the region. This is what the administration has done for three years now. This also applies to the private schools.

Sarah Abed:  Can you tell us about the ambush attack that took place on ِSeptember 8th, 2018 by the Asayish killing 14 Syrian Arab Army soldiers? Who are the Asayish? What do you think about the SDF’s apology? Do you think the Syrian government will react?

Nidal Rahawi: On the morning of 8 September, at around 9 am, three cars carrying members of the Syrian Arab Army moved towards a guard post at Zawra, which is located at the entrance to the city (Al Qamishli), in order to replace the members of rotation on this barrier controlled by the State, which was part of a daily routine that has been going on for a long time. But the Asayish forces had ambushed them in one of the streets of the city where the ambush had been set for them since 4:00 am, and they deployed the snipers on the roofs that are overlooking the road that the Army members will pass, and deployed gunmen in the corners of the streets, so they surprised the army members, stopped them and then started to shot at them directly while most of them were still inside their cars. It is not true what Asayish later reported, saying that the patrol was arresting civilians within the control area of ​​the Asayish belonging to the so-called self-management, this lie does not mislead anyone, especially us, the people of the region, because we know that the state can not enter these areas, and this was clear in the video clips that was photographed by the citizens. The evidence is that the operation took place on a public street that connects the city with the outside, also the pictures and video clips show that they did not have any medium weapons possessed by the murdered members.

Since the decline of the state control over a lot of Syrian territories as a result of the war, the Syrian branch of the PKK (Turkish Workers’ Party) began to expand its influence on the Syrian Jazeera (north eastern region) under the pretext of protecting the region from the Takfiri organizations. (They received a lot of support from the Syrian state before they turned on it to the favor of the American plan that suited their aspirations), so then their true intentions towards secession from Syria has appeared, and they began to create new names for the region, such as Rojava and the province of West Kurdistan, for the purpose of Kurdification. They also formed many militias, including the Asayish militia, which they recently changed its name to (Internal security). By the way, even the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, which were established with purely American support, are also under the control of the PYD, even if they try to cover it with some Arab members, and proof of that, as I said earlier, is the pictures of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the (Turkish) PKK. This is why, we the people in the region do not buy these apologies from some of their factions every time another faction of them conducts an attack, and that is exactly what was happening when the Asayish were attacking us in Al Wusta neighborhood (which has a Christian majority) we had lost many martyrs as a result of their repeated assaults, while at the same time the rest of their factions were repeating the play of apology.

Of course, they are taking advantage of the circumstances and the preoccupation of the state, and the American support to continue these attacks on citizens and their personal properties, and on the state also, realizing that the state can not respond to them at this time because of priorities on other fronts and battles in the rest of the Syrian geography. The words of President Bashar were clear (about two months ago) when he said regarding the Syrian democratic forces “Qasad- SDF”: if they do not accept the dialogue, we will restore the entire Syrian territory with the US presence or without it.

Sarah Abed:  On September 8th, 2018 the Syriac Patriarch was interviewed on Al Mayadeen, what do you think of his statements?

Nidal Rahawi: Many disagreed about what was said in the speech of the Patriarch in that interview on the subject of the private schools, where despite that he was late to make any statement or position since the attack on schools in 28/8, they saw that his speech was not as important as the event and did not touch on the real injustice that occurred to Christians in general and the Syriac community in particular. But let me go to his interview that was published on 9/14 on the Facebook pages in a meeting with Christian youth in Damascus (as I believe). His speech was clear and unequivocal – stating he categorically rejected the curriculum that the Kurdish so-called Education Authority in the self-administration had imposed on them. He described their movement against the Christian schools as (attack and closure of churches and schools). He declared that the Christians and their churches were and will remain with the Syrian state as they have been since the beginning of the establishment of Syria (he said).

Sarah Abed: Can you describe to us what life was like in Al Qamishli before the war in 2011? How has life changed? Do you think at some point things will return to how they were prior to 2011?

Nidal Rahawi: I remember as a child that there was a description for Qamishli city as (Syrian Paris), and the history of this city is very modern dating back to the 1920s, where the first of its builders and residents were Syriac and Armenians (1923 – almost), thus they were able to paint the city with their culture, folklore, customs and lifestyle, the most important characteristic of which was joy, tolerance and the acceptance of other expatriates later, including Kurds.

Until 2011, the city was full of life in the same style as the big cities, despite its smallness. Everyone shared a very close social life without paying attention to differences of religion, ethnicity or sects. The relations between all of its inhabitants were brotherhood and common living relations, without any party trying to control the other or impose its wishes or dictates on it, especially Syriac, who we all know to be the indigenous people of this region.

Unfortunately, I do not think that things will return to what it was before 2011, even after the state regain control of the region, and this is because of the policy adopted by these gangs that claim democracy, the same policy practiced by the Zionist gangs in Palestine until they were able to pass a UN resolution that recognize them, this policy based on the forcible displacement of indigenous peoples and changing the demographic reality to make it easier for them to Kurdify the region after emptying it from its original inhabitants (Syriac).

The character of the city has now changed completely with a direct American help (and the Americans have several military bases in and around our city), they are not only seeing what these gangs are doing with the citizens and the city, but they directly manage, nurture and support them in all possible ways, including weapons of course.

With all this I do not expect the return of life to the city as it was before 2011.

Sarah Abed: We hear about many Christians fleeing your region, have you thought about leaving? What is your message to those that have fled? Do you think they will return at a later date? Have any returned already in your area? Do most people in your area support President Assad?

Nidal Rahawi: Yes, unfortunately most of the Christians emigrated (forcibly) and this was not because of ISIS, but because of the abuses committed by the so-called self-management against them by various means, including economically besieging them. For me, I did not think about leaving my city and my country, but I still defend our rights in our land and our presence with those who remain here. This is what I see as a duty for every Syrian citizen.

Many immigrants are contacting me, expressing their intention of return and their regret because they have left their homeland, complaining of the humiliation they have suffered in their expatriation, but the situation now and their own circumstances there do not allow them to return. Many of them now come home and return to their new countries, but unfortunately who returned and stayed here are very few, we can count them on the fingers of one hand.

In any case, this war contributed in one way or another to the emergence of the national sense and the spirit of citizenship, the spontaneous and sincere belonging of the homeland by most Syrians, especially the people here in the region and even those of them who left. Not only that, but this war has also established in the hearts of the majority a great affection and support for President Bashar al-Assad, which was already planted in their conscience before the war, he proved to his people that he was a strong and intelligent leader in choosing his alliances, and was able to stand up with our army in the face of this war, in which America and some of its agents conspired with it against us.

Sarah Abed: How has the war impacted you on a personal level? Has your life been threatened for speaking out and leading a demonstration? What precautions do you have to take to insure your safety? I heard that you had a restaurant and that it was a target of a terrorist act. Can you tell me what happened?

Nidal Rahawi: In fact, the issue of threatening my life by assault, kidnapping attempts, and murder attempts are nothing new or because of my involvement in the recent demonstration.  I’ve been living with these repeated attacks for three years now, since I was an investor of Domino restaurant that is located in Al Wusta neighborhood, and now I’m forced to refrain from doing any business after all of these treacherous attempts against me.

We in Al Wusta neighborhood, did not accept the to surrender our neighborhood or ourselves to the so-called (Kurdish) self-management, but we stayed defending the state authority and our Syrian flag, this is what bothered these separatists, with the Syriac Union Party, which had intended to give us to these gangs, so they started harassing us and annoying us through their militants (Asayish and members of the Syriac Union Party, whose Christian members do not exceed 15). We have often had to arm ourselves to confront them with the help of Sootoro, which was responsible for protecting Christians in Al Wusta neighborhood.

A lot of skirmishes happened between us and them without being able to get our steadfastness, and our insistence that we are Syrians and we will stay with the Syrian state, we lost some martyrs because of the attacks they were carrying out against us.

After they were sure that we will not bow to them, they resorted to other methods like explosive devices which they planted several times between our cafés, our restaurants and our gatherings, one of them was in New Year’s Eve (2015/2016), where Christians gathered to celebrate, in that night alone we lost nearly 25 martyrs, and then their terrorist attacks continued against us civilians and against our businesses, and of course including myself, through several attempts to kill me, specifically targeting my restaurant, this is because I was one of the most prominent resistors to them, and have been exposing their kurdification plans.  One time a head of an Asayish patrol, that was trying to attack us, said to us when he saw the large crowd of Christian civilians who had resisted them: “This is Rojava and you will leave, or we will burn Al Wusta with everyone in it.” This was the last time they harassed us. After that the terrorist attacks, which lasted for more than six months, began with several bombings – claiming that those who carried out these terrorist operations were ISIS. Of course, this lie did not mislead anyone in the city.

Sarah Abed: Do you think there is a political solution for the current situation in Al Hasakah governorate or will there be a military response from the SAA and the Syrian government?

Nidal Rahawi:  I believe that the possibility of a political solution for the situation in the province of Hasaka with these gangs has become very difficult because of their recent practices against the citizens and the state, especially in this last period after the army went to Idlib. Even if the state accepts any kind of political solution, I will still have to ask: How can I, as a citizen like the rest of the citizens and with all that we have suffered of terrorism by these gangs, accept a political solution?

Sarah Abed: In your opinion, what is the solution that Christians and Muslims wish?

Nidal Rahawi: In my opinion, the only solution that citizens can accept (that I’m aware of) is the return of the state and the restoration of its full authority over the facilities, as was the situation before 2011, without giving anything to these separatists except granting permits to the rest of the Kurds to establish their own schools, like other ethnic groups and sects.

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Make Art Not War

Mr. Rahawi risks his life every time he speaks out against the criminal and inhumane actions of Kurdish militias’ in his hometown. He has made it a point to explain how their illegal actions have negatively impacted the lives of the majority of Syrians in the region in many different ways. They have essentially made life in one of the most oil and agriculturally rich areas in the country almost unbearable. Unless a person is living under these dire circumstances it’s hard to imagine the amount of stress and trauma residents go through on a daily basis.  

Mr. Rahawi had mentioned during our phone call that he was an artist, but couldn’t go out much to buy supplies due to various reasons including availability and the risk involved in leaving his house.

Here are a few of his original paintings:

Painting created by and shared on Mr. Rahawi’s Facebook page.

I underestimated his artistic talent until I looked at his paintings on his Facebook page. It’s upsetting to think that such a talented artist can not pursue his passion especially during this depressive and stressful time of war.

Painting created by and shared on Mr. Rahawi’s Facebook page.

Painting created by and shared on Mr. Rahawi’s Facebook page.

A tragedy that not too many people are aware of is that the people being targeted the most whether it be by Kurdish militia’s or other terrorist factions in this particular area, are the indigenous people, the original inhabitants: the Assyrians and Arameans. These are the native people whose roots dig deep into the fertile Mesopotamia soil and will not be easily uprooted. Not only have they had to endure coordinated attempts to kick them out of their homes, steal their land, ransack their businesses but they have had to deal with cultural appropriation and historical revisionism which is at the center of the Kurdish imposed curriculum.  =

Many of the Syrians I have spoken to in the north eastern region over the past few years, have expressed the same frustration that Mr. Rahawi touched on. At this point, the remaining residents that have weathered the storm fully acknowledge that they need to fight for their right to exist and can only do so if they are united, just as we saw during the demonstration on August 28th, 2018.

In part II of this article, we will expand on the issues brought on by the unrecognized yet strictly imposed Kurdish self-administration curriculum on Kurdish and non-Kurdish children alike in the north eastern region of Syria.

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Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and political commentator. Focused on exposing the lies and propaganda in mainstream media news, as it relates to domestic and foreign policy with an emphasis on the Middle East. Contributes to various radio shows, news publications, and forums. For media inquiries please email [email protected]. Her articles can also be seen at The Rabbit Hole. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research

There is a great deal of discussion about saving civilian lives in Syria, as there should be. Missing from the discussion, however, is the most important point. If Western policymakers were genuinely concerned about saving civilians, they would not have waged this Regime Change war in the first place.

All of the death and destruction is a direct result of the West’s criminal regime change operations. Whereas the atrocity stories about President Assad are fake [1], the West’s crimes are in plain view every day. If Western media was honest, and Western politicians were honest, these truths would be foundational to any discussions about saving civilians in Syria.

Notwithstanding the above, diplomacy is still preferable to war, when possible, and this has resulted in a ceasefire in the Idlib region.  The ceasefire is a relief to surrounding towns which have regularly endured terrorist mortar attacks. The ceasefire agreement looks like this:

Notwithstanding the fact that Turkey has been a major supporter of terrorists throughout the war, if the ceasefire holds, then Turkey’s efforts in this case will be commendable.

Separately, the Netherlands, announced that it will end its support for al Qaeda-affiliated White Helmets.  The rationale for their decision should serve as a wake-up call to Western politicians:

• According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the supervision of the behavior of the rescue workers is ‘inadequate’. The organization that supervises, Mayday, based in the Netherlands, is closely intertwined with the White Helmets itself. In practice, donors do not understand the difference between the two organizations.
• Mayday wants to spend a maximum of 0.9% of its budget on supervision of the work of the White Helmets. ‘That is why there is a lack of independent supervision of the activities and results of the project.’
• The money for the White Helmets is transferred to the Syrian border in cash or enters the country via the hawala system. It is ‘problematic’ that Mayday does not know how much money is paid via which route. That is why there is a danger that money has fallen into the hands of armed groups. The cash flow can also indirectly be used for illegal trade. Systematic control of the money flow is missing.
• The White Helmets are active in areas where armed groups are in power that are considered ‘unacceptable’ for the Netherlands. Contact between the White Helmets and local administrators who work together with extremist organizations is inevitable. [2]

Step by step, Syria and its allies are winning this war against Western-supported terrorism. However, the death and destruction will not end until the West and its proxies are entirely removed from Syria. 

Whereas Syria and its allies seek to minimize the devastation to Syria and its peoples, the West’s Regime Change operations necessarily seek (and are achieving) the opposite. 

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

1. Prof. Tim Anderson, “War Propaganda and the Dirty War on Syria.” Global Research. 2 December, 2015. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-propaganda-and-the-dirty-war-on-syria/5492175) Accessed 20 September, 2018.

2. Moon of Alabama. “The Dike Breaks – Netherland Ends Support For “White Helmets” Terrorist Propaganda.” 15 September, 2018.( http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/09/netherland-ends-support-for-white-helmets-terrorist-propaganda-scam.html) Accessed 20 September, 2018. 

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

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Author: Mark Taliano

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A report in the state-run Zimbabwe Herald newspaper on September 20 says that the cholera outbreak which has killed over 30 people and sickened more than 7,00 has been contained in the capital of Harare.

This is one of the major issues facing the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) administration in the aftermath of national harmonized elections which return the ruling party to power. 

The elections held on July 30 were observed by various international and regional teams in line with the desires of President Emmerson Mnangagwa as it relates to efforts to create an atmosphere for the lifting of sanctions by the United States, Britain and the European Union (EU). However, irrespective of this openness towards the western capitalist states, the sanctions are remaining in force from London to Washington and on a more limited level in Brussels.

A declaration of a state of health emergency had been declared on September 11 resulting from the cholera epidemic as the hospitals, clinics and makeshift medical tents struggled to cope with the situation.  Additional cholera cases have been noted in Masvingo, Manicaland, Midlands and Mashonaland Central provinces.  Public health officials have traced the cases in other provinces back to Harare as the epicenter. 

Zimbabwe makeshift medical treatment tents set-up to address the cholera epidemic (Source: author)

Many people vividly remember the outbreak ten years ago in 2008-2009 when 4,200 people died and some 98,000 were infected. Although this outbreak is far less severe so far, the government wants to ensure that the medical situation stabilizes. 

On September 19 an inter-ministerial committee was established to work towards the eradication of the spreading sickness. The committee is being chaired by the Minister for National Housing, Public Works and Local Government, July Moyo.

There are other high-level officials involved in the committee including ministers Obadiah Moyo (Health and Child Care), Mthuli Ncube (Finance and Economic Development), Joram Gumbo (Energy and Power Development), Prisca Mupfumira (Environment, Tourism and Hospitality Industry), Perrance Shiri (Lands, Agriculture, Land, Water, Climate and Rural Resettlement) and Monica Mutsvangwa (Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services). After a weekly meeting of the entire cabinet, a briefing will be given to the press to update the public about efforts to arrest the crisis. 

There has also been an alert placed on the Beitbridge District to guard against any potential for the disease to impact this important border-crossing area. People from throughout the Southern African Development Community (SADC) enter at Beitbridge from the neighboring Republic of South Africa and leave Zimbabwe from this location heading to other states throughout the region.

Containment methods being utilized by the government were spelled out in a Zimbabwe Herald article on September 20, saying:

“Government has so far mobilized $29 million out of $64.1 million required to fight cholera, amid indications that the outbreak has been contained with the number of patients visiting health institutions declining significantly from 500 to 100 per day. Addressing a joint Press conference of Health and Child Care Officials and members from the private sector, Finance and Economic Development Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube said of the $29 million, Government had contributed $15.1 million while development partners and the private sector had contributed $13.3 million. He said resources mobilized to date were enough to cover the immediate requirement of $25.4 million to contain the outbreak.” 

Economic Development Key to Improving Social Conditions

Cholera is a highly-infectious bacterial disease spread through water which is contaminated by human waste. The infrastructural problems in Zimbabwe are a direct result of the nearly two decades of economic distress engendered by the western sanctions regime.

Broken ageing water pipes and ineffective waste disposal has created an unsanitary situation in the capital and surrounding suburbs. Tap water can be easily contaminated when pipes are malfunctioning leaving concentrated waste in residential areas.

To fix the problem it will take tens of millions of dollars which the government does not have and is unable to borrow due to the sanctions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are not willing to loan funds to Zimbabwe because both institutions are based in the Washington, D.C.

The opposition parties particularly the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance (MDC-A) has blamed the ZANU-PF national government for the problem. In turn the ZANU-PF party points the finger at the local municipal administrations which in the capital are dominated by the western-backed opposition forces. Such a political impasse does not bode well for the working and jobless population which is left with sewage and piles of garbage outside or near their residences.

In response the government has banned independent vendors who sell their goods on the streets in the capital to relieve congestion in the city. People are being encouraged to wash their hands on a regular basis. However, this too is problematic when there is so much contamination in the water supply.

The latest cholera epidemic is compounding the overall health crisis in the wake of the spread of typhoid fever in Gweru and other areas. Nearly 2,000 people have been treated for Typhoid just in this one area of Zimbabwe.

Typhoid as well is spread through contaminated water and food. The disease can be transmitted from one person to the next through the exchange of body fluid.

President Mnangagwa expressed his concerns over the current situation in a recent speech saying the government must devise a strategy to eliminate what he described as “medieval diseases” impacting the country. In order for these problems to be effectively addressed there must be a massive infrastructural improvement plan implemented to fix the water system and maintain regular garbage collection along with building adequate housing for people in urban environments.

Post-Elections Politics and Continuing Sanctions

As to be expected, the MDC-A opposition party which loss both the parliamentary and presidential elections has refused to accept the results of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) which were verified by the international observer teams monitoring the voting and tabulation process from late July through early August. Nelson Chamisa, the MDC-A leader and failed presidential candidate, appealed to the Zimbabwe Constitutional Court unsuccessfully. Mnangagwa was subsequently inaugurated and has appointed a new cabinet to what is being called the “Second Republic.”

In early September, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) met once again in Beijing where African Union (AU) member states were present. The Chinese government committed to supplying $60 billion in economic projects for the continent.

An article published by the government-sponsored Sunday Mail on September 9 by Business writer Tawanda Musarurwa said that Zimbabwe would be a leading beneficiary of the FOCAC resolutions. The report indicated that:

“With Chinese President Xi Jinping tabling a $60 billion facility for African countries, Zimbabwe has already lined up solid projects to access the funding and expedite their implementation. President Xi said the financing will be provided in the form of Government assistance as well as investment and financing by financial institutions and companies. Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Dr. Sibusiso Moyo said at least three projects have been lined up. These include the NetOne expansion project, Hwange 7 and 8 expansion, and upgrade of the Robert Mugabe International Airport.”

These pledges of support will be vital in Zimbabwe’s attempt at economic revitalization in the coming months. President Mnangagwa left the country on September 19 to participate in the 73^rd United Nations General Assembly sessions in New York. The head-of-state will utilize this opportunity as well to seek foreign investment for the Southern African state. 

With the sanctions against the country renewed by the U.S. Congress just days prior to the July 30 elections is a clear sign that Zimbabwe is being targeted for regime change. The imperialists want to overthrow the ZANU-PF party and institute an unbridled neo-colonial dispensation so that the legacy of the national liberation movement and its anti-imperialist foreign policy can be reversed. This has not happened and the ZANU-PF party is committed to maintaining its national sovereignty.

The Zimbabwe position was summed up in a commentary published on September 11 in the Herald. It emphasizes that the current hostile posture of Washington towards Harare is aimed at destabilization and state capture.

Assistant Editor Isodore Guvamombe stressed: “The sanctions are indeed about the U.S. proclivity for regime change in order to achieve its goal to change the power matrix in Zimbabwe from ZANU- PF to the opposition MDC Alliance that will be subservient to it and give U.S. access to our natural resources. ZANU-PF is a great afro-centric revolutionary party that has made it impossible for the U.S. to plunder Zimbabwe’s natural resources at the expense of the autochthons of this country. For that reason the U.S. has tried everything in its power to get rid of the ZANU-PF Government.” (Sept. 11)

Under such circumstances international solidarity by progressive forces around the world is needed. In New York City on September 22, the December 12^th Movement and the Friends of Zimbabwe scheduled a rally and demonstration beginning in Harlem and ending at the United Nations buildings. The aim is to welcome President Mnangagwa to the city and to push for the immediate lifting of sanctions.

These actions represent the fact that many Africans and people of African descent in the U.S. and across the world support Zimbabwe. The U.S. policy towards the ZANU-PF government is representative of the imperialist mode of operation and the desire to maintain hegemony by Washington and Wall Street over the majority of people throughout the world.

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

Featured image: Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa and First Lady Auxilia at his inauguration after winning the July 30, 2018 national election.

Ever since the negotiations to form a coalition government in Germany earlier this year, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP—Socialist Equality Party) has warned that the grand coalition government comprised of the Christian Democratic Union, Christian Social Union and Social Democratic Party is the product of a conspiracy to implement far-right policies in line with the programme of the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD).

This right-wing conspiracy was revealed once again on Tuesday night.

In recent weeks, Hans-Georg Maaßen, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the German secret service, has been increasingly exposed as a supporter and adviser to the AfD. It emerged that he consulted with the AfD before issuing the BfV’s annual security report. Then, following the neo-fascist riot last month in Chemnitz, in which ultra-right demonstrators were videotaped hunting down and attacking people they presumed to be immigrants, Maaßen publicly defended the rioters and cast doubt on the authenticity of the damning videos.

This provoked mass protests demanding that Maaßen be forced to resign. Tens of thousands gathered in several cities to oppose the right-wing xenophobic agitation and the support given it by Maaßen and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU). In Chemnitz, 70,000 people took part in a “rock against the right wing” concert. Under these conditions, the Social Democrats (SPD) declared that Maaßen was no longer acceptable as BfV president and demanded he be fired.

However, Seehofer publicly backed Maaßen, declaring that his ministry was responsible for overseeing the secret service.

The coalition committee met Tuesday evening under the auspices of the three party leaders and agreed that Maaßen would be replaced as BfV president. However, far from being dismissed, he would be given a position as state secretary in Seehofer’s Interior Ministry.

Maaßen was not fired, he was given a promotion. He now holds a high position in the ministry that has powers of oversight and direction of the BfV. The coalition leaders declared that Maaßen would not be responsible for overseeing the BfV in his new post, but Seehofer made clear the worthlessness of this claim by stating repeatedly that he valued Maaßen’s work as a leading political official.

The indications are that Maaßen will function as Seehofer’s right-hand man. He will receive a much higher salary as a state secretary than he did as head of the BfV.

It remains unclear who will take over as head of the secret service. However, it is likely that a current state secretary in the Interior Ministry will move to the BfV to complete the musical chairs maneuver, removing the domestic intelligence service from the firing line and strengthening it.

The German government has responded to the protests against the AfD and its neo-fascist provocations by shifting further to the right. The grand coalition is integrating the hated secret service president and his pro-AfD policy more directly into the government and attempting to cover up the right-wing conspiracy that has long been under way in the BfV by installing a new leadership.

Unrest in Chemnitz

The SPD is playing a key role in this operation. With Maaßen’s promotion to state secretary, the SPD has demonstrated that its demand for his firing and its threat to withdraw from the coalition was pure theatre. The SPD is celebrating the elevation of Maaßen within the state apparatus as a victory.

In reality, it wanted to avoid a new election at all costs. This was due not only to its fear of losing further support, but also because it did not want to hold an election in a situation where tens of thousands of people are taking to the streets each weekend to protest against the far-right and a powerful mass opposition to the grand coalition’s right-wing policies is developing.

It was not for nothing that the SPD negotiated for months behind closed doors to bring about the coalition, thereby making the AfD the official opposition in parliament and granting it political legitimacy and greater prominence.

In almost all areas, the new government’s policies conform to the AfD’s right-wing extremist politics. The coalition agreed on the doubling of the defence budget to make it the largest military budget since World War II. Seehofer’s “masterplan,” adopted by the grand coalition, included a major expansion of deportation and internment camps for refugees. At the same time, the police state infrastructure is being strengthened.

The AfD has been fully integrated into parliamentary work by the SPD, in particular. As the new parliament was being constituted, the SPD demanded a “collegial” approach to the AfD. Stefan Brandner, a leading AfD politician, has the SPD to thank for his appointment as chairman of the parliamentary judicial committee. It was Thomas Oppermann, the SPD vice president of parliament, who proposed Brandner, a representative of the volkish-nationalist wing of the AfD and close ally of the right-wing extremist Björn Höcke.

The connection between the government and the AfD was clearest of all in the secret service. Maaßen met with leading AfD politicians on numerous occasions and discussed his agency’s plans with them, even though these plans were considered state secrets.

Brandner has confirmed that Maaßen spoke with him about this year’s secret service report. Neither the AfD, nor its neo-fascist wing, nor numerous other right-wing extremist groups are mentioned in the report. Instead, organizations that oppose the right-wing extremists are labeled “left-wing extremists.” For the first time, the SGP is declared to be “left-wing extremist” because of its opposition to capitalism and nationalism, according to the report.

Maaßen used the secret service to politically strengthen the AfD and the most right-wing circles in Germany. He is now being rewarded accordingly.

He took over as head of the BfV in the summer of 2012, when the intelligence agency was in deep crisis. Nine months earlier, news about the right-wing terrorist cell National Socialist Underground came to light. Many agents of the secret service were active in its milieu. The BfV subsequently shredded a large number of files. Heinz Fromm, Maaßen’s predecessor, was forced out as a result of the scandal.

Maaßen did not put a halt to ties with far-right extremist groups, but strengthened them. In early 2015, he filed criminal charges against two journalists from the blog Netzpolitik.org. He thus initiated a clampdown on freedom of speech while at the same time establishing close ties with the AfD.

It became clear this summer that the BfV was much more involved in the terrorist attack in Berlin in December 2016 than had previously been known. There is much to suggest that the attack was aimed at creating an atmosphere of fear at the beginning of an election year, so as to strengthen the AfD.

With its decision to promote Maaßen, the grand coalition is giving its backing to the right-wing networks in the secret service and leaving no doubt about the character of the current government.

The SGP therefore demands the dissolution of the BfV and the immediate holding of new elections. The vast majority of the population opposes the government’s right-wing policies, which were negotiated behind closed doors by the losers of last year’s election.

The SGP is doing everything in its power to mobilise the only social force capable of halting the right-wing, authoritarian and militarist policies of the ruling class and all of its parties—the international working class. This requires a socialist perspective.

Our demands are:

• Stop the conspiracy of the grand coalition, the state apparatus and right-wing extremists!
• No more war! Stop Germany’s return to a militarist great power policy!
• Dissolve the secret service! An immediate halt to the surveillance of the SGP and other left-wing organizations!
• Defend the right to asylum! No to the militarisation of the state! No to surveillance!
• End poverty and exploitation—for social equality! Expropriate the super-wealthy and place the banks and corporations under public ownership and democratic control!

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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump toured portions of North and South Carolina still reeling from the record-setting floods spawned by Hurricane Florence.

Trump carefully avoided the scenes of intense human suffering and destruction in the region, including thousands of homeless residents in impoverished areas still waiting for desperately needed aid. He avoided any mention of the hundreds of thousands still without power five days after the storm made landfall. He said nothing of the lack of flood insurance for the vast majority of devastated homeowners, or the failure of the government to make any preparations for a new storm following the catastrophic flooding unleashed just two years ago by Hurricane Matthew.

Instead, he staged a press event at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point near New Bern, North Carolina, a town ravaged by flood waters of the Neuse River, where he reprised the litany of empty promises and lies he gave out last year in a similar public relations visit to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Alongside Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Brock Long, various military and police officers and other notables, Trump boasted of the “incredible” response to the hurricane by his administration and state and local authorities. Hailing the “planning that went into this” as “beyond belief,” he promised the victims of the storm:

“We will never forget your loss. We will never leave your side. We’re with you all the way.”

Trump will have forgotten the workers whose lives have been turned upside down even before Air Force One takes off for Washington, and the corporate media and politicians will drop the issue soon after. No less than in Puerto Rico, Houston and Florida last year—and New Orleans 13 years ago—the victims of the storm will be left to fend for themselves with only token assistance from the government.

Following the mutual backslapping at the Marine air base, the press recorded Trump handing out box lunches to residents of a New Bern neighborhood that had been flooded. His real priorities emerged when he stopped to ask the CEO of Duke Energy about the conditions around Lake Norman, where the Trump National Golf Club-Charlotte is located.

President Donald Trump hands out prepackaged meals to people in cars at Temple Baptist Church in an area impacted by Hurricane Florence (Source: The Greenville News)

As of this writing, 37 people have lost their lives. Many hundreds more are homeless. A quarter of a million people have no electricity. More than 10,000 remain in shelters as several rivers have not yet crested. Long sections of major roadways remain impassable. Fourteen rivers in North Carolina have overflowed their banks; some of which are pouring livestock waste and coal ash downstream. Over one million poultry birds and five thousand hogs have drowned.

With each passing day, the storm reveals more clearly before the eyes of the world the rotten core of American capitalist society. Once again, a natural disaster—compounded by official negligence, callous indifference and the systematic downgrading of basic infrastructure—has revealed the reality of pervasive poverty and class oppression in the United States.

Trump is only the most grotesque expression of the moral depravity, backwardness and criminality of the ruling class as a whole. Its stranglehold over the economic levers of society at every point blocks the rational and humane mobilization of the resources—which exist in abundance—to mitigate the impact of natural disasters and make whole those who are victimized by them.

In Fayetteville, a large city on the Cape Fear River in central-eastern North Carolina, hundreds of residents remain in shelters and county officials have confirmed two deaths. The city has a poverty rate of 18.4 percent. One in four children lives in poverty.

In a statement to National Public Radio, Fayetteville resident Adrienne Murphy, 38, recalled the widespread displacement and food shortages after Hurricane Matthew and issued a message to Trump: “Next week is a long time—you have to act now!”

To the south is the flood-soaked city of Lumberton, where Interstate 95 remains partially closed. Robeson County, where the city is located, has a poverty rate of 27.8 percent, or double the national average. A staggering 70 percent of children in the county live below the poverty line. The Lumber River flooded severely in Hurricane Matthew, leaving over 1,500 residents displaced for months.

Robeson County drafted a “Resilient Redevelopment Plan” after Matthew, which included upgrades to the Lumber River levee and the construction of a floodgate where the levee opens for a railroad crossing controlled by the CSX railroad corporation. The aim was to avoid a repeat of the 2016 storm, when the river broke the levee and destroyed low-income neighborhoods of south and west Lumberton.

CSX refused to cooperate with county planners, and Governor Roy Cooper refused to acquire the property by declaring eminent domain.

In nearby Pembroke, also inundated by flood waters, 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. After Hurricane Matthew, the mayor sought to clear the area’s swamps and canals of fallen trees and debris to improve drainage, but the Army Corps of Engineers refused to take on the project.

In Wilmington’s Northside, a predominantly African-American neighborhood, the power remains out and residents are struggling to clean up and salvage what they can from the flood. Median income in the neighborhood is between $14,000 and $17,000 a year.

In South Carolina, a press release Wednesday from the state’s Emergency Management Division advised residents near the Big Pee Dee, Waccamaw, Little Pee Dee and Lynches rivers that flood waters would continue to crest over the weekend and into early next week. The state fire marshal had already assisted in 518 evacuations over the preceding 24 hours.

Two women died Tuesday night in rural South Carolina when a Horry County Sheriff’s van drove off of a flooded road. The victims were being transported pursuant to a court-ordered evacuation of facilities for the mentally ill. They were handcuffed and chained inside the van.

In a statement published September 2, 2005, entitled “Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath: From natural disaster to national humiliation,” the World Socialist Web Site editorial board wrote:

Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the awful truths of contemporary America—a country torn by the most intense class divisions, ruled by a corrupt plutocracy that possesses no sense of either social reality or public responsibility, in which millions of its citizens are deemed expendable and cannot depend on any social safety net or public assistance if disaster, in whatever form, strikes…

The storm that breached the levees of New Orleans has revealed all of the horrific implications of 25 years’ worth of uninterrupted social and political reaction.

The real results of the destruction of essential social services, the dismantling of government agencies entrusted with alleviating poverty and coping with disasters, and the ceaseless nostrums about the “free market” magically resolving the problems of modern society have been exposed before millions.

This was written before the 2008 Wall Street crash and Great Recession, which destroyed millions of jobs, led to the foreclosure and eviction of 9 million homeowners, and wiped out the life savings of millions of workers. Since then, the plundering of society by the financial oligarchy has intensified, first under Obama and now under Trump. The decay of infrastructure and levels of social desperation have only grown worse, alongside the record rise in stock prices and the fortunes of the top 5 percent.

What emerges from the unfolding disaster in the Carolinas is the failure of the capitalist system and the need for the working class to replace it with a system based on common ownership of the banks, corporations and natural resources, the expropriation of the wealth of the oligarchy, and the satisfaction of social need rather than private profit—that is, socialism.

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September 11 is already an annual day of mourning. But while the nation grieved over victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency announced a plan future generations may well grieve as a tragedy in its own right.

While Americans attended memorial services, the EPA announced plans to roll back regulations on methane — a powerful greenhouse gas that damages the world’s climate and threatens human health.

Methane carries up to 36 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide.

More methane emissions mean more lethal heat waves, extreme storms, rising sea levels, drought, and floods. They mean worsening air quality, water quality, and crop damage. They mean certain crops will lose nutritional value, and pest- and waterborne diseases will spread.

Specifically, the White House wants to kill the Obama administration’s 2016 New Source Performance Standards, which require oil and gas drillers to limit emissions of methane during fracking and flaring (the process of burning off gas that won’t be captured and transported).

It’s yet another big present to the oil and gas industry. Meanwhile, ordinary working families will pay the price, and so will their health. Children, the poor, the elderly, and those with a weak or impaired immune system are especially vulnerable.

The EPA itself agrees: Its own analysis concludes that the new proposed rules could send hundreds of thousands more tons of methane into the atmosphere. The EPA acknowledges further this would hurt thousands of people and rack up a huge cost in health care and agricultural damage.

There are short-term threats, too. Both fracking and flaring pose serious risks to nearby communities, including possible methane leaks.

Methane leaks are frequently accompanied by volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are known to be toxic and/or carcinogenic to humans.

VOCs carry a boatload of negative health impacts. For example, when combined with particulate matter in the presence of sunlight and heat, VOCs form ground-level ozone, a pollutant that aggravates chronic lung diseases, pre-existing heart problems, and asthma.

Put simply, they’re terrible for the air you breathe and the water you drink and the ground you walk on.

Fracking itself poses a danger. This past March, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York released a report showing that fracking increases the risk of serious medical conditions such as asthma, birth defects, and cancer.

A study by the Environmental Defense Fund found that the U.S. oil and gas industry emits 13 million metric tons of methane from its operations each year — nearly 60 percent more than currently estimated by the EPA.

This attempt by the EPA to roll back the methane rule undermines the health and safety of families and communities. It flies in the face of scientific and medical evidence that methane poses serious hazards to our climate and health.

We need more regulation of methane, not less.

The EPA is directly tasked with creating policies that protect human health and the environment. It’s reckless and irresponsible to weaken a rule that directly fulfills that mission.

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Olivia Alperstein is the Media Relations Manager for Physicians for Social Responsibility (www.psr.org). Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Featured image is from the author.

That is all too often the racist mantra among Conservative MPs, certain individuals and communities, leaders, teachers and members of the clergy.  This is the often unspoken position also in our parliament here in Britain where it is considered politically correct, if not essential, to be a member of the over-active Friends of Israel Lobbies in Westminster – that is if you want to be any part of the governing elite. 

Then you must be willing also to denigrate anything and anyone who has the audacity to criticise the eleven year-old blockade against a 1.8 million civilian population in Gaza who are deprived of essential goods, services, water, electricity and medicines by the Israeli government headed by Likud Zionist extremist, Binyamin Netanyahu, in its failed attempt at regime change.

You must also be willing to approve British export licences for military equipment that may eventually be used to assist the Israeli authorities in its continued theft of Palestinian land and its illegal settlement of 600,000 of its citizens in the Occupied Territories in specific violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

You will also, no doubt, approve the export of millions of £’s of UK tax-exempt charitable funds every year to the state of Israel with no enforced restriction against their use in maintaining the oppression of the indigenous Palestinian by the heavily-armed IDF militia.

Is it any wonder there is now a backlash against such grossly prejudiced, racial profiling and oppression of a now dispossessed people who have been the major indigenous nation of Palestine continuously for at least one thousand, two hundred (1,200) years?

(Maybe you should read and absorb that last sentence again!)

Finally, would you consider the foregoing to be: factually substantiated information that is of legitimate and genuine humanitarian concern, pro-democratic, pro-civil and human rights, pro-the authority of the United Nations and pro the rule of law – or would you term such verified information in the public domain to be antisemitic?

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

Global Research has over 50,000 subscribers to our Newsletter.

Our objective is to recruit one thousand committed “volunteers” among our 50,000 Newsletter subscribers to support the distribution of Global Research articles (email lists, social media, crossposts). 

Do not send us money. Under Plan A, we call upon our readers to donate 5 minutes a day to Global Research.

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If, however, you are pressed for time in the course of a busy day, consider Plan B, Consider Making a Donation and/or becoming a Global Research Member. 

Global Research provides penetrating analysis of world events. The articles published by this invaluable website pull no punches in reporting on global power relations. – Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emerita, Thomas Jefferson School of Law

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New US Trade Sanctions Against China

By Peter Koenig and Press TV, September 20, 2018

New Trade Sanctions by the US in the form of tariffs on US$ 200 billion Chinese exports to the US – China in a tit-for-tat move imposed new tariffs on 60 billion of US goods to China.

Syria, the United Nations, and the “Slobodan Milosevic Treatment”

By Kurt Nimmo, September 20, 2018

It’s long been obvious the United Nations is a rubber stamp lapdog of the United States. It set the stage for a decade of sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and piled sanctions of Libya that resulted in the US and NATO (another lapdog) taking military action that killed around 30,000 Libyans. 

Two African Heroes Leave Prison in Rwanda

By Ann Garrison, September 20, 2018

On September 15, Rwandan political prisoners Victoire Ingabire and Kizito Mihigo walked out of Nyarugenge Prison in Rwanda’s capital, along with nearly 2000 more Rwandan prisoners whom President Paul Kagame had granted “executive clemency.” Members of local and international media surrounded them with still and video cameras as they emerged.

Hold the Front Page. The Reporters Are Missing.

By John Pilger, September 20, 2018

Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Video: The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

By Independent POV, September 20, 2018

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, is a documentary film that shows how Britain transformed from a colonial power into a global financial power. At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands.

US Sanctions Reach a Turning Point. De-Dollarization and Collusion against the U.S.

By Karsten Riise, September 20, 2018

The US economy is already less than a quarter of the world’s GDP in USD dollars, and in 2023 it will fall to only just about one fifth of the world (source: IMF). The non-US part, the 4 fifths of the world economy (now including the EU and China, constitute an increasingly advanced group, and they are about to collude against the US sanctions regime. Collusion is the result of parallel interests, and the EU may not actually (or at least publicly) coordinate all its counter-sanctions with other major power centers.

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Hundreds of Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs, have in the last few days signed a letter expressing support for the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corby. The letter will be sent to Labour’s Annual Conference that will take place in Liverpool starting next Sunday, September 23, and continue until Wednesday, September 26. The letter of support reads as follows:

“We are Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, committed to civil equality within Israel, to an end to the occupation and the blockade of Gaza, to a just peace and justice for the Palestinian refugees. The solidarity of progressive forces abroad is vital to our struggle, and we therefore welcomed the election of Jeremy Corbyn, a committed campaigner for peace, as leader of the British Labour Party.”

“Since his election, Corbyn has been subjected to sustained attacks for his supposed friendliness to antisemitism. We reject the substance of these accusations completely, and we note that some of Corbyn’s accusers, such as Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu, are themselves notorious racists and allies of known anti-Semites, such as Viktor Orbán and the Polish nationalists. We also note that, even as many of Corbyn’s critics claim to respect the right to criticize Israel in theory, in practice their attacks seem designed to shut down debate on Israel-Palestine and prevent a future Labour government from applying any real pressure on Israel to change its policies.”

“At the same time, we recognize the reality of antisemitism, including on the left, and we applaud Labour’s sustained efforts to fight it within its ranks. These efforts are free from the hypocrisy of the right, which decries antisemitism, real and imagined, while openly encouraging racism of other kinds. In a global climate of rising fascism, this hypocrisy is extremely dangerous. In order to combat it, it is absolutely necessary to repudiate antisemitism while also standing up for Palestinian rights and for socialism. We call upon all friends of Israeli-Palestinian peace to join the Labour Party’s leadership in its unequivocal commitment to creating a politics free of hate and prejudice, and to support us in working together toward a future without oppression and discrimination in Israel and Palestine. Labour friends, we wish you success in your upcoming National Conference and in the struggles ahead.”

Add your signature to the letter of support for Jeremy Corbyn here.

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Featured image is from CPI.

CNN recently discovered a paradox.  How was it possible, they asked, that in 1989, Viktor Orban, at the time a Western-acclaimed liberal opposition leader, was calling for Soviet troops to leave Hungary, and now that he is Prime Minister, he is cozying up to Vladimir Putin?

For the same reason, dummy.

Orban wanted his country to be independent then, and he wants it to be independent now.

In 1989, Hungary was a satellite of the Soviet Union.  Whatever Hungarians wanted, they had to follow directives from Moscow and adhere to Soviet communist ideology. 

Today, Hungary is ordered to follow directives from Brussels and adhere to the EU ideology, a k a “our common values”.

But what exactly are those “common values”?

Not so very, very long ago, “the West”, that is, both America and Europe, claimed devotion to “Christian values”.  Those values were evoked in Western condemnation of the Soviet Union.

That is out.  These days, indeed, one of the reasons why Viktor Orban is considered a threat to our European values is his reference to a Hungarian conception of “the Christian character of Europe, the role of nations and cultures”.  The revival of Christianity in Hungary, as in Russia, is regarded in the West as deeply suspect.

So it’s understood, Christianity is no longer a “Western value”.  What has taken its place?  That should be obvious: today “our common values” essentially mean democracy and free elections.

Guess again.  Orban was recently re-elected by a landslide.  Leading EU liberal Guy Verhofstadt (image on the right) called this “an electoral mandate to roll back democracy in Hungary.” 

Since elections can “roll back democracy”, they cannot be the essence of “our common values”.  People can vote wrong; that is called “populism” and is a bad thing.

The real, functional common values of the European Union are spelled out in its treaties: the four freedoms. No, not freedom of speech, since many Member States have laws against “hate speech”, which can cover a lot of ground since its meaning is open to wide interpretation. No, the obligatory four freedoms of the EU are free movement of goods, services, persons and capital throughout the Union. Open borders.  That is the essence of the European Union, the dogma of the Free Market. 

The problem with the Open Border doctrine is that it doesn’t know where to stop.  Or it doesn’t stop anywhere.  When Angela Merkel announced that hundreds of thousands of refugees were welcome in Germany, the announcement was interpreted as an open invitation by immigrants of all sorts, who began to stream into Europe. This unilateral German decision automatically applied to the whole of the EU, with its lack of internal borders.  Given German clout, Open Borders became the essential “European common value”, and welcoming immigrants the essence of human rights.  

Very contrasting ideological and practical considerations contribute to the idealization of Open Borders.  To name a few: 

• Economic liberals maintain that because Europe is aging, it needs young immigrant workers to pay for the pensions of retired workers.
• Many Jewish activists feel threatened by national majorities and feel safer in a society made up of ethnic minorities.
• More discreetly, certain entrepreneurs favor mass immigration because growing competition in the labor market brings down wages.
• Many artistically inclined people consider ethnic diversity to be more creative and more fun.
• Certain anarchist or Trotskyist sects believe that uprooted immigrants are the “agent” of the revolution that the Western proletariat failed to produce.
• Many Europeans accept the idea that nation states are the cause of war, concluding that every way of destroying them is welcome.
• International financial investors naturally want to remove all obstacles to their investments and thus promote Open Borders as The Future.
• There are even a few powerful schemers who see “diversity” as the basis of divide and rule, by breaking solidarity into ethnic pieces.
• There are good people who want to help all humanity in distress.  

This combination of contrasting, even opposing motivations does not add up to a majority in every country.  Notably not in Hungary.

It should be noted that Hungary is a small Central European country of less than ten million inhabitants, which never had a colonial empire and thus has no historic relationship with peoples in Africa and Asia as do Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  As one of the losers in World War I, Hungary lost a large amount of territory to its neighbors, notably to Romania.  The rare and difficult Hungarian language would be seriously challenged by mass immigration. It is probably safe to say that the majority of people in Hungary tend to be attached to their national identity and feel it would be threatened by massive immigration from radically different cultures. It may not be nice of them, and like everyone they can change. But for now, that is how they vote.

In particular, they recently voted massively to re-elect Victor Orban, obviously endorsing his refusal of uncontrolled immigration. This is what has spurred scrutiny of Orban’s leadership for signs of incumbent dictatorship.  The EU is taking steps to strip Hungary of its political rights as a result. On September 14, Victor Orban made his position clear in a speech to the (largely rubber stamp) European Parliament in Strasbourg: 

 “Let’s be frank. They want to condemn Hungary and the Hungarians who have decided that our country will not be an immigration country. With all due respect, but as firmly as possible, I reject the threats of the pro-immigration forces, their blackmail of Hungary and the Hungarians, all based on lies. I inform you respectfully that however you decide, Hungary will stop illegal immigration, and defend its borders, against you if necessary.”

This was greeted with outrage.

Former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, currently president of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Group in the European Parliament and an ardent European federalist, responded furiously that “we cannot let far right populist governments drag democratic European states into the orbit of Vladimir Putin!”  

In a tweet to his EP colleagues, Verhofstadt warned:

“We are in an existential battle for the survival of the European project. … For Europe’s sake, we need to stop him!” 

CNN approvingly ran an opinion piece from Verhofstadt describing Hungary as a “threat to international order”.

“In the coming weeks and months, the international community — and the United States in particular — must heed our warning and act: Hungary’s government is a threat to the rules-based international order,” he wrote.

“European governments and the US have a moral obligation to intervene”, Verhofstadt continued. “We cannot stand aside and let populist, far-right governments drag democratic European states into Vladimir Putin’s orbit and undermine the postwar international norms.”

Next come sanctions:

“Political and financial costs must be attached to governments pursuing an authoritarian path and support provided to civil society organizations…” 

Verhofstadt concluded:

“This is not in the interests of the people of America or Europe. We need to stop him — now.”

Verhofstadt’s appeal to America to “stop” the Hungarian prime minister sounds like nothing so much as appeals to Brezhnev by hard-line communists to send the tanks into reformist Czechoslovakia in 1968.  

However, this appeal for intervention was not addressed to President Trump, who is in the same doghouse as Orban among the Atlanticists, but rather to the deep state forces which the Belgian fanatic assumes are still in power in Washington.

At the start of his CNN article, Verhofstadt paid tribute to “the late, great, John McCain, who once described Orban as ‘a fascist in bed with Putin’…” That is the McCain who went around the world as head of the Republican branch of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) encouraging and financing dissident groups to rebel against their respective governments, in preparation for U.S. intervention.  Oh Senator McCain, where are you now that we need you for a little regime change in Budapest?

Orban’s reputation in the West as dictator is unquestionably linked to his intense conflict with Hungarian-born financier George Soros, whose Open Society foundation (OSF) finances all manner of initiatives to promote his dream of a borderless society, notably in Eastern Europe.  Soros operations could be considered privatized U.S. foreign policy, along the same lines as McCain, and innocently “non-governmental”.  One OSF initiative is the private Budapest-based Central European University whose rector is open society advocate Michael Ignatieff.  Hungary recently imposed a 25% tax on money spent by nongovernmental organizations on programs that “directly or indirectly aim to promote immigration,” which affects the CEU.  This is part of a recently adopted package of anti-immigration measures known as the “Stop Soros” bill.  

Hungarian measures against Soros’ interference are of course denounced in the West as a grave violation of human rights, while in the United States, prosecutors search frantically for the slightest indication of Russian interference or Russian agents.

In another blow against the international rules-based order, the Hungarian prime minister’s office recently announced that the government will cease to fund university courses in gender studies, on the grounds that they “cannot be justified scientifically” and attract too few students to be worthwhile. Although privately funded and thus able to continue its own gender studies program, the CEU was “astonished” and called the measure “without any justification or antecedent.” 

Like the Soviet Union, the European Union is not merely an undemocratic institutional framework promoting a specific economic system; it is also the vehicle of an ideology and a planetary project.  Both are based on a dogma as to what is good for the world: communism for the first, “openness” for the second.  Both in varying ways demand of people virtues they may not share: a forced equality, a forced generosity.  All this can sound good, but such ideals become methods of manipulation.  Forcing ideals on people eventually runs up against stubborn resistance.

There are differing reasons to be against immigration just as to be for it. The idea of democracy was to sort out and choose between ideals and practical interests by free discussion and in the end a show of hands: an informed vote. The liberal Authoritarian Center represented by Verhofstadt seeks to impose its values, aspirations, even its version of the facts on citizens who are denounced as “populists” if they disagree.  Under communism, dissidents were called “enemies of the people”. For the liberal globalists, they are “populists” – that is, the people.  If people are told constantly that the choice is between a left that advocates mass immigration and a right that rejects it, the swing to the right is unstoppable.

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Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at [email protected].  Diana Johnstone is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization  (CRG). 

New Trade Sanctions by the US in the form of tariffs on US$ 200 billion Chinese exports to the US – China in a tit-for-tat move imposed new tariffs on 60 billion of US goods to China.

China’s prime minister speaks out about the rise of unilateralism, saying the approach to trade will not solve any problems.

Li Keqiang made the comment at the World Economic Forum in the Chinese city of Tianjin. He said multilateralism should be upheld and the basic principle of free trade should be maintained. The Chinese premier said the trend of globalization is unstoppable, even though there are flaws in the process. Li’s comments come amid heightened trade tensions between China and the United States. Beijing imposed tariffs on 60 more billion dollars-worth of American imports in a tit-for-tat response to Washington’s levies on 200-billion dollars of Chinese goods.

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PressTV: What is your take on this?

Peter Koenig: These are indeed “trade sanctions”. US-imposed trade sanctions. Of course, the Chinese are right, in a world that strives for free trade – unilateralism as demonstrated by the Trump Administration’s-imposed tariffs – is working in the opposite direction.

Two comments, if I may:

First, personally – I have been doubting from the beginning that globalization – and especially globalization in terms of “free trade” is a good thing. There is nothing FREE.

Free trade among equals is one thing, but “free trade” American style, where they call the shots – is of course not what is intended. The weaker always suffers- and I am not referring to China – China doesn’t really suffer, they dominate the entire Asian market, having overtaken the US in Asia about three years ago – but I’m talking in general about developing countries that have to accept highly subsidized US and EU goods in order to stay within these “free trade deals”.

And we see that the west cannot be trusted, i.e. President Trump. He is making his own rules. Therefore, free trade and the related globalization is in my opinion not a good thing. It has hurt too many people of mostly poor countries over the past 30-some years, when neoliberalism started driving the agenda of “globalized free trade”.

Trading among friendly nations, nations that share the same objective, the same political and economic ideology, would be a much preferable alternative. There, nobody can bully another nation into accept his conditions.

This is something we may want to move back to – trading among friendly and culturally aligned nations, where trading is a win-win for both parties.

The second point I wanted to make, is maybe more important: These tariff impositions have nothing really to do with trade. The Chinese know it and the US Administration knows it.

They, the tariffs, have everything to do with pulling down, weakening the Yuan, the very strong Chinese Yuan, and by doing so, the Chinese economy. The Yuan is an officially declared reserve currency – recognized by the IMF – and is fast replacing the dollar as the key reserve currency in the world.

That is what Washington is afraid of – and rightly so. Once the dollar ceases being the main reserve currency, the demand for the dollar will decline, and the hegemonic role for the dollar is gone – which may mean the collapse of the dollar-empire — and in the end the end of the empire altogether.

Already the biggest hydrocarbon producers and consumers in the world, China, Russia, Venezuela and Iran – are no longer using the dollar for their trade deals, but local currencies or the gold-convertible Chinese Yuan.

So, the end of the dollar hegemony is coming sooner or later, but Washington wants to delay it as long as possible, hoping for a miracle, or actually even preparing for a military intervention to save the dollar.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

It’s long been obvious the United Nations is a rubber stamp lapdog of the United States. It set the stage for a decade of sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and piled sanctions of Libya that resulted in the US and NATO (another lapdog) taking military action that killed around 30,000 Libyans. 

Now that supposedly august body has signaled it will investigate war crimes in Syria. 

The Associated Press reports the “resolution adopted by the assembly said the body, known as the ‘International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism,’ would help collect and analyze evidence of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law ‘to facilitate and expedite fair and independent criminal proceedings.’”

There is nothing fair and independent about it. If it were truly fair, the top human rights violator, the United States government and its Pentagon, would be at the top of the UN’s to-do list. 

The US is responsible for the “civil war” in Syria. It has agitated for “regime change” since at least 2005 under the guise of “democracy promotion,” well before the CIA sent operatives—many were “rebels” that participated in the US-NATO Libyan massacre—into the city of Deraa to stir up trouble.

“The staged uprising in Deraa had some locals in the street who were unaware of their participation in a CIA-Hollywood production,” writes Steven Sahiounie. “They were the unpaid extras in the scene about to be shot. These unaware extras had grievances, perhaps lasting a generation or more, and perhaps rooted in Wahhabism, which is a political ideology exported globally by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Royal family and their paid officials.”

The Libya rebels who killed Gaddafi were at the Omari Mosque in Deraa stockpiling weapons.

“The participation of local Muslim Brotherhood followers, who would assist the foreign Libyan mercenaries/terrorists, was an essential part of the CIA plan, which was well scripted and directed from Jordan,” Sahiounie explains. 

“The CIA agents running the Deraa operation from their office in Jordan had already provided the weapons and cash needed to fuel the flames of revolution in Syria. With enough money and weapons, you can start a revolution anywhere in the world.”

It was this manufactured “revolution” that resulted in a brutal war and the death of more than half a million people, all of them—according to the corporate propaganda media—slaughtered by al-Assad and his Syrian Arab Army. 

You can bet this wasn’t a topic of discussion at the United Nations. The attempt to indict and prosecute al-Assad and other Syrian officials for war crimes is undoubtedly a directive handed down by the United States and its bulldog ambassador, Nikki Haley. 

This politically motivated “investigation” by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council—which, incidentally, the US removed itself from—will base its prearranged conclusion on a fairy tale: the unproven and White Helmet staged fake chemical attacks in Syria. 

Because al-Assad will not leave office willingly (having been elected by the Syrian people), the only option appears to be the Slobodan Milošević treatment. This Serbian, the former president of the late Yugoslavia—which was chopped into bantustans by NATO and the United States following a sustained bombing campaign by Bill Clinton—was arrested and sent to The Hague to face prosecution for war crimes. He subsequently died while in confinement. 

I’m not saying Milošević was a nice guy. It is said he killed his political opponents. However, his alleged crimes, when compared to the behavior of US client states and partners—Israel and Saudi Arabia come to mind—are paltry by way of comparison. 

It should be noted that after Milošević died, the International Court of Justice concluded separately in the Bosnian Genocide Case that there was no evidence linking him to the [alleged] genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian War.

This is basically the same routine the US and the UN want to pull on al-Assad. It’s a Plan B to have him removed following the failure of the US, its partners and proxies, to remove him through orchestrated violence and murder. 

And it is perfectly timed. Last week Syria’s UN ambassador, Bashar Ja’afari, said in a letter to General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak that the upcoming investigation is another destructive action by its sponsors, Qatar and Liechtenstein.

Ja’afari hit the nail square on the head. He said the UN decision arrives during a “delicate stage” in negotiations to end the war. He added “some governments… have supported chaos and terrorism in Syria” as part of “their war on global terrorism,” which is farcical as the White Helmet chemical attacks. 

Furthermore, the Syrian UN ambassador said the body has ditched its supposed neutrality—which, of course, it never had—and is obedient as a trained lapdog. He charged the UN is responding “to political and financial pressure and the polarization practices of some member states, especially those supporting the investigative body.”

Meanwhile, the US and Israel continue to violate the UN charter by bombing and occupying a significant part of the country. These two renegade nations should be at the top of the list of candidates to be indicted and prosecuted for war crimes. 

But then a lapdog never bites the hand that feeds. 

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

On September 19, multiple reports appeared in some Arab, Western and Russian media claiming that the Russian Military Police arrested all service members of the 44th brigade of the Syrian Arab Air Defense Forces in the Syrian province of Lattakia over their involvement in the incident with the Russian IL-20 military plane on September 17. Then, the servicemen were allegedly moved to a jail at Hmeimim airbase.

One of the key sources of these reports was the Hammurabi’s Justice News blog well known for its links to US-backed militant groups in at-Tanf and the US-led coalition. The blog was not able to provide any evidence confirming its claims. Furthermore, a source in the SADF told SouthFront that the 44th brigade does not even exist.

Syrian pro-government sources described this kind of reports as another attempt to drive a wedge within the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance using the IL-20 incident.

On the same day, the Russian Armed Forces kicked off snap drills in the eastern Mediterranean, which will last until September 26. Some experts claimed that the drills are a show of force and a warning to Israel following official statements by top Russian officials that the Israeli actions, which led to the IL-20 shootdown on September 17, are unacceptable.

Adviser to Turkish President Erdogan, Yasin Aktay, openly described the Israeli attack as an attempt to sabotage the Russian-Turkish agreement on the Idlib demilitarized zone.

Meanwhile, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) repelled an ISIS attack on their positions in the settlement of al-Baghuz al-Fawqani in the province of Deir Ezzor. The SDF reportedly destroyed two VBIEDs and then attacked ISIS positions near al-Shaddadah and al-Kasrah.

Now, SDF units are developing advance in the direction of al-Susah.

The Russian military is making steps to upgrade security on its bases in Syria and installation of upgraded control systems is one of the technical solutions it is currently working at, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov told media on September 19. Earlier, the Russian president vowed that security of Russian troops deployed in the war-torn country will be boosted.

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

We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document.

The reality we must come to terms with, however, is that in the America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

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

The bogeyman’s names and faces may change over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, etc.), but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security.

Thus, in the so-called named of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago.

Most of the damage, however, has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—which historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans are constitutionally illiterate.

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

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

A 2006 survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsonstelevision family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.

It gets worse.

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

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

In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude,

“Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the Internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.”

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

So what’s the solution?

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

As Jefferson wrote in 1820:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As actor-turned-activist Richard Dreyfuss warned:

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

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Ellen R. Wald’s timely, well-written history of the Saudi national oil company, Saudi Inc. The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Power and Profit (Pegasus Books, 2018), is as much the story of the Saudi oil industry as it is of the ruling Al Saud family’s reliance on black gold to ensure the survival of its regime.

In painting a picture of the Al Saud’s long-term strategy to build up over decades the know-how and expertise needed to run an oil industry and their determination to ultimately after almost half a century take over ownership in a legal, orderly, commercial transaction, Wald contrasts the kingdom’s approach in colourful and painstaking detail with nationalisations as they occurred in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.

It is also the story of a US government that increasingly saw Saudi oil as crucial to its post-World War Two global military operations and was determined to ensure that American oilmen, despite their arrogant underestimation of Saudis whom they saw as Bedouins and willingness to bend the truth to enhance their profit margins, were sufficiently accommodating to avoid British mistakes in Iran that resulted in nationalisation and a US-British backed coup to roll back the Iranian takeover.

Wald’s book provides essential background for the role that the Saudi Arabian Oil Company better known as Aramco plays in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to ween the kingdom off its dependency on oil revenues and diversify its economy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the kingdom’s future as one of the world’s foremost oil producers at a time of significant economic change.

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James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

Title: Saudi, Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Profit and Power

Author: Ellen R. Wald

Publisher: Pegasus Books; 1 edition (April 3, 2018)

ISBN-10: 168177660X

ISBN-13: 978-1681776606

Click here to order.

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This essay is inspired by Professor James Petras’s article, describing that the US never wins wars despite trillions of investments in her war budget and obvious military superiority.

Professor Petras is of course right, the United States is currently engaged in seven bloody wars around the globe (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya) and has not been winning one, including WWII. The question is: Why is that?

To these wars, you may want to add the totally destructive and human rights adverse war that literally slaughters unarmed civilians, including thousands of children, in an open-air prison, Gaza, the US proxy war on Palestine, carried out by Israel; plus, warmongering on Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. Let alone the new style wars – the trade wars with China, Europe, and to some extent, Mexico and Canada, as well as the war of sanctions, starting with Russia and reaching around the world – the fiefdom of economic wars also illegal by any book of international economics.

Other wars and conflicts, that were never intended to be won, include the dismantlement of Yugoslavia by the Clinton / NATO wars of the 1990s, the so-called Balkanization of Yugoslavia, ‘Balkanization’, a term now used for other empire-led partitions in the world, à la “divide to conquer”. Many of the former Yugoslav Republics are still not at peace internally and among each other. President Tito, a Maoist socialist leader was able to keep the country peacefully together and make out of Yugoslavia one of the most prosperous countries in Europe in the seventies and 1980s. How could this be allowed, socioeconomic wellbeing in a socialist country? – Never. It had to be destroyed. At the same time NATO forces advanced their bases closer to Moscow. But no war was won. Conflicts are still ongoing, “justifying” the presence of NATO, for European and US “national security”.   

Then, let’s not forget the various Central American conflicts, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, the 8-year Iraq – Iran war – and many more, have created havoc and disorder, and foremost killed millions of people and weakened the countries affected. They put the population into misery and constant fear – and they keep requiring weapons to maintain internal hostilities, warfare and terror to this day.
 
All of these wars are totally unlawful and prohibited by any international standards of law. But the special and exceptional nation doesn’t observe them. President Trump’s bully National security Advisor, John Bolton, recently threatened the ICC and its judges with ‘sanctions’ in case the dare prosecution of Israeli and American war criminals. And the world doesn’t seem to care, and, instead, accepts the bully’s rule, afraid of the constant saber-rattling and threats being thrown out at the resisters of this world. Even the United Nations, including the 15-member Security Council, is afraid to stand up to the bully – 191 countries against 2 (US and Israel) is a no go?

None of these wars, hot wars or cold wars, has ever been won. Nor were they intended to be won. And there are no signs that future US-led wars will ever be won; irrespective of the trillions of dollars spent on them, and irrespective of the trillions to come in the future to maintain these wars and to start new ones. If we, the 191 UN member nations allow these wars to continue, that is. – Again, why is that?

Image on the right: Victoria Nuland

The answer is simple. It is not in the interest of the United States to win any wars.

The reasons are several. A won war theoretically brings peace, meaning no more weapons, no more fighting, no more destruction, no more terror and fear, no more insane profits for the war industry – but foremost, a country at peace is more difficult to manipulate and starve into submission than a country maintained at a level of constant conflict – conflict that not even a regime change will end, as we are seeing in so many cases around the world. Case in point, one of the latest ones being the Ukraine, after the US-NATO-EU instigated February 2014 Maidan coup, prepared with a long hand, in Victoria Nuland’s word, then Assistant Secretary of State, we spent more than 5 years and 5 billion dollars to bring about a regime change and democracy to the Ukraine.

Today, there is a “civil war” waging in eastern Ukraine, the Russian leaning Donbass area (about 90% Russian speaking and 75% Russian nationals), fueled by the ‘new’ Washington installed Poroshenko Nazi government. Thousands were killed, literally in cold blood by the US military-advised and assisted Kiev army, and an estimated more than 2 million fled to Russia. The total Ukraine population is about 44 million (2018 est.), with a landmass of about 604,000 km2, of which the Donbass area (Donetsk Province) is the most densely populated, counting for about 10% of population and about 27,000 km2.

Could this Kiev war of aggression end? – Yes, if the West would let go of the Donbass area which in any case will never submit to the Kiev regime and which has already requested to be incorporated into Russia. It would instantly stop the killing, the misery and destruction by western powers driven Nazi Kiev. But that’s not in the interest of the west, NATO, EU and especially not Washington – chaos and despair make for easy manipulation of people, for exploitation of this immensely rich country, both in agricultural potential – Ukraine used to be called the bread basket of Russia – and in natural resources in the ground; and for steadily advancing closer to the doorsteps of Moscow. That’s the intention. 

In fact, Washington and its western EU vassal allies are relentlessly accusing Russia for meddling in the Ukraine, in not adhering to the Minsk accords. They are ‘sanctioning’ Russia for not respecting the Minsk Protocol (Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany agreed on 11 February 2015 to a package of measures to alleviate the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine), when in fact, the complete opposite is true. The west disregards the key points of the accord – no interference. But western propaganda and deceit-media brainwash western populations into believing in the Russian evil. The only ones meddling and supplying Kiev’s Nazi Regime with weapons and “military advisors” is the west. 

The going strategy is lie-propaganda, so the western public, totally embalmed with western falsehoods, believes it is always Russia. Russians, led by President Putin, are the bad guys. The media war is part of the west’s war on Russia. The idea is, never let go of an ongoing conflict – no matter the cost in lives and in money. It’s so easy. Why isn’t that addressed in many analyses that still pretend the US is losing wars instead of winning them? – Its 101 of western geopolitics.

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For those who don’t know, the US State Department has clearly exposed it’s plans to guarantee world primacy to the Senate’s Foreign Relations Commission. Assistant Secretary of State, Wess Mitchell, has declared that the United States is punishing Russia, because Moscow is impeding Washington from establishing supremacy over the world. It gets as blunt as that. The US openly recognizes the reason for their fight against Russia, and that Washington would not accept anything less than a full capitulation.

The full supremacy over the world is not possible without controlling the entire landmass of Eurasia – which for now they, the US, does not dominate. Mitchell added, contrary to optimistic hypothesis of earlier administrations, Russia and China are the most serious contenders to impede materially and ideologically the supremacy of the United States in the 21^st Century, in a reference to the PNAC, Plan for a New American Century.

Then Mitchell launched a bomb, “It is always of primordial interest for the United States’ national security to impede the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers.” – This clearly means that the United States will shy away from nothing in the pursuit of this goal – meaning an outright war – nuclear or other – massive killing and total destruction – to reach that goal. This explains the myriad false accusations, ranging from outright insults at the UN by a lunatic Nikki Haley, the never-ending saga of the Skripal poisoning, to Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections – and whatever else suits the political circumstances to bash Russia. And these fabricated lies come mostly from Washington and London – and the rest of the western vassals just follows.

“War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it’s so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So, there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are ‘others’ whom we can legitimately make war upon.” Roger Waters, Co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd.

Russia today is attacked by economic and trade “sanctions”, by travel bans, by confiscated assets they have in the west. The Cold War which propagated the Soviet Union as an invasive threat to the world, was a flagrant and absolute lie from A to Z. It forced the Soviet Union, thrown into abject poverty by saving the west from Hitler during WWII – yes, it was the Soviet Union, not the US of A and her western ‘allies’ that defeated Hitler’s army – losing between 25 and 30 million people! – Imagine! – by saving Europe, the Soviet Union became unimaginably devastated and poor. 

The US propaganda created the concept of the Iron Curtain which basically forbade the west to see behind this imaginary shield to find out what the USSR really was after WWII – made destitute to the bones by the second World War. Yet this Cold War and Iron Curtain propaganda managed to make the western world believe that it is under a vital threat of a USSR invasion day-in-day-out, and that Europe with NATO must be ready to fend off any imaginary attack from the Soviet Union. It forced the Soviet Union to using all her workers’ accumulated capital to arm themselves, to be able to defend themselves from any possible western aggression, instead of using these economic resources to rebuild their country, their economy, their social systems. That’s the west – the lying, utterly and constantly deceiving west. Wake up, people!!!

Here you have it, confirmed by Wess Mitchell. The US would rather pull the rest of the world with it into a bottomless and an apocalyptic abyss with its sheer military power, than to lose and not reaching her goal. That’s the unforgiving ruling of the deep state, those that have been pulling the strings behind every US president for the last 200 years. – Unless the new alliances of the East – i.e. the SCO, BRICS, Eurasian Economic Union – half the world’s population and a third of the globes economic output – are able to subdue the United States economically, we may as well we doomed.
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As the seven present ongoing wars speak for themselves, chaos – no end in sight and intended – allow me to go back to a few other wars that were not won, on purpose, of course. Let’s look again at WWII and its sister wars, economic wars and conflicts. Planning of WWII started soon after the Great Depression of 1928 to 1933 – and beyond. Hitler was a ‘convenient’ stooge. War is not only hugely profitable, but it boosts and sustains the economy of just about every sector. And the major objective for the US then was eliminating the Bolshevik communist threat, the Soviet Union. Today its demonizing President Putin and, if possible, bring about regime change in Russia. That’s on top of Washington’s wish list.

In the midst of the Great Depression, in 1931, the US created the Bank for International Settlement in Basel, Switzerland, conveniently located at the border to Germany. The BIS, totally privately owned and controlled by the Rothchild clan, was officially intended for settling war compensation payments by Germany. Though, unknown to most people, Germany has paid almost no compensation for either WWI and WWII. Most of the debt was simply forgiven. Germany was an important player in Washington’s attempt to eliminating the “communist curse” of the USSR. The BIS was used by the FED via Wall Street banks to finance Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. 

As usual, the US was dancing on two weddings: Pretending to fight Hitler’s Germany, but really supporting Hitler against Moscow. Sounds familiar? – Pretending to fight ISIS and other terrorists in the Middle East and around the world, but in reality, having been instrumental in creating, training, funding and arming the terror jihadists. When WWII was won by the Soviet army at a huge human sacrifice, the US, her allies and NATO marched in – shouting victory. And to this day these are the lessons taught in western schools, by western history books, largely ignoring the tremendous credit attributable to the Soviet Union, to the Russian people.

And since the USSR was not defeated, the Cold War had to be invented – and eventually with the help of Washington stooges, Michael Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the west brought down the Soviet Union – preparing the way for a unipolar world. This grandiose goal of the exceptional nation was however – and very fortunately – stopped in its slippery tracks by the ascent of Russian President Putin.

But that’s not all. For dominating Russia, Europe had to be ‘colonized’ – made into a “European Union” (EU) that was never meant to be a real union, as in the United States of America. The idea of a European Union was first planted shortly after WWII by the CIA, then taken over by the Club of Rome – and promoted through numerous conventions all the way to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. The next logical step was to give the EU a Constitution, to make the EU into a consolidated Federation of European States, with common economic, defense and foreign relations strategies. But this was never to be. 

The former French President, Giscard d’Estaing (1974 – 1981), was given the task to lead the drafting of an EU Constitution. He had strict instructions, though unknown to most, to prepare a document that would not be ratified by member states, as it would have bluntly transferred most of the EU nations sovereignty to Brussels. And so, the constitution was rejected, starting by France. Most countries didn’t even vote on the Constitution. And so, a federation of a United Europe didn’t happen. That would have been an unbeatable competition to the US, economically and militarily. NATO was eventually to take the role of unifying Europe – under the control of Washington. Today, the EU is ever more integrated into NATO.

What happened in parallel to the construct of a (non) European Union, was the European financial and economic colonization or enslavement, through the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1944. They created the World Bank, to manage the Marshall Plan, the US-sponsored European reconstruction fund, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to monitor and regulate the gold standard (US$ 35 / Troy Ounce), vis-à-vis the so-called convertible mostly European currencies. In fact, the Marshall Plan, denominated in US-dollars, was the first step towards a common European currency, prompted by the Nixon Administration’s exiting the gold standard in 1971, eventually leading to the Euro, a fiat currency created according to the image of the US dollar. The Euro, the little brother of the US fiat dollar, thus, became a currency, with which the European economic, financial and monetary policies are being manipulated by outside forces, i.e. the FED and Wall Street. The current President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is a former Goldman Sachs executive.

These are wars, albeit the latter ones, economic wars, being constantly waged, but not won. They create chaos, illusions, believes in lies, manipulating and mobilizing people into the direction the masters of and behind Washington want them to move. These are the same masters that have been in control of the west for the last 200 years; and unknown to the vast majority of the western population, these masters are a small group of banking and financial clans that control the western monetary system, as we know it today. It was brought into existence in 1913, by the Federal Reserve Act. These masters control the FED, Wall Street and the BIS – also called the central banks of central banks, as it – the BIS – controls all but a handful of the world’s central banks. 

This fiat financial system is debt-funding wars, conflicts and proxy hostilities around the world. Debt that is largely carried in the form of US treasury bills as other countries’ reserves. The continuation of wars is crucial for the system’s survival. It’s hugely profitable. If a war was won, peace would break out – no war industry profit there, no debt-rent for banks from peace. Wars must go on – and the exceptional nation may prevail, with the world’s largest military-security budget, the deadliest weapons and a national debt, called ‘unmet obligations’ by the US General Accounting Office (GAO) – of about 150 trillion dollars – about seven and a half times the US GDP. We are living in the west in a pyramid monetary fraud – that only wars can sustain, until – yes, until, a different, honest system, based on real economic and peaceful output, will gradually replace the dollar’s hegemony and its role as a world reserve currency. It’s happening as these lines go to print. Eastern economies, like the Chinese, with China’s gold-convertible Yuan, and a national debt of only about 40% of GDP, is gradually taking over the international reserve role of the US dollar. 

The US of A, therefore, will do whatever she can to continue, demonizing Russia and China, provoke them into a hot war, because dominating, and outright ‘owning’ the Eurasian landmass is the ultimate objective of the killer Empire.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. 

Peter Koening is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

On September 15, Rwandan political prisoners Victoire Ingabire and Kizito Mihigo walked out of Nyarugenge Prison in Rwanda’s capital, along with nearly 2000 more Rwandan prisoners whom President Paul Kagame had granted “executive clemency.” Members of local and international media surrounded them with still and video cameras as they emerged.

Victoire Ingabire is a politician and member of Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic majority. She had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for terrorism and minimizing the Rwandan Genocide after she attempted to run against President Paul Kagame in 2010. She served eight years, including five in solitary confinement, before her release this week.

Kizito Mihigo is a gospel singer and a member of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority, who went to prison in 2015 for terrorism, plotting to kill President Kagame, and minimizing genocide. He had just recorded a music video in which he sang that both Hutu and Tutsi had lost loved ones in the 1994 massacres known as the Rwandan Genocide, and that both must acknowledge one another’s suffering to reconcile.

Victoire, as she is commonly known, has often said the same, as in this statement added to “Song for Madame Victoire Ingabire,” which was recorded to celebrate her heroism while she remained in prison.

Let me tell all Rwandans that what we wish for is that all of us should work together, to make sure that such a tragedy will never take place again. That is one of the reasons why the political party FDU made a decision to return to the country peacefully, without resorting to violence as many people think that the solution to Rwanda’s problems is to resort to armed struggle. We do not believe that shedding blood should resolve problems. When one sheds blood, the blood comes back to haunt him or her.
Charging these two Rwandan leaders with terrorism was ludicrous to say the least.

Going forward

Victoire emerged wearing a bright red dress and lime green jacket, the colors of her political party, Unified Democratic Forces (UDF), which has not been allowed to register and was therefore unable to field her as a candidate against President Paul Kagame in 2010. Rwandan prisoners’ heads are shaven, but it looked as though she’d been allowed to let hers grow into a short natural for perhaps a week or more.

Kizito, as he is commonly known, emerged in an orange cap and a white and orange t-shirt, both bearing the logo of Kizito Mihigo pour la Paix (KMP), the foundation he created to promote peace.

President Paul Kagame granted Victoire “executive clemency,” which will not allow her to run for political office. For that Kagame would have to convert her executive clemency release to “unconditional release.” Both Victoire and Kizito are on parole, required to report to authorities once a month. Victoire is unable to leave the country to meet her two grandchildren, both of whom were born in the Netherlands during her imprisonment.

According to Marcelline Nduwamungu, a founding member of Réseau international des femmes pour la démocratie et la paix (Women’s International Network for Democracy and Peace), Victoire has returned to a house in Kigali that a group of her supporters lived in to advocate for her and prepare food to take to her in prison. They’re all in prison now, so she returned to an empty house. Phone and internet connections are still being arranged, but Deutsche Welle succeeded in arranging an interview, in which she said that she would continue trying to open political space and free all political prisoners, and that she did not fear returning to prison herself. She also said:

“I never, never, never, never confessed that I committed any crime in Rwanda. I did not do it and I did not ask for forgiveness for a crime I did not commit.”

Why now?

Many people have asked why Kagame chose to release Victoire, Kizito and more than 2000 other prisoners now. Victoire herself told Deutsche Welle:

“I don’t know if there is any other tactic [behind my release]. I still believe that he did it because he thinks it is time to open the political space in Rwanda because that is the only guarantee to the security, to the sustainable development in our country. And it is the better solution to better prepare the future generation of our country.”

No one who is not in Kagame’s confidence can know what motivated him, but this is the context in which he released Victoire, Kizito, and more than 2000 other prisoners:

1) The African Court of Human and People’s Rights (AFCHPR) ruled, in December 2017, that Rwanda had violated Victoire’s civil rights according to the Rwandan constitution, and that they should free her and pay reparations. The AFCHPR is the African Union’s highest court, and Kagame is the current president of the African Union, a position that rotates between the continent’s five regions. Many, including the African Bar Association, have pointed out that the president of the African Union should respect its regional and continental courts.

2) Victoire and Kizito Mihigo are both celebrity prisoners known outside Rwanda. In 2016, a Spanish representative to the European Parliament introduced a resolution calling for Victoire’s freedom and succeeded in getting it passed.

3) The most prominent Western powers and politicians have heroized Kagame, enshrined his legally enforced lies about the 1994 genocide, and applauded his ascent to the presidency of the African Union, so they may have demanded he polish his image. The powerful Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution invited him to talk about neoliberal reform as soon as it was announced that he’d be the next AU president.

4) President Kagame is quarreling with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose international reputation has taken a nose dive because his goons beat up Afropop star Bobi Wine so badly that he had to leave the country in a wheelchair, after a long list of internationally known musicians and other prominent figures demanded his release from prison. Wine, still walking with a cane, has appeared on the Voice of America’s Straight Talk Africa and testified in Congress, which could mean the beginning of the end for Museveni. Kagame and Museveni are both longstanding US allies and “military partners” on the African continent, and Kagame would do well to appear as the more respectable partner.

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

It’s fitting that the same society that produced George Orwell with his warnings of a totalitarian dystopia stacked with all-prying monitors, surveillance and paranoia should yield up some of the most invasive surveillance regimes imaginable.  While some states have found the revelations from Edward Snowden the sort that should initiate, at the very least, modest changes, the United Kingdom preferred opposite approach.  It had, after all, been an indispensable ally to the US National Security Agency, its equivalent GCHQ always intent on going one better.

In 2016, the Snooper’s Charter, a name so innocuous as to imply impressive cuddliness, found its way onto Britain’s law books after two failed efforts.  That instrument’s more officious, and appropriate title, was the Investigatory Powers Act, deemed by Snowden “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”  As Paul Bernal suggested in The Conversation on its passage,

“It is not a modernisation of existing law, but something qualitatively different, something that intrudes upon every UK citizen’s life in a way that would even a decade ago have been inconceivable.”

Various efforts in Britain have been mounted against the all-consuming beast of mass surveillance.  The UK Court of Appeal did find in 2015 that the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) failed to place adequate restrictions upon police officers in their attempts to access personal information, including web browsing history and phone records.  The discerning judges noted the absence of an independent overseer and appropriate safeguards that might have saved the legislation.

Last Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights took a rather different view from the national security boffins in the case of Big Brother Watch and Others v the United Kingdom.  The legality of three different surveillance forms featured in the complaint by 16 applicants, launched in the immediate aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures: the bulk interception of communications; the sharing of intelligence with foreign governments; the obtaining of communications data from communications service providers. 

While the applicants did not shun all forms of bulk interception, the relevant claim was that such a regime could hardly be seen to have “the quality of law because it was so complex as to be inaccessible to the public and to the Government” lacking “clear and binding legal guidelines” and “sufficient guarantees against abuse.”

The submission by the UK government was predictably heavy on the issues of threat, security and danger.  The greatest temptation of tyrants is the claim that what is being combated is new, fresh and entirely modern.  National security threats abound like a miasmic phenomenon, and not just that old nagging matter of terrorism.  There was a degree of “sophistication” terrorists and criminals had adopted in communicating over the Internet so as to avoid detection. Encryption was being used; the volume of communications was so vast as to enable concealment. 

By five votes to two, the Chamber found that the bulk interception regime violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights covering the respect for private and family life, home and correspondence.  The failing here was a conspicuous lack of oversight in selecting Internet bearers for targets of interception.  There was also an inadequate system in filtering, searching and selecting any salient intercepted communications; and there was a pronounced lack of pertinent safeguards concerning “related communications data”.  Bulk interception did not, in of itself, violate the Convention; but clearly defined criteria was the essence of validity.

By six votes to one, the Chamber found that obtaining communications data from those in the communications industry also breached the protections of Article 8.  Article 10 of the Convention covering freedom of expression, holding opinions, and the imparting and receipt of information was also found to have been offended by both the bulk interception regime and obtaining communications from service providers. 

The judges noted that the second and third applications involved “investigative journalists who have reported on issues such a CIA torture, counterterrorism, drone warfare, and the Iraq war logs [accepting] that they were potentially at risk of having their communications obtained by the United Kingdom authorities”.   

The judges did, however, fail to bite on several fronts.   Sharing intelligence with foreign governments could not be considered a violation of either Article 8 or 10.  (This, in of itself, raises a set of problems given Britain’s security ties with various unsavoury states who might be all too happy to receive the UK’s bounty.)  On the issue of whether the surveillance regime breached Article 6 (covering the right to a fair trial), and the inadequacy of domestic processes in challenging surveillance measures suggesting a violation of Article 14 (prohibiting discrimination), the court remained unmoved. 

The response of the UK government has been one of readjustment and sweetening.  Whilst “careful consideration” would be given to the ruling, a new “double lock” oversight process, according to a spokesperson, had been introduced in the 2016 legislation. The process involved agreement between an independent judicial commissioner and the authorising secretary of state in executing search warrants.  It is precisely such measures that must be regarded as the mandatory softeners in otherwise extreme security measures that never do what they claim to.   

Despite the recent horror of her premiership, Prime Minister Theresa May, a figure instrumental in building the new British security state, can take comfort from Brexit in one fundamental respect: At the very least she might be able to prize Britannia away from the clutches of a European human rights court that continues to correct wayward member states obsessed with surveillance. 

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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. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Konbini.com

The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.

Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Driven from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions” while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.”  

Image on the right: Robert Parry

Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.

Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful abandonment by the “MeToo” zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war.

With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the “mainstream”, a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.ca, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.  

In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News.

Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask why a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.  

The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.

I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media’s power.

What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards is a former teacher, David Cromwell is an oceanographer. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism — a term rarely used; let’s call it true objectivity —  is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.

I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do. 

Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain’s pioneering health service.

The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as “austerity”, with its deceitful, weasel language of “efficiency savings”  (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and “hard choices” (the willful destruction of the premises of civilised life in modern Britain).

“Austerity” is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes. 

Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off . The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but is it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.

Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to “providing a breadth of view” and to properly inform the public of “matters of public policy”, the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation’s most cherished institutions.  A BBC headline said: “Bill which gives power to GPs passes.” This was pure state propaganda.

There is a striking similarity with the BBC’s coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair‘s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed.   A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line “overwhelmingly” while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation’s much-vaunted “principle” of impartiality was never a consideration.

One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing.

Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and cowardly — onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.

With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.  

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.  

The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore (image on the left) wrote,

“I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.”

Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered “vile abuse”. Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her:

“That’s a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone ‘the most massive turd’? Vile abuse?” 

Moore replied that no, she would not, adding,

“I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronising.” 

Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote,

“It’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in.”

Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as “thoughtful and progressive”. What is the root of this vindictiveness?  Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be “one of us” and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism?  

Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of “fake news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.

“[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives,” wrote Katharine Viner.

Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as “a form of narcissism”. 

“How did this man ….,” brayed the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, “get on the ballot in the first place?” 

A choir of the paper’s precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media.

Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS.  

Supported by a “psyops” campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the US Agency of International Aid, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia.

The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency, Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be “Syria Civil Defence” and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan.

The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organisations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no “mainstream” reporter reports Syria, from Syria.      

In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government”.

This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document.  I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet — “Have you ever been invited to North Korea?”  

So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the “perception”.

When he was US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media”. What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home. 

Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerised the German public.

She told me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of an uninformed public.  

“Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked.

“Everyone,” she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.”

Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell is published by Pluto.

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, is a documentary film that shows how Britain transformed from a colonial power into a global financial power. At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands.

Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British offshore jurisdictions and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance. How did this come about, and what impact does it have on the world today? This is what the Spider’s Web sets out to investigate.

The documentary features contributions from John Christensen a former economic adviser to the Secrecy Jurisdiction of Jersey, internationally renowned economist Michael Hudson, former investigating magistrate Eva Joly and Financial Journalist/Author Nicholas Shaxson whose book Treasure Islands served as the main source for the film.

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A defining moment for the US sanctions regime

Each year, the USA finds a new country or group of countries to target with sanctions. Each year the USA adds about 1,000 individuals to its ever longer sanctions list. Now, US sanctions are coming to a turning point.

Up till now, the EU – representing around the same percentage of the world economy as the USA – was sitting put, as the USA grew its sanctions regime to ever more bizarre proportions. Together, the USA and the EU constituted nearly half of the world’s economy, and US sanctions previously “only” used to target the other half of the world’s economies. Hitherto, the EU had no compelling reasons to strain its relations with the USA because US sanctions do not affect them.

But now, “secondary sanctions” regarding Iran also hit hard at strategic EU companies and financial institutions and negatively affect EU global strategic interests in energy from the Persian Gulf, US sanctions in effect attack the liberty, security and sovereignty of its biggest group of friends, the EU.

Thus, we have now come to a defining moment for the global sanctions regime, run by the USA.

The US economy is already less than a quarter of the world’s GDP in USD dollars, and in 2023 it will fall to only just about one fifth of the world (source: IMF). The non-US part, the 4 fifths of the world economy (now including the EU and China, constitute an increasingly advanced group, and they are about to collude against the US sanctions regime. Collusion is the result of parallel interests, and the EU may not actually (or at least publicly) coordinate all its counter-sanctions with other major power centers.

We talk about the world’s most powerful and complex political-economic structures starting to fundamental change, here.

So we need to analyze the bigger picture, how complete systems of counter-strategies against present and possible future US sanctions are being planned and implemented by strong powers around the world – all directed (but maybe only sometimes coordinated) against the USA. These systems of counter-strategies will include, but not be limited to, the following:

Finance

Payment transfer streams will develop to avoid US banks – hurting the global position of the USA’s major “growth-industry”. It will be a chance (as well as a good excuse) for the EU, China, Japan, India and everybody else, to nationalistically promote THEIR banks in the international system at the expense of US banks.

Looking at the long-term trend, the US financial industry has become really the ONLY big growth industry which drives upwards the USA economy. No other sector in the US economy has the combination of size and growth, that finance has (weapons are a bit the same, but finance is unique in size) – so this will be very hard for the USA.

US banks hitherto have a central role in facilitating all global money transfers, and a lot of international money transfers between third-countries somehow technically go via the USA. This system architecture will now be stopped – not just by China, but also by the EU and probably by India.

Everybody outside the USA will be reluctant to let their money be touched by US financial institutions, or let their money touch US shores even for a milli-second. And of course, the EU and China know how to engineer legal and technical solutions for this.

The growth of US credit card systems will be impeded. Instead cards from China & EU (and India?) will take bigger shares of this profitable and fast growing world market. Russia was the first country on this trend, kicking out all US credit card companies, and inviting in the Chinese credit card system. The EU may well strengthen the role of EU credit cards, and create actions which “incidentally” (oops!?) will hurt US credit cards in EU markets. The finance center of London, UK will after Brexit be caught in this cross-fire between the EU and the USA – if the UK sides with the USA against EU counter-sanction initiatives, the EU may develop strong tools to draw UK credit-card business into EU-jurisdiction.

New global IT money transfer system regimes, which counteract US influence on SWIFT, will erode US political influence. The SWIFT system is based in Brussels, but under heavy US political influence. Russia has already built itself an alternative to that. The EU can no longer accept that the US might be able hurt EU companies on their SWIFT transfers. The EU will therefore have to take actions either to liberate SWIFT from US control, or to create a parallel EU-system.

Avoid Wall Street

Why should countries take up loans in the US, if they can have the same loans without risk of future sanctions from China or even the EU?

The IPO of the Saudi ARAMCO oil company has been stalled – unconfirmed information states that fear of US courts reaching out against Saudi assets after 11 September, is part of the reason. Already, the trend is that the biggest IPOs in the world move to Asia.

De-dollarization

The EU now will shift trade of energy from dollars to Euro – this trend will diminish dollars in other international trade. Trillions of international dollars from trade may come back to the USA – risking inflation and economic crisis. Gold is according to unconfirmed reports being speedily bought up by governments, not only by Russia and China, but even Turkey, recently also hit by US sanctions.

Strategic supply

Airbus cannot deliver airplanes to Iran, because among other things, vital parts are sourced in the USA. This will change. Strategic supply chains will morph to avoid US sub-suppliers, carriers (ships, airplanes, IT), technology, service partners etc – fundamentally hurting the US global position. We are not speaking used-cars, here, we speak strategic business sectors. The EU and China may not state this anti-US sourcing publicly as an official policy, they will just pull the strings to do it VERY effectively in strategic sectors.

Also, US deliveries in other strategic sectors like food (grain and soy from US farmers) and US energy will be affected by counter-sanctions. China sheds US soybeans and pushes their price down – the EU (less dependent hereof) may then use picking-up cheap surplus soybeans from the USA as a bargaining card. The idea of larger US delivery of LNG to the EU probably will be mostly words, but the amounts of LNG from the USA to the EU may possibly only increase marginally. The EU may even come to a cold calculation, that the EU in the gas sector might have a more maneuverable partner with Russia than with the USA. The EU has in several aspects a substantially advantageous size-relation towards Russia, and not towards the USA, and while Russia enjoys a good relationship with China, Russia will like to balance its relations too.

Tourism and education

Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, and the USA sells its cultural influence to all tourists coming. University education is not only a strategic business to finance national research, universities are also a cornerstone for the USA to influence future management generations around the world. Why not send tourists and students to other places than the USA? Chinese tourists and students are of significant importance to the USA, and China has plenty of other destinations to send tourists and students other than to the USA.

Using the state to shield business

As a counter-sanction, the EU now moves central banks and state-owned companies into the fray as financing, business partners and intermediate partners, when dealing with Iran. US sanctions on EU state-owned entities can then amount to a US declaration of (economic) war, not only against EU private entities, but directly against EU states.

Buying other than US weapons

The EU recently is implementing a grand and ambitious strategy to increase its own weapons-industry – independent of the USA. To increase the strength of EU weapons-makers, the EU will need to minimize imports of US weapons. The EU will have to make their own, only importing as few items as possible from the USA. Saudi Arabia is by far one of the world’s biggest arms purchasers – and nearly all is bought form the USA. However, should the bromance between the leaderships of Saudi Arabia and the USA cool down, Saudi Arabia would be well advised to diversify their weapons sources too. And Saudi Arabia even already has Eurofighters from the EU and embryonic arms-relations with Russia and to build on.

The collusion against the USA

US trade war unites the EU, China, India, the rest of the world (even the UK) against US interests. With aggressive, unilateral trade-war, started by the US, all the rest of the world will now have even more motives to coordinate their counter-strategies to the US sanctions regime.

The EU may seem slow to react – and this may lure US politicians in their hubris to believe that the EU cannot or will not. But believe me, the EU will – because this has become a strategic must. The EU has seen the hand-writing of US sanctions on their wall – they will think this through, plan and make deep preparations to create EU sovereignty from US control. Just read between the lines of EU’s Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s recent State of the Union speech. When the EU rolls out their US counter-sanction measures, it will be big, comprehensive and VERY effective.

Negative changes for the USA will last

Once alternative systems to US banks, finance, the US dollars etc. have developed and matured, they will NOT go away.

The USA is in its hubris about to destroy its global claim for economic hegemony – and that is a good thing.

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Karsten Riise is Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from University of Copenhagen. Former senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden with a responsibility of US Dollars 1 billion. At time of appointment, the youngest and the first non-German in that top-position within Mercedes-Benz’ worldwide sales organization.

The Russian Defense Ministry may have finally unveiled the “smoking gun” able to solve the mystery surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, shot down on July 17, 2014 over the Donetsk Oblast, a province in eastern Ukraine.

The MH17 crash killed 283 passengers from 10 different countries and 15 crew members. A Joint Investigation Team (JIT) from Malaysia, the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine – but not Russia – seemed to reach a controversial verdict: Moscow did it.

Well, not really, according to a detailed presentation by Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov and Lt. Gen. Nikolai Parshin, head of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate.

“Once we had the nozzle and engine numbers, we were able to find out the missile’s number.”

So now we know, via declassified files, that the engine of the missile 9D131 allegedly had the serial number 8869032. And a “passport” for the nozzle cluster 9D13105000 carried the number 8-30-113. The actual missile number was 886847349, they said.

The Defense Ministry established that numbers for the components of the 9M38 missile and the number of units noted in the technical documentation stored at the Dolgoprudny Research and Production Enterprise, outside Moscow, are the same.

So, they were able to establish that the missile was made in Dolgoprudny in 1986 and that it was delivered by rail on December 29, 1986 to military unit 20152 deployed to Ukraine – and never returned to Russia.

According to Parshin, this Ukrainian military unit is now called the 223rd anti-aircraft defense regiment of the Ukrainian armed forces, was renamed by a decree from the Ukraine presidential office.

“Currently, this unit is located in the city of Stryi in the Lviv region, [and] they still have the Buk systems. It is noteworthy that units of the 223 regiment have, since 2014, repeatedly been involved in the so-called anti-terror operation in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.”

All documents for the Buk missile system are still stored in Dolgoprudny, and the JIT will be able to examine them. Moscow has already sent the new information to the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, Russian Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko also challenged video footage used by Bellingcat, a UK-based citizen journalist group, allegedly proving that a self-propelled firing system of the Russian 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade was involved in the downing of MH17.

A political football of immense proportions

There’s more – and it does not look good for Kiev. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Konashenkov said:

“We have an audio recording of telephone conversations of Ukrainian servicemen made in 2016. An analysis of its content confirms earlier made conclusions about the direct involvement of the Ukrainian side in the crash of the Malaysian Boeing.”

The voice on the intercepted audio allegedly comes from Ukrainian Armed Forces Col. Ruslan Grinchak, in Odessa, during an exercise called Rubezh-2016. Grinchak was part of a brigade responsible for radar control. His unit actually tracked the MH17 flight in 2014.

Discussing the risk of flying through restricted airspace, Grinchak says that unless restrictions are followed “We’ll f***ing f**k up another Malaysian Boeing.“ What he said was actually published by Ukrainian media outlets.

Konashenkov stressed that Kiev provided no radar data whatsoever to Dutch investigators. He also said that all documents from the Ukrainian unit which received the Buk missile back in 1986 should be more than relevant for the investigation. Or Kiev could simply say they have been destroyed.

The ball is now in the JIT court. Moscow has always insisted, in detail, that the investigation has been biased from the start. It never obtained any key evidence from Kiev, relied on sources such as Bellingcat, and totally ignored evidence provided by Russia.

This is a political football of immense proportions – at the heart of the Maidan coup and subsequent, relentless demonization of Russia. But in terms of the human tragedy, the thing that really matters is to establish incontrovertible MH17 facts.

In a statement, the Joint Investigation Team seems to admit as much:

“The JIT has taken note of the information that has been publicly presented by the authorities of the Russian Federation for the first time today … The JIT will meticulously study the materials presented today as soon as the Russian Federation makes the relevant documents available to the JIT as requested in May 2018 and required by UNSC resolution 2166.”

So, will Kiev agree to investigate itself?

New information ‘to be assessed’

Meanwhile, the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team said on Monday it had requested information on serial numbers on missile components in May 2018, AFP reported.

“The JIT will carefully study the information brought out by the Russian Federation” once the documents are made available, it said in a statement. It added that some information previously provided publicly by Russia such as the alleged presence of a Ukrainian jet near the airliner on radar images “was actually incorrect”.

Also on Monday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree not to extend an official friendship agreement with Russia.

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The flexibility of English, and thriving sign that it is not a dead language, permits repeated atrocities to be committed in the name of new terms.  We are told that what is new is supposedly good, a sign of evolution. More accurately, such terms simply describe an old phenomenon, giving the false impression that the novel has appeared before the old. 

The term “deplatforming” is de rigueur at the moment, a creature of the social media age and lecture circuit.  Invitations to writers’ festivals can be withdrawn at a moment’s notice because the invitee has either not observed the current fashion, or has done something distinctly against it.  Users of social media have their carpet, or platform, as it were, taken from under them.  

The star recipient of that treatment was Alex Jones, who has found himself, and his Infowars, expelled beyond the city gates of social media babble. Social media giants, pressured by the very individuals who believe that free speech is vital oxygen to the body politic, have taken it upon themselves to police expression.

“It’s implausible to imagine a future,” observed a bleak David Harsanyi, “in which liberal activists don’t demand that Republican groups be de-platformed.”

A creature of argumentation and debate very different to Jones is Germaine Greer, a permanent voice of insurrection whose The Female Eunuch still retains, even after a half-century, the sense of being both iconoclastic and holy.  When your book becomes a household weapon of feminist liberation, an item to be found on reading lists to perturb, you know you have made it.  While she has never quite emulated the initial triumph of that deliciously confronting text, she has always managed to take stage and floor, to back into the limelight.  Her enemies are many, and there are as many amongst the fractious sisterhood as they are outside it. Having never been a full card carrying ideologue, Greer has never, thankfully, belonged. 

On the ABC’s Q&A program, Greer was again found showing how her opinions and essays can still strike appropriate chords, ruffle the occasional, fixed feather and disrupt the nonchalant with a discomforting start.  On this occasion, it was rape, that tool of power, appropriation and control that has preoccupied analysts of sexuality since cognition was discovered.   Greer’s reaction was hardly surprising, a no-nonsense slap down on how victimhood should be treated. 

“Trauma is something that is dictated really by the sufferer.  You know, I can’t bear huntsman spiders.  It is not their fault. It’s my fault… I decided to be frightened of them.” 

The program merely saw a reiteration of Greer’s views outlined in her latest essay On Rape, which does not disparage victims but provides a trenchant critique of the justice system that reduces such victims to the minutiae of “evidence”. 

“Rape,” she contends, “is a jagged outcrop in the vast monotonous landscape of bad sex; we can only understand its prevalence and our inability to deal with it if we position it correctly within the psychopathology of daily life.”   

It is “banal rape” that poses the greatest problem, wrapped, as it were, in the dilemmas of the incommunicable, the gulf between sexual participants.  To that end, and here, Greer supplies the kindling for her critics, a different sentencing regime is required, one that focuses on convicting “on the assault charges while leaving the rape issue moot”. 

It is such views that have seen Greer disinvited to the Brisbane Writers’ festival, a move which has been couched in the lingo of organisational guff.  Melbourne University Press publisher Louise Adler was far from impressed by the decision of the organisers, claiming that it “seems counter to the ethos of freedom of speech”.   

The response from the festival was resoundingly cowardly:

“Brisbane writers’ festival does not shy away from controversy or challenging ideas, but as all festival organisers know, it’s invariably difficult to choose between the many authors currently promoting books and the need to provide engaging choices for our audience along a curatorial theme.”

There will always be fashions and tyrannies of thought, attempts to close off argumentation if not ignore it altogether.  Liz Duck-Chong reflects this tendency, and finds it necessary to preface any views with the identity descriptor “trans” (because identities are mysterious, self-justifying ideas rather than markers). Having accepted with a heavy reluctance that there is a “market place of ideas”, she proceeds to dictate, akin to a book banning commissar, what constitutes that market.  “Greer and her ilk” are not “worth listening to” and have nothing to add to the “on going conversation”.  Talk about tolerance is “tired”, an old excuse best left by the wayside.  What such opinions do is remind us that the oldest of ideas, intolerance, remains ever threatening, the censor, a dangerous reality.  The market place is enjoyable, till you encounter ideas you do not like. 

It is important to note that Australia had, at one point, a censorship record of such astounding ferocity it rivalled that of Ireland.  Books of interest were not published for fear of stirring scurrilous thoughts or fostering wayward behaviour.  Banning as an instinct of paternal control came first.  To remove Greer, a well read, tutored figure strides ahead of many of her critics, is to deny audiences not merely an intellectual draught of consequence but a poking sense of fun.  Disliking her ideas is hardly an excuse to avoid entertaining them.   

As for Greer herself, some humour prevails.

“The Brisbane writers’ festival is very hard work.  So, to be uninvited to what is possibly the dreariest literary festival in the world, with zero hospitality and no fun at all, is a great relief.” 

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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. Email: [email protected] 

“Corporations should not be involved in any aspect of the democratic process. They should not be involved in education at any level. They should not be involved in health care. They should not be involved in the administration of social services. They should not be involved in the administration of justice. WHY? Because they are incapable of understanding and conforming to higher human aspirations and needs. Better to leave these areas to government, and to non-profit organizations, both of which are administered by humans in the human interest…The corporation is sociopathic in its disregard for human goals and values; in fact its behavior fits the World Health Organization’s criteria for defining the psychopath.” – Wade Rowland, author of Greed, Inc. Why Corporations Rule the World. (Roland’s book was written 5 years before the 2010 US Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling that gave greedy, super-wealthy, sociopathic corporations the same rights as normal citizens with regard to spending unlimited amounts of money on election campaigns.)

I have a heavily-underlined book in my library that was written in 1995 by David C. Korten. It was titled “When Corporations Rule the World”. Around the time that the book was published, I was a small-town family practitioner still trying mightily to follow the Hippocratic Oath, which I took back in 1968. I was also still trying to honor my patient’s inalienable right to be fully informed about the risks and benefits of any drug I was considering prescribing before he or she consented to the prescription. It was time-consuming to follow those ethical principles.

Korten followed up with a sequel in 1999. He titled that book “The Post-Corporate World”. Here is an excerpt from page 7 of the sequel that nicely summarizes what he was warning his readers about:

“’When Corporations Rule the World’ told the new story as I had come to understand it: 

“Our relentless pursuit of economic growth is accelerating the break-down of the planet’s life support systems, intensifying resource competition, widening the gap between rich and poor, and undermining the values and relationships of family and community. The growing concentration of power in global corporations and financial institutions is stripping governments – democratic and otherwise – of their ability to set economic, social, and environmental priorities in the larger common interest. 

“Driven by a single-minded dedication to generating ever greater profits for the benefit of their investors, global corporations and financial institutions have turned their economic power into political power. They now dominate the decision processes of governments and are rewriting the rules of world commerce through international trade and investment agreements to allow themselves to expand their profits without regard to the social and environmental consequences borne by the larger society. Continuing with business as usual will almost certainly lead to economic, social, and environmental collapse.

“To a considerable extent the problem originates with the United States. Its representatives are the primary marketeers of the false promises of consumerism and the foremost advocates of the market deregulation, free trade, and privatization policies that are advancing the global consolidation of corporate power and the corresponding corruption of democratic institutions. 

“Resolving the crisis depends on civil societies, mobilizing to reclaim the power that corporations and global financial markets have usurped. Our best hope for the future lies with locally owned and managed economies that rely predominantly on local resources to meet the livelihood needs of their members in ways that maintain a balance with the earth. Such a shift in institutional structures and priorities may open the way to eliminating deprivation and extreme inequality from the human experience. Instituting true citizen democracy and releasing presently unrealized potential for individual and collective growth and creativity.”

In 2005, Wade Rowland wrote a book titled “Greed, Inc. why Corporations Rule our World.” Other similarly-themed books on my library shelves that warned about the evils of global capitalism include Antony Sutton’s “Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler” (1976) and William Greider’s “Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy” (1992).

I am saddened to admit that I was so late in understanding that what these authors were warning their readers about in their books, and that is this: the evils of global capitalism also applies also to the medical, psychiatric, pediatric, family practice, pharmaceutical, vaccine, medical device industries, etc, each of which once was physician-controlled and therefore altruistically adhered to the “first do no harm” oath – the Hippocratic Oath pledge that all physicians take when they graduate from medical school. Times have changed – and not for the betterment of either our profession or our patients.

Three decades into my practice of medicine (about the time that Korten wrote his book), I painfully experienced the hostile takeover of my small, independently-owned and operated rural family practice clinic in Pine River, Minnesota. The takeover was orchestrated by a new corporate entity called Essentia Health, a branch of which was located in Brainerd, MN, a larger community 30 miles south of my clinic where the area hospital was located. Essentia was later to become a medical corporate power-house based in Duluth, with scores of profit-making locations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and even Idaho.

At the time of the takeover, I was still trying hard to honor the Hippocratic Oath and the Principle of Informed Consent, but my business manager was always complaining about how I spent “too much time” with my patients. (And my family was understandably complaining about how I spent too much time after hours at the clinic finishing up my charting.) My patients didn’t complain however, and that was what counted to me. I chose to leave that practice before Essentia took control over the clinic. I don’t think that I would have tolerated working for Essentia for very long. 

Essentia is probably no different in its corporate structure than any other giant, for-profit medical corporation. Essentia’s website says:

“Essentia Health is an integrated health system serving patients in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Idaho.

“Headquartered in Duluth, Minnesota, Essentia Health combines the strengths and talents of 14,700 employees, including more than 1,900 physicians and advanced practitioners, who serve our patients and communities through the mission of being called to make a healthy difference in people’s lives.

“Essentia Health, which includes many Catholic facilities, is guided by the values of Quality, Hospitality, Respect, Joy, Justice, Stewardship, and Teamwork. The organization lives out its mission by having a patient-centered focus at 15 hospitals, 74 clinics, six long-term care facilities, three assisted living facilities, three independent living facilities, five ambulance services and one research institute.”

It hadn’t been many years after my graduation from the University of Minnesota Medical School that I became uncomfortable with the politics of the American Medical Association and even my Minnesota Academy of Family Practice, which – despite their flowery proclamations of being highly ethical organizations where the patient came first – I later came to understand were mainly lobbying groups for whatever legislation or new technology was considered profitable for the industry.

But it took me awhile before I became aware of how much Big Pharma corporations were in control of the medical profession. I guess my first clue was the prevalence of the salesmen and saleswomen (we called them “drug reps”) from every conceivable pharmaceutical or medical device company that was targeting me to prescribe their latest, patent-protected and therefore most expensive drug or product. 

The drug reps always managed to act very friendly – as do all successful salespersons – to all the clinic staff members. The reps were always well-dressed, attractive (especially the women) and always came bearing gifts of food and free drug samples of their products – as an incentive for me to hand out their samples to some of my patients who would then be expected to come back for a follow-up office visit and a potential prescription for life that the patient would hopefully (for the drug company) be perpetually refilling. I later tumbled to the fact that the drug rep would be getting a cut of the profits for as long as the patient continued to take the drug, which explained the enthusiasm of the reps. The best drug reps made better money than most of the physician-targets that they were seducing to prescribe their corporation’s drugs. Of course, the CEO’s were making tens of millions of dollars off the same sales, and I was contributing to their schemes.

The drug rep would also often leave me with official-looking medical journal articles that supposedly provided “evidence” of the wonders of the new drug. Of course, I rarely had the time to actually read these reprint hand-outs with any thoroughness or skepticism. It was only much later that I discovered that many of these articles were ghost-written aby paid writers from Big Pharma and/or published in obscure journals that were often illegitimate or even non-existent. 

I could tell a hundred similar stories about cunning of the huge multinational medical/pharmaceutical/vaccine “Corporations that Rule the Healthcare World” that would explain why I have lost any pride that I once had in my once honorable profession and now am embarrassed by my profession’s gradual acquiescence to greedy global corporations that meet the definition of sociopathic entities. Being sociopathic, the spokespersons for Big Pharma and Big Vaccine can’t help being serial liars when they try to sell physicians on the so-called “benefits” of their unaffordable patented and over-prescribed products that are so heavily advertised on TV that patients come in demanding to have the newest relatively untested drug or vaccine or other product prescribed for them – as long as the don’t have to pay for it out of pocket.

The Big Pharma propaganda campaigns are much more potent today than in the days before my retirement a decade ago. At least back then there were no drugs (oral or injectable) that cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. Now there are dozens and dozens of drugs that can cost $60,000 to $120,000 per year! Even wealthy patients would refuse to pay out of pocket for such drugs, so insurance companies are being forced to raise premium rates dramatically. And the sociopaths in Big Pharma and Big Vaccine feel no guilt. It is just the way business is done.

What pains me the most is witnessing the huge influence that the massive propaganda campaigns have over both the prescribers of the risky drugs and vaccines and the patients of those prescribers, despite the huge amount of valid scientific information that is never advertised or even written about in the mainstream media, which is addicted to the huge sums of money from Big Pharma and Big Vaccine.

The immense amount of financial power that the soulless pharmaceutical and vaccine corporations have has been overwhelming, thanks to the huge advertising budgets and the reality of the thousands of non-scientist medical journalists who write about what the corporation feed to them. 

Giving short shrift to the informed consent principle is legal nowadays, for there is another principle called the “Community Standard of Care” which is a legal principle that has nothing to do with medical ethics. I don’t recall being taught about it when I went to med school. Below is one definition of “standard of care” that I found on the internet: 

“In legal terms, (standard of care is) the level at which the average, prudent medical provider in a given community would practice. It is how similarly qualified practitioners would have managed the patient’s care under the same or similar circumstances. The medical malpractice plaintiff must establish the appropriate standard of care and demonstrate that the standard of care has been breached.”

In other words, the standard of care in one community could be considered malpractice in another community depending on what is considered normal or average. So an injured patient-victim of malpractice in one community couldn’t sue for malpractice if the “guilty” physician was practicing in a way that was considered normal or average in that community.

Corrupt capitalist principles – including the need for the individual physician to be highly “efficient” and “profitable” and “quick” has gradually taken over the once honorable practice of medicine. Fulfilling the Fully Informed Consent principle is too time-consuming to be fulfilled when there are dozens of potential adverse effects from every drug or vaccine that should be explained in detail to the patient. Those adverse effects include immediate reactions; delayed reactions (which are often not recognized [and even illogically and diabolically denied] by the physician); permanent disability; and even death. 

No physician that is employed by a large healthcare corporation is allowed the valuable time to explain to the patient about the many potential adverse events, so physicians and nurses have been told by their corporate rulers to just mention a handful of the problems. Giving short shrift to fully informing patients of side effects and then obtaining informed consent (signed or unsigned) from the patient has now evolved into what is a new standard of care in most communities. 

Essentially all Big Healthcare, Big Pharmaceutical and Big Vaccine Corporations are now managed by non-physicians who have Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degrees.

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Following are a number of quotes that refer to the ethical problems and even the criminal activities of medical-related corporations that have taken control over what once were ethical endeavors. 

Let the prescriber and the patients of the prescribers beware.

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“The corporation is a true Frankenstein’s monster – an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self…representing capitalism at its very purest, completely unconcerned with anything save profit and power.” – William Dugger, author of Corporate Hegemony. 

“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical (and vaccine) industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”  – Arnold Seymour Relman, MD (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

“The case against (corporate) science is straightforward: much of the scientific (and medical) literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” – Richard Horton, MD, Editor-in-chief of the highly esteemed British medical journal the Lancet

“Industry-controlled ‘science’ is not really science but a smokescreen to pave the way for products that may be harmful – but what do they care as long as they profit? There are many great scientists but there are also some who are willing to be hired to ‘prove’ that something doesn’t cause cancer, or that something is ‘safe’. You cannot trust the EPA, the FDA, or industry science.” – Blogger

 “The only time the “cure” word is used anymore is by corporate research organizations (and patient advocacy groups) when they solicit funds from the public during their annual charity drives or their ‘walks for the cure’. Clearly all of the financial incentives are to mount a never-ending, unsuccessful search for the cure without ever actually finding it.” – quote from www.healingmatters.com

“The transcripts of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) meetings also show that some of the Committee members had extensive ties to pharmaceutical companies and that the JCVI frequently co-operated with vaccine manufacturers on the strategies aimed at boosting vaccine uptake. Some of the meetings at which such controversial items were discussed were not intended to be publicly available, as the transcripts were only released later, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These particular meetings are denoted in the transcripts as “commercial in confidence,” and reveal a clear and disturbing lack of transparency, as some of the information was removed from the text (i.e., the names of the participants) prior to transcript release under the FOI section at the JCVI website.” – Lucija Tomljenovic, PhD

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).” — Dr Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of the NEJM

“So-called ‘vaccinologists’ are so blinded by their obsession with forcing vaccines on society that they never even considered that there might be factors involved that could greatly affect human health…’vaccinologists’ like to think in concrete terms-that is, they are very narrow in their thinking and wear blinders that prevent them from seeing the numerous problems occurring with large numbers of vaccinations in infants and children. Their goal in life is to vaccinate as many people as possible with an ever-growing number of vaccines.” — Russell Blaylock, MD

“For two years, I have worked with a team of doctors and respected scientific researchers to assemble every published study on Thimerosal, the mercury-based vaccine preservative still present in dangerous concentrations in US flu vaccines and pediatric vaccines worldwide. We have assembled and digested close to five hundred peer reviewed published pharmacological, toxicological, clinical, animal and human epidemiological studies in leading publications. These studies overwhelmingly implicate Thimerosal in a host of neurological injuries including ADD, ADHD, Speech delay, Language Delay, Tics, Misery Disorder and Autism.” – Robert F. Kennedy, JR

“The FDA is there to serve the drug industry. It is NOT there to serve the public.” – Dr. David Graham, Senior Official in the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety (2005)

“You are not going to solve the contagious disease problem of immunocompromised children who are growing up in awful conditions by subjecting them to a barrage of vaccines…the first thing that must be done – before over-vaccinating them – is to provide hygienically controlled living conditions, fresh water, sanitation, good nutrition, etc.” – John D. Stone (parent of a vaccine-injured child)

“Of course the biggest problem with Andy Wakefield was that he actually listened carefully to the parents of his vaccine-injured patients, believed them, took thorough medical histories, did appropriate tests and made accurate diagnoses… where would the practice of medicine wind up if all physicians did that?” – John D. Stone

 “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been “taken”. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan, author of “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”

 “Mercury at one month of age is not the same as mercury at three months, at 12 months, prenatal mercury, later mercury. There is a whole range of plausible outcomes from mercury.” When asked about the risk of aluminum adjuvant toxicity, Verstraeten stated: “the results were almost identical to ethylmercury.” – Dr Tom Verstraeten, senior CDC epidemiologist

“It should be of concern that the effect of routine vaccinations on all-cause mortality was not tested in randomized trials. All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children (from other causes) than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Though a vaccine may protect children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.” — Dr. Peter Aaby

“In the field of chemical toxicology it is universally recognized that combinations of toxins may bring exponential increases of toxicity; ie, a combination of two chemicals may bring a 10-fold increase in toxicity, three chemicals 100-fold increases. This same principle almost certainly applies to the immunosuppressive effects of viral vaccines when administered in combination, as with the MMR vaccine, among which the measles vaccine is (known to be) exceptionally immunosuppresive.” – Harold Buttram, MD 

“Prior to the mercury phase-out (pre-2000), babies received 3,925 micrograms (mcg) of aluminum in their first year-and-a-half of life. After pneumococcal and hepatitis A vaccines were added to the immunization schedule, babies began receiving 4,925 mcg of aluminum during the same age period—a 25% increase. In 2011, CDC recommended that pregnant women receive a pertussis vaccine (Tdap), which also contains aluminum. Studies show that aluminum crosses the placenta and accumulates in fetal tissue. Thus, millions of babies in utero, infants, and young children were injected with, and continue to receive, unnaturally high doses of neurotoxic substances—mercury and aluminum—long after unsuspecting parents were led to believe that vaccines were purified and made safe.” – Neil Z. Miller

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell

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Dr Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic mental health care for the last decade of his career. In his practice he often dealt with the horrific psychological consequences of veterans (and civilians) who had suffered psychological, neurological and/or spiritual trauma during incidents of violence (including basic training and combat).

US military veteran and congresswomen for Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard, has slammed US foreign policy in Syria.

Arming al-Qaeda

On the 13th of September, Gabbard told [23:06] comedian and satirist Jimmy Dore:

“Since 2011 both overtly and covertly, the United States has been providing arms, intelligence, and equipment to fighters who are allied with, fighting along side, working with, al Qaeda in this regime change war.

So these very same terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. We’ve been supporting for years, as this ground force to fight in this regime change war that we have been quietly waging now for seven years.”

These statements are strikingly up front, given the fact that these policies began under Democratic Party President Barack Obama.

On the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Gabbard also criticised Trump’s opposition the Syrian government’s plans to retake Idlib, by way of tweet:

While President Trump & VP Pence give 9/11 speeches about how much they care about the victims of al-Qaeda’s attack on our country, they are simultaneously acting as protectors of AQ in Syria/Idlib, threatening Russia and Syria that if they attack al-Qaeda, we will punish them.

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) September 11, 2018

It would be simplistic to see every anti-government rebel group in Syria as being ideologically identical.

But the earliest evidence, including from western establishment sources that support intervention in Syria, is that the dominant ideology among the majority of the armed opposition groups has long been fairly reactionary.

Supporting sectarianism and reactionary Islam

An US defense intelligence agency (DIA) report dated August 2012 put it bluntly [pdf, 3]:

“A. Internally, events are taking a clear sectarian direction

B. The Salafist (sic), the Muslim Brotherhood, and [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.

C. The West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey support the Opposition; While Russia, China and Iran support the Regime.”

Operation Timber Sycamore

The New York Times (NYT) reported, five years into the war, that the US had been arming and training Syrian rebels, in alliance with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia. Establishment economist and former member of the ‘Chicago Boys’ Jeffrey Sachs also noted this policy in an unusually candid discussion on MSNBC. Although the ‘paper of record’ implies that the US only started funneling weapons to rebels in 2013 (under a programme code-named Timber Sycamore) the evidence suggests otherwise.

Investigative journalist Gareth Porter revealed last year how the same 2012 DIA report shows that the US funneled large amounts of weapons, with incredibly destructive potential, into Syria via Libya as early as October 2011.

Porter describes how the CIA facilitated at least:

“2,750 tons of arms bound ultimately for Syria from October 2011 through August 2012.”

Each container shipped included:

“500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo.”

Establishment way of thinking

Alexander Decina also penned a very informative article on this subject in 2017. Decina, who is a Research Associate with The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) argued that policymakers should stop searching for so called ‘moderate rebels’. The role of the CFR in shaping US policy is difficult to overstate.

Presidential candidate and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton once told the CFR:

“[I]t’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department.

We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”

With friends like these

Decina  writes:

“U.S.-backed and ostensibly moderate groups have even turned their fire on U.S. personnel. In late August, weeks after Free Syrian Army units first fired on U.S. patrols north of Manbij, U.S. troops finally fired back. One of the groups allegedly involved in the latest incident, the Sultan Murad Division, had received U.S. TOW missiles as late as February 2016.

Beyond these problematic U.S.-armed groups, a number of others that Washington has refrained from arming yet declined to blacklist—thus leaving open the door for Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia to support them—are even more troublesome. These have included Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam, and others that have fought al-Qaeda at times, most notably this past July, but have also cooperated closely and formed robust umbrella organizations with the transnational jihadist group. Despite insisting upon their moderate nature, these groups have certainly committed their own atrocities.”

and:

“Basing groups’ moderation on their waving the FSA flag, memorizing talking points about pluralism, and objecting to al-Qaeda has proven insufficient.”

Turkish backed FSA rebels celebrate in Afrin City centre after sacking it and driving out tens of thousands of residents (Source: author)

Mohamed Elmaazi obtained his LLB from SOAS and Masters in International and Comparative law from the American University in Cairo. He worked in human rights law for a number of years before shifting to journalism. He occasionally reports for The Real News Network and currently writes for Open Democracy and The Canary. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

An implementation of the demilitarized zone agreement in Idlib reached during face-to-face talks between Russian and Turkish presidents on September 17 has appeared to be not a simple task as it has been pointed out by many experts.

On September 18, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), the Islamic Turkistan Party, Jaish al-Izza and Hourras Addin refused to respect the agreement and to withdraw its forces and military equipment from the contact line.

On the same day, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu stated that work to establish a new security system in the Idlib de-escalation zone had started. He recalled that all heavy weapons have to be withdrawn from the demilitarized zone by October 10 and radical groups have to withdraw their forces by October 15.

So, Turkey and the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance have to force the militants to obey the agreement if they seek to enforce the demilitarized zone in time. Pro-militant media outlets have already started spreading speculations that Damascus will not act up to its part of the agreement thus creating a media environment to justify actions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) ambushed two groups of ISIS members in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert. Two ISIS members were killed and seven arrested as well as some weapons and six motorcycles were seized by government troops in the area 30 km southwest of Palmyra. Separately, the SAA arrested seven ISIS members and seized 10 motorcycles, 146 pieces of hashish and 14 bags of Captagon containing 10 thousand pills in the area of Froua 70km southeast of Palmyra.

The situation is developing over the downed Russian IL-20 during a September 17 Israeli strike on Syria. Following the attack Defense Minister Shoigu stated that Israel is the side bearing a full responsibility for the incident and added that Moscow reserves “the right to respond”. President Putin described the incident as a string of tragic circumstances. “As for retaliatory measures, they will be first and foremost aimed at additionally ensuring the security of our military personnel and facilities in Syria,” Putin stated.

The Israeli Defense Forces and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed their “regret” at the loss of the Russian lives. Nonetheless, the Israeli side claimed Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are the side responsible for this situation.

There are currently two versions of the shot down: Russia says that Israeli F-16 warplanes used the IL-20 plane as cover to hide from Syrian air defense fire. Israel claims that the IL-20 was shot down by indiscriminate fire from the Syrian Air Defense Forces and there were not Israeli warplanes in the area when the incident took place.

The situation is developing. However, it’s clear that the September 17 incident will further complicate the de-escalation in the region.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu officially stated that Israel bears full responsibility for the downning of Russian IL-20 plane off Syrian coast because its actions had led to this situation.

“The blame for the downing of the Russian plane and the deaths of its crew members lies squarely on the Israeli side,” Shoigu said during a convesation with Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman on the phone. “The actions of the Israeli military were not in keeping with the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership, so we reserve the right to respond.”

Earlier, the Russian Defense Ministry revealed that Israeli warplanes used the IL-20 to hide from Syrian air defense fire during the September 17 strike on targets in the war-torn country.

On September 4, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stated that over the last 1.5 years Israel has carried out around 200 airstrikes on Syria using 800 munitions. The scale of the strikes shows Israel’s long-standing intention to remain a powerbroker in the ongoing Syrian conflict. It’s interesting to note that in most of the cases, the IDF strikes led to a further escalation of the war thus making situation more complicated.

The situation is developing.

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Featured image is from TASS.

It appears that the Russians have pressed the pause button on their plans for an offensive alongside the Syrian government to retake Idlib. By the time they return to play mode the martial music may have changed.

New US policies for Syria

Without fanfare the US has just reformulated its position to create the conditions for it to launch devastating strikes on Syria no longer just on the pretext of alleged use of chemical weapons but on any ‘humanitarian’ pretext the US sees fit. In an interview with the Washington Post on 6 September, James Jeffrey, the hawkish new Special Envoy for Syria fresh from the neocon incubator of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, did not mince words:

“We’ve started using new language,” Jeffrey said, referring to previous warnings against the use of chemical weapons. Now, he said, the United States will not tolerate “an attack. Period.”

“Any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless escalation” he said. “You add to that, if you use chemical weapons, or create refu¬gee flows or attack innocent civilians.”

Jeffrey’s remarks were little noticed because he was that day announcing something else more immediately striking: a ‘new’ policy on Syria involving cancellation of Trump’s announced departure of US troops before the end of 2018 and instatement of a plan to stay on indefinitely until achievement of the twin goals of removing all trace of the Iranian presence in Syria and installation of a Syrian government which would meet US conditions – conditions which President Asad would by Jeffrey’s own admission not be likely to meet.

The headlines naturally focussed on this latest Washington folly – do they think Iran will up sticks as long as there is a single US soldier on Syrian soil, or that there is Syrian Mandela waiting in the wings? – and the importance of the remarks about Idlib was missed. Yet those words may be about to bring the world to the brink of global war.

New doctrine for US intervention

What Jeffreys was saying was quite clear. That with or without alleged use of chemical weapons, a sudden exodus of frightened civilians from a part of Idlib, use of the fabled ‘barrel bombs’, or launch of a major offensive will be taken by the US as a trigger for drastic and probably sustained bombing aimed at bringing the government of Syria to its knees.

Until now successive US administrations have been careful to draw the red line for intervention in Syria at use of chemical weapons, presumably on the grounds that there is universal agreement and international law to the effect that use of prohibited weapons is taboo. WMD after all were the casus belli for Iraq, even if it turned out to be false. Now suddenly we have a new, broader and consequently more dangerous doctrine.

The State Department has not yet favoured the American public, Congress or anyone else with an explanation or justification for the change, but we can speculate. Can it be, for example, that US policy makers realise that when the next alleged use of chemical weapons occurs in Syria, as surely it will, it will be more difficult to sell intervention to the public than the first two times because the game has now been rumbled? Not only has the idea that the White Helmets might not be all they seem entered the bloodstream of media discourse, but the OPCW inspectors, able for once after Douma actually to visit a crime site, failed to find any proof of use of prohibited weapons. Add to that those pesky Russians unhelpfully telling the world exactly how and where the White Helmets were going to stage their next Oscar-winning performances. So why bother with all that rigmarole over chemical weapons when Western opinion is already sufficiently primed to accept any intervention whatever as long as it is somehow ‘humanitarian’ and doing down the evil Russians?

Responsibility to Protect

Step up ‘Responsibility to Protect’, the innocuous-sounding UN-approved doctrine beloved of interventionists of both Left and Right. Never mind that most legal scholars utterly reject the notion that this doctrine legalises armed aggression other than with Security Council approval or in self-defence. Was it not effectively invoked in the British government’s legal position statement provided at the time of the post-Douma strikes? (The US administration, knowing their audience, never bothered to provide any legal justification whatever.)

Slight snag: although the British government have preemptively sought with their legal statement to give themselves cover to commit acts of war on a whim, and without recourse to Parliament, as long as it can be dressed up as humanitarian, nevertheless there might be considerable disquiet in Parliament and possibly even among service chiefs were the government to appear to be about to launch strikes alongside the US had there not been even the appearance of a chemical weapons incident. For this reason it is likely that the British government will attempt to persuade the US not to give up just yet on chlorine.

Is it this new amplified threat – of strikes whether or not Asad obliges or appears to oblige with suicidal use of chlorine – which has given the Russians reasons to call off the dogs, pro tem at least? Probably not, because the Russians were taking it as read that fake chemical attacks were coming anyway. They will take note however that the US has just effectively lowered the bar on its own next heavy intervention in Syria and will not be deterred by any blowing of the gaff.

For those who naively but sincerely believed that if Asad laid off the chlorine he would not get bombed the world has suddenly become a lot more dangerous. For realists however the new doctrine merely removes a hypocrisy, or rather introduces an inflexion into the hypocrisy, whereby the itch felt by those salivating at the prospect of striking Syria, Russia and Iran can be masked as a humanitarian concern which goes beyond abhorrence of chemical weapons.

It’s the war from hell, the savage one that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with seven other Middle Eastern and North African states, have been waging in Yemen since March 2015, with fulsome support from the Pentagon and American weapons galore. It’s got everything. Dead children in the dozens, a never-ending air campaign that pays scant heed to civilians, famine, cholera, you name it. No wonder it’s facing mounting criticism in Congress and from human rights groups. Still, ever since President Donald Trump (like Barack Obama before him) embraced the Saudi-led coalition as this country’s righteous knight errant in the Middle East, the fight against impoverished Yemen’s Houthi rebels — who have, in turn, been typecast as Iran’s cats-paw — has only grown fiercer. Meanwhile, the al-Qaeda affiliate there continues to expand.

For years now, a relentless Saudi air campaign (quite literally fueled by the U.S. military) has hit endless civilian targets, using American smart bombs and missiles, without a peep of protest or complaint from Washington. Only a highly publicized, completely over-the-top slaughter recently forced the Pentagon to finally do a little mild finger wagging. On August 7th, an airstrike hit a school bus — with a laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin — in northern Yemen, killing 51 people, 40 of them schoolchildren. Seventy-nine others were wounded, including 56 children. Soon after, a U.N. Security Council-appointed group of experts issued a report detailing numerous other egregious attacks on Yemeni civilians, including people attending weddings and funerals. Perhaps the worst among them killed 137 people and wounded 695 others at a funeral in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, this April.

The attack on those schoolchildren and the U.N. report amplified a growing global outcry against the carnage in Yemen. In response, on August 28th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis let it be known that the Trump administration’s support for the Persian Gulf potentates’ military campaign should not be considered unreserved, that the Saudis and their allies must do “everything humanly possible to avoid any innocent loss of life.” Considering that they haven’t come close to meeting such a standard since the war started nearly five years ago and that the Trump administration clearly has no intention of reducing its support for the Saudis or their war, Mattis’s new yardstick amounted to a cruel joke — at the expense of Yemeni civilians.

The Statistics of Suffering

Some appalling numbers document the anguish Yemenis have endured. Saudi and Emirati warplanes officially have killed — and it’s considered a conservative estimate — 6,475 civilians and wounded more than 10,000 others since 2015. Targets struck have included farms, homes, marketplaces, hospitals, schools, and mosques, as well as ancient historic sites in Sana’a. And such incidents haven’t been one-off attacks. They have happened repeatedly.

By April 2018, the Saudi-led coalition had conducted 17,243 airstrikes across Yemen, hitting 386 farms, 212 schools, 183 markets, and 44 mosques. Such statistics make laughable the repeated claims of the Saudis and their allies that such “incidents” should be chalked up to understandable errors and that they take every reasonable precaution to protect innocents. Statistics compiled by the independent Yemen Data Project make it clear that the Gulf monarchs don’t lie awake at night lamenting the deaths of Yemeni civilians.

Saudi Arabia and its partners have accused the Houthis, the rebels with whom they have been in such a deadly struggle, of also attacking Yemeni civilians, a charge Human Rights Watch has validated. Yet such a they-do-it-too defense hardly excuses the relentless bombing of non-military sites by a coalition that has overwhelming superiority in firepower. Houthi crimes pale by comparison.

And when it comes to the destruction of civilian lives and livelihoods, believe it or not, that may be the least of it. Take the naval blockade of the country by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that cut the number of ships docking in the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeida from 129 between January and August 2014 to 21 in the same months of 2017. The result: far less food and medicine entered the country, creating a disaster for Yemenis.

That country, the Arab world’s poorest, has long relied on imports for a staggering 85% of its food, fuel, and medicine, so when prices soared, famine spread, while hunger and malnutrition skyrocketed. Nearly 18 million Yemenis now rely on emergency food aid to survive: that’s an unbelievable 80% of the population. According to the World Bank, “8.4 million more are on the brink of famine.” In December 2017, following a barrage of bad publicity, the Saudi-Emirati blockade was eased marginally, but it had already set in motion a spiral of death.

The blockade also contributed to a cholera epidemic, which the shortage of medicines only exacerbated. According to a World Health Organization report, between April 2017 and July 2018, there were more than 1.1 million cholera cases there. At least 2,310 people died from the disease, most of them children. It is believed to be the worst cholera outbreak since statistics began to be compiled in 1949. At 800,000 cases between 2010 and 2017, Haiti held the previous record, one that the Yemenis surpassed within half a year of the first cases appearing. The prime contributors to the epidemic: drinking water contaminated by rotting garbage (uncollected because of the war), devastated sewage systems, and water filtration plants that stopped running due to lack of fuel — all the result of the horrendous bombing campaign.

Wartime economic blockades starve and sicken civilians and soldiers alike and so amount to a war crime. The Saudi-Emirati claim that the blockade’s sole purpose is to stanch the flow of Iranian arms to the Houthis is nonsense, nor can it be considered a legitimate act of self-defense, even though it was instituted after the Houthis fired ballistic missiles at the airport in the Saudi capital and the residence of that country’s monarch. (Both were shot down by Saudi air defenses and were clear responses to coalition airstrikes on Houthi-held territory that killed 136 civilians.) By the standards of international humanitarian law or simply common sense, choking off Yemen’s imports was a disproportionate response, and clairvoyance wasn’t required to foresee the calamitous consequences to follow.

True to form, President Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, echoed Saudi charges that the Houthi missiles were Iranian-supplied Qiam-1s and condemned that country’s interference in Yemen. Given the scale of destruction by a foreign coalition using armaments and technical assistance provided by the United States (and Britain), her comments, in less grim circumstances, would have been laughable.

Those American-supplied weapons have included cluster munitions, which pose a particular hazard to civilians because, when dropped from a plane, their devastating bomblets often disperse over enormous areas. (Such bombs are banned under a 2008 treaty signed by 120 countries that neither Riyadh nor Washington has joined.) In May 2016, the Obama White House confirmed that it had stopped sending such weapons to Saudi Arabia, which then continued to use Brazilian-madevariants. However, other American arms have continued to flow to Saudi Arabia, while its warplanes rely on U.S. Air Force tankers for mid-air refueling (88 million pounds of fuel as of this January according to a Central Command spokeswoman), while the Saudi military has received regular intelligence information and targeting advice from the Pentagon since the war began. And with the advent of Donald Trump, such military involvement has only deepened: U.S. Special Operations forces are now on the Saudi-Yemen border, helping to find and attack Houthi redoubts.

In June 2018, ignoring U.S. opposition, the Saudi coalition heightened the risk to Yemeni civilians yet more by launching an offensive (“Golden Victory”) to capture the port of Hodeida. (So much for the Pentagon’s standard claim that supporting the war gives the U.S. influence over how it is waged and so limits civilian casualties.) Saudi and Emirati airpower and warships supported Emirati and Sudanese troops on the ground joined by allied Yemeni militias. The advance, however, quickly stalled in the face of Houthi resistance, though only after at least 50,000 families had fled Hodeida and basic services for the remaining 350,000 were disrupted, creating fears of a new outbreak of cholera.

The Roots of War

Yemen’s progression to its present state of perdition began as the Arab Spring’s gales swept through the Middle East in 2011, uprooting or shaking regimes from Tunisia to Syria. Street demonstrations grew against Yemen’s strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and only gathered strength as he attempted to quell them. In response, he allied ever more strongly with Saudi Arabia and the United States, alienating the Houthis, whose main bastion, the governate of Saada, abuts the Saudi border. Adherents of Zaydi Islam, the Houthis played a pivotal role in creating a political movement, Ansar Allah, in 1992 to assert the interests of their community against the country’s Sunni majority. In an effort to undercut them, the Saudis have long promoted radical Sunni religious leaders in Yemen’s north, while intermittently raiding Houthi territories.

As a Houthi rebellion began, Saleh tried to make himself an even more indispensable ally of Washington in its post-9/11 anti-terrorist campaigns, notably against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a growing local franchise of al-Qaeda. For good measure, he joined the Saudis in painting the Houthis little more than tools of an Iran that Washington and Riyadh both loathed. When those powers nonetheless came to see the Yemeni autocrat as a political liability, they helped oust him and transfer power to his deputy, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Such moves failed to calm the waters, as the country started to disintegrate and Saudi-U.S. efforts to consolidate the transition from Saleh to Hadi unraveled.

Meanwhile, regular American drone strikes against AQAP angered many Yemenis. In their eyes, not only did the attacks violate Yemen’s sovereignty, they intermittently killed civilians. Hadi’s praise for the drone campaign only discredited him further. AQAP’s power continued to grow, resentment in southern Yemen rose, and criminal gangs and warlords began to operate with impunity in its cities, highlighting the Hadi government’s ineffectuality. Neoliberal economic reforms only further enriched a clutch of families that had long controlled much of Yemen’s wealth, while the economic plight of most Yemenis worsened radically. The unemployment rate was nearly 14% in 2017 (and exceeded 25% for young people), while the poverty rate rose precipitously, as did inflation.

It was a formula for disaster and when Hadi proposed a plan to create a federal system for Yemen, the Houthis were infuriated. New boundaries would, among other things, have cut their homeland off from the Red Sea coast. So they gave up on his government and girded for battle. Soon, their forces were advancing southward. In September 2014, they captured the capital, Sana’a, and proclaimed a new national government. The following March, they occupied Aden in southern Yemen and Hadi, whose government had moved there, promptly fled across the border to Riyadh. The first Saudi airstrikes against Sana’a were launched in March 2015 and Yemen’s descent to hell began.

The American Role

The commonplace rendition of the war in Yemen pits a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition against the Houthis, cast as agents of Iran and evidence of its increasing influence in the Middle East. Combatting terrorism and countering Iran became the basis for Washington’s support of the Saudi-led war. Predictably, as this cartoonish portrayal of a complicated civil war gained ground in the mainstream American media and among Beltway pundits (as well, of course, as in the Pentagon and White House), inconvenient facts were shunted aside.

Still, all these years and all those dead later, it’s worth considering some of those facts. There are, for instance, significant differences between the Houthis’ Zaydi variant of Shia Islam and the Twelver Shiism dominant in Iran — and some similarities between Zaydis and Sunnis — which makes the ubiquitous claims about a Iran-Houthi faith-based pact shaky. Moreover, Iran did not jump into the fray during the violent 2004-2010 clashes between Saleh and the Houthis and did not have longstanding ties to them either. In addition, contrary to the prevailing view in Washington, Iran is unlikely to be their main source of weaponry and support. Sheer distance and the Saudi coalition’s naval blockade have made it next to impossible for Iran to supply arms to the Houthis in the volume alleged. Besides, having pillaged various military bases during their march toward Aden, the Houthis do not lack for weaponry. Iran’s influence in Yemen has undoubtedly increased since 2015, but reducing the intricacies of that country’s internal crisis to Iranian meddling and a Tehran-led Shiite bloc expanding from Syria to the Arabian Peninsula amounts to, at best, a massive oversimplification.

The obsession of Trump and his key advisers with Iran (a remarkable number of them are Iranophobes) and The Donald’s obsession with plugging American arms makers and hawking their wares helps explain their embrace of the House of Saud and continuing support for its never-ending assault on Yemen. (Jared Kushner’s bromance with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman undoubtedly played a part as well.) None of that, however, explains the full-scale American backing for the Saudi-led intervention there in the Obama years. Even as his administration denounced Bashar al-Assad’s slaughter of Syrian civilians, his officials seemed unmoved by the suffering war was inflicting on Yemenis. In fact, the Obama administration offered $115 billion worth of weaponry to Riyadh, including a $1.15 billion package finalized in August 2016, when the scale of Yemen’s catastrophe was already all too obvious.

In recent years, opposition to the war in Congress has been on the rise, with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna playing prominent roles in mobilizing it. But such congressional critics had no effect on Obama’s war policy and are unlikely to sway Trump’s. They face formidable barriers. The mainstream narrative on the war remains powerful, while the Gulf monarchies continue to buy vast quantities of American weaponry. And don’t forget the impressive, money-is-no-object Saudi-Emirati lobbying operation in Washington.

That, then, is the context for the Pentagon’s gentle warning about the limits of U.S. support for the bombing campaign in Yemen and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s subsequent certification, as required by Congress, that the Saudis and Emiratis were taking perfectly credible action to lower civilian casualties — without which the U.S. military could not continue refueling their planes. (Mattis “endorsed and fully supported” Pompeo’s statement.)  As the fifth anniversary of this appalling war approaches, American-made arms and logistical aid remain essential to it.  Consider President Trump’s much-ballyhooed arms sales to the Saudis, even if they don’t total $100 billion (as he claimed): Why then would the Saudi and Emirati monarchs worry that the White House might actually do something like cutting off those lucrative sales or terminating the back-end support for their bombing campaign?

One thing is obvious: U.S. policy in Yemen won’t achieve its declared goals of defeating terrorism and rolling back Iran. After all, its drone strikes began there in 2002 under George W. Bush. Under Obama, as in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, drones became Washington’s anti-terrorist weapon of choice. There were 154 drone strikes in Yemen during the Obama years according to the most reliable high-end estimates, and civilian casualties ranged between 83 and 101. Under Trump they soared quickly, from 21 in 2016 to 131 in 2017.

The reliance on drone attacks has bolstered al-Qaeda’s narrative that the American war on terror amounts to a war on Muslims, whose lives are deemed expendable. And so many years later, in the chaos of Yemen, the group’s power and reach is only growing. The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led intervention is also likely to prove not just self-defeating but self-prophetic. It seems to be cementing an alliance between Iran and the Houthis who, though they have been pushed out of Aden, still control a big chunk of Yemen. Meanwhile, in a move that could make the war even deadlier, the Emiratis appear to be striking out on their own, supporting secession in southern Yemen. There’s not much to show on the anti-terrorism front either. Indeed, the Saudi coalition’s airstrikes and U.S. drone attacks may be moving Yemenis, enraged by the destruction of their homes and livelihoods and the deaths of loved ones, toward AQAP. In short, a war on terror has turned into a war of and for terror.

In Yemen, the United States backs a grim military intervention for which — unless you are a weapons company — it is hard to find any justification, practical or moral. Unfortunately, it is even harder to imagine President Trump or the Pentagon reaching such a conclusion and changing course.

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Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

The GMO lobby, led by Bayer/Monsanto, Syngenta and others have begun to develop a counter-attack to try to neutralize the unexpected and, for them, devastating EU Court of Justice ruling in July requiring that plants modified through so-called gene-editing DNA techniques must submit to the same licensing risk-assessment procedures as all other GMO plants. The ruling caught the GMO industry off-guard. Now they prepare a counter-attack as we might expect from the developers of Agent Orange, neonicotinoids or similar toxins.

On July 25, in a rare ruling in opposition to the recommendation of the European Union Advocate General, judges of the European Court of Justice held that products from new gene editing (GE) techniques are to be considered genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and as such are covered by existing EU GMO regulation. Contrary to the United States where the US Government, since the time of President G.H.W. Bush, has refused to regulate GMO plants arguing the phony claim they are “substantially equivalent” to conventional corn, soybeans or other plants, the EU has strict requirements before licensing and to date only one GMO crop, a patented corn variety is grown legally, that only in Spain.

The EU court ruling dealt a stunning blow to the GMO “biotech” industry which had been arguing their gene editing technologies were not GMO and needed no special regulatory oversight. They planned to sneak new and highly dangerous forms of genetic modification of plants in through the back door. DowDuPont had filed around 50 international patent applications for gene editing and plants, followed by Bayer-Monsanto with around 30 applications. Now under the ruling all gene edited products in the EU must first be fully tested and its products labelled.

The European Court ruling drew a sharp attack from US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. Purdue issued an official statement declaring,

“Government policies should encourage scientific innovation without creating unnecessary barriers or unjustifiably stigmatizing new technologies. Unfortunately, this week’s ECJ ruling is a setback in this regard in that it narrowly considers newer genome editing methods to be within the scope of the European Union’s regressive and outdated regulations governing genetically modified organisms.”

In the UK a group of 33 industry and research centers as well as pro-GMO farmers have delivered a letter to the British Government Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs. The letter protests the July EU Court ruling requiring gene-edited plant varieties to undergo the same risk testing and licensing as other GMO plants. They declare,

“We feel there are significant questions that must be addressed urgently by government if the UK is to retain its strength in plant genetics, to use innovation to boost productivity and competitiveness, and to meet the challenges of nutritional health and environmental protection.”

Behind the progressive-sounding words lie the interests of the major GMO industry firms. Among the 33 signers are Bayer/Monsanto—today the world’s largest holder of GMO patents and related agri-chemicals; Syngenta of Basle, now owned by a Chinese state chemicals company; German GMO and agrichemicals giant BASF; and the UK Agricultural Biotechnology Council, a front for the GMO companies and founded by Monsanto, Bayer et al. The appeal to the UK government misleadingly argues that costs associated with conducting field trials under GMO regulations are extremely restrictive to research institutes and also to small biotech companies, conveniently omitting the leading role of Bayer and other GMO agribusiness giants. They also argue that they desire to “explore the potential to deliver innovative solutions to tackle world hunger…” To date no GMO plant nor gene-edited one has created a solution to world hunger. That’s not what it’s all about.

Change EU GMO Law?

While the European Court decision mandating gene-edited species be treated with the same regulatory regime as GMO varieties before they can be sold in the EU hits the burgeoning gene-editing industry, there are already indications that pro-gene-editing forces are consulting with their allies within the EU Commission about how to rewrite the EU GMO legislation to exempt gene-editing.

Lawyers with a Holland law firm hired by the pro-gene-editing group, New Breeding Techniques (NBT) Platform—NBT is a euphemism for gene editing–commenting on what industry options are, stated, “What could happen at a later stage is that (EU-w.e.) policy makers realize the severe consequences of the ruling or its subsequent developments and thus decide to facilitate the risk assessment for new techniques, enabling a modification of Directive 2001/18 in favor of the NBTs.” The industry lawyers conclude,

“After the ECJ ruling, it is now up to the industry to provide sound evidence that certain new techniques of muta-genesis are as safe or even safer than traditional ones.”

Safe?

This court ruling will prove increasingly challenging even for Bayer and such multinationals accustomed to get their way in Brussels. More reports are being published detailing serious dangers and risks of so-called safe gene-editing techniques and results. A study just released by Dr. Janet Cotter of Logos Environmental UK consultancy and Friends of the Earth US, notes alarming defects in the applications of gene-editing techniques including “large deletions and rearrangements of DNA near the target site that were not intended by researchers.” Another study found that cells genetically engineered with CRISPR, the most-prominent gene-editing technique at present, “have the potential to seed tumors” or may initiate tumorigenic mutations. Another study found that gene-editing with certain soybeans had “off-target effects, in which gene editing occurred at unintended locations with DNA sequences.”

Gene-editing, which is being widely hyped in recent months by such Monsanto friends as Bill Gates and global agribusiness, involves new techniques to alter the genetic material of plants, animals and even bacteria, using “molecular scissors” aimed at a specific part of the organism’s DNA and used to cut that DNA. Gene Drive gene editing, which is being heavily funded by the Pentagon’s DARPA, aims to force a genetic modification to spread through an entire population, whether of mosquitoes or potentially humans, in just a few generations. The scientist who first suggested developing gene drives in gene editing, Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt, has publicly warned that development of gene editing in conjunction with gene drive technologies have alarming potential to go awry. He notes how often CRISPR messes up and the likelihood of protective mutations arising, making even benign gene drives aggressive. He stresses,

“Just a few engineered organisms could irrevocably alter an ecosystem.”

Some 170 civil society organizations from around the globe are urging a moratorium on a form of gene-editing known as gene-drives, warning they could “foster far-reaching, harmful impacts if any unintended effects were to occur.” The Cotter report further stresses, “if the chemistry of a gene-edited plant or animal were changed by the misreading of DNA, it could produce a compound that is toxic to the wildlife that feeds on it.” That is no minor issue. The point is that the gene-editing companies are doing their experiments in especially the USA, completely without government oversight or regulation.

If there is a sunray of sanity in the ruling of the EU Court on regulating gene-edited species, across the Atlantic the approach of the US Government is hardly safe, and totally ignores the Precautionary Principle applied in the EU. The Precautionary Principle states that,

“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

The US Department of Agriculture recently ruled that gene-edited plants or even animals were the same as conventional plants or animals and needed no special safety tests, a mad decision to put it mildly. The new wave of GMO called gene-editing is anything but a step forward for mankind based on evidence to date. The technology, in use since 2012 is simply untested and far too experimental to be let loose on mankind. Why is there such a rush by the US authorities or folks like Bill Gates to spread this? Could it have something to do with eugenics?

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

See below: Engdahl’s outstanding analysis in his book on Genetic Manipulation published by Global Research. 

Featured image is from the author.

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

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

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

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

The re-negotiation of NAFTA ramped up again this week as Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland heads back to Washington for talks on Thursday. The business press is calling this latest round of talks crucial. 

Bloomberg News reported (Sept. 17),

“Without a deal this week, there’s likely little hope that text of a trilateral pact can be published by Sept. 30 … If text isn’t published by then, a deal probably can’t be signed before Andras Manuel Lopez Obrador takes office as Mexico’s president Dec. 1. Then the next step would be up [to] the U.S. – it could extend the clock a bit for further talks, or ramp up fights with Canada and Congress by trying to go ahead with Mexico only.” [1]

Significant issues remain to be settled between Canada and the U.S. Bloomberg News is reporting that those “core” issues include: cultural exemptions, dairy, cross-border shopping, pharmaceuticals, intellectual property, and dispute panels. [2] In the latter category, Bloomberg mentions only Chapter 19 (the panels that deal with dumping and tariffs). No mention is made of Chapter 11 and the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clause that allows foreign companies to sue governments for lost future profits (in secret and private tribunals) if they feel their investments have been treated unfairly by government policy.

With Chapter 11 (and ISDS) not mentioned by Bloomberg, does that mean it’s been sorted out by the NAFTA negotiators? At this point, only the negotiators know for sure, and they’re not saying. But here’s a clue: on September 12, more than 300 U.S. state lawmakers released a letter stating that they “strongly support” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s efforts to eliminate NAFTA’s ISDS system. [3]

Maralyn Chase, a Democratic state senator from Washington State told truthout.org,

“If reports are true – that ISDS has been largely gutted from NAFTA – and if that s in the final text, that would be an immense improvement for state lawmaking.” [4]

Truthout.org reported (Sept. 13),

“Negotiations with Canada are ongoing, but the US recently announced a preliminary agreement to rework NAFTA between Canada and Mexico. Under that version of the deal, ISDS would be eliminated in Canada and the U.S. In Mexico, ISDS would be heavily scaled back … [and] would only be available in cases involving the direct expropriation of property by the government.” [5] 

However, a CBC News report (Sept. 8) says that in the preliminary agreement between the U.S. and Mexico,

“the two countries wanted ISDS to be ‘limited’ to cases of expropriation, bias against foreign companies, or failure to treat all trading partners equally.” [6]

This same report suggests that “’old-fashioned ISDS’ would remain in play for certain sectors: oil and gas, infrastructure, energy generation and telecommunications” that have contracts with the government.  

Politico.com has reported (Aug. 20) that

“The U.S. wants only companies that are headquartered in the U.S. and led by a ‘U.S. person’ to be eligible to file investment claims. That would preclude U.S. subsidiaries of foreign parent companies from using the dispute mechanism…” [7]

Obviously, nothing can be said with certainty until (and if) the text of the preliminary agreement is released. But major industry groups in Canada and the U.S. have been fighting to preserve the ISDS system in NAFTA, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and others.

Tellingly, less than a month ago, Zero Hedge reported (Aug. 25) that Mexico and Canada have “favored keeping the [ISDS] provisions, believing they bolster the confidence of investors.” [7]

Of the three NAFTA governments, Canada has been sued the most often under ISDS, and in 41 lawsuits (that we know of), Canada has already paid out more than $200 million in settlements, well over $67 million in legal fees, faces a $570 million charge under the recent tribunal ruling on Bilcon, and still faces billions more in ISDS lawsuits under NAFTA. Nonetheless, the Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (and Stephen Harper before him) has long insisted on retaining ISDS in its various trade deals and investment treaties.

While media pundits have called that insistence “odd” and “curious” and “inexplicable”, I decided to try to find the explanation for it. 

In my latest book, Bypassing Dystopia, published in May 2018 (Watershed Sentinel Books) I devote a lengthy section to unravelling the mystery of why Canada keeps on insisting on ISDS in trade deals. 

What I found isn’t pretty. As it turns out, it’s not only fat-cat Canadian lawyers and legal firms that make a bundle off ISDS, but also third-party funders of the lawsuits, and entire industries like the Canadian mining industry. Canadian federal administrations have not only been reluctant to jettison ISDS, they have even assisted Canadian corporations in launching at least 55 such lawsuits, usually because of a target government’s environmental policies. As a result, Canadian multinational corporations and investors are the fifth most prolific users of ISDS lawsuits in the world, according to international statistics.

But now the investor-state dispute settlement clause has become so widely known by the public and so widely hated across most of the planet, that the list of countries that refuse to sign trade or investment deals which include ISDS is growing: India, South Africa, Indonesia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Australia, Bolivia, Argentina, Norway, and even members of the EU are balking at full ratification of the Canada-EU deal (CETA) because of it. 

Now, even the Trudeau government appears to be getting the message.

On September 8, CBC News reported that on August 14,

“Canada launched a public consultation period … to review all its foreign investment treaties – including 34 bilateral investment treaties as well as the investment provisions included in an additional 20 trade agreements.” [8]

International Trade Diversification Minister Jim Carr told CBC News that

“the consultation amounts to the first ‘major review’ of Canada’s investor protection agreements in a decade.” 

As far as I can determine, that CBC report of Sept. 8 (more than 2 weeks after the launch of the public consultation) was the first (and still only) mention of it in the press. To date, no NGO in Canada has mentioned this public consultation: not even the Council of Canadians, which has long fought against ISDS and other controversial trade issues. 

Half-heartedly or not, the Canadian government is asking Canadians to provide input on its review of ISDS and some other issues. Navigating the government website can be confusing, but here is the method I used to reach the appropriate online consultation form. Google “government of Canada public consultations trade”; click on “Free Trade Agreements (FTA) Consultations – Global Affairs Canada”; then click on “Active consultations: Consulting Canadians on the renegotiation of NAFTA with the U.S. and Mexico.” 

They probably expect no members of the public to respond. Why not surprise them?

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Joyce Nelson’s latest book is Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-filled Challenges to Corporate Rule (Watershed Sentinel Books, 2018). It is the sequel to Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism (Watershed Sentinel Books, 2016). Nelson can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca

Notes

[1] Josh Wingrove (Bloomberg News), “U.S.-Canada NAFTA talks are poised to come to a head this week,” Financial Post, September 17, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Mike Ludwig, “Hundreds of State Lawmakers Want a NAFTA Without Corporate Tribunals,” truthout.org, September 13, 2018.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Janyce McGregor, “Why NAFTA’s unloved investor-state dispute chapter may be in rouble,” CBC News, September 8, 2018.

[7] Megan Cassella, “Dog days are busy days on trade,” politico.com, August 20, 2018.

[8] Tyler Durden, “’Big Trade Agreement Could Be Happening Soon’: U.S. Mexico On Verge Of Resolving Key Nafta Negotiation Hurdles,” zerohedge.com, August 25, 2018.  

The latest advert for Ukraine’s armed forces depicts chiselled military hunks over a caption: “THEY WILL PROTECT YOUR INVESTMENTS — Ukrainian Army: protecting the borders of civilisation.”

In reality, Russia was Ukraine’s largest single investor in the first six months of 2018, comprising 34.6 per cent of total foreign direct investment.

Advertising slogans for Ukraine’s army targeted at English-speaking investors are a sign of increasing desperation within ruling circles.

Recent public reports of the mafia running Odessa, Ukraine’s largest port, were linked via the Paradise Papers in a BBC investigation to money laundering in London’s property market by Alexander “The Don” Angert and his enforcer Hennady Trukhanov, currently Odessa’s mayor.

Ukraine’s real economy meanwhile is flatlining. GDP collapsed from $183 billion (£139bn) per annum in 2013 to $93bn (£70bn) last year.

The average Ukrainian wage today is €190 (£170) per month. In May rail workers shut down production at Ukraine’s largest steel mill in wage protests against owners ArcelorMittal.

Daily shelling of urban areas and civilian infrastructure by Ukraine’s army and their allied fascist paramilitary formations affects 60 per cent of the population of the Donbass living along the heavily mined 457km contact line with the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

Food insecurity has doubled in Ukraine since 2016, now affecting 1.2 million people, alongside escalating cases of multidrug-resistant TB, HIV and even polio.

Ukraine’s Right Sector rally in Kiev in 2015 (Source: author)

According to the UN refugee agency, Ukraine currently has 1.8 million internally displaced persons and the World Health Organisation records 4.4 million affected by the war in the east, of whom 3.4 million require humanitarian assistance and protection. Over 10,000 have died.

In this human catastrophe, it is remarkable that the British government’s gift of another £35 million in aid to Ukraine’s military announced in June 2018 receives so little media attention.

Britain’s latest donation is in addition to £850,000 of “non-lethal” military equipment announced by then Tory defence secretary Michael Fallon in March 2015.

Around 100 British military trainers were deployed to run 30 courses for infantry, medical and logistics corps across 14 military sites in the Ukraine.

Britain also installed a “senior adviser” inside Ukraine’s defence ministry, no doubt, given Ukraine’s epically corrupt politics, to ensure British largesse is greasing the right palms.

British military funding of Ukraine, however, is dwarfed by that of Canada and the United States.

In April this year the US supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine and in May 2018 the US Congress approved $250m of military funding, specifically including deliveries of lethal weaponry.

Just two weeks ago on September 1, President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker (a neocon, acolyte of senator John McCain, previously appointed by George Bush as US ambassador to Nato) announced further US arms supplies would follow, boasting of rising anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine.

One day earlier, a terrorist bomb in a central Donetsk cafe killed Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Ukraine is where the new cold war has tipped into a hot war.

However, Ukraine’s endemic corruption, state instability and poor-quality armed forces have proved to be constraints on Nato ambitions.

These constraints have reinforced a reliance on far-right militias, with links to organised crime and neonazi, white supremacist groups.

Socialists have long warned against the dangers of Western states nurturing far-right Ukrainian political forces.

In June 2018, Labour MSP Neil Findlay criticised a visit to the Scottish Parliament by Andriy Parubiy, a founder of the neonazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU), saying:

“I would prefer to know the next time I am asked to welcome a racist, fascist nazi to this parliament.”

Predictably, the Labour MSP was accused of having “tallied perfectly with Kremlin messaging.”

More recently, however, “Bellingcat” (an “open source, social media investigation” website with a pronounced pro-Nato reputation) has warned about Western financial, military and political support for Ukrainian neonazis.

This suggests that Nato countries’ increasing reliance on openly neonazi paramilitaries to maintain the current pro-Western regime in power in Ukraine is causing serious concerns.

On August 30, Bellingcat published a report (“Ukrainian Far-Right Fighters, White Supremacists Trained by Major European Security Firm”) by Oleksiy Kuzmenko, detailing the “sophisticated training geared towards combat application” delivered since 2016 by the European Security Academy (ESA) to Ukraine’s neonazi Azov Battalion, now part of Ukraine’s National Guard.

Californian Congressman Ro Khanna, a strong critic of Azov, claimed in May 2018 that the “battalion has very much engaged in incidents of neonazism.”

Khanna characterizes Azov as a “neonazi battalion” and promoted the 2018 US Congressional ban on the use of US budget funds “to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.”

Based in Wroclaw, Poland, ESA is Europe’s largest private military training agency. Serving British soldiers are sent there on specialist training and security courses paid for by the British government as part of “resettlement programmes” to prepare them for the world of private security contractors in civvy street.

Azov Battalion veterans and activists in Azov’s political party, The National Corps, received special-ops training at ESA’s training centre in Poland along with activists of other far-right organisations in Ukraine linked to attacks on Roma, LGBT persons and civil rights activists.

Members of Azov’s aggressively expanding street force, the National Militia, which attacks minorities in Ukraine and seeks to mirror law-enforcement to enforce “Ukrainian order,” also received ESA training.

Yet another, Tradition and Order, “an aggressively expanding violent ultra-nationalist organisation,” at least one of whose leaders is a self-admitted “national-socialist” with a penchant for nazi salutes, also attended an ESA course in Poland.

Politicians like Neil Findlay have shown that it is possible to stand up against the normalisation of the far right in Ukrainian politics.

It is now essential that the Westminster government is held to account for its funding and training of far-right, Ukrainian paramilitaries.

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Featured image is from Crisis Group.

A new official report produced by the Norwegian government illustrates the continuing absurdity of NATO expansion and foreign adventurism in places very far away from the “North Atlantic” explicit in the name North Atlantic Treaty Organization — places like Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine or Syria. 

Top Norwegian officials have now admitted they “had very limited knowledge” of events unfolding in Libya during 2010 and 2011, prior to NATO’s military intervention on behalf of anti-Gaddafi rebels — a war that resulted in regime change and a failed state ruled by competing governments and extremist militias to this day. Norway enthusiastically joined the US, UK, and French led bombing of the country initiated in March 2011 even knowing full well its military knew next to nothing of what was unfolding on the ground.

But what did decision-makers have to go on? Consider this absurd admission from the official report: “In such situations, decision-makers often rely on information from media and other countries,” the report reads.

The commission that produced the report was chaired by former Foreign Minister Jan Petersen, and ultimately concluded that politicians in Oslo dragged the nation into the US-led bombing campaign with no regard for what could come next.

The commission report states that there were “no written sources” that so much as attempted to assess the nature of the conflict Norway was about to join. The officials failed to “assess the type of conflict Norway was taking part in” it finds.

NATO’s name for the operation was the US code name ‘Operation Odyssey Dawn,’ and Norway flew 596 strike missions during the first five months of the NATO intervention, dropping 588 bombs on Libyan targets, according to the report. Norway had provided six F-16 fighter jets and its pilots were reported to have conducted 10 percent of all coalition strikes against pro-Gaddafi forces.

Norway’s former Center Party leader Liv Signe Navarsete said of the final report:

 “When you look at what happened next, with Libya becoming a hotspot of terrorism, this is not a decision to be proud of.”

The war had been sold to the European public on “humanitarian” grounds and included sensational atrocity stories, many which were later proven false, painting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as an irrational homicidal maniac.

One notable story explicitly promoted by the State Department as well as US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice was the Viagra-fueled mass rape story, which claimed that Gaddafi had supposedly supplied his troops with Viagra in order to unleash sexual terrorism on the civilian population. Amnesty International and other human rights investigators later the proved the story completely false.

Some Norwegian politicians now claim the country was hoodwinked into another US-led regime change operation similar to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003. However, considering European leaders had the glaringly obvious example of Iraq and the lies it was built on so recent in history, this appears yet more excuse making designed to evade public responsibility.

Libya has long been forgotten in Western mainstream media, but has come back into headlines as a small civil war has lately erupted within areas under control of the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. Since Gaddafi’s overthrow the country has been fought over by three (and at times up to four) competing governments while the streets are ruled by Islamist militias, including in some areas ISIS terrorists.

According to a CNN report last year, open air slave markets have since come into existence as Libya remains largely lawless and as a once stable national infrastructure and economy has crumbled.

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge.

“This isn’t the first time that the evidence is very clear that we have aligned ourselves with al-Qaeda when we think it’s temporarily of benefit to our foreign policy,” declared former United States House of Representatives member and presidential candidate Ron Paul last week in regard to US policy toward Syria and the developing situation in Idlib, Syria. Paul made the comment in an interview at RT focused on recent developments in Syria.

Paul’s assessment came shortly after the interviewer played video of Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, calling Idlib a year back “the largest al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”

The US government’s antagonism toward efforts by the Syria government, aided by allied nations, to take back control of Idlib, makes more sense when US foreign policy toward Syria is understood in the context Paul provides in the interview. Paul explains that, while the US has used opposition to al-Qaeda “as the excuse” for US intervention in Syria, he believes instead “we’re there for other reasons.” Those reasons, Paul says, include opposition to Iran and Russia that are supporting Syrian military forces, as well as that “we think al-Quaeda will help our position — the United States position — to get rid of [Syria President Bashar al-Assad].”

Many Americans tolerate the US “trying to maintain a modern-day empire” via interventions including in Syria because they are not well informed about the matter, suggests Paul. To help cure this problem, Paul says he is trying with the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which he founded after leaving the House of Representatives, “to alert people to the danger that is involved with our foreign policy.”

So what should the US do in Syria? “Leave as soon as possible,” advises Paul.

Watch Paul’s interview here:

The disconnect between Saudi imperatives and the expectations of Western governments and financial markets who repeatedly focussed on unmet Saudi time indications of the Aramco IPO rather than broader policy statements fit a pattern of misperceptions.