Global Research

Each night, the streets of the Christian town of Mhardeh teem with life.

Young people in trendy attire drink beer and smoke Shisha pipes, shyly eyeing up attractive passersby and posing for group selfies, while off-duty soldiers with their girlfriends sitting side-saddle whizz through the town on motorbikes.

“Look at this, even during the hardest part of the war, people are out. It’s a release, a way to forget what we are suffering because, when the mortars rain down on us, we have to hide in our basements,” says science undergraduate Samer Altouma.

One of four churches in Mhardeh (MEE/Katharine Cooper)

As people melt back to their homes and the music and chatter fades, explosions reverberate through the ground, as waiters pack away chairs and tables.

Mhardeh city centre is just ten kilometres from Idlib province, the last rebel-held stronghold in Syria, near where a snaking frontline is manned by volunteer Christian units from the Mhardeh Defence Force, the Syrian Army and allied forces.

Last week, 11 civilians were killed, including six children when three missiles fell on the town. One man lost his mother, wife and three children when his house was hit. A further 20 people were injured in the attack.

The looming Idlib conflict – set to be the last major battle of Syria’s ruinous civil conflict – is nothing new for the city. The Christian Mhardeh Defence Forces, formed in 2011 as a local branch of Syria’s voluntary pro-government National Defence Forces, have been pitted against the country’s rebel factions for seven years, after the city first came under attack.

“We are peaceful Christians who didn’t want to enter the war so we tried to reach a peaceful solution and our priests went out and talked to the terrorists [armed rebels, mostly from outlying Sunni villages], trying to diffuse the situation,” says Mhardeh Defence Force commander Simon al-Wakil.

“We told them, if you want to break down the Syrian government, go to Damascus not here but when we saw how they behaved towards us, using only an iron fist, we realised this was a fake revolution.”

At this point, seven years into the civil war, pro-government Syrians, along with the Syrian government and ally Russia, characterise all rebel groups in Idlib as terrorists. The Syrian government has presented itself as a defender of the country’s minority faiths and has extensive in-country support from Christians and Alawites.

As dialogue efforts broke down, rebels besieged the city, shelling residential areas, mining roads and kidnapping passing civilians or those trying to flee, he said. With no Syrian Army units in the area, the village formed the Mhardeh Defence Force.

Most men over 18 able to carry a gun volunteered and, under the leadership of Commander Wakil – the former head of a local construction company – started a defence of their city which has lasted seven years.

The Mhardeh Defence Force currently has around 200 fighters on the Idlib front lines, alongside the Syrian Army and allied forces, but thousands more Mhardeh volunteers can be swiftly mobilised, according to Wakil, who says his men are on standby, waiting for government orders to advance.

Rebuilding Mhardeh

“Mortar, mortar, mortar,” Wakil repeats like a mantra as he drives through the city, pointing out extensive newly tarmacked sections of Mhardeh’s roads, damaged by seven years of bombardment.

Rebel attacks have killed 97 civilians and injured a further 156 over the last seven years but most of Mhardeh’s almost exclusively Christian population have remained in Syria.

This was encouraged by priests and senior members of the community who feared that, if locals fled, they might never be able to return, to an area where Christian communities have lived for nearly 2,000 years.

To ensure the city remained habitable, the local council facilitated the prompt rebuilding of homes damaged or destroyed in fighting, with repairs funded by the community and wealthy locals when families did not have the money themselves.

“We are such a tight-knit community that if you hit one of us, you hit us all,” explains Altouma.

Although the situation inside Mhardeh has stabilised, missiles fired from rebel positions are still able to hit the city, as they did last week, and its citizens live in fear of further attacks.

Honouring some of Mhardeh residents killed during in the war (MEE/Katharine Cooper)

While morale in Mhardeh remains strong, Syria’s civil war and international sanctions have sent prices of most goods rocketing, and life remains tough. Every week, the Red Crescent in charge of distributing UN-supplied aid, is inundated by residents collecting boxes of essential foodstuffs.

“These aid supplies were very, very important to local people during times of siege by terrorists, when food was used like a weapon,” explains deputy head of the local Syrian Red Crescent, Wael al-Khouri.

“Now people can manage to live without this aid but it is still very helpful and all the items here are long-life so can be stored for future use.”

With the city no longer under siege and the end of the Syrian conflict finally in sight, Khouri says the Red Crescent is now starting to change its focus, upping its support to local widows, the war-wounded and, particularly, the many children who have been affected by the war.

Life near the Idlib front lines

The bells of Mhardeh’s four churches and one monastery ring out every day, with special ‘warning’ tolls when shelling is underway or anticipated, and on the surface life continues as normal, with bustling streets and groups of locals heading to the fertile hills to gather seasonal figs.

But daily life is overshadowed by the ongoing war. In a downtown military control room, Commander Wakil monitors the front-lines, sitting in front of an array of high-power weapons clipped to the wall and a shelf of bullets carefully arranged in order of size.

Simon al-Wakil, Mhradeh Defence Force commander (MEE/Tom Westcott)

Beside a large poster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stretched across the length of a wall stands a glass case containing a decorated Syrian Army boot on top of the flags of the Confederate States of America and Israel.

Around him, sipping strong coffee, sit members of the Mhardeh Defence Forces – teachers, doctors, engineers and poets – who, he says, took up arms to defend their Christian town, culture and history. The narrative that rebels threatened Syrian minorities has been used extensively by the government but the residents of Mhardeh say for them, this is a reality. They believe their town was targeted by rebels from outlying Sunni villages specifically for being Christian and say they were expected to flee in terror to pre-prepared refugee camps in Turkey.

Christians light candles in one of Mhardeh’s four churches (MEE/Katharine Cooper)

Wakil, injured himself nine times, gestures around the room, saying every man present has been injured in fighting and most have gone straight back to the front lines after treatment.

“We are pro-Syria,” he says firmly. “Before the war, Syria was a great place, on a road of development, but then 86 countries and the ‘Zionist entity’ [the term some Syrians apply to Israel, which they do not recognise as a country] supported the destruction of this country. They destroyed Syria but we, and our children, will rebuild it.”

The Syrian government has presented itself as a defender of the country’s minority faiths and appears to have quite extensive in-country support from Syrians of all faiths, including Christians and Alawites.

Religious and patriotic tattoos on a Mhardeh Defence Force fighter (MEE/Katharine Cooper)

Teacher Anwar Pijou says he believes this was part of an international plan to strip Syria of its state and institutions and reduce it to a similar level of chaos endured by neighbouring Iraq after 2003, saying:

“True Syrian patriots are pro-state, pro-constitution and pro-law because, if there’s no government and no state, there would be no law and just chaos.”

On the shell-strewn front-lines, overlooking countryside and abandoned villages stretching towards Idlib province, members of the Mhardeh Defence Force manning tank and mortar positions monitor the horizon for activity. Idlib city is 70 kilometres from here, and the start of Idlib province lies just seven kilometres distant.

Mhardeh Defence Force commander Simon al-Wakil in front of a poster near the Idlib frontline bearing the faces of himself, Assad and Putin (MEE/Katharine Cooper)

Steam pours from the chimneys of a nearby electrical sub-station, one of the most fiercely-contested local facilities, which changed hands multiple times, repeatedly plunging Mhardeh into darkness for weeks on end. During a 14-day occupation, rebels graffitied the premises with mottos including: ‘We don’t need the electricity of Assad, the light of Islam is enough for us.’

Wakil’s military leadership of Mhardeh’s seven-year defence has made him something of a local hero. His face, alongside that of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, features on posters near the Idlib frontline. His portrait also hangs in an art exhibition showing the work of local art students, painted by 19 year-old Sarah Nimow who described Wakil as “inspirational”.

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Featured image: On a warm summer evening, the town centre is full of young people (MEE/Katharine Cooper)

Once again, the United States is blackmailing countries that would send Americans to face justice in the International Criminal Court. Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton is leading the charge to shield US and Israeli war criminals from legal accountability.

On September 10, Bolton told the right-wing Federalist Society that the United States would punish the ICC if it mounts a full investigation of Americans for war crimes committed in Afghanistan or of Israelis for human rights violations committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

ICC Prosecutor Has “Reason to Believe” US Military Committed Torture

Last fall, Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the ICC, recommended to the court’s Pre-Trial Chamber that it open a full investigation into the possible commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by parties to the war in Afghanistan, including US persons.

In 2016, Bensouda’s preliminary examination found reason to believe, “at a minimum,” that members of the US military “subjected at least 61 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity,” and CIA personnel “subjected at least 27 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and/or rape.”

Torture and inhuman treatment constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute.

Bensouda stated in her 2016 report:

The information available suggests that victims were deliberately subjected to physical and psychological violence, and that crimes were allegedly committed with particular cruelty and in a manner that debased the basic human dignity of the victims. The infliction of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” applied cumulatively and in combination with each other over a prolonged period of time, would have caused serious physical and psychological injury to the victims. Some victims reportedly exhibited psychological and behavioural issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.

Moreover, Bensouda concluded these actions were not isolated instances of misbehavior, noting:

The gravity of the alleged crimes is increased by the fact that they were reportedly committed pursuant to plans or policies approved at senior levels of the US government, following careful and extensive deliberations.

After Bensouda determined an official investigation was warranted, Bolton wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The ICC constitutes a direct assault on the concept of national sovereignty, especially that of constitutional, representative governments like the United States.”

The countries of the world, including the United States, spent 50 years developing an international court to try genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. However, in 1998, when the world’s countries voted on the Rome Statute to establish the court, the United States was one of only seven countries that voted against it. There are 123 member states that are parties to the Rome Statute.

The court entered into force in July 2002. Judges on the court are respected for their impartiality and they represent regional diversity.

Bolton, Trump Threaten Sanctions Against ICC if It Investigates Americans

The United States isn’t a party to the Rome Statute, but Afghanistan is. Therefore, the court could take jurisdiction over individuals who allegedly committed crimes in Afghanistan.

In one of his final acts as president, Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute but recommended to incoming President George W. Bush that he not submit the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification. When a country signs a treaty, it indicates an intent to ratify — and become party to — the treaty.

Bush didn’t just refuse to send the Rome Statute to the Senate. Through then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, the Bush administration withdrew the US’s signature from the statute in May 2002. Bolton declared the unprecedented action “the happiest moment of my government service.”

Congress then enacted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act to prevent prosecution of US armed forces “to the maximum extent possible.” One clause, dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act,” authorized the use of force to extract any US or allied force detained by the ICC.

At Bolton’s behest, the Bush administration then extracted bilateral immunity agreements from 100 countries, in which the US government threatened to withhold foreign aid if they turned over US persons to the ICC.

Bolton told the Federalist Society that his mission to “prevent other countries from delivering US personnel to the ICC” was “one of my proudest achievements.”

Now the United States is escalating its threats against the ICC.

On September 10, the same day Bolton vilified the ICC before the Federalist Society, Donald Trump issued a statement saying that if the ICC formally opens an investigation, his administration would consider negotiating “even more binding, bilateral agreements to prohibit nations from surrendering United States persons to the ICC.” He threatened to ban “ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the United States, sanction their funds in the United States financial system, and, prosecute them in the United States criminal system,” as well as “taking steps in the United Nations Security Council to constrain the Court’s sweeping powers.”

In his address to the Federalist Society, Bolton called the ICC “illegitimate,” declaring,

“We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.”

The ICC Is a Court of Last Resort

Under the principle of “complementarity,” the ICC takes jurisdiction over a case only if the suspect’s home country has been unable or unwilling to effectively prosecute it.

If the United States had prosecuted individuals in the Bush administration for the commission of war crimes in Afghanistan, the ICC would not be examining the case. But shortly after taking office, Barack Obama said,

“[G]enerally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.”

Indeed, Bensouda noted, the Obama administration’s review was “limited to investigating whether any unauthorized interrogation techniques were used by CIA interrogators, and if so, whether such conduct could constitute violations of any applicable statutes.” She noted Obama Attorney General Eric Holder’s proclamation that his Justice Department “will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel [OLC] regarding the interrogation of detainees.”

But in the infamous “Torture Memos” that John Yoo wrote while working in Bush’s OLC, he defined torture much more narrowly than the law allows. And notwithstanding the Torture Convention’s unequivocal prohibition of torture, Yoo erroneously claimed that self-defense and national security are defenses that can be used to justify torture.

Holder limited his investigation to two of the most heinous instances of torture: the deaths of Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi. Ultimately, however, Holder’s Justice Department “determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted.”

Rahman froze to death in 2002 after he was stripped and shackled to a cold cement floor in the secret Afghan prison called the Salt Pit. Al-Jamadi died after being suspended from the ceiling by his wrists bound behind his back. Military police officer Tony Diaz, who witnessed al-Jamadi’s torture, said that blood gushed from al-Jamadi’s mouth like “a faucet had turned on” when he was lowered to the ground. A military autopsy determined al-Jamadi’s death was a homicide.

Nonetheless, Holder refused to prosecute those responsible for the torture and deaths of those two men.

In 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 499-page executive summary of its 6,700-page classified torture report. It says that several detainees were waterboarded — one 183 times, another 83 times. It is well-established that waterboarding constitutes torture, which is a war crime.

The executive summary states that the CIA utilized “rectal feeding,” in which a mixture of pureed hummus, pasta and sauce, nuts and raisins was forced into the rectum of one detainee. “Rectal rehydration” was used to establish the interrogator’s “total control over the detainee.”

Other examples of “enhanced interrogation techniques” documented in the summary include slamming into walls, hanging from the ceiling, being kept in total darkness, being deprived of sleep — sometimes with forced standing — for up to seven-and-a-half days, being forced to stand on broken limbs for hours, being threatened with mock execution, being confined in a coffin-like box for 11 days, as well as being bathed in ice water and dressed in diapers. One detainee “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled,” according to the report.

But those who perpetrated this torture and cruel treatment have not been held to account in a court of law. For that reason, Bensouda is recommending a full investigation by the ICC.

US Tries to Shield Israeli Leaders From War Crimes Liability

Besides endeavoring to protect Americans from accountability for war crimes, the Trump administration is also explicitly attempting to shield Israelis from war crimes liability.

The ICC prosecutor is conducting a preliminary investigation of war crimes committed in Gaza in 2014. She should expand it to include crimes committed by Israel during the 2018 Great March of Return, when it killed unarmed protesters week after week.

In his speech to the Federalist Society, Bolton criticized the possibility of an ICC investigation into alleged international crimes committed by Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank. He said,

“We will not allow the ICC, or any other organization, to constrain Israel’s right to self-defense.”

As an occupying force, Israel does not have a right to self-defense against the occupied Palestinians. Moreover, self-defense is not a defense against the commission of torture, which is a war crime.

Bolton referred to Israel’s construction of illegal settlements as “housing projects” and stated that the US’s recent decision to close the Palestinian Liberation Office in Washington, DC, was partly due to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s pursuit of a criminal investigation at the ICC. Bolton stated,

“If the court comes after us, Israel or other US allies, we will not sit quietly,” and he threatened retaliation.

“America’s Exceptionalism” Animates Bolton’s Assault on ICC

Bolton revealed that American exceptionalism motivated him to vilify the ICC. He wrote, “Proponents of global governance … know that America’s exceptionalism and commitment to its Constitution were among their biggest obstacles.”

Bensouda responded to Bolton’s Federalist Society speech, stating the ICC is “an independent and impartial judicial institution” based on the principle of complementarity. She stated, “The ICC, as a court of law, will continue to do its work undeterred, in accordance with those principles and the overarching idea of the rule of law.”

No one, not even Americans and Israelis, enjoy impunity for the commission of war crimes. In spite of the Bolton-Trump assault on the ICC, its prosecutor promises to hold firm and do her job. Her efforts must be supported.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. The editor and contributor to The United States and Torture: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, Cohn testified before Congress about the Bush interrogation policy.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has taken a series of drastic punitive actions against the Palestinian people. Some analysts have accepted the official White House explanation that many of the actions were done either out of displeasure with actions taken by the Palestinian leadership or as pressure forcing them “to take steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.” I disagree. When added together, the Trump administration moves are so all-encompassing and far-reaching that I suspect a more ominous intent. 

Here’s what the administration has done:

It cut US assistance to UNWRA, congressionally authorized humanitarian, development projects and programs for the West Bank and Gaza, and ended the annual grant Congress has authorized for Palestinian hospitals operating in East Jerusalem. In addition to these cruel cuts in much needed assistance, the administration closed the Palestinian Mission in Washington and announced plans to redefine who is, in their view, a Palestinian refugee.

At the same time, the White House acquiesced to the passage of Israel’s “Jewish Nation-State Bill” and said nothing in opposition to Israel’s recent announcement of thousands of new settlement units, some in highly sensitive areas—either in Arab East Jerusalem or deep in the heart of the West Bank. They also let pass, without protest, Israel’s planned demolition of an entire Arab village and a number of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem.

In a recent interview with a Sheldon Adelson-owned Israeli newspaper, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, after gloating over his success in moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, made it clear that there is a “new day” in the US-Israel relationship. He said, “We don’t tell Israel what to do,” signaling that Israel can operate with impunity toward the Palestinians and the occupied territories because in the new US view “It’s always Israel’s decision.” In a separate and equally revealing interview, Jared Kushner termed the Trump administration’s moves as necessary to “strip away ‘false realities’”—meaning “taking Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees right of return off the table.”

All of these actions, taken together, tell me that the Trump administration has fully embraced the hardline world view of Israel’s Likud. They reject not only the Palestinian right to self-determination, they also do not accept the very idea of Palestinian “peoplehood.”

The plans they have announced would sever the West Bank from Gaza and leave East Jerusalem and the 28 Palestinian villages trapped within the Israeli-annexed “Greater Jerusalem.” Meanwhile, as a result of the Trump administration’s declared intention to economically strangle UNWRA and end this program, the Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan would not only be forced to give up their property rights and their “right of return,” they would be turned over the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees to be resettled in other countries.

If this Trumpian approach were to succeed, the Palestinian nation would be dismembered and dispersed. In their mind, it would cease to exist.

The Israelis, for their part, have been given carte blanche. They get: Jerusalem; an end to the “refugee problem;” the right to declare that only they are entitled to self-determination; freedom to demolish and build, as they wish, in the occupied lands; and an increasingly economically deprived Palestinian population that they hope will either submit to Israel’s will or be forced to leave.

All of this calls to mind an earlier era, when Zionists referred to Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land;” or Golda Meir’s “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine… They did not exist;” or the religious Zionist claim that God gave this land to them and they should deal harshly with the “strangers” whom they find there.

This hardline Israeli rejection of Palestinians as a nation and a people with rights was to have ended with the Oslo Accords, signed 25 years ago. In the introduction to that Accords, Israel and the Palestinians recognized each other’s right to self-determination. What was left, was to find the way to implement that mutual recognition. Succeeding US administrations failed miserably in pressing the parties to implement the Accords.

For example, instead of “striking while the iron was hot,” the Clinton administration, operating with the faulty assumption that the Israelis and Palestinians could do it on their own, lost precious time, allowing hardline Israelis, Palestinians, and members of Congress to sabotage the fledgling process.

As a frequent visitor to Israel/Palestine in those early years, after seeing the expanding Israeli forms of repression, the growth of settlements, and increased Palestinian bitterness and despair brought on by dramatic spikes in unemployment and poverty, I wrote “if there’s a ‘peace process’ someone forgot to tell the Israeli occupation forces and the Palestinian people.”

The situation went from bad to worse. Israeli politics became more hardline. The “Palestinian Authority” became an economic dependency and a security force without any real control over their territory, their land and their ability to develop. The US, failing to address the asymmetry of power (Israel had it all, while the Palestinians had none), largely functioned as a self-willed impotent shepherd of a dying “peace process”—oftentimes acting less like an “honest broker” and more like the begrudging enabler of Israel’s bad behavior.

And then the peace process died an unannounced and unacknowledged death. Only the fiction of a process remained.

Now, with the Trump administration, the mask is off and the fiction has ended. As it takes shape, as revealed through this administration’s recent actions, Trump’s “ultimate deal” appears to be not a formula for a just peace, but a forced Palestinian acquiescence to the Zionist vision for Palestine. Recognizing this, an Israeli commentator recently sarcastically wrote “First Trump took Jerusalem off the table, then he took the refugees off the table, all he has to do now is take the Palestinians off the table—and I guess we’ll call it peace.”

But not so fast. Despite the dysfunctional state of the Palestinian political order, it must be remembered that it wasn’t the PLO or the Palestinian Authority or UNWRA that created and sustained Palestinian national aspirations. Rather, these bodies, in their time, have embodied those aspirations of the Palestinian people. These entities may disappear or be destroyed—but the will of the Palestinian people lives on. Those who ignore either their will or the fact that the issue of Palestine, for the Arab people, remains “the wound in the heart that never healed” should beware of the consequences of their ignorance.

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James J. Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute.

Like British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn Canadian lawyer Dimitri Lascaris is the victim of a “Big Lie” slander campaign. Defenders of the most aggressive ongoing European settler colonialism have once again smeared a “proud, anti-racist advocate for human rights.”

In this article I offer some important context regarding the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs’ (CIJA) and B’nai B’rith’s (BB) absurd “anti-Semitism” accusations against Lascaris, which were echoed by the leaders of the four main federal political parties. But, looking at the run up to his ‘offending’ tweet suggests that Lascaris was targeted in an unprecedented smear campaign because he was exposing CIJA and BB’s soft underbelly, notably their dalliance with racist extremists. In the week before he was denounced Lascaris repeatedly challenged CIJA, BB’s and Liberal MP Michael Levitt’s association with individuals making anti-Muslim remarks, death threats against politicians and promoting a book denouncing the “Jewish menace”.

The immediate background to CIJA and BB’s campaign against Lascaris was an August 29 demonstration opposing BB’s smears against the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). CIJA, BB and Levitt tarred that rally as being racist and threatening. Two days before the display of solidarity with CUPW Levitt issued a statement saying he was “deeply concerned”  and “disturbed” by the planned protest, announcing that he had contacted the police. Afterwards CIJA Vice President for the Greater Toronto Area, Noah Shack, thanked the police and stated: “What the Jewish community of Bathurst Manor witnessed today is a failed attempt at intimidation by a hateful group of protesters.”

But in reality, it was the counter rally of BB supporters that was racist and threatening. In the week after the rally Lascaris repeatedly called on CIJA, BB and Liberal MP Levitt to publicly repudiate the Islamophobia of the pro-BB counter protesters. Prior to his ‘offending’ tweet, Lascaris posted video of protesters making anti-Muslim comments and tweeted “B’nai B’rith can’t bring itself to condemn the white supremacists, racists & Islamophobes who support its organization and who stood at its doorstep last week screaming hatred at supporters of CUPW. Instead, it hurls baseless claims of ‘bigotry’ at its critics.”

VIDEO: On August 29, at our rally in support of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, a male @BnaiBrithCanada supporter hurls obscenities at a female supporter of @CUPW. She continues to call him 'sir' as he heaps abuse on her. Yet B'nai Brith claims we were the aggressive ones. pic.twitter.com/wYWtL3BAAh

— Dimitri Lascaris (@dimitrilascaris) September 3, 2018

Via twitter and Facebook Lascaris also called on them to criticize two BB supporters who called for a number of Muslim and brown politicians to face the death penalty. In a video detailing  their participation in the counter protest, Mary Forrest and a friend called for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and several Muslim MPs to receive the “guillotine” or be “stoned” to death. Lascaris tweeted:

“If a supporter of Palestine called for Israel’s criminal PM Benjamin Netanyahu to be put to death, B’nai B’rith and CIJA would become apopletic and call that person a ‘terrorist’. But when pro-Israel fanatics call for Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau to be killed, they say nothing.”

In another tweet before the supposed “anti-Semitic” comment, Lascaris criticized Levitt’s trip to Israel during which he met the COO of Sodastream. He wrote,

“while Michael Levitt showcases Israel’s apartheid regime, supporters of his close ally B’nai B’rith called for the death penalty to be imposed on Justin Trudeau and Levitt’s Liberal colleagues Iqra Khalid, Omar Alghabra and Maryam Monsef. Shamefully, Levitt has said nothing.”

In their video about protesting in support of BB, Forrest and her friend talked about campaigning for former Rebel Media host Faith Goldy, who is running for mayor of Toronto. In fact, the white supremacist mayoral candidate attended the rally in support of BB. In April Goldy promoted a book by Romanian fascist leader Corneliu Codreanu titled For My Legionaries, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as one of “the canonical works of global fascism.” Published in 1937, it repeatedly attacks Jews and calls for eliminating the “Jewish threat”.

Here’s Goldy posing for a photo with the women that threatened the PM and MPs.?
They must be known to police, as they organize plenty of hate rallies. pic.twitter.com/StRkrRzKK8

— fleur delis♥ (@fleurdelis30) September 3, 2018

Lascaris repeatedly called on BB to denounce their supporters’ association with Goldy. He tweeted, “White supremacist Faith Goldy promoted fascist propaganda calling for eliminating ‘the Jewish menace’. Goldy was warmly received by B’nai B’rith supporters last week. And B’nai B’rith expects us to believe it speaks for Canadian Jewry?”

BB, CIJA and Levitt refused to disassociate themselves from protesters they aligned with before and after the August 29 protest. Instead they distorted an innocuous tweet about their two main allies within the Liberal Party caucus and sought to portray themselves as the victims. To the political establishment’s shame, the leaders of four political parties, as well as numerous other MPs, joined the smear of Lascaris.

Egged on by the politicians, CIJA and BB took their ‘we are victims’ silliness to embarrassing heights. CIJA CEO Shimon Koffler Fogel put out a statement implying that Lascaris’ tweet was somehow connected to Rosh Hashanah. In an attack on the activist-lawyer titled “An Urgent Note Before Rosh Hashanah: Fighting Antisemitism in 5779”, Fogel wrote: “Those who seek to demonize and ultimately dismantle the Jewish State, through BDS and other toxic forms of advocacy, are becoming bolder and more aggressive. They are letting the veil slip on the false distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And some of them openly seeking to undermine our rights as Jewish Canadians to be accepted as equals in Canadian politics, democracy, and civil society. It’s clearer than ever that the fight against the anti-Israel agenda is a fight to preserve the future of the Canadian Jewish community.”

B’nai B’rith CEO Michael Mostyn made the connection to the Jewish New Year more clear, tweeting “Two days before Rosh Hashanah, one of the holiest days in Judaism, Dimitri Lascaris hurled an antisemitic trope at Canadian leaders that was even promoted in the ‘Elders of the Protocols of Zion.’”

Mostyn followed this shameful tweet by revealing the direct political objective of the attacks against Lascaris. BB’s head tweeted, “Canadians expect ALL their elected officials across the political spectrum to refuse to interact with CJPME [Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East] until it apologizes and removes Dimitri Lascaris as their chair – this would certainly include Niki Ashton”, who Lascaris supported in the NDP leadership race.

Comparing the Left’s response to the attacks on Lascaris and activist-author Nora Loreto six months ago is informative. While both faced unprecedented backlash for publishing relatively innocuous tweets, only one of the social justice campaigners received substantial support from radical leftists.

This doesn’t bode well for the Left’s ability to respond to the accusations of anti-Semitism certain to follow Niki Ashton or someone with similar politics taking the reins of the NDP or another Left party coming close to governing. Israel lobby groups’ spectacular campaign against Corbyn in Britain and their smears against Lascaris suggests that anyone serious about building a movement for climate justice, economic inequality, indigenous rights, etc. needs to think carefully about the best ways to counter CIJA, BB, etc. smear tactics.

We need to be prepared for the next Big Lies.

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A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that “Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects”. CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.” Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”.

Listen to Michel Chossudovsky on Spreaker.

Phillip Farruggio’s Interview with Michel Chossudovsky

on It’s the Empire Stupid

or  click  here 

***

Selected Excerpts from Michel Chossudovsky’s writings

Who is Osama bin Laden 

Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”

Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.  (Who is Osama bin Laden, Global Research, September 12, 2001)

Where was Osama on Septembers 11? 

There is evidence that the whereabouts of Osama are known to the Bush Administration.

On September 10. 2001, “Enemy Number One” was in a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan, as confirmed by a report of Dan Rather, CBS News. (See our October 2003 article on this issue)

He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as George W’s speeches in the course of the last five years.

According to Dan Rather, CBS, Bin Laden was hospitalized in Rawalpindi. one day before the 9/11 attacks, on September 10, 2001.

The Cell Phones: “We Have Some Planes” 

The 9/11 Commission’s Report provides an almost visual description of the Arab hijackers. It depicts in minute detail events occurring inside the cabin of the four hijacked planes.

In the absence of surviving passengers, this “corroborating evidence”, was based on passengers’ cell and air phone conversations with their loved ones. According to the Report, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was only recovered in the case of one of the flights (UAL 93).

Focusing on the personal drama of the passengers, the Commission has built much of its narrative around the phone conversations. The Arabs are portrayed with their knives and box cutters, scheming in the name of Allah, to bring down the planes and turn them “into large guided missiles” (Report, Chapter 1, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.pdf ).

The Technology of Wireless Transmission

The Report conveys the impression that cell phone ground-to-air communication from high altitude was of reasonably good quality, and that there was no major impediment or obstruction in wireless transmission.

Some of the conversations were with onboard air phones, which contrary to the cell phones provide for good quality transmission. The report does not draw a clear demarcation between the two types of calls.

More significantly, what this carefully drafted script fails to mention is that, given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8000 feet:

“Wireless communications networks weren’t designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they’re surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground ( http://www.elliott.org/technology/2001/cellpermit.htm

Expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry casts serious doubt on “the findings” of the 9/11 Commission. According to Alexa Graf, a spokesman of AT&T, commenting in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks:

“it was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations… From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude”

( http://wirelessreview.com/ar/wireless_final_contact/)

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A recently published report shows the number of detained migrant children is almost five times greater than the nearly 3,000 previously reported by the Donald Trump administration.

According to a New York Times report, 12,800 migrant children are currently being detained by the United States’ government.

In the report, the NY Times claims the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) attributes the increase to a reduction in the number of children being allowed to live with relatives or sponsors while their court cases progress, and not to a similar increase in the number of children entering the U.S.

A direct consequence of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy towards illegal immigration,

“Red tape and fear brought on by stricter immigration enforcement have discouraged relatives and family friends from coming forward to sponsor children,” the NY Times reported.

Earlier this year authorities announced that potential sponsors, including family members, would have to submit fingerprints during the required vetting process and that their data would be shared with immigration authorities. Most potential sponsors are undocumented immigrants themselves, so this policy acts as a deterrent.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has warned of the negative effects of child detention.

“Detention cannot be justified based solely on the fact that the child is unaccompanied or separated, or on the basis of his or her migration or residence status. …This is particularly critical as recent studies have indicated that detention of children can undermine their psychological and physical well-being and compromise their cognitive development. Furthermore, children held in detention are at risk of suffering depression and anxiety, and frequently exhibit symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder,” it argued in a 2017 paper.

The danger to children is significantly increased by the strain on the immigration detention center system, which is making it harder for authorities to guarantee minors safety and proper treatment.

In recent months, interviews with detained migrant children have revealed they are being kept in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions. Migrant children have experienced alleged mistreatment, sexual abuse, negligence, and sleep deprivation. Reunited families have also said minors were returned traumatized, withdrawn, and scared.

Despite social uproar and condemnation, on Tuesday the Trump administration announced it will triple the size of a temporary detention center in Tornillo, Texas, to house up to 3,800. According to an exclusive CBS News investigation, Tornillo and Homestead, another large temporary detention center, are exempt from “surprise” child welfare inspections designed to guarantee the health and safety of children kept at these centers.

The Trump administration also announced reforms last week to allow indefinite detention by keeping parents and children together in custody. Analysts argue that the reform will open a new judicial battle because it would violate the 1997 Flores settlement, which stipulates children can only be kept in immigrant detention for up to 20 days.

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Emboldened by Trump’s continuing threats to protect al-Qaeda in Syria, Israel has chosen the joyous occasion of the Damascus 60th International Fair…to bomb Damascus International Airport. Not that it matters to Israel — or to Trump — it is a war crime to bomb civilian planes and airports. Several missiles were intercepted by Syria’s air defense system and no casualties have been reported at this writing. 

As with its 4 September bombings, Israel may have again attempted to test the Syrian air defenses for recently acquired S300 systems for the anticipated Three Musketeers plus Germany’s coming aggressions against Syria, to protect their Al-Qaeda terrorists in Idlib — the most perverse generation of Al-Qaeda, whose White Helmets faction have kidnapped dozens of Syrian children and have their canisters of weapons-grade chlorine ready.

On that date, Syria’s Ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari “again noted the anomaly of the SAA using CWs it does not have only during the times it is making huge military progress, and the oddity that the armed terrorists never get killed, despite not being in proper biohazard garb, and how strange that these weapons Syria does not have only kill women and children.”

Israel chose this time in an impotent attempt to destroy the joyous occasion of the final day of the very successful edition of the Damascus International Fair. One-half million persons attended the exposition, whose exhibits included such miracles as the SAHAB 73 airplane.

The airport is just kilometers away from the fair grounds; surely Israel was disappointed in its criminal missiles being intercepted, but also that the people at the fair did not panic, did not flinch; they continued their visit. These are the resilient people of Syria who have stood up to the US and UK invaders of Iraq, who are surrounded by NATO and NATO stooges. These are Syrians who have fought and won a massively armed al-Qaeda and all of its derivative sects. They are on the verge of getting their country back on its feet once Syria finishes off al-Qaeda’s last stronghold, in Idlib.

These people should not be tested; whoever challenges them will end up losing and losing dearly.

Including Israel.

In examining the future, we must look to the past.

As we watch the media today, we are spoon fed more and more propaganda and fear of the unknown, that we should be afraid of the unknown and have full faith that our government is keeping us safe from the unknown. But by looking at media today, those of us who are old enough will be reminded of the era of Cold War news articles, hysteria of how the Russians would invade and how we should duck and cover under tables in our kitchens for the ensuing nuclear war.

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Under this mass hysteria all Western governments were convinced that we should join Western allies to fight the unknown evil that lies to the east. Later through my travels in Russia during the height of the Cold War with a peace delegation, we were shocked by the poverty of the country, and questioned how we ever were led to believe that Russia was a force to be afraid of. We talked to the Russian students who were dismayed by their absolute poverty and showed anger against NATO for leading their country into an arms race that they could not win. Many years later, when speaking to young Americans in the US, I was in disbelief about the fear the students had of Russia and their talk of invasion. This is a good example of how the unknown can cause a deep rooted paranoia when manipulated by the right powers.

All military is expensive, and we can see in Europe that the countries are reluctant to expand their military spending and find it hard to justify this to their people. In looking at this scenario, we can ask ourselves what is beneficial about this hysteria and fear caused on both sides. All armies must have an enemy to deem them necessary. An enemy must be created, and the people must be convinced that there is need for action to safeguard the freedom of their country.

Right now, we can see a shifting of financial power from old Western powers to the rise of the Middle East and Asia. Do we honestly believe that the Western allies are going to give up their power? My suggestion is: not easily. The old dying empires will fight tooth and nail to protect their financial interests such as the petrol dollar and the many benefits that come through their power over poverty-stricken countries.

Firstly, I must say, that I personally believe that Russia is not by any means without faults. But the amount of anti-Russian propaganda in our media today is a throwback to the Cold War era. We must ask the question: Is this leading to more arms, a bigger NATO? Possibly to challenge large powers in the Middle East and Asia, as we see the US approaching the South China seas, and NATO Naval games taking place in the Black Sea.

Missile compounds are being erected in Romania, Poland and other ex-Soviet countries, while military games are set up in Scandinavia close to the Russian border to practice for a cold climate war scenario. At the same time, we see the US President arriving in Europe asking for increased military spending. At the same time the USA has increased its budget by 300 billion in one year.

The demonization of Russia is, I believe, one of the most dangerous things that is happening in our world today. The scapegoating of Russia is an inexcusable game that the West is indulging in. It is time for political leaders and each individual to move us back from the brink of catastrophe to begin to build relationships with our Russian brothers and sisters. Too long has the elite financially gained from war while millions are moved into poverty and desperation.

The people of the world have been subjected to war propaganda based on lies and misinformation and we have seen the results of invasions and occupations by NATO disguised as “humanitarian intervention” and “right to protect”. NATO has destroyed the lives of millions of people and purposely devastated their lands, causing the exodus of millions of refugees. The people around the world must not be misled yet again. I personally believe that the US, the UK and France are the most military minded countries, whose inability to use their imagination and creativity to solve conflict through dialogue and negotiation is astonishing to myself and many people. In a highly militarized, dangerous world it is important we start to humanize each other and find ways of cooperation, and build fraternity amongst the nations.

The policies of demonization of political leaders as a means of preparing the way for invasions and wars must be stopped immediately and serious effort put in to the building of relationships across the world. The isolation and marginalization of countries will only lead to extremism, fundamentalism and violence.

During our visit to Moscow we had the pleasure of attending a celebration of mass at the main Orthodox Cathedral. I was very inspired by the deep spirituality and faith of the people as they sang the entire three-hour mass. I was moved by the culture of the Russian people and I could feel that their tremendous history of suffering and persecution gave them sensitivity and passion for peace.

Surely it is time that we in Europe refuse to be put in a position where we are forced to choose between our Russian and American brothers and sisters. The enormous problems that we are faced with, such as, due to climate change and wars, mass migration and movement of peoples around the world, need to be tackled as a world community. The lifting of sanctions against Russia and the setting up of programs of cooperation will help build friendships amongst the nations.

I call on all people to encourage their political leaders in the US, EU and Russia to show vision and political leadership and use their skills to build trust and work for peace and nonviolence.

*

Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book, The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation.

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As Australia’s tattered yet new government, led by the increasingly oafish and amateurish Scott Morrison trundled into its post-climate phase, states which see their existence as dependent on the cutting of carbon emissions have been more than a touch concerned. Their reality remains divorced from the paper clip conspiracies of Canberra and the energy cliques obsessed with cutting prices. 

Morrison’s ascension to power was yet another, existentially imposed headache in the aftermath of US President Donald J. Trump’s announcement that the United States would be making a dash from any obligations and aspirations associated with the Paris Climate Agreement. Pacific Island states were starting to write up their wills.

When the decision by Trump was made in the middle of last year, such states as Samoa and Fiji felt a shudder. 

“His decision,” came the press release from an assortment of Pacific Island Civil Society Organisations, “is a clear sign of his continued support of the fossil fuel industry which directly threatens the lives of communities living in the Pacific Islands.” 

The Australian response, ever mindful of the wishes of its obese cousin and all powerful defender, has reflected a certain bipolar conditioning on matters ecological and climactic.  Canberra takes the position, when convenient to its neighbours, that climate change is genuine, dangerous and in need of serious consideration.  When necessary, amnesia takes hold. 

In the aftermath of Morrison’s replacement of sitting Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama sent a salutary reminder to the new Australian leader couched in a disarming note of congratulation. 

“I look forward to working with you across a broad front, including the global campaign for action on climate change, the greatest threat facing Australia and all of your neighbours in the Pacific.” 

This, to a man who had coarsely brandished a lump of coal in the Australian parliament in February last year, supplied by the good offices of the Minerals Council of Australia. “This is coal,” he guffawed to his opponents, caressing the inert item in his hand with a fetishist’s resolve. “Don’t be afraid; don’t be scared.” 

Morrison ought to be suffering jitters from such figures as Samoa’s Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele, who has made it clear how climate change laggards should be treated. 

“We all know the problem, we all know the solutions,” he explained to the Lowy Institute at the end of last month, “and all that is left would be some political courage, some political guts, to tell people of your country there is a certainty of disaster.”

Then came the delicious blow, landed between the gizzards.  “So any leader of any country who believes that there is no climate change, I think he ought to be taken to mental confinement.  He is utterly stupid.  And I say the same thing to any leader here. 

Despite such cataclysmic promises, Australia’s politicians remain resilient before the inconveniences of reality, and warm to the enticements of stupidity.  The big god coal, and associate demigod fossil fuels, call the tune.   

The new Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, made the necessary, paternalistic adjustments for her audience earlier this month ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru.  This line waxes and wanes along the issue of aid, the condescending drip aid designed to influence more than change.  The angle on Australian generosity was pushed (daddy with deep pockets cares), as much to counter the phantom of Chinese influence in the region as anything else. “The largest development assistance in the region is overwhelmingly coming from Australia; in fact it will hit the largest contribution ever during 2018-19 at $1.3 billion.” 

Payne also busied herself bribing regional neighbours with such reassurances as employment, a tribute to an old legacy of enticing black labour to an economy short of staffing.  Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, she said with soothing corruption, would be added to Australia’s Pacific Labour Scheme, nothing less than a traditional, extracting incentive for the Australian economy.  As ever, the benefit would be for Australia more than anybody else: citizens from those countries would be able to fill the necessary jobs in rural and regional Australia.  (Well and good – they might, in time, have no country to return to.) 

Despite the issue of climate change making its inevitable appearance on the agenda, Payne preferred to see it as one of the items for discussion, rather than the main show.  “We really recognise that our Pacific Island neighbours are particularly vulnerable to climate change.”  Australia had been purportedly “working hard” towards climate change commitments, though Payne failed to spell out any coherent steps of late.  

The internal politics of the governing coalition in Australia remains intimately related to the fossil fuel industries and climate change sceptics.  The schismatic Tony Abbott remains convinced that Australia should go the way of Trump, and more than a sprinkling of his colleagues think the same.  Central to this is not environmental degradation so much as cheaper energy prices, which has become the holy of holies, the El Dorado of policy makers.  Such is the thinking that accompanies the short term aspirations of shop keeping types even as it dooms island states to watery oblivion.

* 

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]

‘Based on wide-ranging meticulous research, van der Pijl utilises the case of the downing of MH17 as a prism to refract the political corruption of state-directed oligarchic capitalism in Ukraine coupled to the self-interest of a neo-liberal driven European Union. He offers a masterly analysis of the complex domestic personal relationships and class forces involved in the breakup of Ukraine and the wider Soviet bloc, and concurrently the clash by foreign interests for material assets. The discussion of the downing of MH17 is based on a wide range of sources and provides the best available case study of the topic. Van der Pijl’s research raises controversial conclusions both about the validity of the process, the conclusions of the investigation of the crash and the wider motivations of the principal interests.

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This is a book which can be recommended to students of contemporary capitalism, of the transformation of the socialist block as well as to those concerned with contemporary international affairs.

It builds a convincing case of instances of collusion, misrepresentation, ‘fake news’ and lying underpinning the actions and policies of Ukrainian leaders and Western interests. There is a chilling message in the book – the propensity to resort to force and military action – which should worry all citizens. This is a book which deserves to be widely read and its uncomfortable conclusions will be intensely debated by students.’

David Lane, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University

‘Providing an essential counterpoint to the dominant post-Soviet narrative – that neoliberal capitalism brings democracy and prosperity – Kees van der Pijl blasts his way through decades of western myth-making to expose the brutal reality: that America’s drive for global domination continues. And as the US falters economically it uses its raw military power to enforce an unchallenged unipolar world – its goal is neoliberal global governance backed by full spectrum military dominance and US nuclear primacy. But powerful political and economic forces are working to resist this never-ending US expansionism. Van der Pijl reveals the latest stages in this global struggle, this new cold war, in a forensic and captivating account, centred on the conflict in Ukraine – a microcosm of the current global crisis.’

Kate Hudson, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Media Officer of Left Unity and Visiting Research Fellow at London South Bank University

‘This book successfully combines top-down and bottom-up approaches to the evolution of EU-US confrontation with Russia from the key year 2008, when Russia turned from hopeful member of the US-led global alliance to a “contender,” challenging that hegemony in what is now a new Cold War. Van der Pijl applies penetrating analysis from political economy, showing how the latest crises of global capitalism play out in the fault lines of Ukraine. As for the bottom-up narratives, we find here clear delineation of the intersection of oligarchs and political fractions dating from Ukraine’s independence to time present. The narrative on the ground slows to detailed accounting for every historic turn directly leading up to and following the coup d’etat of February 2014, providing the full context for the MH17 air catastrophe. Easily readable, but with full scholarly attributes of Notes, extensive bibliography and index.’

Dr Gilbert Doctorow, Russia specialist and journalist

‘A must for anyone studying the origins of the new Cold War. A profound analysis of the geopolitical context of the Ukrainian civil war. The book is well written and highly accessible. It contains a lot of material that did not find its way to the Western main-stream press. Van der Pijl shows how especially Western involvement transformed Ukrainian internal struggles into a conflict between NATO and Russia. The book is a valuable contribution to the debate about the recent history of Ukraine.’

Hans van Zon, Professor Emeritus, Central and Eastern European Studies, University of Sunderland, author of The Political Economy of Independent Ukraine

‘Kees van der Pijl has succeeded once again. Revisiting the downing of Flight MH17 in order to develop a macro-analysis of the contemporary global political economy, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War  is a magisterial work that demystifies the contemporary discussions on Russia and East-West relations. Rich in insight and information – bringing together history, political economy and geopolitics – it will certainly impact current debates on international politics.’

Professor Leonardo César Souza Ramos, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

‘Kees van der Pijl is both an eagle and a truffle hunter. Like a truffle hunter he reconstructs in great detail the downing on 17 July 2014 of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing 296 passengers and crew. Like an eagle he situates this catastrophe in the much broader picture of the Soviet Union’s disintegration and the concurrent NATO and EU expansion. Van der Pijl’s well-written study does not give a definitive answer to the question “who did it?”, but helps us immensely to understand the context of this tragic event.’

Dr Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Professor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam

***

Excerpt from Chapter 1

The Global Gamble of a New Cold War

Eastern Partnership Versus Eurasian Union

Meanwhile, Washington and a bloc of Baltic states led by Poland and Sweden were crafting a comprehensive Cold War response to Russia’s new contender posture, the Eastern Partnership. Although nominally an EU venture, it was actually an Atlantic undertaking of which Europe was only the subcontractor: the EU would be unceremoniously sidelined when the going got tough—in February 2014.

Well before the Georgian debacle, the Bush administration had become sceptical about the outcomes of the Rose and Orange Revolutions. The incoming rulers in Tbilisi and Kiev and the oligarchs seemed interested only in private enrichment.  American planners therefore began to devise ways of constitutionalising ‘market democracy’ in post-regime-change states. Dissatisfied with the timid proposals of her initial policy planning director, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice brought Stanford International Relations scholar, Stephen Krasner, to the State Department in 2005. In his new role, Krasner collaborated with Carlos Pascual, a former director in the National Security Council responsible for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and appointed US ambassador in Kiev in 2000. Pascual was credited with having convinced Kiev to join in the Iraq invasion, amidst general approval for that criminal adventure among governments in ‘the new Europe’. 

After his return in late 2003, Pascual became Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in the State Department and, with Krasner, devised a strategy for preventive intervention in weak states (‘weakness’ including ethnic or religious divisions) and a stabilization and reconstruction rulebook listing the measures by which ‘market democracy’ was to be established. On this basis, a list of countries liable to ‘collapse in conflict’ was drawn up, for which ‘reconstruction blueprints’ were to be prepared even if they had not yet in fact collapsed. In a talk at Georgetown University in October 2004, Pascual explained that this would not only allow intervention by rapid-response teams composed of private companies, NGOs and think tanks (saving ‘three to six months in response time’), but also enable them to ‘change the very social fabric of a nation’ on the basis of the said contracts. As Naomi Klein reported,

The office’s mandate is not to rebuild any old states… but to create “democratic and market-oriented” ones. So, for instance …, [Pascual’s] fast-acting reconstructors might help sell off “state-owned enterprises that created a nonviable economy.” Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means “tearing apart the old”.

In this strategy, Ukraine’s Naftogaz, the gas and oil holding, was such a ‘state-owned enterprise’ in  ‘a nonviable economy’, although, as we will see in chapter 5, the attempt to privatise it would eventually run aground in the face of oligarch resistance. Generally, however, governments in collapsed countries ‘take orders well’. This would apply to all the successor states of the Soviet Union, including Russia under Yeltsin. Given Pascual’s CV and the anti-Russian tendency in Washington, his reasoning also served as a blueprint for intervention in Ukraine to weld democracy promotion, economic warfare and the application of military force into a ‘new art of military intervention premised on the temporary occupation and technocratic reconstruction-reconstitution of illiberal societies’. A state benefiting from this would also find its sovereignty limited, or as Krasner calls it, be assigned ‘shared sovereignty’, ‘a voluntary agreement between recognized national political authorities and an external actor such as another state or a regional or international organization’.

The limited sovereignty contract for Ukraine, which its president would step back from signing in 2013, would take the form, paradoxically given its elaboration in Washington, of an EU Association Agreement in combination with a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). It was inscribed in the Eastern Partnership, initiated by the Baltic bloc. The Partnership, an offshoot of the European Neighbourhood Policy of 2004, was added to the ‘multi-layered drive to expand so-called European institutions such as NATO, the European Union, and all the organizations complementing them’. This drive increasingly focused on thwarting the Eurasian Economic Community of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, in which Ukraine had obtained observer status in 2002. Its first concrete instalment, a Customs Union, was planned to come into effect in 2009.

The Eastern Partnership was proposed by  the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski. A British citizen since his studies in Oxford, he only gave up his UK passport in 2006 when he was appointed Minister for Defence. His attitude toward Russia was revealed when he likened  the Nordstream project with Gazprom to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Via his wife, the author and US citizen, Anne Applebaum, Sikorski is part of a neoconservative coterie which also includes the co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, Robert Kagan, and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. Nuland was on Cheney’s staff in the Bush years and was kept on under Obama; she eventually became the stage manager of the coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014. Sikorski drafted the Eastern Partnership proposal with Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, the neoliberal nemesis of prime minister Olaf Palme in the 1980s, to give it more traction in the EU and dissimulate its Atlantic signature. It was Bildt who identified the EU Association Agreement as a market democracy contract when he characterised it as requiring a complete make-over of the country’s rules on property and competition, which in turn ‘will provoke really fundamental transformations in the long run.’ 

In May 2008, the Eastern Partnership was offered to six former Soviet republics, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova (the four GUAM states), Belarus (which briefly before had still been branded ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’) and Armenia. It was formally launched at the Prague EU Summit of 2009. Sensing that Ukraine and the Black Sea were key targets in the envisaged Partnership, from which Russia was to be excluded, Moscow countered by proposing a tripartite structure with the EU and Ukraine to modernise the country’s gas pipeline grid and prevent future disruptions of the supply to Europe (as had happened again in January of that year), but this was dismissed. Likewise, Russian proposals floated to investigate the compatibility of the Eurasian customs union and the DCFTA were judged inadmissible from the EU perspective. After the Georgia conflict, Germany and France gave up their opposition to that country’s association with NATO, against a backdrop of urgent expert advice to work for closer ties with Ukraine. 

The EU became the executor of this essentially Atlantic project at a time when American forward pressure towards Eastern Europe had slackened due to the financial crisis and the US presidential elections and when it was expected that the Bush-era enthusiasm for regime change would be scaled back. The EU had, moreover, abandoned its consensual approach in its drive for a European Constitution. Though it was voted down in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005, the EU rammed it though as the Lisbon Treaty without alterations (apart from trivia such as the ‘European anthem’) in 2007. Coming into force in 2009,  it required accession countries not only to open their economies but also align their defence and security policies with those of NATO. As we will see in chapter 3, the Baltic bloc would lead the effort of convincing other EU states of the need to draw in Ukraine, whilst the Obama administration was ‘leading from behind’ until it shifted gear following Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012, and actually directed the regime change in Kiev.

From 2010, then, the EU began binding invitees to the Eastern Partnership to the Western camp through a limited sovereignty contract including key defence provisions. However, as Richard Sakwa noted, this was bound to have grave consequences, particularly where Ukraine was concerned: ‘the effective merger of EU security integration with the Atlantic security community ^meant that [Ukraine’s ] association with the EU… took on dangerous security connotations [for Russia], as well as challenging Moscow’s own plans for economic integration in Eurasia.’  

The EU was launched on the path of geopolitical competition, something for which it was neither institutionally nor intellectually ready. Not only was the Association Agreement incompatible with Ukraine’s existing free-trade agreements with Russia, but there was also the Lisbon [Treaty] requirement for Ukraine to align its defence and security policy with the EU. This was an extraordinary inversion: instead of overcoming the logic of conflict, the EU became an instrument for its reproduction in new forms.

Since the US’s aim in this new, third Cold War, like the second, was regime change in Moscow, whilst reining in any independent European posture, it relied on the armour of coercion in every domain, including nuclear weapons. 

*

Prof. Kees van der Pijl is fellow of the Centre for Global Political Economy and Emeritus Professor in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.

Title: Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War (Prism of disaster)

Author: Kees van der Pijl

ISBN: 978-1-5261-3109-6

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Pages: 208

Price: £18.99

Click here to order.

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Earlier this week, John Bolton—Trump’s national security adviser and basically the president of US foreign policy—told the Federalist Society he would see to punitive sanctions if the International Criminal Court at The Hague moves to charge American soldiers who “served” in Afghanistan with war crimes. 

“If the court comes after us, Israel or other US allies, we will not sit quietly,” said Bolton. He said the US is ready to impose financial sanctions and go so far as to arrest members of the court.

“We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the US financial system, and we will prosecute them in the US criminal system,” he said. 

France 24 reported:

Bolton pointed to an ICC prosecutor’s request in November 2017 to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the US military and intelligence officials in Afghanistan, especially over the abuse of detainees.

Neither Afghanistan nor any other government party to the ICC’s Rome Statute has requested an investigation, Bolton said.

The US has occupied Afghanistan and handpicked its government for the last seventeen years, so obviously it will not bite the hand of its master.  

Ashraf Ghani, the current president, will follow orders to the letter. The alternative is to be strung up by the Taliban. 

Ghani isn’t a peasant who came up through the ranks. He was educated at Johns Hopkins University, worked for the World Bank, and gave a TED talk a few years back. Ghani was considered as a candidate to replace Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the United Nations in 2006. 

As the exceptional nation, the indispensable nation, the United States believes it is above the law and arrogantly violates it in broad daylight. 

The US was a serial violator well before the Geneva Conventions. It committed war crimes during the Philippine-American war in 1898 (most notoriously, executing children). 

During the Second World War the US attacked rescue vessels, executed prisoners, and soldiers routinely raped women. Of course, this pales in comparison to firebombing Tokyo and Dresden, and dropping atomic bombs on civilians. 

In Korea, the US is responsible for the No Gun Ri Massacre and other atrocities. The country was bombed back to the Stone Age.

In Vietnam, the brutality of the US was exposed with the My Lai Massacre (many of the victims were mutilated and raped). Of course, this might be considered a small incident when compared to the organized destruction of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The US organized death squads under Operation Phoenix. 

But this was a long time ago, and the memory of the American public is short. Primary example: the late John McCain, a US pilot who bombed civilian targets in North Vietnam, is considered a “hero.”  

The “war on terror” consists of non-stop crimes against humanity. Neocons in the George W. Bush administration flaunted international norms all over the place. 

In 2002, Bush issued a memorandum permitting the military to deny protections under the Geneva Conventions. The Supreme Court challenged the internment of detainees and military tribunals held at the Guantanamo Bay gulag. But not even the court can put a stop to such psychopathic behavior. 

Legal proceedings were held in Germany. Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, George Tenet, and others were accused of torture and prisoner abuse. 

This behavior was subsequently legalized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which retroactively rewrote the War Crimes Act and abolished habeas corpus for detainees. 

The Bush (actually the Reagan era) neocons had nothing but contempt for international law. 

“When trying to disguise the emptiness of the ‘bomb them and just see’ approach, the neocons still like to appeal to the depth of the great 20th century German-Jewish emigre philosopher Leo Strauss,” writes Robert Howse. “In one attack on the supposed weakness of Obama’s foreign and security policy, Bill Kristol cited Strauss’s remark  ‘the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or of justice unable to use the sword.’”

The sword of justice—nukes (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), firebombing civilians (Tokyo and Dresden), killing one third of Korea’s population, slaughtering countless peasants in Vietnam, and the atrocities and illegality of the war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, “special operations” in Africa and shipping jihadi maniacs and weapons into Syria, thus far resulting in over half a million dead.  

John Bolton is undoubtedly well aware of these violations of international law, but can the same be said for the president-in-waiting, known for his ignorance of international affairs? And if he did understand, it wouldn’t matter. He has advocated “bombing the shit” out of small, recalcitrant nations, while knowing practically nothing about those nations. 

 Finally, as Russia has demonstrated, sanctions are not an effective form of punishment for defying the exceptional nation and its neoliberal globalist objectives. The only thing that works for the neocons is bombing and mass murder. 

So, when will Bolton bomb The Hague? 

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

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Spain’s President, socialist Pedro Sanchez, canceled a week ago the sale of 400 laser-guided missiles to the Saudis for humanitarian reasons (value of the missile contract € 9.2 million –US$ 10.7 million). A couple of days ago, he reversed that noble decision, reinstating the sale, because the Saudis threatened cancelling their contract for 5 “Corvette” warships to be built by Navantia over the next few years, for a value of € 1.8 billion (US$ 2.1 billion), providing work for some 6000 shipyard workers in one of the economically worst hit areas of Spain, Cadiz Province of Andalusia.

So, to safe jobs, Sanchez decided to sell the bombs after all – the very bombs that will further decimate the Yemeni population – kill masses of children and increase the untold, unfathomable misery for this poor country, strategically located on the Gulf of Aden.

The war ships, Spain is producing for the Saudis, are certainly not going to bring peace to the world either; they bring perhaps work to Spanish shipyard workers, but, Dear Mr. Sanchez, where are your ethics, where is your sense of Human Rights?

Would it not be more ethical to help Spanish workers find alternative jobs, or while they are looking, pay them unemployment at a decent level? Perhaps exceptional unemployment, because the reason for the unemployment in this case is ‘exceptional’ and ethical to the point that the workers would probably understand – a sense of integrity and conscience they may proudly pass on to their children.

To top it all off – Spain’s Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, pretends that the Saudis have to guarantee that the missiles will not be used against Yemenis. Whom does she think she is fooling? – Would the Spanish people be so blind to reality to believe this lie? – I don’t think so. The Spaniards, having gone themselves through ten years of foreign imposed economic austerity hardship, an economic warfare of sorts, are more awake than believing dishonesties that serve the capitalist, profit-seeking war industry.

The Spanish bombs may substantially contribute to the killing of tens of thousands of Yemenis and among them countless defenseless children and women. The delivery of these missiles would be a tacit recognition and acceptance that the Saudis, supported by the US, the UK and France, block vital food and medical supplies from entering Yemen, thereby starving literally millions to death. And most likely the Spanish warships are creating in Yemen or elsewhere even worse human suffering.

Instead, Mr. Sanchez – why not showing your heart and compassion for these innocent victims of western aggression, overriding your Minister of Defense, and block the sale of the 400 deadly missiles and the 5 killer Corvettes?

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According to Mint Press News (10 September, 2018), the UN estimates that nearly 20 million Yemenis could die from starvation this year. That’s about 70% of the entire population, and that horrific number includes more than 2 million children. Two to three generations wiped out by the world’s most criminal monster nations, the Saudis, supported by the US, UK, France specifically, and more generally, by NATO. About 500,000 of these children already show severe signs of malnutrition, which, if it lasts over an extended period of time, may cause severe brain damage and stunting, effects that might even be passed on to future generations.

Since the onset of the war which typically and conveniently is called by the west a ‘civil war’ which it is of course not – the US has supported the confrontation with over US$ 200 billion of war planes and weapons, and the UK with missiles and bombs. This war of aggression by the US and western puppet allies, aiming foremost at dominating the country’s geographic and geostrategic location, overlooking the Gulf of Aden and further to the east, the Arabian Sea, leading to the Persian Gulf, has created the worst humanitarian crisis in modern history.

Under international pressure and a UN appeal, the Saudis have offered US$ 300 million worth of humanitarian aid – food and medication – with deadly strings attached. They have weaponizing this humanitarian aid, by closing the main ports of entry, especially the one of Hodeida, so the aid could not reach the population in need. Yemen relies for 80% of her food supply on maritime imports, 90% of which normally enters through the Red Sea port of Hodeida.

The Saudis – always with the explicit support of Washington – targeted on purpose key survival installations, like water supply and sewerage systems, agricultural fields, market places, food storage sites, power generation and electricity grids, hospitals, schools, basic transportation infrastructure – all to create the most abject scenario for starvation and disease, especially intestinal diseases, dysentery, cholera, from lack of drinking water and sewage pollution. With a currency that loses every day more of its value and skyrocketing food prices, three quarters of the population depends on humanitarian aid – most of which is blocked at the points of entry.

The last remaining lifeline for about 18 million Yemenis is the port of Hodeida. In fact, the assault on the port city of Hodeida is led by another U.S. Gulf coalition ally, the United Arab Emirates. The deadly operation to capture Hodeida is dubbed “Golden Victory”, putting up to a million people into an open prison of sexual torture, rape, starvation and uncountable other war crimes. According to UN estimates, a quarter-million men, women, and children could die from the military assault alone should the US-backed coalition continue its invasion of Hodeida. Saudi warplanes have already bombed school buses with children and buses of refugees fleeing the airstrikes, killing hundreds.

Mr. President Sanchez, you must be aware of this abysmal situation and crime that your 400 guided missiles would worsen – more bloodshed, more suffering, more children killed? – Aren’t you?

And if you are, Mr. President, don’t you think that the humanitarian gesture that you first intended, not selling these bombs to the Saudis – would by far outweigh the unemployment of 6000 shipyard workers? – An unemployment that your government could easily resolve, if not on a regular, then on an exceptional basis for the exceptional cause of avoiding more killing and more suffering, or what the UN describes as an outright genocide.

But there may be more at stake than meets the eye. Despite some fierce opposition, the US Congress has again voted for unquestioned support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. Foreign Secretary Pompeo has made it clear that he expects allied nations, especially NATO nations, of which Spain is one, to follow the US lead in supporting the Saudi-led hostility against a nation already eviscerated, for all practical purposes.

Was this perhaps understood as a threat of US sanctions, in case you disobey this tacit order, Mr. President?

Dear Mr. Sanchez, you would have a brilliant and simple legal reason for NOT selling these deadly and destructive weapons, missiles and warships, to the Saudis. The Spanish Constitution, like the Constitutions of most European countries, prohibits selling weapons to countries “when there are indications that these weapons could be used against inherent human dignity”.In addition, the common position of the EU recommends and insists that her members refrain from selling arms when there is a risk that they are used to violate Human Rights.

Of course, any EU law or regulation is easily overruled by the Masters from Washington. That’s why it takes guts – and a more – for a President, a socialist and humanitarian at heart, one who in his first 100 days in office has already done a lot of good at home, by undoing some of the disastrous social laws of his conservative predecessor, who was forced out of office in the midst of modern Spain’s scandal of worst corruption – hence, for you Mr. President, to resist the pressure form outside as well as from within – would be sending an important message of moral and ethics to the world.

Mr. Sanchez, you would be a hero, not only for Spain and the Spanish shipyard workers, who would most certainly applaud you, but for the entire world. You would demonstrate that your ethics cannot be compromised by money or political pressure. This would, indeed, be a novelty for our neoliberal western world.

And your personal benefit, Mr. Sanchez: You could again sleep at night.

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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. 

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Famine stalks Yemen because of US/UK supported bombing raids coupled with a naval blockade – ignoring the laws of war. 

On Thursday, UN humanitarian official in Yemen Lise Grande said war in the country continues taking an “incalculable human” toll, adding:

Conditions “deteriorated dramatically in (recent) days. Families are absolutely terrified by” endless terror-bombing and shelling, countless numbers losing the struggle to survive daily.

On Friday, AP News reported that starving Yemenis in parts of the country are eating “leaves of a local vine, boiled into a sour, acidic green paste” – providing stomach filler but little else.

Yemen’s Aslam district health facilities are overwhelmed with starving, emaciated adults and children, including “(e)xcruciatingly thin toddlers (with) eyes bulging,” suffering from endless war, trauma, lack of food, and other essentials to life and well-being.

The same is true in many other communities throughout the country, devastated by endless US/UK orchestrated, Saudi-led aggression and blockade.

Countless numbers of Yemenis are extremely malnourished, starving.

After three-and-a-half years of endless war, thousands of Yemenis perished, no one keeping count of the mortality rate.

UN figures willfully distort and understate the human toll, worsening daily with no prospect for conflict resolution.

An unnamed mother spoke for countless others, saying she has no money to buy food, medicines or anything else for her children.

Availability of essentials to life in many parts of the country is woefully inadequate or nonexistent.

According to Yemeni health official Mekkiya Mahdi,

“(w)e are in the 21st century, but this is what the war did to us.”

In numerous villages and surrounding areas in parts of the country, most everyone is living off leaf paste, she said, adding “I go home, and I can’t put food in” the mouths of my family or myself.

Countless numbers of Yemenis are dying daily from war, related violence, untreated diseases, and starvation. Hundreds of thousands more are close to perishing. Millions may die if war continues for years.

The Trump regime and its imperial partners oppose conflict resolution while falsely claiming otherwise.

On Tuesday, Mike Pompeo deceived Congress, claiming the Saudi and UAE regimes “are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure” – a bald-faced lie.

On Wednesday, a Pompeo press statement turned truth on its head, claiming the Trump regime considers “ending the conflict in Yemen…a national security priority,” adding:

The US is “work(ing) closely with the Saudi-led coalition to ensure Saudi Arabia and the UAE maintain support for UN-led efforts to end the civil war in Yemen, allow unimpeded access for the delivery of commercial and humanitarian support through as many avenues as possible, and undertake actions that mitigate the impact of the conflict on civilians and civilian infrastructure.”

Fact: Cold hard reality is polar opposite Pompeo’s willful Big Lie.

His spokeswoman Heather Nauert compounded the deception, saying the Trump regime is “implementing measures to protect civilians in Yemen” – they don’t give a damn about in the country or anywhere else.

Trump and UK regime hardliners are facilitating daily slaughter, starvation, and overall deprivation, supporting endless aggression and genocide, opposing diplomatic conflict resolution.

On Friday, Supreme Revolutionary Committee of Yemen chairman Mohammed Ali al-Houthi said Saudi and UAE warplanes intend attacking food storage facilities in Hodeidah, falsely claiming they’re used to store weapons.

The port city is the country’s main entry and distribution point for food, medical supplies, fuel, and other essentials to life.

On Wednesday, UNICEF said millions of Yemeni children are gravely harmed by severe malnutrition, starvation, lack of medical care, and displacement.

Its Yemen representative Meritxell Relano called the country “a living hell for its children.”

“(E)very year in (the country), 66,000 children under age five are dying of preventable diseases (alone)…(h)alf of them (perishing) during birth or in the first month of life (from) diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition related causes.”

Conditions are “catastrophic.” The lives and welfare of millions of Yemenis hang in the balance, countless numbers losing the struggle to survive, enduring extreme pain and suffering most people can’t imagine.

Yemen is ground zero for opposition to peace and indifference to human lives and welfare by the Trump regime and its imperial partners in high crimes.

Other US-led wars of aggression are just as contemptuous of rule of law principles and human life.

No nation more grievously violates the high-minded standards it professes to honor and respect than America.

Under Republicans and undemocratic Dems, it’s a ruthlessly vicious rogue state, exceeding the worst high crimes of all others.

It’s responsible for millions of deaths post-9/11 alone, accountability not forthcoming because the UN and world community do nothing to demand it.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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A claim to righteousness in international affairs is fundamental to Canadian exceptionalism, the idea that this country is morally superior to other nations. — Yves Engler [1]

In early August of this year, the Canadian minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, tweeted for Saudi Arabia to release human rights activists. This greatly angered the Sauds who issued a series of sanctions that included selling off Saudi assets in Canada, ceasing purchases of Canadian wheat and barley, expelling Canada’s ambassador, suspending all Saudi Arabian Airlines flights to and from Toronto, and ordering Saudi students to leave Canadian schools.

So far Canadian government officials have not responded other than to state Canada will continue to speak out on human rights abuses. That Canada speaks about human rights abuses comes across as rank hypocrisy to some Canadians. Given that Canada exists through a genocide against its Original Peoples; given that Canada is a partner in US imperialist wars; given that Canadian corporations, especially mining corporations, have been exploiting the third world whereby do Canadian officials living in their government greenhouse deign to cast rocks at other houses?

Canada touts itself as a multicultural land that embraces diversity. Canada tends to align itself more so with the Scandinavian welfare-state model rather than the rugged individualism of its neighboring United States. And Canada has a politically represented Left, or what purports to be a Left, in the New Democratic Party (NDP) — even a Communist Party and Marxist-Leninist Party, although neither are electorally successful.

Yves Engler has written Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada (Black Rose Books, 2018) which examines the Left in Canada. I tend to use the term progressivism because it refers to a grouping “that encompasses a wide spectrum of social movements that include environmentalism, labor, agrarianism, anti-poverty, peace, anti-racism, civil rights, women’s rights, animal rights, social justice and political ideologies such as anarchism, communism, socialism, social democracy, and liberalism.” The term the Left points to a bipolar split rather than a spectrum. Nonetheless, progressivism and the Left are referring toward a similar orientation.

In Left, Right Engler examines the NDP (and its earlier incarceration as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or CCF), the labor movement, leftist institutions, and leftist personalities (and other actors) for just how leftist or left-leaning they actually are. If one self-identifies as Left, then its seems perfectly reasonable that one should adhere to leftist principles. Actions will define a social/political orientation with greater clarity than words (which are also important). To belong to a party deemed leftist which then pursues right-wing policies presents a contradiction — and in the worst case, exposes one to criticism for hypocrisy.

Engler critiques the CCF/NDP for its militarist support, lack of compassion for foreign workers, and moral corruption of its leaders. For instance, NDP stalwart “Stephen Lewis was stridently anti-Palestinian,” writes Engler. (p 31) Ex-federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair was a front-and-center Zionist. Engler notes that another ex-federal NDP leader Jack Layton was passionate about the role of Canada’s military in Afghanistan. (p 35)

Engler asks,

Has the desire of some in the NDP to replace the Liberals as the slightly leftist alternative to the Conservatives caused the party to move so far to the right that it agrees with Canada being a partner in enforcing imperialism? If so, what sort of home does it offer to those who oppose US Empire and all forms of imperialism? (p 48)

This reviewer does not consider any major Canadian party to be Left. The Conservatives are staunchly neoliberal. Ditto for the Liberals (just a bite less to the Right than the Conservatives). The NDP also are a Right of Center party. Their lack of internationalism, support for militarism, racism among leaders, etc locate them at a great distance from leftist principles. At best the NDP are faux-Left.

The labor movement has also seen jingoism, militarism, racism among labor leaders, anti-communism, and a lack of solidarity (a sine qua nonfor the dignity of labor).

Engler writes that the Right has caught the ear of many labor leaders. (p 86-94)

Even “left-wing” think tanks bend to the Right, as do “leftist” critics. Engler notes that the Rideau Institute’s support for “peace-keeping” plays into mythologizing Canada as a peaceful kingdom while aligning with military objectives. (p 99)

As far as I can tell, major Canadian peacekeeping missions have always received support from Washington. Ignoring the power politics often driving peacekeeping missions has resulted in (unwitting) support for western imperialism. (p 100)

The author dispels the obfuscation of corporate/state media and its purveyors to cut through disinformation that has captured some of the “leftist” imagination. Engler shreds the role of a good Canada historically and more contemporaneously, among others, in supporting Zionism, the US-France-Canada orchestrated coup in Haiti, as well as the lauded (nauseatingly by corporate/state media) Canadian general Roméo Dallaire who twisted the genocide in Rwanda. Dallaire is a strong proponent of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, a cover for western imperialism. (p 176)

Even among Original Peoples — traditionally considered, in at least a societal sense as leftist [2] — have seen their “leaders” support militarism, colonialism, imperialism, corporate plunder, and environmental degradation. Engler says an online search will reveal the Assembly of First Nations insouciance about how Canadian policy impacts on rest of the world. (p 179) The Assembly of First Nations is, however, problematic insofar being viewed as a legitimate representative of Original Peoples. (p 192) [3]

The Left treads a slippery slope when it agrees with or takes up right-wing causes such as militarism, acquiescing when environmental destruction is at stake, and failure to support solidarity networks outside Canada. Engler broaches the antidote which is genius in its simplicity and obviousness: the Do No Harm principle backed by the Golden Rule.

Yet contrariwise Engler opines, “Canadian soldiers have only fought in one morally justifiable war: World War II.” (p 52) No explanation is proffered by the author for this opinion. One wonders how the Do No Harm principle was satisfied by Canadians fighting overseas? Also Engler’s contention of a morally justifiable [4] war is challengeable, and it is challenged by history professor Jacques Pauwels in his book The Myth of the Good War. [5]

Engler writes in a very readable style, and his work is solidly backed by sourcing. Most saliently, his work has a moral core. Left, Right is important and valuable in that it does not only illustrate and lament the corruption of leftist principles, but it also provides solutions about how leftist principles can be upheld; pushing the Left leftwards.

Read Left, Right and find out about how the NDP can be made relevant on the Left, about how to increase public awareness, and about how to grow the leftist movement.

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1. Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada (Black Rose Books, 2018): 151.
2. This was anathema for colonialism and its capitalist ideology. “The communal–they [colonialists who decided that “the Indians were to be individualized and completely Americanized” (p 3)] called them ‘communistic’–patterns of the Indians were an affront to their sensibilities. Unless the Indian could be trained to be selfish, they felt there was little hope of civilizing and assimilating them.” In Francis Paul Prucha (ed), Americanizing the American Indians (Harvard University Press, 1973): 8.
3. Something pointed out by Indigenous warrior Splitting the Sky: “The Assembly of First Nations is a neo-colonial elected system and their Chiefs are dependent on federal funds, therefore they are considered as collaborators of a foreign power.” In Splitting the Sky with She Keeps the Door, From Attica to Gustafsen Lake (Chase, BC: John Boncore Hill, 2001): 84. Review. 
4. The language is slippery here because Engler does not state that WWII was morally justified, just indicating that moral justifications could be made. But is that not true for almost any war? And do not the war-initiating nations invariably purport some sort of moral rationale to justify aggression?
5. E.g., US motivations during WWII were based on corporate interests: “… the US power elite is motivated first and foremost by economic interests, by business interests… (p 240; see also p 29-41); not on fighting fascism as GIs “first became acquainted with fascist (or at least quasi-fascist) practices, in the form of petty mistreatments and humiliations…. The American soldiers had not wanted this war, and they did not fight for the beautiful ideas of freedom, justice, and democracy; they fought to survive, to win the war in order to end it, in order to be able to leave the army, in order to be able to go home.” (p 22) In Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War(Toronto: Lorimer, 2015).

“It seems quite daunting, what the Palestinians are facing, but like Dr. Swee Ang who was with us and who was a long time Palestinian supporter, and who has seen the Sabra-Shatilla massacres – is a witness to the massacres in that community – she said she was inspired by the Palestinians, their resilience, how they were able to continue on in the face of all sorts of murderous oppression.”

– Larry Commodore, from this week’s interview. (transcript below)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The ongoing subjugation of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation continues to take its humanitarian toll.

According to the most recently published report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, restrictions on goods entering and leaving the Gaza Strip have contributed to the devastation of Gaza’s economy with the unemployment rate in the second quarter of 2018 standing at an unprecedented and staggering 53.7 per cent. Israeli reprisals against the demonstrators at the border fence with Israel since March 30 have resulted in the deaths of 179 Palestinians and injuries to over 18,000 others.

Gaza’s devastated electricity grid has been cut up to 20 hours a day. Funds for the UN emergency fuel program, mainly intended to power back-up generators has run out as of the end of August, leaving hospitals without the service support, and severely compromising other critical health centres and sanitation facilities.

In the occupied West Bank, Israel is expanding its settlements. In August, an Israeli Defense committee approved the construction of over 1000 settlement homes. According to the Israeli NGO Peace Now, 96 per cent of these settlements approvals “are in isolated settlements that Israel will likely need to evacuate within the framework of a two-state agreement”. In 2017, the Netanyahu government advanced plans to build 6,742 settlement homes compared to 2,629 the previous year. As of the end of August, plans were advanced for the construction of 3,794 more units.[1]

All of this in spite of a near consensus of opinion within the international community, including the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court that the settlement enterprise is illegal. [2]

The Global Research News Hour radio program concentrates its focus this week on Israel’s role in exacerbating the ongoing crisis in the occupied territories, and the failure of the international community to hold this Middle East power to account.

Our first guest, Suha Jarrar, elaborates on the crisis in Gaza with a special emphasis on the additional impact of climate change and how Israel’s settler colonial project interferes with Palestinians’ ability to adapt.

Our next guest, Larry Commodore speaks about his experiences on board the Freedom Flotilla boat Al Awda which was intercepted by Israeli forces in July while attempting to peacefully breach the Gaza blockade to bring aid to the people of Gaza.

Finally, Dmitri Lascaris breaks down Canadian culpability in aiding and abetting Israeli violation of international law.

Suha Jarrar is a Palestinian human rights researcher and advocate, and currently the Environmental and Gender Policy Researcher at Al-Haq human rights organization in Ramallah, Palestine. Suha obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in environmental and gender studies from Trent University in Canada, and her Master of Science in Climate Change Science and Policy from the University of Sussex. Suha’s M.Sc. research focused on climate change adaptation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Larry Commodore is a long-time indigenous rights activist and former elected chief of the Soowahlie community of the Stó:lō Nation, near Vancouver.

Dmitri Lascaris is a Canadian lawyer, journalist and activist. In 2012, Dimitri was named by Canadian Lawyer Magazine as one of Canada’s 25 most influential lawyers. He is a correspondent and board member of The Real News Network and a board member of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

Transcript – Interview with Larry Commodore, September 13, 2018

Global Research: This past summer, activists from countries around the world, including Canada, took part in the 2018 Freedom Flotilla, a peaceful, non-violent action aimed at breaking Israel’s blockade of Gaza and bringing vital supplies to Palestinians on the territory. On July 29th, the Flotilla ship Al Awda was intercepted and boarded by Israeli soldiers. The passengers and crew would report being assaulted, threatened and detained, and their cargo and personal effects stolen. |They would remain in detention for four days.

One of the passengers was Larry Commodore, a long time Indigenous rights activist, and former elected chief of the Soowahlie community of the Stó:lō Nation, near Vancouver. Larry cited the similarities between his experiences as a First Nations man in the Canadian settler-State, and the realities of Palestinians under occupation as a motivation for his involvement in Palestinian solidarity activism. He joined us by phone from the Soowahlie community where he lives, to tell us what he witnessed and experienced during the ordeal.

Larry Commodore: Well again, we were stuck in … The night before we were actually singing and …having a good time together, and we knew that they were gonna – they will be coming down on us. We talked a bit about what jail would be like and that and so forth.

When it started coming down the next day, I was, uh, I was by the wheelhouse. I listened to the radio communication with the Israeli navy. They were calling us that uh, that we were a threat to the Israelis’ security and that – they were telling us to turn around. And we told them that we were in international waters, that we had no intention of going to Israelis’ waters, and that we had the right to … seek passage.

We went back and forth for I don’t know how long, half an hour or so. At some point the captain of our boat, Herman Reksten, advised that (we should) be prepared for an attack (from the) Israelis. So I went down deck and alerted everybody that – to get ready! The Israelis are coming! Go in the bathroom! Get something to eat! Do whatever you have to do to get ready!

The Israeli commandos boarded quite quickly. I was surprised at that, how quickly they were able to board and start attacking our people at the – that were at the wheelhouse…

GR: Could you talk about their use of force against the crew and the passengers?

LC: Yeah, that’s what got me going there, because as I say, I didn’t have a good view but I did see some of them knocking our guys onto the deck there – the commandos were – and that got me quite upset then. As I say, I didn’t have a good view, but any fear that I had now was washed away by the anger, because I heard yelling and screaming going on. So I was quite angry at what was transpiring. Again, I didn’t have a good view of what exactly was going on. And I didn’t find out until later on what exactly happened there because some our folks was tasered, one of our folks had a broken foot there because they started stomping on people’s feet, that were around the wheelhouse too. They uh…

And then they got the captain, Herman Reksten, and they started beating up on him. The boat was stopped at that point, and they wanted the captain to start the boat again. But apparently, it’s a bit of a process to start the boat, and then you have to go down to the engine room…So they brought him – the captain – down to the engine room and got the engineer – told the engineer to start the boat, and the engineer said no. And so they started beating on the captain again and told the engineer (if he doesn’t) start the boat they were going to continue beating the captain. And they even threatened the captain with execution too.

So after that, after the beating of the captain, the engineer started the boat after that.

GR: The ship and its passengers were taken to the Ashdod naval base in Israel after a 6 hour journey. Larry reports that passports, wallets and other personal effects were seized by the soldiers. He said he would not voluntarily leave the Al Awda until those belongings were returned to him.

LC: The last thing I remember…they had me on the deck and they put handcuffs on my hands there…on my back. And then that’s all I remember.

I was told by other shipmates that they had dragged me off – they were quite violently they had dragged me off the ship. That I had a gash on my foot there and there was a lot of blood coming out. But they ended up bringing me to the hospital because of the gash on my foot, and I was unconscious when they brought me to the hospital, and uh, I came to because they were stitching up my foot there and it was painful. And I came to, I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know how I got there.

I was in a total daze….and then I just went unconscious again, and when I came to, I was in Givon prison, and it’s a bit of a blur there, I don’t remember much of the hours at Givon.

GR: While in detention, Larry would discover that his bladder had been injured during the melee leaving him unable to urinate. The discomfort was sufficiently intense that he indicated he was in no condition to take part in a proceeding in front of an immigration judge, nor was he able to travel back to Canada. After two days, officials relented and sent him to a hospital. However, the guard escorting |him seemed insensitive to his plight.

LC: The head guard that they got me to the hospital, he didn’t believe that I had a bladder problem at all. So at the hospital, he was forcing me to drink more water. He forced me to drink about eight glasses of water. Then he got me to the bathroom. Told me to urinate….and I couldn’t urinate, he was standing right behind me at the time too…Again, I couldn’t urinate, and then I told him that…(said) you’re playing games with me. And then he got me to drink more water, and I still wasn’t able to urinate. So he kind of gave up on that – the guard kind of gave up on that and he got me back into the hospital again. And then after a while the doctor came and realized that there was a problem, and he put a catheter on me and I was able to pass fluid after that.

GR: Mmm…

LC: And uh, I was brought back to the hosp – uh, to prison. I was – leg shackles on. When they were bringing me to the hospital I had leg shackles on, and the guard kept yelling at me: “Walk faster! Walk faster!” even though |I wasn’t able to walk very fast. And I was also carrying a urine bag too.

GR: Larry got deported from Israel the day after his hospital visit. He saw doctors in Toronto and was returned to his home on the West Coast of Canada. After three weeks of bed rest he reports an almost complete recovery from his ordeal.

Have you approached the Canadian government? What are they saying about these actions taken by the Israeli forces against you?

LC: Yeah, well, it’s uh, I did have a meeting with the Canadian consulate when I was in Israel, and again I was really kind of blurry then too, I still wasn’t in very good shape. And uh, I don’t think…before I realized that (I had) the bladder issues too, when I seen a consulate.

They wouldn’t seem helpful at all. They just seemed that they’d go with the Israeli line that I was being a threat to the Israeli security, and uh, and thenvthey gave me a phone number for them, and uh, because we have access to a phone, didn’t do me any good…I wasn’t too impressed with them at all.

It seems quite daunting, what the Palestinians are facing, but like Dr. Swee Ang who was with us and who was a long time Palestinian supporter, and who has seen the Sabra-Shatilla massacres – is a witness to the massacres in that community – she said she was inspired by the Palestinians, their resilience, how they were able to continue on in the face of all sorts of murderous oppression.

And that’s what inspires me, is the Palestinians themselves, how they are able to continue on…As I say, the reason I was there was to – thought it was my duty to be challenging the oppressor, and I think that should be everybody’s duty – every decent person, every person of conscience it should be their duty to stand up to challenge Israel and the way they – their murderous oppression that really is inflicted …on the Palestinians in Gaza in particular… We just have to create a better world for everybody.

-end of transcript-

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Notes:

1. https://twitter.com/peacenowisrael/status/1032307745083535360/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1032307745083535360&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aljazeera.com%2Fnews%2F2018%2F08%2Fisrael-approves-plans-1000-settlement-homes-180822162800080.html
2. https://imeu.org/article/israel-international-law-settlements

First published by GR on June 11, 2018

Emerging market economies are heading for an economic implosion. From South America to South Asia conditions are deteriorating rapidly and heading for an even more severe economic crisis in which many are already mired. At the head of this list is Brazil and Argentina. Others increasingly fragile, however, include Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, and even India, which has covered up its weak economic condition, and massive non-performing bank loan problem, by manipulating its GDP to falsely exaggerate its growth rate.

Business pundits, and even some commentators on the ‘left’, argue that emerging market economies, of which all the above are key members, now account for more than half of the world’s GDP. This suggests their vulnerability to US and G7 economies is less than it has been in the past. The so-called advanced economies–i.e. the USA, Japan, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy (the ‘G7–are increasingly irrelevant. But global GDP numbers are manipulated everywhere to show a stronger growth than actually has been occurring. Overnight, economies like India double their GDP numbers by redefining categories that compose their Gross Domestic Product, GDP, by manipulating price estimations that boost real GDP and by introducing statistical assumptions in their estimation of growth that are gross misrepresentations. GDP is thus not a good indicator of the condition of their economies. Even so, global GDP itself is now slowing this past year, as global trade also slows (even before USA precipitated ‘trade wars’ take effect). But this idea of declining vulnerability of economies like Brazil and Argentina is incorrect.

GDP numbers obscure the still significant vulnerability of emerging market economies (EMEs) to the advanced economies and their policy actions, especially the USA. This is true for even the largest EME’s like Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Indonesia, India and others. More symptomatic economic indicators of the growing crisis in EMEs are their currency declines, money capital outflows, rising domestic interest rates, and rising import cost inflation.

USA Levers of Economic Power: Currency, Credit Access & Central Bank Rates

While the EME’s share of global GDP has risen in recent decades, the world economy is nevertheless still largely manipulated by the USA and other G7 economies. That manipulation is exercised by the USA in particular by several means: through its dominant currency, the US dollar; by control of the flow of much of global credit (and debt) by US banks and US shadow banks through capital markets; and by the influence of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, over US interest rates and, in turn, rates by other central banks and banks elsewhere.

Recessions and crises in the EMEs are largely the consequence of USA policy shifts involving US interest rates, US dollar appreciation or depreciation, global crude oil price speculation that follow the dollar, or lending by US banks and US shadow banks (i.e. investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, etc.,) in what are called ‘capital (corporate debt) markets’ that function as alternative sources of credit from traditional bank loans.

In 2017 all these US policy levers began to shift to the disadvantage of emerging markets. That shift is accelerating in 2018. The result has been ‘made in the USA’ deepening recessions in the EMEs, collapse of their currencies, capital outflow from EMEs back to the USA and G7, accelerating EME domestic inflation, and increasing political unrest and instability.

Therefore, not GDP, but a more telling initial indicator of the growing fragility in emerging economies is the recent freefall of their currencies in relation to the US dollar, Euros, and Japanese Yen, as well as the capital flight from these countries that occurs in tandem with the collapse of their currencies. These in turn become the key drivers of EME domestic recession, mass unemployment, inflation, goods shortages, and growing political instability.

And at the head of the list of economies with currency instability today in South America are Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. But the same process is emerging rapidly elsewhere in the EMEs, in Turkey, Indonesia. Malaysia, and perhaps next even India. But no region of the global economy more strongly reflects the crisis today than Brazil and Argentina.

Destabilizing Argentina and Brazil

Argentina’s currency, the Peso, has fallen around 25% since the beginning of 2018. Turkey, Brazil and others are also falling at double digit rates in recent months. With the collapse of their currency, the value of investments held by capitalists in these countries–foreign and domestic alike–also fall in value. To protect the value of investors’ assets from collapsing with their currency (i.e. stocks, bonds, real estate, foreign currency holdings, derivatives, etc.) their governments (legislatures and central banks) respond by raising interest rates in their own economies, in the desperate attempt to stem the capital outflow set off by currency collapse. Investors’ investment values are propped up by raising domestic interest rates. But the the contradiction is that higher interest rates depress the real economy, throwing it into recession; or if recession already exists, into yet deeper recession and even depression. But investors don’t care about recession; they care foremost about protecting the value of their investments. Thus the pro-business, pro-investor EME governments opt for higher rates and accept mass unemployment as a cost.

EME currency collapse has another economic consequence. Since most of these countries import much of their basic goods (food, medical supplies, oil, raw materials for manufacturing, consumer goods, etc.), the collapsing currencies also raise inflation on these goods due to rising import costs. Thus stagnating and then declining real economy and mass unemployment is accompanied by rising prices. More workers are laid off because of the slowing economy, while the prices they must pay for basic goods and services simultaneously rise as well.

Argentina and Brazil are especially exposed to this scenario of US rising interest rates and dollar that precipitates collapse of their currencies, capital flight, rate hikes, mass unemployment and inflation.

Since the 2008 global crash they have borrowed heavily–especially in US dollars. The massive trillions of dollars of debt they accumulated since 2008 must be repaid in dollars. To get dollars they must export and sell more goods. But the slowing of global trade and other developments in China, Europe and China has reduced their ability to export more. They can’t raise sufficient dollars with which to pay their US dollar denominated debt (to US banks and shadow banks). In order to continue to pay their foreign debt principal and interest coming due (to US and G7 bankers) they are forced to borrow dollars from the International Monetary Fund, IMF–another key economic institution controlled by the US and G7.

Argentina recently borrowed another $50 billion from the IMF–to pay its debt to USA and G7 bankers. However, this doesn’t solve its problem. It only shifts debt payments from private bankers to the the IMF. The IMF never ‘bails out’ countries; it always bails out bankers that have loaned to these countries when the latter cannot make payments to their bankers (and bond investors, etc.).

While Argentina has turned to the IMF to temporarily buy time as its crisis deepens, Brazil has gone another route to deal with its ‘made in the USA’ crisis that has been ripening since 2015. It has borrowed even more from US bankers. And it has chosen to raise its interest rates to astronomical levels, in the vain hope of propping up the value of its currency will stem its capital outflow (and encourage continuing capital inflow to Brazil from USA and G7 investors as well).

Brazil’s central bank interest rate is currently around 40%–up from around 14% just a few years ago. That means businesses or consumers have to pay 40% on any loan or debt their incur to stay in business or maintain consumption levels. Interest rates that high virtually shut down wide areas of an economy. And that’s what’s been happening in Brazil. Mass unemployment has followed. As has accelerating inflation and cost of living as Brazil’s currency, the Real, has collapsed in relation to the dollar. Understandably, political unrest follows as jobless grows and prices for basic goods accelerate. That too is now underway.

Brazil’s crisis began in 2015. At that time its central bank interest rates were, as noted, around 14%. Since 2015 they have risen to the 40%. More than half of that acceleration has occurred in just the past year, and especially in 2018. But those 40% rates, and the unemployment and inflation, are the result currency collapse and capital flight–which in turn is a process that has its origins in the USA and rising US interest rates and dollar appreciation.

The error of the Brazilian Workers Party while still in government, led by Lula and then Rouseff, was to allow Brazil’s central bank to steadily raise interest rates since 2015 to current levels. Central banks are always controlled by the private bankers. And private bankers in EMEs like Brazil are dominated by US bankers and investors. And EME central bankers are in turn controlled by their domestic banking interests.
Furthermore, capitalists everywhere have cleverly engineered their central bank institutions to ensure the central banks are shielded from popular national legislatures, just in case popular democratic movements (like the Workers Party) democratically assume power over national governments. Political power remains shielded from economic power. Capitalists have many ways to sabotage democratically elected governments. Central bank interest rates are but one tool.

The Political Strategy Element

The Workers Party in Brazil should therefore have democratized (nationalized in the public interest and fundamentally restructured) the Brazilian central bank back in 2015-16, by opening its decision making process to include democratic forces and representatives. (For my view of how central banks can, and must, be democratized see the concluding chapter to my book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes’, Clarity Press, 2017).

In Argentina, the Kirchner government for years refused to repay the US hedge funds their billions of dollars in claims from the earlier debt crisis engineered by them. What it should have done was to pay the hedge funds in special issued and printed Argentine pesos, instead of dollars, and told them to get lost, they’ve been paid. Instead it fought them in global courts dominated by the US and G7.

As the Brazilian economy began to weaken after 2016, and conditions worsen, the USA, allied with domestic Brazil capitalists and pro-Business politicians in Brazil, developed a political strategy to accompany the US interest rate-dollar policies designed to undermine Brazil’s currency and destabilize its economy. This was the so-called ‘political corruption’ offensive, engineered in the USA and implemented in coordination with Brazilian business interests and pro-business political parties. By painting Workers Party leaders–Rouseff and then Lula himself–as corrupt, they drove them from office (or in the case of Lula jailed him to prevent him from running). An unapologetic pro-Business/pro-USA Temer government was put in place. A similar ‘political’ strategy was implemented against the Kirchner government in Argentina, to drive it from office and replace it with the current pro-business Macri government. Temer in Brazil and Macri in Argentina are mirror images of the USA-G7 economic-political strategy to remove populist governments in South America and replace them with pro-USA, pro investor governments.

The Special Case of Venezuela: When All Else Fails… Military Action

Destroy the currency is always at the forefront of USA imperialist strategy to drive out populist, democratic governments and re-install pro-Business, pro-US investor governments. USA policy toward Venezuela today is not dissimilar, and represents an extreme version of what has been rolled out in Brazil and Argentina. The USA embarked several years ago to destroy Venezuela’s currency, shut off access to US dollars with which to purchase needed food, medical and other imports, while launching another version of ‘government leaders are corrupt’ political-public opinion offensive. It has supported and financed domestic political opposition forces and parties to the Maduro government. Now it is talking about the final extreme alternative of military intervention. It is lining up other right wing governments in Latin America to take the lead in intervention if necessary. But the USA will plan, direct and finance the costs of military intervention using its proxies, if it comes to that. Recent elections in Venezuela that returned the Maduro government to office have signaled to Washington that the Brazil-Argentina strategy might not work in Venezuela. Thus the consideration of more direct military intervention is now on Washington’s agenda. Trump has as much as said so publicly.

But the USA’s strategies of economic destabilization by, initially, raising interest rates to generate capital flight and currency collapse, to have central banks escalate domestic interest rates in the countries to precipitate mass unemployment and recession, to cause accelerating import goods inflation of critical items–and to engage in ‘leaders are corrupt’ political offensives to depose democratically elected popular governments–may not prove successful in the longer term.

Resistance is Not Futile

Already democratic movements, unions, strike actions, mass demonstrations are emerging in Brazil and Argentina. And Venezuela holds out despite the desperate destruction of its economy by USA-business interests. Elections are set soon in Brazil. The results will be critical. What the USA-Temer government’s next moves might be are critical. How Brazil goes, so too will go Argentina, giving rise to further popular demonstrations and strikes should elections in Brazil throw out the Temer government. And should both countries restore democratic governments, USA policy toward direct intervention in Venezuela will stall temporarily.

But whatever the political outcomes, the more fundamental economic forces will still prevail: South American popular governments must find a way to prevent their central banks from acting ‘independently’ on behalf of pro-business, pro-US investors, interests; they must find a way to stabilize their currencies not based on the US dollar; and they must not fall into the debt trap offered by the IMF. Until these levers of US-G7 economic power and hegemony are eliminated, emerging market economics like Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela will always be susceptible and at the mercy of USA economic hegemony.

*

This article was originally published on Jack Rasmus’s Website.

Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, August 2017; ‘Looting Greece: A New Financial Imperialism Emerges’, Clarity Press, October 2016; and ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’, Clarity Press, January 2016. His website is: http://www.kyklosproductions.com and twitter handle, @drjackrasmus. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

First published  by GR on May 13, 2015

The media has taken an increasing interest in the 28 pages that were redacted from the 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry Report. The stories usually feature one of the Inquiry’s leaders, former Senator Bob Graham, who has claimed that the missing pages point to involvement of the government of Saudi Arabia. Although Saudi complicity is in no way surprising, facts that are often overlooked suggest that Graham’s actions may not be entirely straightforward. This leads independent researchers to raise concerns about his intentions and those concerns are justified.

To begin with, Graham never calls for release of other documents collected by the government’s 9/11 investigators, most of which are still held secret. That includes the majority of 9/11 Commission documents, of which only a fraction have been released—with much of the content redacted. The release of Commission documents is hindered by claims that they are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) because they are congressional records. Nonetheless, the public deserves to see documents that might answer critical questions.

Moreover, Graham shows no interest in the many alarming facts about 9/11 that have been uncovered through released documents and videos. Some things that have been released via FOIA request are far more compelling than claims of Saudi financing. These include numerous testimonies to explosives being used to bring down the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings.

After a lawsuit by 9/11 victims’ families, the oral histories of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) were released in August 2005. At least 23% of those eyewitnesses gave testimony to explosions in the Twin Towers. About 60 FDNY members reported hearing warnings of the unpredictable “collapse” of WTC Building 7.

Still held secret by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are the agency’s computer models on which it based its non-explosive conclusions. In response to a FOIA request, a NIST spokesman declared that revealing the computer models would “jeopardize public safety.” Graham is never heard challenging that absurd justification for withholding critical information, nor has he objected to the fact that NIST conducted an entirely unscientific WTC investigation.

Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based on torture testimony, the records of which were destroyed by the CIA. Since that time, the government has produced documents stating that the first alleged al Qaeda leader tortured for information was never related to al Qaeda in any way. This means that all of his torture testimony, upon which the 9/11 Commission Report was based, was false. Yet Graham and his supporters say nothing about it.

The U.S. official most responsible for preventing terrorism in the years prior to 9/11 is known to havehelped Osama bin Laden evade capture at least twice. That same official was a personal friend and representative of the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, a country that Bob Graham’s investigation glossed over despite its many links to 9/11.

According to Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch, Tommy Boggs may have been behind the redaction of the 28 pages from the Joint Inquiry Report. A long-time Washington powerbroker and son of a member of the Warren Commission, Boggs was a public relations consultant for the Saudi royal family. That connection is remarkable given that the Boston Globe reported, in November 1990, that a partner in Boggs’ firm was a director of the Kuwait-American Corporation (KuwAm). As anyone interested in 9/11 knows, KuwAm was the firm that owned and operated Stratesec, the security company for several 9/11-related facilities. There are many reasons why the leaders of KuwAm and Stratesec are central suspects in the crimes of 9/11.

These facts are of no interest to Graham or the mainstream media. For unknown reasons, they only seem interested in uncovering Saudi involvement. Such inexplicable behavior, particularly when it has to do with 9/11, should raise concerns. Little discussed facts about Graham might shed light on the answer to this dilemma.

For example, few people seem to remember that Bob Graham was against an investigation from the start. In November 2001, two months after 9/11, Graham was leading the effort to delay any inquiry into the crimes. His position was “that it would not be appropriate to conduct such an investigation at a time when the government’s focus is on prosecuting the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.” Three months after 9/11, Graham was still fending off cries for an investigation, stating that it was “still too soon.” Paradoxically, he claimed that it was best to wait until the threat of additional attacks subsided before investigating 9/11. He said that, “Once the possibility of fresh attacks by ‘’sleepers’ already in the United States has diminished, the time will be ripe.”

While Graham was trying to stop an investigation, the Senate voted for one anyway. The compromise was that Graham and his CIA operative protégé, Porter Goss, would run it and that it would have a very limited focus on intelligence agency shortcomings. And although Graham now claims that the Bush Administration covered-up Saudi involvement in 9/11, he and Goss, who had an interesting history together, led an inquiry that covered-up 9/11 in nearly every other sense.

When Graham and Goss announced their inquiry in February 2002, they made it clear that they would not pursue “blame game” attempts with respect to “what went wrong.” The resulting investigation was completely deferential to the intelligence agencies that it was chartered to investigate. Due to an alleged leak, Graham and Goss even supported the FBI’s investigation of their own panel members while the panel was investigating the FBI. As expected, the final Joint Inquiry Report was largely a whitewash.

Another unnoticed fact is that Graham’s calls for release of the 28 pages have matched up, chronologically, with changes in Saudi government leadership. That is, the times when Graham has made noise about the 28 pages have run parallel to the times of uncertainty with regard to the succession of the Saudi monarchy or Saudi strategic partnerships. This suggests that Graham is simply using the redacted section of his report as a control mechanism to bring new Saudi leadership in line with continued U.S. interests.

Although Graham joined others to call for release of the 28 pages in July 2003, perhaps in an attempt to pressure Saudi Arabia to fully support the War on Terror (which it did soon after), he did not continue that effort. In fact, Graham appeared to ignore the issue for the next seven years. In November 2010, the illness of King Abdullah began to stir fears over the succession to the Saudi throne. Just a few months later, Graham released a novel that hinted at unresolved questions about Saudi involvement in 9/11.

In late 2013, the Saudi government announced that King Abdullah was very ill and, in late 2014, his death was said to be imminent. At the same time, the Saudis began forging a new strategic relationship with China, leaving people to wonder if the U.S. was “losing Saudi Arabia to China.” That was when Graham really turned up the heat. He joined a coalition of U.S. congressmen who began resurrecting the issue of the 28 pages with gusto and they began to get a lot of attention from the mainstream media.

The demise of Abdullah ignited conflict among factions within the Saudi power structure. The Saudi king died in late January 2015 and Graham’s new calls for release of the redacted section became increasingly well covered as the new king, Salman, took office. The calls for what Graham says is evidence that Saudi Arabia financed the attacks continue to this day as King Salman demonstrates an as yet unclear position toward the United States.

Overall, there appears to be a correlation between times when Saudi support for the U.S. is perceived as being threatened and times when the media publicizes possible Saudi connections to 9/11. With the rise of King Salman and the growing Chinese-Saudi relationship, new connections have been reported as coming from the imprisoned convict Zacarias Moussaoui as well as through claims about an FBI cover-up of a Saudi family in Sarasota.

Americans should be interested in the release of any information that sheds light on the crimes of 9/11. However, it should always be remembered that Saudi oil is the single most important resource related to U.S. economic stability. Continual U.S. control of the government that holds that resource is, therefore, paramount.

Bob Graham and the media may forget about the missing 28 pages if and when King Salman is sufficiently cowed to U.S. interests and China becomes less threatening as a Saudi strategic partner. But one thing is certain—if the only mainstream coverage of 9/11 questions continues to center on implications of Saudi financing of the attacks, the truth about what really happened will remain solely a matter of independent inquiry.

Kevin Ryan blogs at Dig Within.

Of relevance to the ongoing currency war, first published in November 2017

One quote that always crosses my mind regarding the decline of the U.S. dollar and the state of geopolitics associated with it, is by Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute who said that “When all else fails, they take you to war.” 

As the U.S. dollar continues to lose its status as the world’s premiere reserve currency, the reality of a world war seems inevitable, especially when major countries such as China, Russia and Iran are making strategic moves to bypass the U.S. dollar in favor of other currencies such as China’s ‘Petro-Yuan’. China has made the decision to price oil in their own currency the “Yuan” by a new gold-backed futures contract which will change the dynamics of the world’s economy. China is preparing to launch the petro-Yuan later this year that will eventually threaten the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

At the end of World War II, the international economic system was in shambles, so a plan was devised to create a new economic system. By July 1944, more than 730 delegates arrived at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hamphire and signed on to the historic Bretton Woods agreements which was a plan to set up a system of rules, regulations that eventually led to the creation of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF’s main purpose was to prevent any temporary imbalances of payments. The framework of the Bretton Woods agreements was to control the value of money between various countries. Each country had to have an established monetary policy that kept the exchange rate of its own currency within a fixed value in terms of gold. By 1971, the U.S. terminated the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold (at the time, the fixed rate of gold was at $35 an ounce) ending the Bretton Woods system allowing the U.S. dollar to become a fiat currency which has allowed central banks (especially the Federal Reserve bank) to “print money out of thin air.”

China’s move will have consequences.  For starters, it will certainly undermine Washington’s ability to impose economic sanctions on any nation at will and at the same time, will slowly diminish the purchasing power for U.S. consumers as imports become more expensive.

China (the largest holder of U.S. debt) is the largest importer of oil, while Russia, one of the largest exporters of oil in the world have agreed to use the petro-Yuan to bypass the petro-dollar. The petro-Yuan threatens the U.S. dollar’s hegemony around the globe as several nations have recently demonstrated as they all share an interest in joining the transition from the U.S. dollar to the Yuan for oil transactions including Washington’s arch enemies Iran, Venezuela and even Indonesia (currently not on Washington’s hit list).

The mainstream-media has been reporting on the latest developments concerning China’s plan to bypass the dollar and introduce the petro-Yuan to the international community in an article by CNBC titled ‘China has grand ambitions to dethrone the dollar. It may make a powerful move this year’:

China is looking to make a major move against the dollar’s global dominance, and it may come as early as this year. The new strategy is to enlist the energy markets’ help: Beijing may introduce a new way to price oil in coming months — but unlike the contracts based on the U.S. dollar that currently dominate global markets, this benchmark would use China’s own currency. If there’s widespread adoption, as the Chinese hope, then that will mark a step toward challenging the greenback’s status as the world’s most powerful currency.

China is the world’s top oil importer, and so Beijing sees it as only logical that its own currency should price the global economy’s most important commodity. But beyond that, moving away from the dollar is a strategic priority for countries like China and Russia. Both aim to ultimately reduce their dependency on the greenback, limiting their exposure to U.S. currency risk and the politics of American sanctions regimes

Washington is on a collision course for another war with North Korea with U.S. President Donald Trump leading the charge. With the power of the U.S. dollar on life support, the U.S. empire of debt continues to use the threat of war and in some cases, wage actual wars around the world namely Iran, Syria and Venezuela which have been on Washington’s hit list for some time. Iran and Russia are already slowly transitioning away from the U.S. dollar to avoid any future economic sanctions imposed by Washington. Venezuela is also ready and willing to make its move against the U.S. dollar. Reuters did report on the decision made by the Maduro government to implement a new system of international payments for its oil exports. The report headlined with ‘Venezuela’s Maduro says will shun U.S. dollar in favor of yuan, others’ quoted what Maduro had said during a session of the National Constituent Assembly at Palacio Federal Legislativo in Caracas, Venezuela:

“Venezuela is going to implement a new system of international payments and will create a basket of currencies to free us from the dollar,” Maduro said in an hours-long address to a new legislative superbody, without providing details of the new mechanism. “If they pursue us with the dollar, we’ll use the Russian ruble, the yuan, yen, the Indian rupee, the euro,” Maduro said

Another recent article published by CNBC ‘China will ‘compel’ Saudi Arabia to trade oil in Yuan — and that’s going to affect the US dollar’ interviewed Carl Weinberg a chief economist and a managing director at High Frequency Economics about how the US dollar will lose its global dominance in the near future once Saudi Arabia will be forced to use the petro-Yuan since China is the world’s top importer of oil:

Carl Weinberg, chief economist and managing director, said Beijing stands to become the most dominant global player in oil demand since China usurped the U.S. as the “biggest oil importer on the planet.”

Saudi Arabia has “to pay attention to this because even as much as one or two years from now, Chinese demand will dwarf U.S. demand,” Weinberg said. “I believe that yuan pricing of oil is coming and as soon as the Saudis move to accept it — as the Chinese will compel them to do — then the rest of the oil market will move along with them”

The U.S. dollar is slowly losing its’ status as the world’s reserve currency, so is a war with China a possibility? Would the U.S. attack North Korea as a stern warning to China or would it bring China into the conflict in an attempt to save the U.S. dollar? Saddam Hussein wanted to trade in Euro’s instead of the U.S. dollar for Iraq’s oil exports and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi wanted the Gold Dinar to dethrone the U.S. dollar in the continent of Africa. The decisions made by both Iraq and Libya had consequences that led to their destruction by U.S. and NATO forces. Can the U.S. do the same to China? I highly doubt it since China has a formidable military that can defend itself against any U.S. attack. China is certainly not Iraq nor Libya. So will there be a war against China in the long term? With the U.S. steadily collapsing at a slow pace, Washington would do anything to survive. The U.S. dollar supports the Military-Industrial Complex and its destructive and very expensive adventures around the world.

The launch of the petro-Yuan will accelerate the process in what we can call De-Dollarization. However, there are some people in the mainstream-media that are not convinced that the petro-Yuan will overthrow the U.S. dollar anytime soon, for instance, David Fickling from Bloomberg News recently wrote ‘The Petroyuans time hasn’t come’ said:

Look, for instance, at the most-traded product on the Dalian Commodity Exchange in China, iron ore. While mainland commodity markets have seen febrile activity in recent years, bid-ask spreads are still several times higher than those on major contracts traded in London and New York. That makes trading more costly, volatility higher, and price discovery weaker — and as a major consumer of crude, Beijing ought to be opposed to that sort of change.

There are the producers to consider, too. Most of the Middle East’s oil exporters have currencies that are pegged to the greenback. Switching to yuan pricing would introduce foreign-exchange risk to their budgets for little obvious gain, especially as China generally consumes less than 20 percent of their exports.

That doesn’t mean the planned contract is useless. China will benefit from having a benchmark that’s more appropriate for its own purposes — particularly one that reflects the medium sour grades of crude that are chiefly consumed by local refineries, as opposed to the sweet, light varieties that underpin the main Western contracts.

Just don’t expect it to change the world. While the economic center of gravity has been moving east, oil’s connections to West Texas and the North Sea will remain strong for years to come

James Rickards, the author of ‘Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis’ will most likely disagree with Fickling’s analysis:

Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast

The U.S. dollar is failing because of Washington’s economic and foreign policies and its collusion with the Wall Street banking cartels, multi-national corporations and the Military-Industrial Complex. Max Keiser of The Keiser Report was interviewed on RT News and explained why the world is seeking to move away from the U.S. dollar:

Countries worldwide are tired of funding the America’s “military adventurism by being a party to the ‘Empire of Debt,’ as it’s known around the world – the US dollar,” and therefore, will likely join the de-dollarization movement, Keiser said.  The US financial sector and its military-industrial complex are unlikely to give up the dollar hegemony without a fight, though, as the dollar is both the basis and the main product of America. And the US will use its other favorite tool for it – war, Keiser believes.

“Maybe they will start a war between Japan and China, and maybe they will start a war with North Korea. America will do anything to keep the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency,” Keiser said.  “They will invade the countries, like Afghanistan, they will stop at nothing. Because this is the basis of the US empire. It’s not land-based, it’s not based on material goods, it’s based on rent-seeking. It’s based on landing dollars, getting out income and when countries can’t pay they dismantle the assets and take them over. We saw it in Latin America, South America, this is how America built its empire”

Whether you agree or not, a currency war has begun and we are all going to be paying close attention in the coming months and years ahead to see how far Washington will go to maintain the supremacy of the U.S. dollar. So as China is getting ready to launch the petro-Yuan, is the U.S. willing to launch a war against North Korea?

This article was originally published by Silent Crow News.

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Basra is supposed to be a prosperous province for its citizens. The province is a home for most of Iraq’s biggest oil fields. Overall, Iraq is a country with the 4th largest oil reserve in the world. All the country’s six ports, transporting oil and other goods, are located in Basra. The petrochemical industry is also growing rapidly. Basra was also blessed with fertile soil so it once became a food barn for the country. 

But Basra residents’ life not even as bright as the night lights of the city. Since 2014, residents of various cities have fled to Basra to escape from ISIS. The population has increased dramatically and the existing infrastructure is no longer adequate. Unemployment is increasing rapidly because new citizens do not have sufficient skills, while foreign companies prefer to employ skilled labor from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh or Indonesia.

In July 2018, hundreds of people in Basra rallied against Prime Minister Haider Abadi’s administration over the various economic problems they faced, especially the lack of electricity and health water, and unemployment.

Actually, these problems are faced by the people in southern Iraq years ago but have never been resolved.  Since the reign of Saddam Hussein, the southern Iraq region with a majority Shiite population has been ignored.

Dr. Dina Y. Sulaeman (image right)

In 2003, US and its allies invaded Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein. Since then, until 2013, the US occupied Iraq and forced a sectarian system of government for its interest. According toIraqi novelist in New York Times, Sinan Antoon:

L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced the formation of the so-called Governing Council in July 2003. The names of its members were each followed by their sect and ethnicity. Many of the Iraqis we spoke to on that day were upset with institutionalization of an ethno-sectarian quota system. Ethnic and sectarian tensions already existed, but their translation into political currency was toxic. [1]

There is one main fact to consider: Basra is a Shiite-dominated region. The riot in Basra which began in June and escalated on 7th September with the burning of the Iranian consulate building is interesting to analyze since its majority of population are Shiite, and the Prime Minister is a senior member of Iraq’s ruling Shiite political class. 

This fact seems to contradict  the observations of some analysts who wrote that the latest developments in Basra reflects the refusal of Basra citizens to Iranian intervention and/or their rejection of a pro-Iranian government. Many articles, both mainstream media and anti-mainstream demonized Iran as the cause of electricity shortages in Iraq while neglecting to acknowledge the important role of the US in this conflict. This article tries to provide a more comprehensive review on the riots in Basra.

Iran-Iraq Relations in Idealism Perspective

Most of Middle Eastern observers analyze the conflicts in the region with a realistic perspective: it is all about power struggles. They argue that Iran’s involvement in Iraq is to control the Baghdad regime; or to contain Saudi Arabia’s power in the region; or to fight US hegemony. The religious factor is often used as an argument: the alleged Shiite-theocracy regime wants to expand its influence and power in the region; or, the Shiite-country wants to fight the Sunni-Saudi. 

Strangely, if religion is taken as an important assumption in the analysis, why is it that the opposite assumption is not taken into consideration: it is the religious factor that keeps Iran helping Iraq in the midst of its economic difficulties? Why is this positive-idealism factor often ignored in the analysis about Iran?

In the perspective of idealism, countries are assumed as actors which tend to work together because in this way they  achieve their national interests. Using this idealistic perspective, Iran’s moves in the Middle East, particulary Iraq, would be seen very different perspective in contrast to the images of so-called realist observers.

Iran is a theocratic state which blatantly states that the foundation of its country is the Islamic 12 Imam-Shiite school. Most Iranians are very respectful towards the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants, and this respect also becomes the basis of  foreign policy. In this perspective, Iraq is a spiritually-valuable neighbor for Iran. Many tombs of Shiite-sacred Imams are located in Iraq and every year, 2-3 million Iranian pilgrims come to Iraq to visit those tombs. For that spiritual reason too, following the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iran assisted its neighbor to build infrastructure of electricity, clean water, roads, and airports, in the southern regions of Iraq, especially on the paths of pilgrims from Iran to Iraq, such as Najaf, Basra, and Karbala.

Iran also benefits from the development of the abandoned southern cities of Iraq. Usually, the Shiite pilgrims from many countries visit Iran as well. Travel agents offer Iraqi-Iraqi pilgrimage packages because some sacred tombs of Shiite prominent figures can also be found in Iran. 

And naturally, the increase of tourism in both countries contributes to increasing trade between the two nations.

Now Iran is the third largest exporter to Iraq, after Turkey and China. Iraqis bought Iranian goods at cheaper price than goods from other countries but still the total value reached 6.6 billion USD in one year (2017) [3]. In the past, Iraq and Iran were two nations that fought each other for eight years [largely engineered by Washington] and now, thanks to this spiritual pilgrimage and trade, both countries have become friends.

In the perspective of idealism, this is the ideal relationship between countries: economic cooperation and  peace. This is what idealistic thinkers such as Alfred Zimmern dreamed about.

But this good human tendency is always suppressed by the greed of some parties. There are always superpowers who are interested in waging war because in this way their industrial machines continue to work and make money.

The doctrine of realism provides a justification for “struggle for power” or “survival for the fittest” which equal to enmity and war. 

The realist doctrines frame cooperation between Iran and Iraq as endangering stability. For example, as written by Katzman, a specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs:

“Iran has sought to achieve its goals in Iraq through several strategies: supporting pro-Iranian factions and armed militias; attempting to influence Iraqi political leaders and faction leaders; and building economic ties throughout Iraq. It is Iran’s support for armed Shiite factions that most concerns U.S. officials. That Iranian activity continues to a threat to stability in Iraq, according to senior U.S. commanders, and positions Iran to pursue its interests in Iraq after U.S. forces leave Iraq by the end of 2011.” [4]

If economic and security cooperation are a ‘threat to stability in Iraq’, what about the US embargo towards Iraq in the 1990s which resulted in more than a million deaths, many of them children?

What about the 2003 US invasion of Iraq?

The invasion and occupation has destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, disrupted its social order while triggering  sectarian warfare and the birth of ISIS. As a result of the US led war on Iraq, water and land in Iraq are contaminated as a result of depleted uranium ammunition. The radioactive fallout has caused cancer, leukemia and congenital birth anomalies. As stated by Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector,

“The irony is we invaded Iraq in 2003 to destroy its non-existent WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. To do it, we fired these new weapons, causing radioactive casualties.”[5]

If we use the idealism perspective, voices from Iraq and Iran that continue to articulate unity between the two brothers will be seen as good thing. It makes sense particularly in view of the pressure of the Trump administration towards the Iraqi government to establish an embargo against Iran. As stated by the ruling party, Dawa: 

“The party calls on all free governments in the world, especially the Islamic ones, to reject these unjust sanctions which contradict the most basic principles of human rights that prohibit the starvation of people.”

Of course, it is not only about the principles of human rights. Iraqi rejection to join the US in embargoing Iran is also related to the country’s interest.

“The 2 [million] or 3 million Iranian pilgrims who come each year represent a major economic activity that Iraq could now be deprived of,” said an economic adviser to PM Abadi, Muzhar Mohammed Salah. [6]

However, why is this reasonable call framed as  a “hard-line-pro-Shia” stance rather than as a reasonable refusal against injustice? Why a superpower can arbitrarily embargo some countries and force other countries to join in the restriction,  even if it is detrimental to the country’s interest?

Resistance to US Hegemony 

Generally, anti-mainstream media have voiced resistance towards US hegemony and crimes in the Middle East. However, in the recent Basra issue, some observers still treat Iran as the same power hungry actor as the US. In one article of Global Research, it is written:

“…Several observers seem to confirm this. They point out that Iran is responsible not only for reducing electricity and water in the south, but also for inciting the inhabitants of Basra to revolt against the oil companies that recruit too few Iraqi workers.”[7]

But strangely, in the same article, the writer admit that,

“Many Iraqis regularly experience power outages – households only get a few hours of electricity a day – despite the fact that billions of dollars have been spent since the US invasion in 2003. Because of mismanagement, corruption and wasting 40 billion dollar to rebuild the electricity grid, Iraq is to date still unable to be self-sufficient.” 

So, is it Iran’s fault, or the incapacity of the Iraqi government?

In July 2018, Iraq’s total electricity debt to Iran has reached 2 billion USD. Nowadays, Iran’s economy is not in a good state with its Riyal hit a record low against the U.S. dollar.

The article also stated that the Saudis have offered electricity for only a quarter of Iran’s price. While the price is doubtful because solar power technology is more expensive than the conventional one, the offer seems strange and this is recognized by the author:

Saudi Arabia agreed to build a solar power plant and sell the electricity to Iraq at a steep discount to supplies the war-torn country previously bought from the kingdom’s regional arch-rival Iran. The deal, which hasn’t been approved yet by Iraqi authorities, includes building a 3,000-megawatt plant in Saudi Arabia within a year of the signing of the agreement, Iraq’s Ministry of Electricity spokesman Mussab Serri said by phone. Iraq will buy the electricity for $21 per megawatt-hour, or a quarter of what it paid Iran for the imports, Serri said.

The question arises: why does Iraq not build a solar power plant in its own country? [8]

By using common sense, we can immediately see that the Saudis offer is nothing but nonsense. If it is true that the Saudis have a very cheap electricity, PM Abadi will not wait long to approve it.

Abadi’s willingness to negotiate with the Saudis on electricity shows that it is far-fetched to assume that his consideration in buying electricity is a matter of Shiite-ideology or ‘a loyalty to Iran’. It is worth noting, it was not the first time that Iran cut off the electricity supply to Iraq due to the payment debt.

So Abadi’s decision is logic: it is better to pay the debt and as a result, in August 2018, Iran opens its electricity supply to Iraq.

The question that should be asked: why is it that after the Iranian-electricity problem was solved, the demonstration of September 7 occured and the Iranian embassy was burned?

Of course, many Iraqi difficulties have yet to be resolved, but why -as Adriaensens wrote, the demonstrators were angry with Iran suggesting that “Shiites have to choose between Iraqi nationalism and loyalty to Iran”? [9] 

Is not it like a misplaced puzzle?

Should the Shiites in the south not thank Iran instead of being angry? Who is really angry with Iran? I am sure that most of anti-mainstream thinkers know the answer: it is in the US interest to generate anti-Iran sentiment.

The US’ Interest

As mentioned earlier, the decree of Paul Bremer in July 2003 has triggered sectarianism in Iraq society.

In May 2003, another decree of Bremer dissolved the Iraqi army and this move incited the birth of ISIS. Christoph Reuter of Spiegel wrote about how Haj Bakr, an ex-Iraqi soldier, formed ISIS:

But when Paul Bremer, then head of the US occupational authority in Baghdad, “dissolved the army by decree in May 2003, he [Haj Bakr] was bitter and unemployed.”

Thousands of well-trained Sunni officers were robbed of their livelihood with the stroke of a pen. In doing so, America created its most bitter and intelligent enemies. Bakr went underground and met Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Anbar Province in western Iraq. [10]

The US crimes in Iraq did not end there. The research of CAR (Conflict Armament Research) found that:

“In one instance, PG-9 73 mm rockets, sold by Romanian arms manufacturers to the U.S. army in 2013 and 2014, were found sprinkled across both battlefields. Containers with matching lot numbers were found in eastern Syria and recovered from an Islamic State convoy in the Iraqi city of Fallujah.”

“On Dec. 12, 2015, Bulgaria exported anti-tank missile launcher tubes to the U.S. army through an Indiana-based company called Kiesler Police Supply. Fifty-nine days later, Iraqi federal police captured the remains of one such weapon after a battle in Ramadi, Iraq.” 

“Videos and images of U.S.-made small arms captured by the Islamic State, particularly M16 and M4 service rifles, are featured prominently in propaganda videos to tout defeat over groups supplied and trained by U.S. personnel.” [11]

And, in October 2016, As with Iraqi military begin a nine-month operation to free Mosul from ISIS’ grip. The Intercept wrote how this operation has done a huge devastation:

The nine-month battle to wrest the city from the Islamic State occupation, led by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces, killed thousands of civilians. It extinguished entire families in seconds. Across Iraq, it displaced millions to refugee camps, many of them from Mosul. It erased years of the city’s history, its dignified 18th-century facades, and the beating heart of the city where both trade and tourism had thrived. It did more damage to Mosul in those nine months than had occurred in the previous 14 years.

Mosul residents are left asking: Who will pay for the reconstruction? [12]

Prof. James Petras in articled published in Global Research (2014) wrote,

“No peaceful economic activity can match the immense profits enjoyed by the military-industrial complex in war. This powerful lobby continues to press for new wars to sustain the Pentagon’s huge budget.  …War profits have soared with the series of military interventions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.” [13]

Now, fifteen years since the US invaded Iraq using the WMD pretext, some US politicians keep saying that America’s Iraq mission is not over. Senator Ernst says,

“Unless we are confident in Iraq’s capacity and ability to defend themselves, U.S. presence in Iraq will remain necessary to protect our interests.”

So, it is all about US interest. What about the Iraqi interest? 

As I mentioned earlier, the tendency of countries to cooperate peacefully is always plagued by people who take advantage of war and the profits from war.

Then the question remains: how do we believe that Iran has an idealistic perspective in its engagement in Iraq? How do we make sure that it wants to establish cooperation for the mutual interests of the two nations? 

One way to address and answer this question is by analyzing the speech of Iranian elites and prominent media. If we observe the comments in online media, what prevails is an atmosphere which suggests that Iranians are angry with their Iraqi neighbors. They called for the government to no longer help Iraq.  For the Iranian people, it turns out that Iraq is quite a viper in their bosom. 

Interestingly, Iranian officials refrain from criticizing the Iraqi government and repeatedly state that the riot in Basra is a US plot.

Iran’s media actively remind the public that “the aim of the enemies is to create discord between Iranian and Iraqis civil societies”. Kayhan, the most prominent newspaper in Iran, published an article (Parsi) entitled “Curtain of 4 Scenarios” and explained that there are four US scenarios in Iraq. 

First, the US is trying to create tensions among people in northern Iraqi who are mostly Sunnis with the Popular Militia Unit (PMU) which is also called Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi.

The PMU is formed by the government to mobilize Iraqi civilians to fight ISIS. Its members consist of Shiite, Sunni, Christian, and Yazidi but the US and the pro-US observers always portray the organization as a hardline-pro-Iran entity.

After its success in defeating ISIS, on December 11, 2017, the organization became  consolidated under the Iraqi Armed Forces.

Second, the US and its allies are doing the divide-and-rule scenario at the grassroots of both countries.

Many local Iraqi media, as well as Arab media such as Syarq Al Awsat, are disseminating news that provokes the anger of civilians in both countries. This was also reported by Tehran Times:

A media campaign recently started to agitate the Iraqi people against Iran by negatively covering electricity shortage in Iran that halted export of electricity to Iraq.

It also tried to create cynicism among Iraqis toward Iranian pilgrims who regularly visit Iraq, trying in particular to question the pilgrims’ sexual conduct.

On a parallel plain, the same story was stirred in Iran by media claiming that Iraqi pilgrims who visited Iran’s Mashhad were sexually benefiting from Iranian women.

The cynicism campaign also included fake reports that Iraqis are intentionally burning the plantation at the Hour al-Azim wetland in southwestern Iran in order to cause inconvenience to Iranians living in Khuzestan province.[15]

Third, the riots in Basra reflect a similar pattern to  the riots in Iran in early 2018. In Iraq, pro-Saddam yells were shouted, while in Iran, pro Shah Reza’s yells were also shouted. Considering that both figures were US proxies, and considering the US interest as mentioned earlier, it is clear, who the initiator of the riots is. 

Fourth, the burning of the Iranian consulate was carried out before the military operation to free Idlib’s Syria from the grip of US-backed jihadist militias and few weeks before the largest pilgrimage ritual in the world, Arbaeen Walk.

Every year in the month of Safar (Islamic Calendar) Shiites from various parts of Iraq, Iran, and many other countries conduct long marches to the tomb of Husein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, in Karbala city. As written by Catherine Shakhdam, Arbaeen Walk shows the world that “Islam really has nothing to do with the Terror Daesh/ISIS has carried underneath its flag.

It is rather the doctrine Daesh’s architects have formulated in its name that came to pollute our public discourse and set ablaze communities.” [16]

Considering these two events, Kayhan advised the Iranian public to act wisely because the aim of the Basra riot was “to create divisions between two brothers and sisters together, Iran and Iraq, which at the same time would create divisions within the axis of Resistance”. As we all know, Iran, Iraq and Syria are three sovereign countries that face the same enemy: jihadist militias, which claim to fight in the name of Islam but are supplied with funds and weapons by the US and Israel.

*

Dr. Dina Y. Sulaeman is Director of Indonesia’s Center for Middle East Studies. Bandung. 

Notes

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-anniversary-.html

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/01/19/can-the-us-still-rely-on-iraqi-prime-minister-haider-al-abadi/

[3] https://thearabweekly.com/questions-over-baghdads-ability-abide-renewed-us-sanctions-against-iran

[4] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22323.pdf

[5] https://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/why-us-wont-apologise-sorry-destroy-iraq-war-bush-1838892478

[6] https://thearabweekly.com/questions-over-baghdads-ability-abide-renewed-us-sanctions-against-iran

[7] https://www.globalresearch.ca/revolt-in-iraq-the-lion-of-babylon-roars-again/5651009

[8] ibid

[9] ibid

[10] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html

[11] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/12/14/us-weapons-helped-daesh-fuel-industrial-revolution-of-terrorism-report.html

[12] https://theintercept.com/2018/04/22/to-defeat-isis-the-u-s-helped-turn-old-mosul-into-rubble-but-wont-help-rebuild-it/

[13] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-soaring-profits-of-the-military-industrial-complex-the-soaring-costs-of-military-casualties/5388393

[14] http://kayhan.ir/fa/mobile/news/141598/1373 

[15] https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/427304/Iran-Iraq-integrity-under-attack-as-suspects-burn-consulate-in

[16] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-pilgrimage-of-the-heart-arbaeen-2017-shows-the_us_5a0c8535e4b006523921858f

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The belongings of Arjen Kamphuis, a Dutch cybersecurity expert closely associated with the transparency organization WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, have been found in Norway, sparking fears that Kamphuis was the victim of a criminal act.

Kamphuis’ belongings were found on Tuesday floating in the sea east of the Norwegian town of Bodø, where Kamphuis was last seen on August 20 by a local fisherman.

The discovery is the first concrete lead in an intensive, weeks-long search that was conducted in part by Norway’s elite missing-persons and organized-crime unit, Kripos.

Notably, Bodø is home to important Norwegian and NATO military installations as well as being a critical node of NATO’s “cyber defense” network.

On September 4, Norwegian police stated that, while an investigation into Kamphuis’ disappearance had been opened, there was “no reason to assume that there is a crime, but we keep all possibilities open” and that police had no theory regarding the cybersecurity expert’s disappearance.

My best friend has gone missing in Bodø, Norway. Friends, colleagues and family are very, very worried. Please share <3 #FindArjen #Bodø #Norway #MissingPerson #ArjenKamphuis pic.twitter.com/fZpqOW3TRP

— Ancilla (@ncilla) August 31, 2018

Yet, following the discovery of Kamphuis’ belongings, Norwegian police have been tight-lipped, stating on Wednesday that “due to the ongoing investigation, the police do not at this time wish to release any information about which specific items that have been found.”

Kamphuis’ association with WikiLeaks and his reputation as an internet security expert have spawned several theories regarding his disappearance, with some suggesting that he may have become a target of intelligence agencies given his status as an “associate” of Assange, his efforts to instruct journalists in how to keep their communications secure, and his offer to train WikiLeaks members in how to shield their data from government surveillance.

.@JulianAssange associate and author of "Information Security for Journalists" @ArjenKamphuis has disappeared according to friends (@ncilla) and colleagues. Last seen in Bodø, #Norway, 11 days ago on August 20. pic.twitter.com/dV75NGKpgI

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 31, 2018

Kamphuis’ advocacy against government surveillance and past work with WikiLeaks may indeed have drawn the ire of intelligence agencies like the CIA, as the agency was greatly embarrassed by the WikiLeaks Vault 7 releases last year, which exposed the CIA’s hacking program and how the agency lost control over its hacking tools and exploits.

WikiLeaks and its associates in U.S. crosshairs

Furthermore, the U.S. government in general has upped the ante in its fight to silence government leakers and whistleblowers, as well as the organization of WikiLeaks itself, which then-Director of the CIA Mike Pompeo (currently serving as Secretary of State) labeled a “hostile intelligence service” that was not entitled to First Amendment protections.

Notably, the U.S. government has actively been pursuing Julian Assange, who has remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy for over six years after receiving political asylum in 2012. Assange’s asylum has come under threat as the Trump administration has exerted extreme political pressure against Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, leading those close to Assange to worry that his asylum could be withdrawn in the weeks and months ahead.

Other reasons for concern regarding Kamphuis’ disappearance involve past suspicious deaths of other close associates of Assange. For instance, prominent human rights lawyer John Jones, who represented Assange when the Swedish government initially tried to extradite him for questioning on rape accusations, died in May 2016 from an apparent suicide after being struck by a train. However, three months later, his death was ruled not to have been a suicide, as had previously been claimed, and the case remains unsolved. At the time of his death, Jones was working to save the lives of the son of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and former Libyan spy chief Abdullah al-Senussi.

Another well-publicized case is the 2016 murder of alleged WikiLeaks source Seth Rich, who is believed to be the source of the WikiLeaks Democratic National Committee emails release. After Rich’s death, Assange hinted that Rich was the source of the emails and WikiLeakssubsequently offered a $20,000 reward for information that would help bring his killer to justice.

Two other close associates of Assange, Michael Ratner and Gavin MacFadyen, also died in 2016. However, no evidence has emerged that paints their deaths in a suspicious light, as both were said to have died from complications relating to cancer.

*

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.

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Global Research Introductory Note

We bring to the attention of our readers three videos pertaining to alleged roles of Petrov and Boshirov in the Skripal Affair.

**

1. CCTV Camera Footage of the Suspects
2. The official UK police statement indicating the timeline (September 5)
3. The RT interview with Petrov and Boshirov including the full (English) transcript.

Suggestion to our readers: view the CCTV and official UK police timeline videos prior to viewing the RT interview.

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1, CCTV Camera Footage of Suspects, March 2-3, 2018

Notice that the two suspects pass through the corridor at exactly the same time and the same place at 16:22:43 

Physically impossible. One would assume that they would be one behind the other which is not the case.  Was the time stamp on the  CCTV footage manipulated?

See the analysis of Craig Murray on this issue 

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2. The official UK police statement by Neil Basu, Assistant Commissioner, Terrorism Policing, indicating the Timeline (The Sun, September 5, 2018)

The Sun, September 5

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3. The RT interview with Petrov and Boshirov including the full transcript(English subtitles).

RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan has spoken exclusively to the two men the UK named as suspects in the Skripal poisoning – Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.

MARGARITA SIMONYAN: You called my cell phone, saying that you were Ruslan Boshirov and Аlexander Petrov. You’re Aleksandr Petrov, and you’re Ruslan Boshirov. You look like the people from the pictures and videos from the UK. So who are you in reality?

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I was caught in a twitterstorm of hatred yesterday, much of it led by mainstream media journalists  for daring to suggest that the basic elements of Boshirov and Petrov’s story do in fact stack up. What became very plain quite quickly was that none of these people had any grasp of the detail of the suspects’ full twenty minute interview, but had just seen the short clips or quotes as presented by British corporate and state media.

As I explained in my last post, what first gave me some sympathy for the Russians’ story and drew me to look at it closer, was the raft of social media claims that there was no snow in Salisbury that weekend and Stonehenge had not been closed. In fact, Stonehenge was indeed closed on 3 March by heavy snow, as confirmed by English Heritage. So the story that they came to Salisbury on 3 March but could not go to Stonehenge because of heavy snow did stand up, contrary to almost the entire twittersphere.

Once there was some pushback of truth about this on social media, people started triumphantly posting the CCTV images from 4 March to prove that there was no snow lying in Central Salisbury on 4 March. But nobody ever said there was snow on 4 March – in fact Borisov and Petrov specifically stated that they learnt there was a thaw so they went back. However when they got there, they encountered heavy sleet and got drenched through. That accords precisely with the photographic evidence in which they are plainly drenched through.

Another extraordinary meme that causes hilarity on twitter is that Russians might be deterred by snow or cold weather.

Well, Russians are human beings just like us. They cope with cold weather at home because they have the right clothes. Boshirov and Petrov refer continually in the interview to cold, wet feet and again this is borne out by the photographic evidence – they were wearing sneakers unsuitable to the freak weather conditions that were prevalent in Salisbury on 3 and 4 March. They are indeed soaked through in the pictures, just as they said in the interview.

Russians are no more immune to cold and wet than you are.

Twitter is replete with claims that they were strange tourists, to be visiting a housing estate. No evidence has been produced anywhere that shows them on any housing estate. They were seen on CCTV camera walking up the A36 by the Shell station, some 400 yards from the Skripals’ house, which would require three turnings to get to that – turnings nobody saw them take (and they were on the wrong side of the road for the first turning, even though it would be very close). No evidence has been mentioned which puts them at the Skripals’ House.

Finally, it is everywhere asserted that it is very strange that Russians would take a weekend break holiday, and that if they did they could not possibly be interested in architecture or history. This is a simple expression of anti-Russian racism. Plainly before their interview – about which they were understandably nervous – they prepared what they were going to say, including checking up on what it was they expected to see in Salisbury because they realised they would very obviously be asked why they went. Because their answer was prepared does not make it untrue.

That literally people thousands of people have taken to twitter to mock that it is hilariously improbable that tourists might want to visit Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, is a plain example of the irrationality that can overtake people when gripped by mob hatred.

I am astonished by the hatred that has been unleashed. The story of Gerry Conlon might, you would hope, give us pause as to presuming the guilt of somebody who just happened to be of the “enemy” nationality, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite the mocking mob, there is nothing inherently improbable in the tale told by the two men. What matters is whether they can be connected to the novichok, and here the safety of the identification of the microscopic traces of novichok allegedly found in their hotel bedroom is key. I am no scientist, but I have been told by someone who is, that if the particle(s) were as the police state so small as to be harmless to humans, they would be too small for mass spectrometry analysis and almost certainly could not be firmly identified other than as an organophosphate. Perhaps someone qualified might care to comment.

The hotel room novichok is the key question in this case.

Were I Vladimir Putin, I would persuade Boshirov and Petrov voluntarily to come to the UK and stand trial, on condition that it was a genuinely fair trial before a jury in which the entire proceedings, and all of the evidence, was open and public, and the Skripals and Pablo Miller might be called as witnesses and cross-examined. I have no doubt that the British government’s desire for justice would suddenly move into rapid retreat if their bluff was called in this way.

As for me, when I see a howling mob rushing to judgement and making at least some claims which are utterly unfounded, and when I see that mob fueled and egged on by information from the security services propagated by exactly the same mainstream media journalists who propagandised the lies about Iraqi WMD, I see it as my job to stand in the way of the mob and to ask cool questions. If that makes them hate me, then I must be having some impact.

So I ask this question again – and nobody so far has attempted to give me an answer. At what time did the Skripals touch their doorknob? Boshirov and Petrov arrived in Salisbury at 11.48 and could not have painted the doorknob before noon. The Skripals had left their house at 09.15, with their mobile phones switched off so they could not be geo-located. Their car was caught on CCTV on three cameras heading out of Salisbury to the North East. At 13.15 it was again caught on camera heading back in to the town centre from the North West.

How had the Skripals managed to get back to their home, and touch the door handle, in the hour between noon and 1pm, without being caught on any of the CCTV cameras that caught them going out and caught the Russian visitors so extensively? After this remarkably invisible journey, what time did they touch the door handle?

I am not going to begin to accept the guilt of Boshirov and Petrov until somebody answers that question. Dan Hodges? David Aaronovitch? Theresa May? Anybody?

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday lambasted his predecessor, John Kerry, for meeting Iranian officials in back-channel talks and accused him of trying to undermine the Trump administration’s policy toward Tehran.

“What Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented,” Pompeo told a news conference, adding that he “ought not to engage in that kind of behavior. It’s inconsistent with what the foreign policy of the United States is, as directed by this president. It is beyond inappropriate.”

Pompeo’s crack at Kerry comes a day after President Donald Trump accused the former secretary of state of “illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime” in a late-night tweet.

“John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people,” Trump said on Twitter late on Thursday.

“He told them to wait out the Trump Administration!” he said, ending his Tweet with the word “BAD!”

Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal which Trump scrapped this year, said during a tour to promote his new book “Every Day is Extra” that he had met Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif “three or four times” since he left office and Trump had entered the White House.

A spokesperson for Kerry said in a statement on Friday:

“Kerry stays in touch with his former counterparts around the world just like every previous secretary of state.

“There’s nothing unusual, let alone unseemly or inappropriate, about former diplomats meeting with foreign counterparts… What is unseemly and unprecedented is for the podium of the State Department to be hijacked for political theatrics,” the spokesperson added.

Meanwhile, Kerry took to Twitter to respond to Trump, saying:

“Mr. President, you should be more worried about Paul Manafort meeting with Robert Mueller than me meeting with Iran’s FM. But if you want to learn something about the nuclear agreement that made the world safer, buy my new book.”

Mr. President, you should be more worried about Paul Manafort meeting with Robert Mueller than me meeting with Iran's FM. But if you want to learn something about the nuclear agreement that made the world safer, buy my new book, Every Day Is Extra: https://t.co/DKjc33Kvvu https://t.co/cesltkt0zW

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) September 14, 2018

Asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday if he had offered Zarif advice on how to deal with Trump’s decision to withdraw from the pact, Kerry replied:

“No, that’s not my job.”

“I’ve been very blunt to Foreign Minister Zarif, and told him look, you guys need to recognize that the world does not appreciate what’s happening with missiles, what’s happening with Hezbollah, what’s happening with Yemen,” he added, echoing the current administration’s denunciation of Tehran’s “malign” influence.

Conservative commentators immediately leapt on the act as evidence of “treason,” with some calling for Kerry to go to prison.

Asked by a Republican lawmaker during a congressional hearing about the so-called shadow diplomacy, Manisha Singh, an assistant secretary of state, said Thursday:

“It’s unfortunate if people from a past administration would try to compromise the progress we’re trying to make in this administration.”

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert added:

“I’ve seen him brag about the meetings that he has had with the Iranian government and Iranian government officials. I’ve also seen reports that he is apparently providing, according to reports, advice to the Iranian government.

“The best advice that he should be giving the Iranian government is stop supporting terror groups around the world.”

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Sweden’s elections are normally dull affairs. The same political arrangements have been in place for decades, featuring mild oscillations around the centre between the green-red bloc (Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party) and the conservative Alliance (the Moderates, Christian Democrats and the Centre and Liberal Parties). 

The favoured line for political watchers of Sweden is standard.  Few monumental disagreements have registered since Sweden became a model free-education welfare state with impeccable health services funded by high taxes.  But Europe has caught a rash, and it has become something of a contagion.  The symptoms are clear enough: consternation at Brussels at the centralising European machinery; concerns about immigration; apoplexy about perceptions of rising crime; and the corrosions posed to the once seemingly impregnable welfare state.

Sweden’s own contribution to such fears comes in the form of Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats, a person who reminds the observer of fascist politics that appearances, and the aesthetic of appeal, matter.  Last Sunday’s elections saw the SD do well, garnering 42 of the 342 seats in the Riksdag. 

While his party was nursed in the bosom of neo-Nazi politics in the 1980s, Åkesson has spruced matters up, giving the impression that slickness and modern looks are somehow contradictory to reactionary politics.  (Parallels are evident in the cosmetic adjustments made to the Front National in France.)   

His party members seem well kitted out, dressed less to offend than to blend.  Decency is all in, and efforts are being made to keep the more savage sentiments in the cupboard.  “Open Swedishness” is being promoted as a platform for integration, and Åkesson has been conscious to carry the necessary political ornamentation that comes with good public relations.  Jonas Chongera, a Congo-born former pastor, has been seen keeping him company as a member of the municipal council of Forshaga in Värmland.  Four years ago, the lapsed pastor made it clear that responsibility for refugees was a fundamental goal of the party, proud that the SD was the only one daring to ponder the imponderable issue of immigration. And that was before the arrival of 163,000 asylum seekers in 2015. 

As Barbara Wesel of Deutsche Welle observed,

“It seems that voters really buy this image of the ‘nice son-in-law’ that Jimme Åkesson is projecting – you know, sort of every mother’s dream if she wants to marry off her daughter.” 

Not that this is an image that needed to be sold in the first place.  Traditional voters have been put off by policies seemingly placed on the autopilot of consensus, a stance that made former Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt smugly deem Sweden a “humanitarian superpower”.   

Such political tags tend to prove dangerous and unnecessary. 

“I feel immigrants have priority now,” came the opinion of former Social Democrat voter Helena Persson, who did her bit push the SD into first place in the village of Håbo-Tibble.  “The Swedish people come second.” 

Åkesson was also given a modest pre-election fillip by French President Emmanuel Macron, who felt slighted at remarks made by the SD leader calling him an “EU-federalist” who “travels around Europe to speak ill of the national state, nationalism, all that I stand for.”  Between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and France’s Macron, few differences could be discerned, a view prompting the French leader to suggest to Swedish voters, rather impudently, that Åkesson “is not compliant with your story and your values”. 

Åkesson’s views have not been racy or spectacular, having spent time on the boiler plate for some years.  In the summer of 2014, as his party was readying itself for the September general elections, he espoused the sorts of views that would have moved many a supporter of US President Donald Trump.  “Islamism is the Nazism and Communism of our time.”  To those few Swedish nationals who had found their way to fight in Iraq and Syria, “You guys can stay there.  Sweden is no longer your home, this country is built on Christian principles.” 

If tranquil, unflappable Sweden can be rocked and disrupted, the rest need to worry. But it would also be remiss to consume a version of Sweden as the land of milk-honeyed tolerance somehow free of Nazi sympathy.  A figure such as Åkesson is hardly a bolt out of the blue, and historiography on the subject of Swedish fascism has attempted to correct the misunderstandings about its origins and influence.  Elisabeth Åsbrink has done more than anybody else in recent times to show how certain figures of Swedish fascism were very aware about the need to evolve their creed after the Second World War.  Like Ingvar Kamprad’s modular furniture, fascist ideology has, over time, been re-assembled for modern needs.

One such figure in this reassembling venture was Per Engdahl, described by Åsbrink as “intelligent and modern” who realised in 1945 that he needed a new set of clothes, nay, wardrobe, to sell his politics. “He made contact with Oswald Mosley’s fascists in England, with the French fascists, the Swiss Nazis and Hitler’s loyalists in Germany.”  And that was merely a spare green grocer’s list of right wing pugilists, not considering his own role in founding a Danish Nazi party and links with the Italian Social Movement. 

The SD now finds itself riding a European trend distinctly offended by the sensibilities of “bloc” politics.  The forces of progressivism have been found wanting, and refusing to stake any claim to political relevance will simply provide kindle for Åkesson.  Despite not winning the Swedish elections, he has already staked an irrefutable claim to change his country’s politics.

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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]

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The UK government is now targeting critics of the fake chemical attack in Salisbury it has attributed to the Russians with zero evidence.

Most recent example, Dr. Chris Busby, a British retired nuclear scientist. His home in Bideford, Devon was raided after cops responding to a domestic argument reported feeling sick after visiting the residence.

Later, it was reported, these supposedly stricken officers felt fine.

Busby was arrested and detained under the explosives act.

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Central bankers are now aggressively playing the stock market. To say they are buying up the planet may be an exaggeration, but they could. They can create money at will, and they have declared their “independence” from government. They have become rogue players in a game of their own.

Excluding institutions such as Blackrock and Vanguard, which are composed of multiple investors, the largest single players in global equity markets are now thought to be central banks themselves. An estimated 30 to 40 central banks are invested in the stock market, either directly or through their investment vehicles (sovereign wealth funds). According to David Haggith on Zero Hedge:

Central banks buying stocks are effectively nationalizing US corporations just to maintain the illusion that their “recovery” plan is working . . . . At first, their novel entry into the stock market was only intended to rescue imperiled corporations, such as General Motors during the first plunge into the Great Recession, but recently their efforts have shifted to propping up the entire stock market via major purchases of the most healthy companies on the market.

The US Federal Reserve, which bailed out General Motors in a rescue operation in 2009, was prohibited from lending to individual companies under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010; and it is legally barred from owning equities. It parks its reserves instead in bonds and other government-backed securities. But other countries have different rules, and today central banks are buying individual stocks as investments, with a preference for big tech stocks like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Those are the stocks that dominate the market, and central banks are bidding them up aggressively. Markets, including the US stock market, are thus literally being rigged by foreign central banks.

The result, as noted in a January 2017 article on Zero Hedge, is that central bankers, “who create fiat money out of thin air and for whom ‘acquisition cost’ is a meaningless term, are increasingly nationalizing the equity capital markets.” At least they would be nationalizing equities, if they were actually “national” central banks. But the Swiss National Bank, the biggest single player in this game, is 48% privately owned; and most central banks have declared their independence from their governments. They march to the drums not of government but of big international banks.

Marking the 10^th anniversary of the 2008 collapse, former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury secretaries Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson wrote in a September 7 New York Times op-ed that the Fed’s tools needed to be broadened to allow it to fight the next anticipated economic crisis, including allowing it to prop up the stock market by buying individual stocks. To investors, propping up the stock market may seem like a good thing; but what happens when the central banks decide to sell? The Fed’s massive $4 trillion economic support is now being taken away, and other central banks are expected to follow. Their US and global holdings are so large that their withdrawal from the market could trigger another global recession. That means when and how the economy will collapse is now in the hands of central bankers.

Moving Goal Posts

The two most aggressive central bank players in the equity markets are the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan.  The goal of the Bank of Japan, which now owns 75% of Japanese exchange-traded funds,  is evidently to stimulate growth and defy longstanding expectations of deflation. But the Swiss National Bank is acting more like a hedge fund, snatching up individual stocks because “that is where the money is.” About 20% of the SNB’s reserves are in equities, and more than half of that is in US equities. The SNB’s goal is said to be to counteract the global demand for Swiss francs, which has been driving up the value of the national currency, making it hard for Swiss companies to compete in international trade. The SNB does this by buying up other currencies, and it needs to put them somewhere, so it is putting the money in stocks.

That is a reasonable explanation for the SNB’s actions, but some critics suspect other motives. Switzerland is home to the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ bank” in Basel, where central bankers meet regularly behind closed doors. Dr. Carroll Quigley, a Georgetown history professor who claimed to be the historian of the international bankers, wrote of this institution in Tragedy and Hope in 1966:

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.  This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.  The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.

The key to their success, said Quigley, was that they would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers. The goal was to establish an independent (privately owned or controlled) central bank in every country. Today, that goal has largely been achieved.

In a paper presented at the 14th Rhodes Forum in Greece in October 2016, Dr. Richard Werner, Director of International Development at the University of Southampton in the UK, argued that central banks have managed to achieve total independence from government and total lack of accountability to the people, and that they are now in the process of consolidating their powers. They control markets by creating bubbles, busts, and economic chaos. He pointed to the European Central Bank, which was modeled on the disastrous earlier German central bank, the Reichsbank. The Reichsbank created deflation, hyperinflation, and the chaos that helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. The problem with the Reichsbank, says Werner, was its excessive independence and its lack of accountability to German institutions and Parliament. The founders of post-war Germany changed the new central bank’s status by significantly curtailing its independence. Werner writes, “The Bundesbank was made accountable and subordinated to Parliament, as one would expect in a democracy. It became probably the world’s most successful central bank.”

But today’s central banks, he says, are following the disastrous Reichsbank model, involving an unprecedented concentration of power without accountability. Central banks are not held responsible for their massive policy mistakes and reckless creation of boom-bust cycles, banking crises and large-scale unemployment. Youth unemployment now exceeds 50 percent in Spain and Greece. Many central banks remain in private hands, including not only the Swiss National Bank but the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Italian, Greek and South African central banks.

Banks and Central Banks Should Be Made Public Utilities

Werner’s proposed solution to this dangerous situation is to bypass both the central banks and the big international banks and decentralize power by creating and supporting local not-for-profit public banks. Ultimately, he envisions a system of local public money issued by local authorities as receipts for services rendered to the local community. Legally, he notes, 97 percent of the money supply is already just private company credit, which can be created by any company, with or without a banking license. Governments should stop issuing government bonds, he says, and instead fund their public sector credit needs through domestic banks that create money on their books (as all banks have the power to do). These banks could offer more competitive rates than the bond markets and could stimulate the local economy with injections of new money. They could also put the big bond underwriting firms that feed on the national debt out of business.

Abolishing the central banks is one possibility, but if they were recaptured as public utilities, they could serve some useful purposes. A central bank dedicated to the service of the public could act as an unlimited source of liquidity for a system of public banks, eliminating bank runs since the central bank cannot go bankrupt. It could also fix the looming problem of an unrepayable federal debt, and it could generate “quantitative easing for the people,” which could be used to fund infrastructure, low-interest loans to cities and states, and other public services.

The ability to nationalize companies by buying them with money created on the central bank’s books could also be a useful public tool. The next time the megabanks collapse, rather than bailing them out they could be nationalized and their debts paid off with central bank-generated money. There are other possibilities. Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts argues that we should also nationalize the media and the armaments industry. Researchers at the Democracy Collaborative have suggested nationalizing the large fossil fuel companies by simply purchasing them with Fed-generated funds. In a September 2018 policy paper titled “Taking Climate Action to the Next Level,” the researchers wrote, “This action might represent our best chance to gain time and unlock a rapid but orderly energy transition, where wealth and benefits are no longer centralized in growth-oriented, undemocratic, and ethically dubious corporations, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron.”

Critics will say this would result in hyperinflation, but an argument can be made that it wouldn’t. That argument will have to wait for another article, but the point here is that massive central bank interventions that were thought to be impossible in the 20^thcentury are now being implemented in the 21^st, and they are being done by independent central banks controlled by an international banking cartel. It is time to curb central bank independence. If their powerful tools are going to be put to work, it should be in the service of the public and the economy.

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This article was originally published on Truthdig.com.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. A 13^th book titled Banking on the People: Democratizing Finance in the Digital Age is due out at the end of the year. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

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Trump and the Pentagon have sent a number of Marines to al-Tanf in Syria where they are participating in live-fire exercises. According to Reuters, the objective of the exercise is designed to send “a strong message to Russia and Iran that the Americans and the rebels intend to stay and confront any threats to their presence,” that is to say their illegal presence in Syria. 

Colonel Muhanad al Talaa, commander of the Pentagon-backed Maghawir al Thawra group, told Reuters the eight days of drills that ended this week at the U.S. military outpost in Tanf were the first such exercises with live-fire air and ground assault, involving hundreds of U.S. troops and rebel fighters.

In addition, the base on the Syria-Jordan border is intended to be a “bulwark against Iran and part of a larger campaign against Iran’s military expansion in the Middle East.”

Here’s what Reuters failed to mention: Maghawir al Thawra, aka the Revolutionary Commando Army (RCG), is an Islamist group pretending to be “moderate,” thus acceptable to the United States and its partners. It received training from the Authenticity and Development Front and the CIA in Jordan.

The Authenticity and Development Front (ADF) is funded and supported by Saudi Arabia, known for its long-standing support for Wahhabi-infused terror groups. ADF partnered up with head choppers, including the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, a recipient of US TOW anti-tank missiles. The Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement is accused of war crimes, including beheading a Palestinian boy named Abdullah Tayseer Al Issa, executing people by throwing them off rooftops in Aleppo, and abducting and torturing journalists. It’s said Trump ordered the halt of support for al-Zenki and other Salafist terror groups in Syria.

The RCG is also aligned with Jaysh al-Islam, a group that formerly called for the establishment of an Islamic state and Sharia law in Syria, but is said to have changed its tune and now calls for the Syrian government to be replaced by a technocratic body that represents the diversity of the Syrian people. It is not explained how this comports with Wahhabi Islam (and is undoubtedly a PR campaign to clean up its image so it can be “vetted” by the CIA). It is quite unbelievable to think such a radical group could possibly change its spots.

For example, in 2015 Jaysh al-Islam said the Bilad al-Sham (Damascus) should be “cleansed of the filth” of the Shi’ites and Alawites. As with other murderous Salafist groups operating in Syria with US encouragement and support, Jaysh al-Islam’s preferred method of cleansing would be mass execution and the genocidal removal of all Shi’ites from Syria.

These groups, sharing an ideology little different from that of al-Qaeda, are now working directly with US Marines, leaving little doubt the US is exploiting crazed Wahhabi terror to overthrow the elected Syrian government.

This is part of the master plan for the Arab and Muslim (and Persian) Middle East, designed by the United States and inspired by the writings of Likudnik and other Zionist radicals in Israel (see Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” and “Israel’s Sacred Terrorism,” by Livia Rokach). In addition to grabbing more land in Syria—adding to its theft of the Golan Heights—Israel would like to see its Arab neighbors either under the thumb of brutal autocrats and dictators or busted up into powerless and ethnically divided bantustans unable to challenge Israel and the United States.

The latest decision by the US to stay in Syria—after Trump said he would exit—and send in hundreds of Marines is a clear signal the US and Israel have not admitted defeat in Syria and will continue to work to overthrow the government there.

Of course, this effort to prop up and train a gaggle of “moderate rebels”—it was long ago determined there are no longer any moderates fighting in Syria—will fail against the defensive military moves of the Syrian Arab Army with help from Russia and Iran.

And this is where the danger lies. If US Marines fight alongside al-Qaeda spin-offs, there is more than a chance there will be a confrontation with Russia.

Although most Americans are oblivious to what’s happening in Syria, they will certainly wake up on the day the US and Russia go to war with thermonuclear weapons.

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

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The Ethiopian capital is on edge as Oromo from the surrounding region flock to Addis Ababa ahead of tomorrow’s open-air concert organized by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), a group that was previously designated as “terrorists” by the government up until recently, with the cause of tension being that youth are provocatively hoisting and even painting the OLF flag all over the city in what some non-Oromo locals feel is an act of hyper-aggressive political signaling that’s bound to instigate violence.

Contextual Backgrounder 

Ethiopia has been undergoing a transformation since its new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed entered into office a little over half a year ago, and one of the most profound domestic changes was that several high-profile groups that were previously designated as “terrorists” by the government have been delisted and encouraged to enter into a national dialogue with the authorities. All of this has been celebrated by most of the country apart from those intimately tied to the former Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) ruling faction of the governing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition, but no one was under any illusions that the path ahead would be easy after decades of conflict and ethno-regional “political engineering” led to the de-facto destruction of Ethiopia’s once-unified national identity.

Competing Nationalisms

The now-acting President of the Somali Regional State Mustafa Omer wrote a very frank but nonetheless objective article last summer about the two main trends of nationalism in Ethiopia that he provocatively titled “Can contradictory Oromo and Amhara political aspirations be reconciled?”, which is a must-read for anyone who isn’t already familiar with these ideas. To concisely summarize his points as best as possible but understanding that they nevertheless need to be read in full in order to be fully grasped, Omer basically puts forth each of the country’s two main ethnic groups’ perspectives on their shared history, concluding that the Oromo’s ethno-driven decentralization is incompatible with the Amharas’ desire to (re)craft a unified trans-ethnic identity and that compromises are urgently indeed otherwise the country is bound to descend further into bloodshed with time.

The “Flag War”

Bearing in mind this prevailing concept, the ongoing “Flag War” in Addis Ababa is extremely disturbing and suggests that Ethiopia’s two competing nationalisms are on the brink of physically clashing over their ideals. To bring the reader up to speed, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), one of the presently rehabilitated groups that were previously designed as “terrorists”, is organizing a massive open-air concert tomorrow in the capital, and countless Oromo from the surrounding region are thronging into the city ahead of the event. Some of these over-ebullient youth are hoisting and even painting the OLF flag all throughout Addis, which has provoked non-Oromo locals into confronting them. The Prime Minister and police chief seemed to sympathize with the new arrivals and urged the native inhabitants to remain calm and not overreact to what’s happening.

That might be a lot easier said than done, however, because flags are in and of themselves some of the most symbolic and emotional objects in history, and it’s understandable why they elicit strong reactions one way or the other. This is especially true in the case of the OLF’s flag, which had for decades represented an ethno-separatist cause that, if successful, would have literally destroy the geographic core of the country and put an end to Ethiopia. Although the Oromo are the country’s largest plurality (~34%), the Amharas (~27%) had historically been its vanguard people up until the Tigrayans were able to masterfully manipulate the post-civil war system in order to emerge as the most influential ethnic group despite constituting roughly 6% of the population. The informal post-TPLF transition has now thrust these ethno-power disparities and aforementioned competing nationalisms to the forefront of the national conversation.

An Impossible “Balancing” Act?

PM Abiy has tried to “balance” the Oromo and Amhara nationalisms by emphasizing the country’s identity diversity and retaining the TPLF-drawn ethno-“federal” boundaries (many of which have been criticized for “dividing and ruling” local populations to the ruling Tigrayan faction’s political benefit) while preaching the need to develop an inclusive national identity that remains united despite its many differences. This is practically as impossible of a task as “balancing” communism and capitalism, with the “hybrid solution” of “state capitalism” being equally unacceptable to both parties’ leading ideologues the same as PM Abiy’s ultimate vision might be for Oromo and Amhara nationalists. Moreover, if the state apparatus that he’s now responsible for is perceived to be biased in one way or another (whether that’s actually the case, is fake news, or is a weaponized exaggeration), then it could contribute to radicalizing the other side.

The challenge that Ethiopia is facing is that its many diverse people were so desperate for a change that they placed all of their hopes into PM Abiy, making him out to be whatever they wanted him to be just like many Americans did with former President Obama, but some of their expectations are now being exposed as unrealistic. On the one hand, ultra-nationalist Oromo might not be pleased with their Prime Minister’s support of Ethiopian unity, while their counterparts in the Amhara camp might fear the consequences of his plans to incorporate Oromo nationalism into the state framework. Again, Omer’s article about the competing nationalisms of both ethnic groups comes to mind in illustrating the almost existential challenge facing Ethiopia today, one which is dangerously coming to a point during Addis’ “Flag War”.

The Danger Of A “Civilizational Balkanization”

It’s important to mention at this juncture that Omer’s provisional leadership has actually overseen two very symbolic changes in his region, which saw it drop the “Ethiopian” pretext from the Somali Regional State’s prior official name and also replace the flag that this predecessor modified by returning the white Somali star on the blue background that internationally symbolizes Somali nationalism. This might have emboldened OLF’s supporters to more prominently display their organization’s flag in Addis, which they claim as part of their historic Oromo territory despite the Amharas contending that it was originally theirs before the southern people’s northern migration centuries ago. The dispute over Addis’ ownership between the Amhara and Oromo also explains why the “Flag War” has led to such high tensions in the capital city.

The first-mentioned group perceives the sudden hoisting and painting of OLF flags in their city by youth from the surrounding region to be an aggressive reaffirmation of the Oromo’s historical claims, which makes the Amharas feel doubly disrespected because they were already made to feel like “second-class citizens” under the TPLF despite their legacy of leadership in the country and might now think that nothing really changed under PM Abiy.  As for the Oromo, they understandably feel emboldened after “one of their own” became Prime Minister and their OLF opposition “heroes” are now legally recognized as a legitimate political force, hence their ecstatic expression of nationalism by hoisting and painting the group’s flags all over the capital city ahead of tomorrow’s OLF-organized open-air concert.

As a result of the incompatibility between these two national visions, tensions are rapidly reaching a crisis level in the city and could see the explosion of violence if all sides – including the state – don’t responsibly manage these fast-moving dynamics. Worse still, any high-profile violence in the capital could catalyze simmering and long-suppressed nationalist sentiments elsewhere in the country such as the ones between the Oromo and Somali people that began to heat up last year over the arbitrarily drawn border between their two “federal” states, to say nothing of a “Clash of Civilizations” template unfolding between the country’s majority-Muslim and majority-Orthodox peoples as well as within each of “their own” against minority confessions. For example, the majority-Muslim Oromo might be pushed into conflict with their minority Orthodox brethren, the same as could happen in the reverse when it comes to the Amhara.

The eventual outcome of these Hobbesian conflicts could be the “Civilizational Balkanization” of Ethiopia, a very real danger that mustn’t be discounted.

Concluding Thoughts

The “Ethiopian Renaissance” that PM Abiy is trying his best to herald in has suddenly but not unexpectedly been thrown into jeopardy by the long-running nationalist contradictions between his country’s two largest ethnic groups, coming to a head in the capital city of all places and right before an open-air concert there organized by the OLF. The sudden influx of Oromo youth from the surrounding region and their spree of OLF flag hoisting and painting have alarmed some of the non-Oromo locals of this multiethnic city who interpret their actions as hyper-aggressive political signaling being committed with impunity and predicated on expressing the superiority of their nationalist vision. This has in turn elicited an increasingly physical reaction from some of the Amharas in Addis who feel like their sensitivities are being trampled upon, thus instantaneously resurrecting one of the country’s oldest and deepest fault lines and throwing Ethiopia on the course of “Civilizational Balkanization” if it’s not properly addressed.

PM Abiy is in a bind because he can’t order serious state action against the flag-hoisting and –painting Oromo youth ahead of what basically amounts to their celebration of his premiership and the positive changes that they expect it will produce for their people without risking a very negative reaction from them that could in turn undermine the OLF’s ongoing reconciliation talks with the government. Similarly, refusing to decisively respond to what the Amhara locals view as ethno-political provocations risks making him appear biased in support of the Oromo and therefore undercutting his support among the country’s other constituent people, especially those like the Amharas and Somalis who are engaged in preexisting territorial tensions with the country’s largest plurality as it is. The “Flag War” therefore represents the most sensitive challenge that PM Abiy is forced to face in the de-facto post-TPLF transitional period thus far, and his handling of it will determine whether the “Ethiopian Renaissance” rolls on or burns out.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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

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Like many, my first thought at the interview of Boshirov and Petrov – which apparently are indeed their names – is that they were very unconvincing. The interview itself seemed to be set up around a cramped table with a poor camera and lighting, and the interviewer seemed pretty hopeless at asking probing questions that would shed any real light.

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I had in fact decided that their story was highly improbable, until I started seeing the storm of twitter posting, much of it from mainstream media journalists, which stated that individual things were impossible which were, in fact, not impossible at all.

The first and most obvious regards the weather on 3 and 4 March. It is in fact absolutely true that, if the two had gone down to Salisbury on 3 March with the intention of going to Stonehenge, they would have been unable to get there because of the snow. It is therefore perfectly possible that they went back the next day to try again; and public transport out of Salisbury was still severely disrupted, and many roads closed, on 4 March. Proof of this is not at all difficult to find.

This image is from the Salisbury Journal’s liveblog on 4 March.

Those mocking the idea that the pair were blocked by snow from visiting Stonehenge have pointed to the CCTV footage of central Salisbury not showing snow on the afternoon of 4 March. Well, that is central Salisbury, it had of course been salted and cleared. Outside there were drifts.

So that part of their story in fact turns out not to be implausible as social media is making out; in fact it fits precisely with the actual facts.

The second part of their story that has brought ridicule is the notion that two Russians would fly to the UK for the weekend and try to visit Salisbury. This ridicule has been very strange to me. Weekend breaks – arrive on Friday and return on Sunday – are a standard part of the holiday industry. Why is it apparently unthinkable that Russians fly on weekend breaks as well as British people?

Even more strange is the idea that it is wildly improbable for Russian visitors to wish to visit Salisbury cathedral and Stonehenge. Salisbury Cathedral is one of the most breathtaking achievements of Norman architecture, one of the great cathedrals of Europe. It attracts a great many foreign visitors. Stonehenge is world famous and a world heritage site. I went on holiday this year and visited Wurzburg to see the Bishop’s Palace, and then the winery cooperative at Sommerach. Because somebody does not choose to spend their leisure time on a beach in Benidorm does not make them a killer. Lots of people go to Salisbury Cathedral.

There seems to be a racist motif here – Russians cannot possibly have intellectual or historical interests, or afford weekend breaks.

The final meme which has worried me is “if they went to see the cathedral, why did they visit the Skripal house?” Well, no evidence at all has been presented that they visited the Skripal house. They were captured on CCTV walking past a petrol station 500 yards away – that is the closest they have been placed to the Skripal house.

The greater mystery about these two is, if they did visit the Skripal House and paint Novichok on the doorknob, why did they afterwards walk straight past the railway station again and head into Salisbury city centre, where they were caught window shopping in a coin and souvenir shop with apparently not a care in the world, before eventually returning to the train station? It seems a very strange attitude to a getaway after an attempted murder. In truth their demeanour throughout the photographs is consistent with their tourism story.

The Russians have so far presented this pair in a very unconvincing light. But on investigation, the elements of their story which are claimed to be wildly improbable are not inconsistent with the facts.

There remains the much larger question of the timing.

The Metropolitan Police state that Boshirov and Petrov did not arrive in Salisbury until 11.48 on the day of the poisoning. That means that they could not have applied a nerve agent to the Skripals’ doorknob before noon at the earliest. But there has never been any indication that the Skripals returned to their home after noon on Sunday 4 March. If they did so, they and/or their car somehow avoided all CCTV cameras. Remember they were caught by three CCTV cameras on leaving, and Borishov and Petrov were caught frequently on CCTV on arriving.

The Skripals were next seen on CCTV at 13.30, driving down Devizes road. After that their movements were clearly witnessed or recorded until their admission to hospital.

So even if the Skripals made an “invisible” trip home before being seen on Devizes Road, that means the very latest they could have touched the doorknob is 13.15. The longest possible gap between the novichok being placed on the doorknob and the Skripals touching it would have been one hour and 15 minutes. Do you recall all those “experts” leaping in to tell us that the “ten times deadlier than VX” nerve agent was not fatal because it had degraded overnight on the doorknob? Well that cannot be true. The time between application and contact was between a minute and (at most) just over an hour on this new timeline.

In general it is worth observing that the Skripals, and poor Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, all managed to achieve almost complete CCTV invisibility in their widespread movements around Salisbury at the key times, while in contrast “Petrov and Boshirov” managed to be frequently caught in high quality all the time during their brief visit.

This is especially remarkable in the case of the Skripals’ location around noon on 4 March. The government can only maintain that they returned home at this time, as they insist they got the nerve agent from the doorknob. But why was their car so frequently caught on CCTV leaving, but not at all returning? It appears very much more probable that they came into contact with the nerve agent somewhere else, while they were out.

I shall write a further post on these timing questions shortly.

This report by prominent British Scientist Dr. Chris Busby was published in April 2018.

In recent developments, Chris Busby’s home was raided by police. He was arrested on trumped up charges.

See screenshot below.

This arrest points to the suppression of Freedom of Expression in the UK, specifically with regards to Busby’s scientific analysis of the Skripal Affair.

The Sun, September 13, 2018

Officers were treated at the scene for various symptoms but were not harmed and have since returned to duty.

Bomb disposal teams were drafted in as a search of the house resulted in items being found that “require expert analysis”, police said.

Dr Busby, 73, is said to keep radioactive samples at home including mud from around the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria.0

Police said a 73-year-old local man has been detained under the explosives act and awaits questioning — although they would not confirm if this was Mr Busby. (The Sun, September 13, 2018)

The officers were treated at the scene, they were not hospitalised or harmed and they returned to their duty. They did not even get time off.

In other words, they were not poisoned. The report above contradicts itself. They were taken ill with suspected poisoning. But where is the medical report. Dr. Busby was detained for 19 hours because they the officers were  allegedly feeling unwell. But the report says they weren’t. Lots of innuendos, sloppy journalism.

Busby was one of main voices in the analysis of the impacts of depleted uranium radiation in Iraq.

The British media’s intent was to smear a prominent British scientist and anti-war activist who questions the official story regarding the Skripal affair.Was Dr. Chris Busby framed?

Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, September 14, 2018

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Dr Busby says a few words about the Russian Nerve Agent issue. He speaks as an expert in this area.

Chris worked for several years at the famous Wellcome Research laboratories in Beckenham, London as a Senior Scientist in the Department of Physical Chemistry. His job, at the basic level, was to help determine the structure and origin of pharmaceutical compounds. So, he is an expert in this area.

He also carried out similar work at Queen Mary College London for his first PhD and synthesised complex organic chemicals.

From that, he relates that the synthesis of a specific small organic chemical like the supposed Novichoks is not very difficult. Most synthetic organic chemists could knock up small quantities of the 234 compound, given the structure.

Mainly, there is no way that the compound that was detected in the Skripal attack could be traced to a Russian laboratory (or any laboratory) by any lab unless the lab already had a sample known to come from the Russian laboratory (or the source laboratory).

The determination and identification methods mainly depend on mass spectrometric fragmentation patterns, and include the spectrum of stray molecular fragments from impurities associated with the synthesis route. This is how Wellcome located Patent jumping, and took this evidence (from Busby and colleagues) into the courts. All chemists know this, and that is why the Porton head said what he said, as any chemist would have been able to raise this issue and show that he was lying, if he said anything else. It is basic physical chemistry.

So, the new headline in the Times, about a secret Russian laboratory is also bogus.

What is also clear is that the mass spectrum of the A234 compound was put on the NIST database in 1998 by a worker from the USA chemical warfare laboratory.

Chris therefore concludes that this whole affair is a tissue of lies and misdirection, rather like the WMD Iraq scenario and is aimed at creating a war with Russia that no one can win and where all life will lose.

image: Trump and Netanyahu

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They work in concert to carefully lay the foundations and propaganda for war, for between them they hope to dominate the world with their egocentric madness for power and influence. One is a former real estate developer and the other an expansionist occupier of foreign land. Both have access to nuclear and chemical/biological weapons of mass destruction. 

They use the most powerful economic and political sanctions available in today’s US-dominated world to aggressively cripple those nation states they wish to either command or destroy and will unilaterally threaten and intimidate all those who oppose them, with financial, economic and military sanctions.

They militarily equip those who do agree to support them, with US-made planes, tanks, helicopters, ships, guns, missiles, drones, chemicals and billions of dollars in aid, in order to help carry out their ideological objectives.

These objectives currently include:

1.     Bankrupting the sovereign state of Iran by closing down its oil industry and global export markets; inciting civil insurrection to bring about unrest and revolution, then to install a puppet government in a plan to control the entire Middle East and its oilfields in conjunction with its own vassal state in the region.

2.     Starving two million Palestinians in Gaza by blockading the delivery of all essential goods, medicines and electricity in order to subjugate an entire people and to transfer those eventually surviving to Jordan, thereby extinguishing any possibility of a Palestinian state, in an overt operation of ethnic cleansing.

3.     Forcibly annexing all its illegally occupied Palestinian Territories and to proclaim a Greater Israel running from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan with the indigenous Arab population forcibly expelled to neighbouring states.

4.     Attacking Lebanon to bring about a regime change compliant to a US-White House agenda.

5.     Intimidating and threatening all 28 Member States of the European Union with trade sanctions if there is any impediment to the US foreign policy of intimidation, annexation and forcible regime change, anywhere in the world.

6.     Threatening Russia with war by continuing provocative military exercises with an aggressive build-up of troops on its borders.

7.     Treating the United Nations, the UN Security Council and its internationally agreed resolutions, with contempt.

Both these warmongers are self-identified Political Zionists who will stop at nothing to achieve their ideological aims of control, domination and ultimate power for themselves and their families. Whilst neither individual is a statesman of any stature, both are dangerous megalomaniacs for whom there are no legal, moral, religious or military boundaries.

They are both willing and prepared to risk nuclear and even chemical warfare in the furtherance of their objectives.

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

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This is a scoop to bring the US biological warfare effort back into the spotlight. On Sept. 11, Russian media reported that the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research laboratory, a research facility for high-level biohazard agents located near Tbilisi, Georgia, has used human beings for conducting biological experiments.

Former Minister of State Security of Georgia Igor Giorgadze said about it during a news conference in Moscow, urging US President Donald Trump to launch an investigation. He has lists of Georgians who died of hepatitis after undergoing treatment in the facility in 2015 and 2016. Many passed away on the same day. The declassified documents contain neither the indication of the causes of deaths nor real names of the deceased. According to him, the secret lab run by the US military was established during the tenure of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. The viruses could spread to neighboring countries, including Russia, Igor Giorgadze warned.

The laboratory’s work is tightly under wraps. Only US personnel with security clearance have access to it. These people are accorded diplomatic immunity under the 2002 US-Georgia Agreement on defense cooperation.

Eurasia Review reported that in 2014 the Lugar Center was equipped with a special plant for breeding insects to enable launching the Sand Fly project in Georgia and the Caucasus. In 2014-2015 years, the bites of sand flies such as Phlebotomins caused a fever. According to the source,

“today the Pentagon has a great interest to the study of Tularemia, also known as the fever of rabbits, which is also equated with biological weapons. Distributors of such a disease can be mites and rodents”.

It makes remember the statement made by Nikolai Patrushev, Head of Russia’s Security Council, in 2015. He warned about the threat stemming from biological weapons laboratories that operate on the territories of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). He specifically mentioned the Richard G. Lugar Center in Georgia.

The US has bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world, including the post-Soviet space. They are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Foreign inspectors are denied access to them. It should be noted that independent journalist investigations have been made public to confirm the fact that the US military conducts secret research to pose a threat to environment and population. Jeffrey Silverman, an American journalist who has lived in Georgia for many years, is sure the Richard Lugar Center, as well as other labs, is involved in secret activities to create biological weapons. Georgia and Ukraine have been recently hit by mysterious disease outbreaks, with livestock killed and human lives endangered. The US military operates the Central Reference Laboratory in Kazakhstan since 2016. There have public protests against the facility.

In 2013 a Chinese Air Force Colonel Dai Xu accused the US government of creating a new strain of bird flu now afflicting parts of China as a biological warfare attack. According to him, the American military released the H7N9 bird flu virus into China in an act of biological warfare. It has been reported that the source of Ebola virus in West Africa were US bio-warfare labs.

Russian experts do not exclude the possibility of the use of a stink-bug by the US military as a biological weapon. A couple of years ago, mosquitoes with Zika virus have been spotted in Russia and South Ossetia to cause outbreaks of human and animal flu.

The US activities violate the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), a legally binding treaty that outlaws biological arms. It effectively prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, retention, stockpiling and use of biological and toxin weapons and is a key element in the international community’s efforts to address the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In force since 1975, the convention has 181 states-parties today. The BWC reaffirms the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the biological weapons use. In 1969, US President Richard Nixon formally ended all offensive aspects of the US biological warfare program. In 1975, the US ratified both the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the BWC.

Negotiations on an internationally binding verification protocol, which would include on-site inspections by an independent authority to the BWC, took place between 1995 and 2001. The US did not sign up. Its refusal to become a party to the verification mechanisms makes any attempt to enhance the effectiveness of the BWC doomed. A Review Conference is held every five years to discuss the convention’s operation and implementation. The last one, which convened in November 2016, was a frustration with minimal agreement on the final document and no substantive program of work to do before the next event takes place in 2021. There is little hope the BWC will ever be strengthened to have teeth. With no verification mechanism, the US military bio-warfare labs will always be a matter of concern. The issue is serious enough to be included into global security architecture. The UN General Assembly is the right place to raise it. Its 73rd session will open on September 18.

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Peter Korzun is an expert on wars and conflicts.

Featured image is from the author.

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As Turkey’s President Erdogan runs out of money, he is now, more than any time before, using religion to exploit the Balkans, especially the states that are more susceptible to Islamic influence. Bosnia is at the fore of Erdogan’s ambitious Islamic agenda, where he is sparing no political capital or financial resources, even under his current economic hardship, to assert his influence and distance the country away from the EU’s reach. Obviously, the Bosnians cannot survive simply on being devout Muslims, with the youth unemployment rate at almost 60 percent. Turkey is unlikely to economically recover anytime soon, and Erdogan’s promises to provide financial aid and investments will ring hollow in the face of his deepening financial crisis.

The war of words, hyperinflation, US sanctions, and reckless investments on borrowed money have steadily been chipping away at the value of the Turkish Lira. Five years ago, $1 was worth 2 lira; today, six liras are exchanged for a dollar, but that has not discouraged Bosnian leaders from seeking closer association with Erdogan.

Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosnian Muslim leader and the chairman of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, said last May (in front of thousands of Turkish expatriates and Bosnian supporters of Erdogan who travelled from all over Europe to Sarajevo) that

“God has sent [our] nations one person to return them to their religion… He is Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We remain standing with God’s help.”

The crowd cheered when a leader of diaspora Turks equated and idealized Sarajevo as “the Jerusalem at the heart of Europe”.

Bosnia was more than willing to open the door for the Turkish president to organize an election rally in Sarajevo, especially following the EU’s refusal to allow him to campaign in its member states. For Erdogan, the Balkans is the region that can put him in a position to realize his political goal of reviving some semblance of the Ottoman Empire while undermining the EU’s influence in these countries.

Bosnia consists of two entities: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose population is made up of Muslim Bosnians and Catholic Croats; and Republika Srpska, where Orthodox Serbs are a majority. About half of Bosnia’s 3.8 million citizens are Muslims, many of whom consider Erdogan their trusted leader, if not their savior.

For more than a decade, Erdogan has invested heavily in spreading his influence among Balkan states, and Bosnia was and still is one of his main targets. He pledged a multi-billion dollar investment in a key motorway connecting Serbia and Bosnia. Turkey and Bosnia signed a letter of intent for the construction of a highway connecting the two Balkan capitals, a project estimated to cost $3.5 billion, which has not yet started because of lack of financial resources.

Meanwhile, the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA)—a vehicle through which Turkey spreads its Islamic agenda in the Balkans—has completed more than 800 small projects in Bosnia, mostly related to religious institutions.

European leaders have already been voicing concerns over Turkey’s influence in the Balkans. Only a few months ago, French President Emmanuel Macron declared

“I don’t want a Balkans that turns toward Turkey or Russia”.

During his May speech in Sarajevo, Erdogan urged supporters to actively participate in European politics to counter anti-Turkish sentiment.

“You need to be in those parliaments instead of the ones who betray our country,” he said, referring to European lawmakers with Turkish roots.

In a conversation with us, Orhan Hadzagic, a political analyst from Bosnia, said that Erdogan is adulated by Bosnians as more than just a foreign leader. He rhetorically asks,

“From Erdogan’s last visit to Bosnia, what was the benefit for Bosnian citizens from that rally, an event featuring the heads of two parties who support one other?”

Hadzagic is convinced that his country is risking its accession to the EU by opening its doors to Erdogan, from where he is challenging Brussels directly.

“Many NGOs”, he said, “are close to Turkey; they receive financial support to change the negative image and the perception about the rising authoritarian rule in Turkey, among Bosnians.”

Although a large majority of Bosnians do not see any alternative to the European Union, they are passionate in their support of Erdogan. In a poll conducted by the International Republican Institute and released in March of this year, 76 percent of Bosnians said they had positive views about Turkey’s role in their country.

For Erdogan, Bosnia occupies a special place and he will endeavor to maintain his image both as a religious leader and economic savior. That said,

“Erdogan’s list of priorities is growing, so Bosnia is inevitably descending on that list,” said Hadzagic, “which will reduce [Erdogan’s influence on] the state, NGO, and media organizations here in Bosnia. Consequently, it will lead to the reduction of Ankara’s influence.”

As such, Erdogan is increasing his focus on the local media outlets and non-governmental institutions in Bosnia by providing them with some financial aid to support his political agenda. But even that is becoming financially burdensome, making it more difficult to continue with his media campaign.

Sead Numanovic, a well-known journalist from Bosnia, told us that

“The EU and US are still (and I fear they will continue to be) very passive in the Balkans, this environment gives an additional space for Erdogan to work easily on his anti-Western agenda.”

This explains why Erdogan’s AK Party has recently opened an office in Sarajevo, its first official branch in the Balkans.

A spokesperson from the Turkish Embassy in Sarajevo told Foreign Policy that Turkey firmly supports the NATO and EU membership process of Bosnia and Herzegovina—“Turkey is not [in Bosnia] to seek influence, but to encourage political stability for the sake of the entire region.” There is nothing further from the truth.

Xhemal Ahmeti, a historian and expert on Southeast European issues, said that Bosnia’s Muslims currently are most loyal to the Turkish autocrat.

“Bosnian Muslims have lost their hopes that their Trinitarian state will become an EU member. That’s why they rely on Turkey to survive, given that they are sandwiched between Catholics, conservative Croats, and Orthodox jurisdictions”, said Ahmeti. “Paradoxically, though, while the Bosnians Muslims seek Erdogan’s protection from the Orthodox (Serbs and Russians), Erdogan’s close allies are Putin and [Serbia’s Prime Minister] Vucic.”

Bosnian leaders and citizens must realize that Erdogan is moving ever closer to Russia and Iran. The EU has already made it clear that since full adherence to its charter, especially regarding human rights, freedom, and democracy, are prerequisites to EU membership, Bosnia must not cozy up to Erdogan because he has flagrantly abandoned the EU’s founding principles, and the development of a full-fledged democracy in Bosnia does not serve his interest.

It is now up to the Bosnian leaders to determine their own destiny, which must inexorably be linked to full membership with the EU if they want to grow and prosper while embracing full democracy.

This does not suggest that they should sever relations with Turkey as a regional power, with which they will need to intensify the development of a mutually gainful relationship once Erdogan departs the political scene.

In the interim, they must be cautious in their dealings with Erdogan, who manipulates them by using Islam to pursue his sinister political agenda.

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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[email protected] Web: www.alonben-meir.com

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When Bolton expresses his desire to “strangle the ICC in its cradle,” what he really means is he wants US troops to be able to murder babies in their cradles with impunity.

On February 12, 2010, US Army Rangers conducted a nighttime raid on a home in the village of Khataba, outside Gardez, Afghanistan. Dozens of men, women and children, including the district prosecutor and local police chief, had gathered at the house to celebrate the naming of a newborn baby just before the raid occurred. The Rangers stormed the home with guns blazing, killing the prosecutor, police chief, two pregnant women and a teenage girl.

The US military lied about the Khataba raid, initially making the outrageous claim that the women and girl had been killed by their relatives before the assault. But Afghan investigators soon discovered that not only had the American troops killed the civilians, they also dug the bullets out of their riddled bodies and washed the wounds with alcohol in a failed attempt to conceal their crime. When confronted with the evidence, the US-led coalition admitted its forces had indeed killed the women. Despite the US admission, none of the Rangers involved in the atrocity were ever disciplined.

The Khataba raid is but one of many US war crimes and atrocities in Afghanistan. Other notable events include the 2010 serial murder of unarmed Afghan civilians in Kandahar province by members of a self-described Army “Kill Team,” which collected victims’ body parts as grisly souvenirs of their crimes, the torture and murder of detainees at secret prisons including the notorious “Salt Pit” near Kabul and air strikes like the intentional bombing of an international charity hospital in Kunduz that killed 42 patients and staff in October 2015.

To date, no senior US government, military or intelligence officials have been held accountable for these and other incidents that, if committed by America’s enemies, would inarguably be considered — and prosecuted as — war crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was created two decades ago to address the general impunity enjoyed by many war criminals. And while the court, which has almost exclusively prosecuted Africans, has been widely criticized as the “Infamous Caucasian Court” and an instrument of Western neocolonialism, it has in recent years announced that it would begin investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan, as well as Israeli crimes against Palestine, which became the 123rd ICC member nation in 2015.

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Lobbyists for “creators” threw their lot in with the giant entertainment companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU Copyright Directive by a hair’s-breadth this morning, in an act of colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.

Here’s what the EU voted in favour of this morning:

• Upload filters: Everything you post, from short text snippets to stills, audio, video, code, etc will be surveilled by copyright bots run by the big platforms. They’ll compare your posts to databases of “copyrighted works” that will be compiled by allowing anyone to claim copyright on anything, uploading thousands of works at a time. Anything that appears to match the “copyright database” is blocked on sight, and you have to beg the platform’s human moderators to review your case to get your work reinstated.
• Link taxes: You can’t link to a news story if your link text includes more than a single word from the article’s headline. The platform you’re using has to buy a license from the news site, and news sites can refuse licenses, giving them the right to choose who can criticise and debate the news.
• Sports monopolies: You can’t post any photos or videos from sports events — not a selfie, not a short snippet of a great goal. Only the “organisers” of events have that right. Upload filters will block any attempt to violate the rule.

Here’s what they voted against:

• “Right of panorama”: the right to post photos of public places despite the presence of copyrighted works like stock arts in advertisements, public statuary, or t-shirts bearing copyrighted images. Even the facades of buildings need to be cleared with their architects (not with the owners of the buildings).
• User generated content exemption: the right to use small excerpt from works to make memes and other critical/transformative/parodical/satirical works.

Having passed the EU Parliament, this will now be revised in secret, closed-door meetings with national governments (“the trilogues”) and then voted again next spring, and then go to the national governments for implementation in law before 2021. These all represent chances to revise the law, but they will be much harder than this fight was. We can also expect lawsuits in the European high courts over these rules: spying on everyone just isn’t legal under European law, even if you’re doing it to “defend copyright.”

In the meantime, what a disaster for creators. Not only will be we liable to having our independently produced materials arbitrarily censored by overactive filters, but we won’t be able to get them unstuck without the help of big entertainment companies. These companies will not be gentle in wielding their new coercive power over us (entertainment revenues are up, but the share going to creators is down: if you think this is unrelated to the fact that there are only four or five major companies in each entertainment sector, you understand nothing about economics).

But of course, only an infinitesimal fraction of the material on the platforms is entertainment related. Your birthday wishes and funeral announcements, little league pictures and political arguments, wedding videos and online educational materials are also going to be filtered by these black-box algorithms, and you’re going to have to get in line with all the other suckers for attention from a human moderator at one of the platforms to plead your case.

The entertainment industry figures who said that universal surveillance and algorithmic censorship were necessary for the continuation of copyright have done more to discredit copyright than all the pirate sites on the internet combined. People like their TV, but they use their internet for so much more.

It’s like the right-wing politicians who spent 40 years describing roads, firefighting, health care, education and Social Security as “socialism,” and thereby created a generation of people who don’t understand why they wouldn’t be socialists, then. The copyright extremists have told us that internet freedom is the same thing as piracy. A generation of proud, self-identified pirates can’t be far behind. When you make copyright infringement into a political act, a blow for freedom, you sign your own artistic death-warrant.

This idiocy was only possible because:

• No one involved understands the internet: they assume that because their Facebook photos auto-tag with their friends’ names, that someone can filter all the photos ever taken and determine which ones violate copyright;
• They tied mass surveillance to transferring a few mil from Big Tech to the newspaper shareholders, guaranteeing wall-to-wall positive coverage (I’m especially ashamed that journalists supported this lunacy — we know you love free expression, folks, we just wish you’d share);

What comes next? Well, the best hope is probably a combination of a court challenge, along with making this an election issue for the 2019 EU elections. No MEP is going to campaign for re-election by saying “I did this amazing copyright thing!” From experience, I can tell you that no one cares what their lawmakers are doing with copyright.

On the other hand, there are tens of millions of voters who will vote against a candidate who “broke the internet.” Not breaking the internet is very important to voters, and the wider populace has proven itself to be very good at absorbing abstract technical concepts when they’re tied to broken internets (87% of Americans have a) heard of Net Neutrality and; b) support it).

I was once involved in a big policy fight where one of the stakes was the possibility that broadcast TV watchers would have to buy a small device to continue watching TV. Politicians were terrified of this proposition: they knew that the same old people who vote like crazy also watch a lot of TV and wouldn’t look favourably on anyone who messed with it.

We’re approaching that point with the internet. The danger of internet regulation is that every problem involves the internet and every poorly thought-through “solution” ripples out through the internet, creating mass collateral damage; the power of internet regulation is that every day, more people are invested in not breaking the internet, for their own concrete, personal, vital reasons.

This isn’t a fight we’ll ever win. The internet is the nervous system of this century, tying together everything we do. It’s an irresistible target for bullies, censors and well-intentioned fools. Even if the EU had voted the other way this morning, we’d still be fighting tomorrow, because there will never be a moment at which some half-bright, fully dangerous policy entrepreneur isn’t proposing some absurd way of solving their parochial problem with a solution that will adversely affect billions of internet users around the world.

This is a fight we commit ourselves to. Today, we suffered a terrible, crushing blow. Our next move is to explain to the people who suffer as a result of the entertainment industry’s depraved indifference to the consequences of their stupid ideas how they got into this situation, and get them into the streets, into the polling booths, and into the fight.

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On September 13, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) deployed several battle tanks and armoured vehicles at their observation post near the town of Murak in northern Hama, according to reports by pro-militant sources.

It was first time when the TAF deployed its heavy military equipment in this area. Pro-government activists link this deployment with attempts of the Turkish leadership to prevent an expected military operation of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) in the province of Idlib and nearby areas.

The TAF has 12 observation posts in the so-called Idlib de-escalation zone. Many of them are located in the areas directly controlled by internationally recognized terrorist groups or close to these areas.

On the same day, the SAA artillery carried out strikes on positions of Jaish al-Izza, a close ally of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, near Masasneh in northern Hama. Separately, artillery strikes hit a HQ of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham near al-Tamanah in southern Idlib killing several militants inside it.

Government troops also continued their operation against ISIS cells in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert. According to pro-government sources, the SAA further advances along the road towards the T3 pumping station seizing seized loads of weapons, medical supplies, satellite communication devices and a vehicle left behind by ISIS members.

On September 12, in an interview with Fox News, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley claimed that the US and its allies are going to pushing the Assad government not only for possible chemical attacks in Idlib, but for any attack, which hits civilians.

She also recalled allegations that the Assad government had already ordered to use chemical weapons in the area.

It should be noted that according to the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance, chemical attack provocations are being prepared by Idlib militants seeking to trigger a US-led military action against the Damascus government.

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Twenty-five years ago, on 13 September 1993, the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shook hands on the lawn of the White House in Washington DC.

The occasion was the signing of a ‘declaration of principles’ that, in theory, would lead within five years to a comprehensive peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. The so-called Oslo process – ‘Oslo’ because the secret negotiations that led to the agreement took place in the Norwegian capital – marked a brief moment of optimism during a conflict that has now lasted seventy years, ever since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

The principal Israeli negotiator was Yossi Beilin, and he has just published a fascinating analysis of why that moment of optimism was so brief. In a nutshell: because extremists on both sides unleashed a cycle of violence that in effect stopped the process in its tracks, and because the Israeli side failed to recognise that in ‘asymmetrical negotiations’, the stronger party must be careful not to gain too much.

I find his analysis of particular interest as it closely matches some of what I reported fifteen years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the Rabin-Arafat handshake, as a result of which I got into all sorts of trouble with pro-Israel lobby groups.

And it casts an interesting light on some of the current debate about when, and how, criticism of Israel and Israeli government policies is legitimate. (None of what follows, by the way, is meant to imply that the Palestinian side is entirely free from blame in the continuing conflict. The lack of leadership is not confined to only one side.)

In an article for the BBC news website to mark the tenth anniversary of the Oslo accords, I reported from Jerusalem:

‘Within months of the [White House] signing ceremony, a Jewish settler shot dead 29 Muslim worshippers in a mosque in the ancient West Bank city of Hebron. A little over a month later came the first post-Oslo Palestinian suicide bomb. And in November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic.’

Those statements, each of which was entirely true, were condemned at the time by an influential US-based, pro-Israel lobby organisation, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), as a ‘distortion of historical fact’. And in a critique of my accompanying radio report, it added: ‘Although Lustig tried to appear even-handed by interviewing both Israelis and Palestinians, it was clear he was not straying from BBC’s “blame Israel” line.’

Now compare what I reported fifteen years ago with what Yossi Beilin wrote this week:

‘The extreme right in Israel and Islamic groups used violence that we did not foresee to thwart the process and to denigrate it in the eyes of the public. The first murderous event occurred in February 1994, when a religious Jewish doctor from Kiryat Arba settlement, a reserve officer, entered the Hebron Cave of the Patriarchs in his military uniform and massacred 29 Muslims in cold blood and injured many others. The second event was the most dramatic: the assassination of Rabin in 1995 by an extremist Jew who did so explicitly to stop the process.’

Yossi Beilin held several ministerial positions in a succession of Israeli governments, including deputy foreign minister, minister of economy and planning, justice minister and minister for religious affairs. I think it would be quite a stretch to describe him as ‘anti-Israel’.

I dredge up these memories from long ago because too many people still try to argue that criticising Israeli government policies, or even pointing to shared Israeli responsibility in failure, is somehow tantamount to being antisemitic, or at the very least anti-Israel. (My reporting in 2003 was attacked by CAMERA as part of the ‘BBC’s consistent efforts to blame Israel.’ Once, when I was on a visit to Boston, they picketed the event at which I was due to speak and carried placards describing both me and a BBC colleague as antisemites.)

Back in 2003, I pointed out that one of the biggest failures of the Oslo process was that it did not include a commitment to halt the building of illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. The pro-Israel lobbyists objected to that as well, but this week Yossi Beilin backed me up: ‘We succeeded in convincing the Palestinians not to mention a freeze in settlement construction, but Israel continued to build settlements after the Oslo agreement, and this was the gravest Israeli provocation.’

The wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya have knocked the Israel-Palestine conflict off the front pages. After all, how much reporting of endless Middle East conflicts can we take? But while we’ve all been obsessed with Brexit, President Trump has nonchalantly ordered the suspension of all US financial aid to the UN’s Palestinian relief organisation UNRWA and of an additional $25 million in aid to Palestinian hospitals in east Jerusalem.

The US president seems to think that the Palestinians can be bullied and threatened into submission. The hard-line Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has never made any secret of his deep antipathy to the Oslo agreement and all it represents, seems to think the same.

History will prove them wrong. And it is not, and never will be, antisemitic to say so.

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Robin Lustig is a journalist and broadcaster. From 1989-2012 he presented Newshour on BBC World Service and The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4. He studied politics at the University of Sussex and began his journalistic career as a Reuters correspondent in Madrid, Paris and Rome. He then spent 12 years at The Observer before moving into broadcasting in 1989. He has extensive experience of covering major world events for the BBC, and has broadcast live programmes from Abuja, Amman, Baghdad, Berlin, Harare, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Kabul, Kosovo, Moscow, New York, Paris, Rome, Sarajevo, Shanghai, Tehran, Tokyo and Washington.

Featured image is from the author.

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The successful actions of the Syrian Arab Army led to the almost total liberation of the country from various terrorist groups. The only exception is Idlib province, where militants who refused to lay down weapons and join nationwide reconciliation were transported along their family members.

Currently, the key actors in the province are Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) (around 16,000 fighters) (formerly Al Nusra) who control the major part of the region, including the provincial capital, and Bab al-Hawa Border Crossing, located not far from the Turkish border; Falaq al-Rahman (around 6,000 fighters); Nusrat al-Islam (2,500 fighters); Jaysh Al-Izza (approximately 6,000 fighters), and Ahrar al-Sham ( about 1,500 fighters). There are also a lot of foreign mercenaries from across the Middle East, Northern Africa, Asia, and CIS of up to several thousand persons.

According to different sources, from 50,000 to 100,000 militants remain in Idlib, armed with from 300 to 400 units of various armed vehicles. At the same time, they also armed with European-made assault rifles, heavy machine guns, mortars, ATGMs and, which repeatedly fell into the hands of the government forces after clashes with terrorists.

Nowadays, the last preparations are being made for the beginning of the counter-terrorist operation. Its success will allow the Syrian government to move towards a full-fledged political settlement of the crisis. In late August, Syria’s Defense Minister General Ali Abdullah Ayyoub stated that Damascus is determined to recapture Idlib and clear it from terrorists as a result of a large-scale military operation or by political means.

Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva Hussam al-Din Ala claimed that Syria is determined to liberate Idlib from HTS and other affiliated groups and to return it to homeland like other regions liberated from terrorism.

It’s worth noting that the first precondition for the liberation of Idlib was created earlier in the year when the Syrian army units established full control over Abu al-Duhur airbase and hence deprive the jihadists of the only one landing strip and the opportunity to receive arms and weapons from the western sponsors. At present, the elite Tiger Forces headed by the legendary commander Suheil Al-Hassan, the 4th Armored Division and the units of the Republican Guard, led by Maher Assad, the younger brother of Syrian leader have already been deployed near the borders of the province.

Moreover, the former militants who joined the Syrians troops to take part in Idlib offensive. Around 400 former Jaysh al-Ababil militants went over to the government forces during the battle for the Eastern Ghouta and would be fighting along Tiger Forces.

Besides the open hostilities, the Syrian army uses proven methods, like dropping leaflets calling militants to lay down arms and surrender. Such tactics worked well during the liberation of Damascus suburbs and southern provinces when thousands of militants were amnestied and returned to peace.

The similar actions have already given positive results in Idlib province. According to a source in Syria’s high command, around 15,000 militants and their family members will soon leave the region through the humanitarian corridor in Abu al-Duhur.

Despite all the efforts of the Western State to destabilise the situation in Idlib by publishing false news on upcoming chemical weapons provocation and providing the jihadists with arms and weapons, the Syrian authorities have all the necessary to liberate the province completely. The courage of the Syrian army, as well as the support of the true allies, will let them to clear the province, and its liberation is just a matter of time.

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Featured image is from the author.

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For almost seventeen years, Global Research, together with partner independent media organizations, has sought Truth in Media with a view to eventually “disarming” the corporate media’s disinformation crusade.

To reverse the tide, we call upon our readers to participate in an important endeavor.

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.

Global Research Volunteer Members can contact us at [email protected] for consultations and guidelines.

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. 

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The Tech-Driven New ‘Business Model’ for the US Education System

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, September 14, 2018

As a further elaboration on this theme, here’s my verbatim reply to my well meaning colleague, who’s desire for a higher ed college model outside capitalist economy I share, but which I do not believe will happen. Nor do I think that the two main political parties, Republicans and Democrats, will do much, if anything, about the new tech-driven education business model displacing the current 4 year model. They will not prevent or slow the radical transformation of education in the US but will pass legislation to accelerate it.

U.S. Again Cries ‘Chemical Warfare’ in Syria

By Scott Ritter, September 14, 2018

The Syrian government, backed by Russian airpower and Iranian advisors, is preparing to undertake a major offensive designed to retake the province of Idlib from opposition forces. The newly appointed State Department Special Representative for Syria, Jim Jeffreys, claims that there is “Lots of evidence” that Syria is preparing to use chemical weapons, specifically chlorine gas, in support of the Idlib operation.

Bringing Down a President?

By Philip Giraldi, September 13, 2018

If anyone doubted that the top level of the intelligence agencies in Washington have dedicated themselves to ousting President Donald Trump, the past two weeks should have demonstrated precisely how such a plan of action is being executed. First came the leaked accounts of chaos in the Trump Administration derived from the Bob Woodward book Fear: Trump in the White House.

First They Came for Alex Jones, Then for Russian Cable News RT and Syrian TV. Going to War with Russia, Syria, Iran?

By Ann Garrison, September 13, 2018

Shortly after Alex Jones was kicked off Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, New York City residents let me know via email and Twitter that the Russian cable news outlet RT was gone in their area. They all reported the screen message, “Programming on this network is no longer available.” One said that he had called Spectrum customer service, where a representative confirmed that RT was no longer available, but with no further information. He complained and the rep said she’d pass it upstairs.

The Trump Administration’s Intent Is to “Let the ICC Die”.The International Criminal Court is “Illegitimate” according to Bolton

By J. B. Gerald, September 13, 2018

In a speech to the Federalist Society September 10th National Security Adviser John Bolton announced the U.S. will not cooperate in any way with the International Criminal Court. Speaking for the President and Trump administration Mr. Bolton says the U.S. considers the International Criminal Court illegitimate, and he threatens its judges with denial of entry to the States, and impounding their financial assets, and with arrest, if they pursue cases which might “unjustly” place in jeopardy U.S. citizens. This threat extends to those assisting the Court.

Extreme Weather Events and the Seventh Mass Extinction of Species

By Dr. Andrew Glikson, September 13, 2018

The glacial-interglacial oscillations of the Pleistocene (from 2.6 million years ago to 11,500 years ago), are giving way to a human-induced extreme thermal event that is leading to the melting of the large ice sheet, a rise in sea level by many meters and ultimately tens of meters, dangerous hurricanes, floods and droughts.

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Activists have unraveled underway Israeli efforts to turn a historical mosque in Majdal city, in territories occupied in 1948, into a museum and a liquor store.

A video posted on Facebook by activists from the so-called “Eraf Watanak” group shows the transformations made by the Israeli authorities who turned the mosque into a wine shop and an artistic exhibition hall.

Documents attached to the video show that the mosque dates back to the Ottoman era and that it was established following the liberation of Jerusalem by Salah al-Deen al-Ayoubi.

“This is another proof of Israeli plans to violate the sanctity of holy shrines,” Lawyer Khaled Zabarqa said. “The mosque still carries signs of its Islamic origin; it still has a minaret, a mihrab (a semicircular niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the qibla, that is, the direction of the Kaaba in Makkah and hence the direction that Muslims should face when praying), and a minbar (a pulpit in the mosque where the imam stands to deliver sermons).

“To open a bar and a restaurant in the mosque is a dangerous violation of the sanctity of the site and a provocation to adherents of Islam everywhere in the world”, he further stated, calling on the concerned institutions to immediately step in and cease such Israeli aggressions.

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Featured image is from PIC.

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Interviewed Tuesday by host Sharmini Peries at The Real News, Lawrence Wilkerson, a College of William & Mary professor and former chief of staff for United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned that “the neoconservative agenda” for an escalated United States war on Syria followed by war on Iran has had a “resurrection” in President Donald Trump’s administration.

Regarding talk about the US taking military action in Syria in response to potential allegations of the use of chemical weapons — false flag or otherwise — in the country, Wilkerson comments that the war advocates are “looking for every excuse, any excuse, all excuses, to reopen US operations, major U.S. operations, against [President Bashar al-Assad] in Syria, always realizing that the ultimate target is Tehran.” Tehran is the capital of Iran.

Addressing previous allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syria government that were used to justify US military actions in the country, Wilkerson, who is an Academic Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, states that he has seen “no proof” that Assad “ever used chemical weapons” and disparages the reputability of the White Helmets organization whose claims have been used to build support for US military actions in Syria.

Wilkerson further warns that the neoconservative agenda regarding war on Syria and Iran also threatens both conflict between the US and Russia and the long-term bogging down of US military forces in major conflict. Wilkerson states:

“My serious concern is about the way [US National Security Advisor John Bolton] and others in their positions of power now are orchestrating a scenario whereby Donald Trump, for political reasons or whatever, can use force in a significant way against Assad and ultimately Iran, because Iran’s forces are there, and ultimately against Russia, because their forces are there in Syria, and this is most disquieting.”

The neoconservatives’ military plan, argues Wilkerson, is “a recipe for” the US military being in the region for “the next generation” with significant force “mired even deeper in this morass” and with the “day after day” attrition of dollars and lives.

Watch Wilkerson’s complete interview here:

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

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Click here to order.

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Featured image: A truck drove around Caracas with a banner from the grassroots commune movement, with a picture of Allende on it (@SAPI_ve / Twitter)

Thousands of pro-government supporters took to the streets in Caracas Tuesday in a show of support for President Nicolas Maduro, and to commemorate forty-five years since the vile coup d’etat in Chile which overthrew elected President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.

The mobilisation was also in opposition to recent revelations that the current US government had been holding regular meetings with “rebel” Venezuelan military commanders, who were trying to instigate a coup d’etat against the current government.

With the participation of a whole range of pro-government political parties, social movements, and organisations, the march coincided with the Congress of the youth wing of the governing United Socialist Party (JPSUV).

“What we are asking for is that they get their hands out of Venezuela (…) this we say to imperialism, to the enemies of the nation, to the reactionary international and national Right, this people is not willing to put up with more threats and persecutions,” stated Chavista leader Pedro Carreno at the march.

Crowds gathered in the centre of Caracas to oppose imperialist intervention in Venezuela (Rayner Peña R)

One of the marchers, Janet Quintana, from the Guaicaipuro Vive collective in Miranda state, explained that

“We are rejecting the treason against our country, we reject the hostile interventionism of Mr Donald Trump, we reject all types of psychological or verbal violence against our nation because in Venezuela we are free and we have a participatory democracy.”

President Nicolas Maduro had previously paid homage to Salvador Allende by tweeting that

“We commemorate the eternal memory of the socialist leader Salvador Allende at the 45th year of the magnicide carried out by North American imperialism. His voice converted itself into millions of people who continue struggling for a fairer world. Allende lives, the struggle continues!” read his tweet.

Conmemoramos la eterna memoria del líder socialista Salvador Allende, al cumplirse 45 años del magnicidio perpetrado por el imperialismo norteamericano. Su voz se convirtió en millones de personas que continúan luchando por un mundo más justo. ¡Allende Vive, La Lucha Sigue! pic.twitter.com/ntMntLlqiJ

— Nicolás Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) September 11, 2018

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The two reactor Brunswick nuclear plant on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina may be critically threatened by flooding from hurricane Florence. The nuclear plant has a sea wall designed to withstand 22 feet of flooding according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The National Weather Service in Wilmington NC reported on Thursday that the Cape Fear River is expected to crest at up to 22 feet on Tuesday Sept. 17 swollen by hurricane Florence storm surge and downpours.

The seawall was constructed following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan after a tsunami overtopped the sea wall and damaged plant electric power and controls leading to catastrophic meltdowns and release of radiation.

The Brunswick reactors are the same GE Mark I reactors that are at Fukushima. It is highly likely that offsite power to the nuclear plant will be disrupted by hurricane Florence. In this case, onsite emergency generators will be required to maintain cooling systems for the nuclear plants and spent fuel ponds filed with highly radioactive waste.

If water overtops the seawall, it can lead to electrical failure and potential for catastrophic events similar to the Fukishima reactor disaster that resulted in multiple reactor meltdowns and hydrogen explosions in overheating reactors.

“It is extremely worrying that the Tuesday forecast is for a 22 foot flood crest at 22 foot sea wall at the Brunswick plant. Inadequate nuclear safety measures once again pose the unnecessary risk of catastrophic accidents,” said energy expert Roy Morrison.

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Roy Morrison‘s latest book is Sustainability Sutra Select Books, NY 2017. He builds solar farms.

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Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press, 2018) is arguably one of the most wide-ranging, critical, and theoretically nuanced examinations of the political economy of the carceral state in the USA to date. While there has been a substantial growth in writing on the criminal justice system in recent years, particularly following critical engagement with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), there remains important theoretical gaps in understanding the political and economic dynamics of mass incarceration under neoliberalism. Wang helps to fill those gaps by taking seriously the relevance of radical political economy to understanding the foundations of the carceral state and outlining the limitations of these approaches in acknowledging the centrality of anti-black racism which, as Wang notes, is “at the heart of mass incarceration” (85).

The main theoretical framework underpinning Wang’s analysis is her deployment of the concept of racial capitalism to capture the racialized dimensions of accumulation and class in the contemporary U.S. social system. Wang begins by examining Marx’s analysis of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Capital, and then Rosa Luxemburg’s extension of Marx through her work on the expanded reproduction of capital and the spatio-temporal dynamics of capitalism’s expropriating logic across the world market. Tracing Luxemburg’s analysis to David Harvey and his notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ Wang then explores the limits of conventional Marxist analyses in adequately encompassing all the dynamics of oppression and class stratification in capitalist societies.

In drawing on analyses of racial capitalism and settler colonialism to uncover historical and contemporary forms of dispossession, expropriation, and disposability through state violence, Wang extends her analysis beyond exploitation in the realms of work and production. Rather, she argues that there are dual and mutually overlapping logics of exploitation and expropriation intrinsic to capitalist social systems. Indeed, Wang amends Harvey by adopting the term ‘racial accumulation by dispossession’ to demonstrate that carceral capitalism simultaneously homogenizes subjects through the wage relation and exploitation, but also differentiates them as racialized and gendered subjects (101).

The U.S. Carceral-Debt Economy

From here, Wang highlights two central modalities of oppression within the U.S. carceral-debt economy: predatory lending and parasitic governance. Underscoring financialization in the neoliberal period, Wang illustrates how, through administrative mechanisms that are apparently colour-blind, financialization intensifies expropriation through the inclusion of marginalized and racialized subjects into financial markets as opposed to their exclusion from credit markets, which characterized previous historical periods. In demonstrating the uneven accumulation of credit and uneven distribution of ‘risk’ across class and racial lines, Wang’s chapter on racial capitalism and the debt economy concludes that an anti-black racial order is produced by late-capitalist accumulation in the USA (120).

Analyzing a wide variety of forms and relations of indebtedness within the U.S. economy, from student debt, to securitized mortgage loans, to criminal justice debt, Wang unpacks the ‘racialization of risk’ embedded within the lending practices of financial institutions and the foundational structures of the U.S. economy more broadly (146). Within the context of a low-growth economy, when conventional forms of accumulation are reaching their limits and the low-income access to credit have been all but exhausted, Wang asserts that “fraud and predation become a way to secure profits and maintain growth as there are fewer and fewer domains for expansion” (148). Fraudulent lending practices, regressive surcharges and fees, and forms of high-pressure sales manipulation by financial institutions that target the most vulnerable populations have become central to new forms of surplus extraction within the USA. Wang’s analysis advances a novel theoretical placement of the dispossessions that produce racial capitalism alongside Marxist theorizations of accumulation, crisis, and the state.

Drawing on Marxist theories of public finance as well as Wolfgang Streeck’s notion of the transformation from a postwar ‘tax state’ to a neoliberal ‘debt state,’ Wang highlights the financialization of public debt. With the political ascendance of bondholders, she contends, “government bodies [have] become more accountable to creditors than to the public” through their debt-servicing obligations (18). Wang’s analysis thus uncovers surprising intersections between municipal finance and the new financial architecture of the U.S. criminal justice system as the courts and prison system adapt the neoliberal administrative practices of forging ‘user-funded public services’. Unlike most studies produced by legal scholars and non-profit advocacy groups, Wang situates the shift toward an ‘offender-funded’ criminal justice system in the post-2008 period within the crisis of public finances, particularly of cities, and the turn to fiscal austerity and the radical extension of the neoliberal practices of the ‘new public management’ across all levels of government.

Indeed, Wang shows how the fiscal collapse of cities and municipalities across the USA – from Flint, to Detroit, and Ferguson – emerged from the historical dynamics of financialization, de-industrialization, capital flight, and shifting tax regimes. In the post-2008 crisis period, the additional fiscal pressures prompted states to further download the costs of the carceral system onto offenders.

It is here that Wang makes the novel and controversial argument that the state increasingly relies on the criminal justice apparatus – from the array of fines and fees levied on users of the criminal justice system, to the civil forfeiture of ‘assets’ to police departments, and to the elaborate debt collection efforts of the criminal justice system – to expropriate funds from marginalized segments of the U.S. population. Notably, Wang calls these processes an ‘expropriative tax.’ Wang argues that these regressive methods of revenue extraction enable governments to recover some of the costs of the criminal justice system and serve as an indirect means for austerity-driven governments to service their debts (176). In making this argument, Wang illustrates how deeply engrained the criminal justice system is within the political economy of the USA.

In the second half of her book, Wang explores specific aspects of carceral capitalism. ‘Biopower’ and the construction of juvenile delinquency in the popular imaginary is taken up through an engagement with Agamben, Foucault, and Esposito; algorithmic policing technologies implemented across U.S. police departments form part of what can be summed up as a Silicon Valley-education-policing complex; the politics of safety and liberal anti-racism are probed for how they often constrain critical reflection and political action. Wang concludes with a discussion of potential ‘abolitionist futures’, draws again on Luxemburg for her sense of mass struggle, but also black radical thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Jackson, and others. In all this, Carceral Capitalism illustrates the numerous intersections between carceral governance and capitalism in the U.S. and their political importance in American politics today.

Toward a Post-Capitalist, Post-Prison Future

A major political conclusion of Wang’s book is its engagement with prison abolitionism, a central theme of the prison reform movement. While Black Lives Matter, Indigenous groups, and immigrants’ rights organizations around the U.S. and Canada have continued to shed light on the importance of radically restructuring criminal justice apparatuses from their current form, these issues have not figured high on the agenda of the Left. With the intense level of political attention on the Trump administration’s abuse of immigrant families at the U.S. southern border, and calls from some progressive circles for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, Wang’s text reminds us that all elements of the criminal justice system separate, terrorize, and brutalize many families every day, especially low-income, racialized, and immigrant working-class families.

In the book’s final chapter, entitled “The Prison Abolitionist Imagination: A Conversation,” Wang remarks that, just as it has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, many believe that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a world without prisons (297). While she certainly illustrates how deeply embedded the criminal justice system is within the capitalist system, Wang offers less in how an integrated anti-capitalist and prison abolitionist movement might take root. Nonetheless, as her argument demonstrates, the depth and scope of carcerality in the U.S. renders piecemeal reform of the criminal justice system not only strategically misguided but also self-defeating. From the surveillance software concocted in universities and sold to police departments by Silicon Valley startups, to the debt-collection companies that rely on the carceral state to collect and pursue unpaid debts, and the more prosaic elements of the criminal justice system, the carceral apparatus is deeply entwined in U.S. capitalism and remains a central issue around which the Left must mobilize in the making of a new working-class movement.

Carceral Capitalism is both an illuminating critique of the U.S. criminal justice system and a much-needed synthesis of anti-capitalist and abolitionist politics. The book is unconventional in form and structure, shifting from the author’s personal reflections on the U.S. criminal justice system, abolitionist poetry and writing, to a sophisticated critique of policing, power, and the political economy of capitalism and the carceral state in the USA. Wang’s analysis also has relevance for the Canadian context, where immigration detention centers continue to indefinitely detain Black and Brown immigrant populations, private security forces continue to proliferate at an unknown rate, and Indigenous populations continue to be targeted by the criminal justice system on a vastly disproportionate scale. There is the same need in Canada to re-insert creative and imaginative modes of thinking about reforming – even abolishing – the criminal justice and prison systems into the radical Left as part of an emancipatory future. Wang urges readers, activists, and onlookers that the prison – as a symbol of carceral capitalism – can only be undone by using “a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the present” (298).

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As the Trump-Netanyahu conspiracy to destroy the indigenous people of former Palestine gathers pace: as the numbers of unemployed and starving in Gaza increase by the hour: as those without electricity, food and shelter reach crisis point: as disease and contagion spread – the world watches in silence as long-established, vital humanitarian aid is arbitrarily cancelled by Trump upon the demand of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, thereby directly threatening the existence of nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza.

In a scenario reminiscent of other notorious examples of ethnic cleansing, the Likud – White House initiative to destroy an entire people is today being carried out as more illegal settlements are authorised by the Netanyahu government on occupied Palestinian land in open violation and contempt of international law and the will of the United Nations.

The entire US-Israeli operation is a criminal endeavour by a White House under the open influence and funding of a cohort of evangelical Christians and other Zionists who bank-rolled the Trump Presidency using millions of casino dollars and who now act in concert on behalf of the Israel lobby to destroy the Palestinian people and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The EU and the U.N. Security Council must act now to stop this program of ethnic cleansing.   The first action should be to stop all trade with the Israeli state unless or until it complies in full with UNSC Resolution 2334; dismantles its illegal settlements and have those of its citizens in the Occupied Territories repatriated to Israel as demanded by the United Nations.

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

Featured image is from American Free Press.

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Exclusive footage from the censored Al Jazeera documentary, “The Lobby – USA,” shows Israeli government officials taking credit for attacks on Black Lives Matter and reveals an Israel lobbyist explaining how his organization shut down a BLM fundraiser

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When the Movement for Black Lives released a platform in August 2016 that supported the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement and identified Israel as an apartheid state engaged in a project of genocide against Palestinians, the Israeli government snapped into action.

Previously unreleased footage from Al Jazeera’s censored investigative documentary, “The Lobby – USA,” shows Israeli diplomats complaining about the Black Lives Matter “problem” and boasting about their cultivation of established black civil rights activists as pro-Israel proxies.

The footage also reveals how the Israel lobby orchestrated the sudden cancellation of a Black Lives Matter fundraiser at a New York City nightclub.

Recruiting black communal leaders into Israel’s war on Black Lives Matter

Just days after the Movement for Black Lives released its pro-BDS platform, Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter, James Kleinfeld (who appears as “Tony” in the documentary), attended the 2016 conference of the Israel American Council, or IAC.

Organized as a coalition of the most hardline Israel lobby groups in the US, from Christians United For Israel to the Israel on Campus Coalition, the IAC functions as the right-wing, pro-Likud supplement to AIPAC. With a massive cash infusion from pro-Israel oligarchs such as Sheldon Adelson and Adam Milstein, the IAC has emerged as one of the most powerful arms of Israel lobbying in America.

Kleinfeld attended a break-out session at the IAC conference that was packed with Israeli diplomats serving at consulates across the US. Their anxiety about the Movement for Black Lives platform statement was palpable.

“The major problem with Israel is with the young generation of the black community — Black Lives Matter starts there,” stated Judith Varnai Shorer, the Israeli consul general in Atlanta, Georgia.

Shorer boasted that she and other government officials were taking decisive measures to drive a wedge between established black community leadership and the new generation gravitating towards Black Lives Matter.

“I had last week a sit down dinner at my house for forty people which I considered the leadership of the black community,” the Israeli diplomat recalled. “Many very important people [were there]. They can be part of our doing and activities.”

Andy David, the Israeli consul general in San Francisco, California, described how he personally recruited Clarence B. Jones (image on the right), the former lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr., as an advocate for Israel.

“He’s somebody that I reached out to,” David said of Jones. “He became a close and personal friend. Because of that relationship he published three articles in the Huffington Post explaining why their agenda was hijacked.”

The articles David was referring to were a series of editorials Jones published in the Huffington Post during August 2017. Jones wrote as a civil rights elder concerned that linking efforts against police violence to the Palestinian struggle would disrupt community relations with Jews. He did not acknowledge his apparent relationship to the Israeli government or any input from Israeli officials.

“While the Black Lives Matters Movement may want to encourage the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands, we respectfully suggest that they should not make this a central or major issue in their current struggle for Police accountability for the repeated and successive shootings Blacks across America,” Jones argued.

While Jones’ editorials had negligible impact within Black Lives Matter circles, he represented an important asset for an Israel lobby that feared losing the support of black communal leadership. In 2014, when Jones was honored at the Israeli consulate in New York City, he claimed that “Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported Israel today.”

In his comments at the IAC conference, David, the Israeli consul general, claimed the former civil rights lawyer “wrote the draft speech for Martin Luther King – ‘I Have a Dream.’” Yet the accounts by Taylor Branch, the pre-eminent civil rights scholar and biographer of King, suggest that this was an exaggeration at best.

In the pages of Branch’s voluminous history of King from 1954-63, “Parting The Waters,” Jones is mentioned just once in connection the “I Have A Dream” speech — for his lawsuit against record companies that attempted to sell bootlegged copies of the address.

Branch’s accounts confirm Jones as confidant of King, but he appears to have functioned more as a strategist and paid legal counsel than as an ideological influence. The historian described Jones as “a California entertainment lawyer” known for his “handsome ebony face, sports car, tailored suits, colognes, European accessories, and brisk executive style…”

Touting his supposed friendship with Jones, the Israeli general consul, David, proclaimed, “Martin Luther Kind will turn in his grave if he saw the anti-Israel tendencies or policies that are starting to emerge within Black Lives Matter.”

An email from the Grayzone to Jones’ account at San Francisco State University, where he works as an adjunct professor, and a call to the Dr. Clarence B. Jones Institute were not returned.

Cancelling a Movement for Black Lives fundraiser 

The censored Al Jazeera documentary also reveals how The Israel Project, a major Israel lobbying organization in Washington, arranged the cancellation of a Movement for Black Lives fundraiser at a New York City nightclub.

The fundraiser was to have consisted of a concert directed by Tony award-winning actress Tonya Pinkins at the small Broadway club, Feinstein’s/54 Below. However, just days before the show, the owners of 54 Below announced that they were cancelling the event due to the opposition to Israel expressed in the Movement for Black Lives’ platform.

Because “we can’t support these positions, we’ve accordingly decided to cancel the concert,” the club owners stated.

Eric Gallagher, the development director of The Israel Project, took credit for axing the event.

“I don’t know if you saw that this club ditched a Black Lives Matter event,” Gallagher said to Kleinfeld, the undercover reporter. “One of our donors, we just put in a call to him and he put in a call to the place.”

Al Jazeera cancels “The Lobby – USA,” footage leaks out

In hopes of preventing the public from seeing the full breadth of its political subterfuge, including spying on American citizens in coordination with Israel’s Ministry of Strategy Affairs, the Israel lobby initiated a pressure campaign to prevent Al Jazeera’s release of “The Lobby – USA.”

The campaign consisted of visits by high profile Israel lobbyists Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein to Doha, as well as threats from Congress to force Al Jazeera to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act if it aired the documentary. Qatar has since donated $250,000 to Klein’s Zionist Organization of America and other hardline Israel lobby outfits.

An August 29 article by the Wall Street Journal reported that Dershowitz and Klein were among 250 influential pro-Trump figures targeted by a Qatari lobbying blitz after the wealthy kingdom fell under embargo by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Qatari royal family’s goal was to preserve its relationship with the Washington by cultivating support within Trump’s inner circle, especially among his most hardline pro-Israel political fixers.

Electronic Intifada reported in June that Qatar had decided to nix “The Lobby” over “national security concerns.” According to reporters Asa Winstanley and Ali Abunimah, Qatari royals fretted that that release of the documentary could be a factor in provoking the US to pull its Al Udeid Airbase from the Gulf country at a time when it was under diplomatic attack by Saudi Arabia and UAE, both close allies of Israel and the US.

Despite the ban, pieces of the documentary have begun to trickle out. This August 27, Electronic Intifada released footage identifying Adam Milstein as a moving force behind the malicious anti-Palestinian blacklisting operation known as Canary Mission. The report came on the heels of a Grayzone exclusive naming pro-Israel lawyer Howard David Sterling as the owner of Canary Mission’s web domain.

More recently, the Grayzone released footage from “The Lobby – USA” showing Emergency Committee for Israel executive director Noak Pollak teaming up with the right-wing Hoover Institution to pay protesters to heckle a 2016 conference of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Reporter Alain Gresh has published a detailed review of the censored documentary at Le Monde Diplomatique. He confirmed an Electronic Intifada report from this March that the film revealed Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs director-general Sima Vaknin-Gil describing the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) as an unregistered agent of Israeli intelligence in its war against the BDS movement.

“Data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, money trail. This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best. We have FDD. We have others working on this.” Vaknin-Gil stated in footage contained in the film.

Haaretz editor Amir Tibon has also covered the exclusive reports on the suppressed documentary by Grayzone and Electronic Intifada.

Based on these excerpts (haven't watched anything else) it feels like the "deal" some Jewish groups cut with Qatar to censor the movie was a mistake, serious "own goal". Makes the whole thing much more mysterious and fascinates the imagination https://t.co/fIDVQeyVPr

— Amir Tibon (@amirtibon) August 30, 2018

In a recent interview on The Real News and on the Electronic Intifada, journalist Asa Winstanley called for Qatar to end its censorship of Al Jazeera and release the full contents of the network’s documentary investigation into the Israel lobby.

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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty One Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, and The Management of Savagery, which will be published later this year by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the forthcoming Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

All images in this article are from the author.

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On September 12, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) announced that it had abducted Yusuf Nazik, a suspect of the 2013 Reyhanli bombing, in the Syrian city of Lattakia and transported him to Turkey. According to the MIT, Nazik confessed that he participated in the 2013 attack on orders from Syrian intelligence units. He allegedly scouted the crime scene prior to the attack and moved explosives from Syria to Turkey.

On May 11, 2013, two car bombs exploded in the city of Reyhanli in Turkey’s Hatay Province killing 53 people. Then, the Turkish side accused the Syrian Intelligence and Turkish Marxist group Acilciler, now thought to be based in Syria, of being behind the attack. The Syrian side denounced these claims.

Then Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi de-facto placed responsibility for the attacks on the Turkish authorities.

“It was the Turkish government that had facilitated the flow of arms, explosives, vehicles, fighters and money across the border into Syria” he stated adding that Ankara “had turned the border areas into centres for international terrorism”.

Other versions of the incident suggest that ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra (now known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) and other al-Qaeda-linked groups operating in the region may have been behind the attack.

In any case, the detention of Nazik and a new wave of Turkish accusations against the Damascus government over the 2013 bombing are a part of the ongoing standoff on the Idlib issue. Ankara’s efforts to show Syria as a state supporter of terrorism are designed to allow the Erdogan regime to take an upper hand in this standoff and to promote Turkish interests within Syria. A part of these interests is to rescue militant groups operating in Idlib and to keep this area outside of the zone of control of Damascus, thus creating another Turkish-occupied zone within the war-torn country.

On the same day, commanders of Turkish-backed groups of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) revealed to Reuters that Turkey has increased weapon supplies, including unguided rockets, to militant groups in the province of Idlib and nearby areas.

According to pro-government sources, militants already used a part of the supplied rockets to shell the government-controlled areas north of Lattakia city, particularly Sqoubin, al-Qanjarah, Demsarkho and Ugarit.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the National Defense Forces (NDF) made an advance against ISIS cells in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert securing the areas of Wadi Salhub and Bi’r Hajjah. The SAA and the NDF are now working to secure the entire road heading towards the T3 pumping station. Then, according to pro-government sources, they will be able to focus on securing the Doubayat gas field and the settlements of Bir Naji, Barabij, Sarayim and Nayriyah.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) captured the villages of al-Baghuz Fawqani and al-Kasrah as well as eliminated 41 ISIS members during the first 48 hours of their operation against ISIS in the Hajin pocket, the SDF announced.

The US-backed force is now developing its advance in the area aiming to eliminate the last ISIS stronghold on this bank of the Euphrates.

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Fiji’s inclusion as the latest member of the US’ anti-Daesh coalition in Syria has nothing at all to do with protecting the island nation’s people from the world’s worst terrorist group but is the US’ way of pressuring the country to send a none-too-subtle signal to China.

A rather peculiar bit of news emerged earlier this week when the official Twitter account of the US’ “Operation Inherent Resolve”, the formal name of its anti-Daesh coalition in Syria, posted that the South Pacific Island nation of Fiji became the 79^thmember of this campaign. The country is literally located on the other side of the world and has no interests whatsoever in the Mideast, nor is it facing any credible threat – whether immediate or latent – from the world’s worst terrorist group. No further details have been forthcoming thus far so it’s unclear whether Fiji will physically “fight Daesh” (which has nowadays become a euphemism for perpetuating the occupation of Kurdish-controlled northeastern Syria)  by volunteering its soldiers as cannon fodder for the US or if it’s just signing on for symbolism’s sake.

For those who might not be aware of Fiji’s history, the country was recently shunned by the West after its 2006 military coup, the leader of which still serves as its Prime Minister. It was during that time that China brought the country in from the cold, proverbially speaking, and made impressive strategic inroads with the most influential state in this geographically broad but sparsely populated space. The West normalized its relations with Fiji since then after lifting its sanctions against the country in 2014, but it appears as though they’ve somehow managed to convince its leadership of the need to join the anti-Daesh coalition in Syria in order to also send a signal to its strategic partner China. It can’t be known for sure, but two possible explanations exist for why this happened.

The first one is that Fiji strategically capitulated to the US and Australia, striking some sort of deal with them to avoid any prospective anti-Chinese pressure against it in exchange for gradually moving away from Beijing. This interestingly resembles the second explanation except for its intent and intensity, which is that the decision shouldn’t be seen as anti-Chinese but rather as part of a delicate and circumstantially necessitated “balancing” act, the success of which could lead to the reinforcement and possibly even strengthening of China’s strategic presence there if it ends up deterring the “Hex” from destabilizing Fiji. It’s far too soon to say which of these two explanations most accurately accounts for why Fiji joined the anti-Daesh coalition, though it’s fair to say that it nevertheless sends a none-too-subtle signal to China that the US remains the South Pacific hegemon.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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

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A higher ed colleague of mine recently responded to my ‘Amazon the Job Killer’ piece (see post below) which described, in part, how the coming Artificial Intelligence tech revolution will destroy jobs at a rate and magnitude unforeseen before in US history, educational services included.

The colleague had previously shared a graphic with the faculty which highlighted the admirable slogans:

“Education is not a product. Students are not customers. Professors are not tools. The university is not a Factory!”

As a higher ed teacher, this colleague was especially concerned about my analysis of how AI would impact the dominant higher ed college model that has prevailed since 1945–i.e. the four year college experience, now on its last legs propped up increasingly by an unsustainable $1.5 trillion subsidization in the form of student loans, an ‘end of cycle’ solution that cannot continue beyond more than another decade. Certainly teachers would fight back, the colleague argued, as recent teacher strikes in some parts of the US have shown.

But my colleague’s four slogans are more a lament than a call to resistance, since all the four have already become a reality to a significant degree: Higher ed especially has become a product, students obviously are customers, professors are increasingly just tools–soon to be replaced by more efficient, more productive, and more profitable tech tools; and the university is an education factory, maintained by multi-trillion dollar subsidies from the central government that will unravel with the next major recession and economic crisis.

It is a business model that will, like other business models, soon be displaced by a more profitable model based on AI and related technologies. Higher college ed as we know it will largely disappear with the coming diffusion of AI tech throughout the US system. The ‘model’ off 4 year college will soon decline rapidly, I argued.

As a further elaboration on this theme, here’s my verbatim reply to my well meaning colleague, who’s desire for a higher ed college model outside capitalist economy I share, but which I do not believe will happen. Nor do I think that the two main political parties, Republicans and Democrats, will do much, if anything, about the new tech-driven education business model displacing the current 4 year model. They will not prevent or slow the radical transformation of education in the US but will pass legislation to accelerate it.

Here’s My Colleague’s Original Comments:

“well yes, this is a (technology) train that has left the station, but I can’t see the elite institutions succumbing. Small liberal arts institutions are digging their own grave and it is troubling, to say the least, to see so many cooperating in their own demise.”

My Subsequent Reply:

In ten years, K-12 teachers will be machine operator monitors, with lesson plans from software textbooks developed by bureaucrats and delivered to all students everywhere, on handheld devices and from in class monitors. (And eventually removed from brick & mortar classrooms altogether).

In the process, the same ‘cost saving’ K-12 model will quickly migrate to community colleges (already begun) and then to 4 year institutions (ditto, being planned and piloted). The higher education system you see today will be gone by 2035. No more ‘brick & mortar’ institutions. We are living in the twilight of the demise of higher education (and K-12 lower) as we know it. Artificial intelligence will make it all redundant. And the alternative that replaces it far more profitable. Nothing escapes the capitalist dynamic to cut costs and raise profit margins. Education services is no exception.

Yes, teachers will fightback on a local to local basis. But the AFT and NEA and others will continue to defer to the Democratic Party, which will prevent a more national teacher and public employee response to the crisis of jobs and wages for public workers of all kinds. Capitalists have all but destroyed the private sector unions. As I predicted several years ago the target was now the public unions. Next attack will be not only to legalize the open shop, as has been done. But to take away any dues checkoff and collection.

As for elite higher ed, agreed, some will continue the legacy brick and mortar education model (Harvards, Yales, etc.). Or, to put it another way, an ‘extended youth 4 year resort model’ for the well to do who can afford it and take a liberal arts approach to education. But college for the rest will become a glorified STEM training experience or nothing, delivered as I described. In the interim, hundreds of smaller liberal arts institutions will simply disappear.

Capitalism is increasingly unable to deliver, except for below quality jobs and income for most, when compared to what it had in the past. The next global recession, coming in late 2019 or early 2020 for sure, will occur with a Fed and monetary policy left with few response options (rates will have risen only to 3% at most, compared to 5.25% in 2007, and rate cuts will have little effect). And fiscal policy (more tax cuts and government spending) will be confronted with Trump $1 trillion annual deficits for at least another decade and $31 trillion national debt by 2028. So few options for stimulus policy there as well.

Watch for really draconian policy alternatives when the crisis hits, like freezing your savings or forcing you to convert savings to buy your bank’s worthless stock as a bailout). On the fiscal side, watch as they steal social security’s remaining $2.9 trillion Trust Fund’s surplus, and try to turn over medicare to the insurance companies. Private defined benefit pensions in the public sector will be dumped on the government’s PBGC (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation) or on a new PBGC like government agency for the public sector, that will, like the private sector PBGC, pay half of what the benefit would have been.

The central political problem to stopping all this is the organization question. There’s no organizational alternative on the horizon for those wanting to challenge these conditions. The quality of the two mainstream parties shows they are in decline, and an alternative has not yet risen. Republicans are becoming Trump’s (and the ultra right) party; Democrats are refusing to allow Sanders and progressives to reform it. (Did you know that more than 100 members of the DNC are corporate heads and lobbyists?). Do you really think they’ll ever turn to economic issues and the working class again? Never, apart from just ‘talking the talk’. That’s why identity politics is their solution and marketing pitch.(My definition of Identity Politics: ‘Self-Divide and Self-Conquer’). Except for the west coast and northeast, the DP has lost influence across the board in state and local politics. In 80% of the states now they’re defunct. They’re a 20% party. Just a national parliamentary (congress) vote seeking party. Sanders’ (and the Our Revolution crowd) quixotic ‘inside-outside’ strategy to reform it is a joke.

Sorry to be so pessimistic. But I’m a devout materialist and refuse to pretty up the scenario. To sum up: AI will devastate conditions further for all but the few, and it will come faster than most think because it makes capital more profitable in a period when US capital is being increasingly challenged by foreign competitors.

Trump is a response to that. What he represents is a policy offensive designed to restore and ensure US global economic hegemony for another decade. He represents a new, more virile, aggressive and violent form of Neoliberalism, that requires a de-democratization domestically, an even more manipulable domestic workforce, and emerging US economic warfare globally against both challengers and allies alike.

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

Jack Rasmus is the author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: Economic Policy in the US from Reagan to Trump’, to be published by Clarity Press. His latest book is ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, 2017, also published by Clarity. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and his twitter handle is @drjackrasmus.

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Featured image: U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley at the UN this week. (Twitter/Nikki Haley/U.S. Govt)

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The New York Times, on September 11, 2013, accommodated Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s desire “to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders” about “recent events surrounding Syria.”

Putin’s op-ed in the Times appeared under the title: “A Plea for Caution From Russia.” In it, he warned that a military “strike by the United States against Syria will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders … and unleash a new wave of terrorism. … It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.”

Three weeks before Putin’s piece, on August 21, there had been a chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was immediately blamed. There soon emerged, however, ample evidence that the incident was a provocation to bring direct U.S. military involvement against Assad, lest Syrian government forces retain their momentum and defeat the jihadist rebels.

In a Memorandum for President Barack Obama five days before Putin’s article, on September 6, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) had warned President Barack Obama of the likelihood that the incident in Ghouta was a false-flag attack.

Despite his concern of a U.S. attack, Putin’s main message in his op-ed was positive, talking of a growing mutual trust:

“A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action. [Syria’s chemical weapons were in fact destroyed under UN supervision the following year.]

“I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive … and steer the discussion back toward negotiations. If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust … and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.”

Obama Refuses to Strike

In a lengthy interview with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg published in The Atlantic much later, in March 2016, Obama showed considerable pride in having refused to act according to what he called the “Washington playbook.”

He added a telling vignette that escaped appropriate attention in Establishment media. Obama confided to Goldberg that, during the crucial last week of August 2013, National Intelligence Director James Clapper paid the President an unannounced visit to caution him that the allegation that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack in Ghouta was “not a slam dunk.”

Clapper’s reference was to the very words used by former CIA Director George Tenet when he characterized, falsely, the nature of the evidence on WMD in Iraq while briefing President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2002. Additional evidence that Ghouta was a false flag came in December 2016 parliamentary testimony in Turkey.

In early September 2013, around the time of Putin’s op-ed, Obama resisted the pressure of virtually all his advisers to launch cruise missiles on Syria and accepted the Russian-brokered deal for Syria give up its chemical weapons. Obama follow public opinion but had to endure public outrage from those lusting for the U.S. to get involved militarily. From neoconservatives, in particular, there was hell to pay.

Atop the CNN building in Washington, DC, on the evening of September 9, two days before Putin’s piece, I had a fortuitous up-close-and-personal opportunity to watch the bitterness and disdain with which Paul Wolfowitz and Joe Lieberman heaped abuse on Obama for being too “cowardly” to attack.

Five Years Later

In his appeal for cooperation with the U.S., Putin had written these words reportedly by himself:

“My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

In recent days, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has left no doubt that he is the mascot of American exceptionalism. Its corollary is Washington’s “right” to send its forces, uninvited, into countries like Syria.

“We’ve tried to convey the message in recent days that if there’s a third use of chemical weapons, the response will be much stronger,” Bolton said on Monday. “I can say we’ve been in consultations with the British and the French who have joined us in the second strike and they also agree that another use of chemical weapons will result in a much stronger response.”

As was the case in September 2013, Syrian government forces, with Russian support, have the rebels on the defensive, this time in Idlib province where most of the remaining jihadists have been driven. On Sunday began what could be the final showdown of the five-year war. Bolton’s warning of a chemical attack by Assad makes little sense as Damascus is clearly winning and the last thing Assad would do is invite U.S. retaliation.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, with remarkable prescience, has already blamed Damascus for whatever chemical attack might take place. The warnings of direct U.S. military involvement, greater than Trump’s two previous pin-prick attacks, is an invitation for the cornered jihadists to launch another false-flag attack to exactly bring that about.

Sadly, not only has the growing trust recorded by Putin five years ago evaporated, but the likelihood of a U.S.-Russian military clash in the region is as perilously high as ever.

Seven days before Putin’s piece appeared, citizen Donald Trump had tweeted:

“Many Syrian ‘rebels’ are radical Jihadis. Not our friends & supporting them doesn’t serve our national interest. Stay out of Syria!”

In September 2015 Trump accused his Republican primary opponents of wanting to “start World War III over Syria. Give me a break. You know, Russia wants to get ISIS, right? We want to get ISIS. Russia is in Syria — maybe we should let them do it? Let them do it.”

Last week Trump warned Russian and Syria not to attack Idlib. Trump faces perhaps his biggest test as president: whether he can resist his neocon advisers and not massively attack Syria, as Obama chose not to, or risk the wider war he accused his Republican opponents of fomenting.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years, and was a Presidential briefer from 1981 to 1985.

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.

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In an unprecedented attack on one of the most important judicial bodies in the world, National Security Advisor John Bolton on Monday threatened to sanction the International Criminal Court and its staff if the court approves a full investigation into U.S. torture in Afghanistan. The U.S. is not a member of the court, but it has supported the court’s efforts to hold perpetrators of war crimes accountable — as long as those efforts don’t involve U.S. or close allies.

In a speech at the Federalist Society, Bolton said of the ICC,

“We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system.”

While Bolton’s hostility to international bodies in general — and to the ICC in particular — is not new, he is now setting a new policy on behalf of the U.S. government.

He also made misleading statements and old, half-baked arguments to support the U.S.’s new approach of treating well-respected judges and prosecutors like it treats international drug traffickers or suspected foreign war criminals.

For example, Bolton suggested that the court could investigate and prosecute “acts of aggression” by the United States, warning that the term could be used to cover many U.S. policies. This is fear-mongering and incorrect. In reality, the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over the crime of aggression by non-members — and even members must specifically agree to it.

The true reason for the policy now is that the Trump administration wants to stop a long-overdue investigation into U.S. torture. The administration’s threats come as former U.S. officials face, for the first time, the possibility of a full criminal investigation by the court for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is an ICC member, which means that the court can prosecute crimes committed there since May 2003 when it joined the court. The impending investigation would also cover CIA torture at secret “black sites” in three European countries that are members: Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.

The ICC prosecutor’s office announced a preliminary examination in 2007 into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. In November 2017, the ICC prosecutor announced that she was seeking a full investigation, which can lead to prosecutions. The full investigation is awaiting authorization by the ICC’s “Pre-Trial Chamber.”

A full investigation would cover crimes by all parties involved in the war since 2003, including the Taliban, Afghan forces, and allied forces including the United States. The investigation could cover acts by civilian and military leaders who approved the illegal torture regime.

Obviously, the Trump administration doesn’t want this to happen. Indeed, in talking about the reasons behind Bolton’s remarks, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the ICC had just informed the administration that a decision on the investigation was imminent.

A Bush-era law prohibits the government from assisting the ICC in extraditing U.S. citizens, and bars military aid to countries that are ICC members (with some exceptions). However, there is no legal basis for the Trump administration’s threat to criminally prosecute ICC judges and prosecutors and hit them with travel and financial sanctions.

The long-term goal of the Trump administration is clearly to attack the ICC’s legitimacy and pressure other countries to cut its funding and boycott it. This misguided and harmful policy will only further isolate the United States from its closest democratic allies — every other member of NATO except Turkey has joined the ICC. Bolton’s words of intimidation also give solace to war criminals and oppressive regimes seeking to evade consequences for their crimes.

The Trump administration’s new policy is a dangerous attack on the rule of law and an affront to survivors of U.S. torture who have been denied justice for the past 15 years — including during the Obama administration, which decided to “look forward not backward” and failed to hold former Bush administration officials accountable for their torture policy.

This week’s attack on the ICC is also the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s campaign to undermine universal human rights and international bodies. Previous offenses include withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Trump has also pulled out of the negotiations leading up to the Global Compact on Migration, attacked a U.N. independent human rights expert investigating poverty in the United States, and refused to appear at a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The American people and our political representatives in Congress must push back against these dangerous actions. The Trump administration’s move must also be strongly resisted by allies abroad to prevent further damage to institutions that were created to fight impunity and hold rights violators accountable.

*

Featured image is from South China Morning Post.

Die Liberty Passion lief am 8. August und die Liberty Promise am 2. September im Hafen von Leghorn ein, wo die Liberty Pride am 9. Oktober ankommen wird. Die drei Schiffe werden dann nacheinander am 10. November, 15. Dezember und 12. Januar nach Leghorn zurückkehren.

Es handelt sich um riesige Ro-Ro-Schiffe, 200 Meter lang und mit 12 Decks, die jeweils 6500 Autos transportieren können. In Wahrheit  tragen sie keine Autos, sondern Panzer.

Sie sind Teil einer US-Flotte von 63 Schiffen, die privaten Unternehmen gehören, die im Auftrag des Pentagons kontinuierlich Waffen weltweit entlang der Häfen der USA, des Mittelmeers, des Nahen Ostens und Asiens transportieren.

Der Hauptanlaufpunkt im Mittelmeer ist Leghorn, da es mit dem benachbarten US-Basis Camp Darby verbunden ist.

Worin die Bedeutung des Stützpunktes besteht, erklärte Oberst Erik Berdy, Kommandant der Garnison der US-Armee in Italien, bei einem kürzlichen Besuch bei der Zeitung “La Nazione” in Florenz.

Die logistische Basis, die sich zwischen Pisa und Livorno befindet, ist das größte Waffenlager der USA außerhalb der Heimat. Der Colonel hat den Inhalt der 125 Bunker von Camp Darby nicht genau benannt. Er kann auf über eine Million Artilleriegeschosse, Flugbomben und Raketen sowie Tausende von Panzern, Fahrzeugen und andere militärische Gegenstände geschätzt werden.

Es kann nicht ausgeschlossen werden, dass es in der Basis Atombomben gegeben hat, gibt oder geben wird.

Camp Darby – betonte der Oberst – spielt eine Schlüsselrolle: Es liefert Waffen an die US-Boden- und Luftstreitkräfte in viel kürzerer Zeit, als sie bei einer direkten Lieferung aus den USA erforderlich wäre. Die Basis lieferte die meisten der Waffen, die in den Kriegen gegen den Irak, Jugoslawien, Libyen und Afghanistan eingesetzt wurden.

Da die großen Schiffe seit März 2017 monatlich in Leghorn einlaufen, werden die Waffen von Camp Darby ständig zu den Häfen von Aqaba in Jordanien, Jeddah in Saudi-Arabien und anderen Häfen im Nahen Osten transportiert, die von den USA und den alliierten Streitkräften in den Kriegen in Syrien, Irak und Jemen genutzt werden. Auf ihrer  Jungfernfahrt entlud die Liberty Passion im April 2017 in Aqaba 250 Militärfahrzeuge und andere Materialien.

Zu den Waffen, die jeden Monat auf dem Seeweg von Camp Darby nach Jeddah transportiert werden, gehören sicherlich auch US-Bomben, mit denen die saudische Luftwaffe (wie Fotobeweise zeigen) Zivilisten im Jemen tötet.

Es gibt auch ernsthafte Hinweise darauf, dass die großen Schiffe in der monatlichen Verbindung zwischen Leghorn und Jeddah auch Fliegerbomben transportieren, die von RWM Italia von Domusnovas (Sardinien) aus nach Saudi-Arabien für den Krieg im Jemen geliefert wurden.

Durch den verstärkten Waffentransit durch das Camp Darby reicht die Kanal- und Straßenverbindung der Basis mit dem Hafen von Leghorn und dem Flughafen von Pisa nicht mehr aus. Daher wurde eine massive Reorganisation der Infrastruktur beschlossen (bestätigt durch Oberst Berdy), einschließlich einer neuen Eisenbahn. Der Plan sieht die Zerstörung von 1000 Bäumen in einem Schutzgebiet vor. Sie wurde jedoch bereits von den italienischen Behörden genehmigt.

Dies alles ist nicht genug. Der Präsident des toskanischen Regionalrates Giani (Pd), der Oberst Berdy empfing, verpflichtete sich, “die Integration zwischen dem US-Militärstützpunkt Camp Darby und der umliegenden Gemeinschaft” zu fördern. Eine Position, die im Wesentlichen von den Bürgermeistern Pisas Conti (Lega) und Livornos Nogarin (M5S) geteilt wird. Letzterer, der Oberst Berdy und den damaligen US-Botschafter Eisenberg empfing, hisste die Stars and Stripes-Flagge am Rathaus.

Manlio Dinucci

(il manifesto, 11. September 2018)

Übersetzung: K.R.

No dia 8 de Agosto de 2018 fez escala no porto de Livorno,o navio Liberty Passion (Paixão pela Liberdade) e no dia 2 de Setembro, o Liberty Promise (Promessa de Liberdade), que serão secundados, no dia 9 de Outubro, pelo Liberty Pride (Orgulho da Liberdade). Os três navios regressarão a Livorno, sucessivamente, nos dias 10 de Novembro, 15 de Dezembro e 12 de Janeiro de 2019. São navios Ro-Ro enormes, com 200 metros de comprimento e 12 pontes, cada um capaz de transportar 6500 automóveis. Mas eles não carregam carros, mas tanques. Fazem parte de uma frota norte-americana de 63 navios pertencentes a empresas privadas que, por conta do Pentágono, transportam armas continuamente num circuito mundial entre os portos dos EUA, do Mediterrâneo, do Médio Oriente e da Ásia. A escala principal do Mediterrâneo é Livorno, porque o seu porto está ligado à base americana limítrofe de Camp Darby.

Qual é a importância da base foi recordado pelo coronel Erik Berdy, comandante da guarnição do Exército dos EUA em Itália, numa visita recente ao jornal “La Nazione” em Florença. A base logística, situada entre Pisa e Livorno, é o maior arsenal dos EUA fora da pátria. O coronel não especificou o conteúdo dos 125 bunkers em Camp Darby. Pode ser estimado em mais de um milhão de projécteis de artilharia, bombas para aviões e mísseis, além de milhares de tanques, veículos e outros materiais militares. Não pode ser descartado que, no futuro, nessa base estiveram, estão ou podem ter estado bombas nucleares.

Camp Darby – sublinhou o coronel – desempenha um papel fundamental, reabastecendo as forças terrestres e as áreas dos EUA num espaço de tempo muito mais curto do que seria necessário se elas fossem abastecidas directamente pelos USA. A base forneceu a maioria das armas para as guerras contra o Iraque, Jugoslávia, Líbia e Afeganistão. Desde Março de 2017, com os grandes navios que param mensalmente em Livorno, as armas de Camp Darby são constantemente transportadas para os portos de Aqaba na Jordânia, Jeddah na Arábia Saudita e outros portos do Médio Oriente para serem usados pelas forças americanas e pelas forças aliadas nas guerras na Síria, no Iraque e no Iémen.

Na sua viagem inaugural, o Liberty Passion desembarcou 250 veículos militares e outros materiais em Aqaba, em Abril de 2017. Entre as armas que são transportadas por mar todos os meses, de Camp Darby a Gedda, certamente há também bombas americanas para aviões que a aviação saudita emprega (como evidenciado por provas fotográficas) para matar civis no Iémen. Há também sérios indícios de que, na ligação mensal entre Livorno e Gedda, os grandes navios também transportam bombas aéreas fornecidas pela RWM Itália (Radioactive Waste Management) de Domusnovas (Sardenha) http://www.sardiniapost.it/inchieste/rwm-la-fabbrica-bombe-promuove-la-salute-utile-oltre-15-mln/ à Arábia Saudita para a guerra no Iémen.

Como resultado do aumento do trânsito de armas de Camp Darby, a ligação por canal e estrada, da base com o porto de Livorno e o aeroporto de Pisa, já não é suficiente. Uma reorganização maciça da infraestrutura foi decidida (confirmada pelo Coronel Berdy), incluindo um caminho de ferro novo. O plano envolve o abate de 1000 árvores numa área protegida, mas já foi aprovado pelas autoridades italianas. Tudo isto não basta. O Presidente do Conselho Regional da Toscana, Giani (Pd), recebendo o coronel Berdy, prometeu “promover a integração entre a base militar dos EUA de Camp Darby e a comunidade que a circunda”. Posição substancialmente partilhada pelo prefeito de Pisa, Conti (Lega) e de Livorno, Nogarin (M5S). Este último, recebendo o coronel Berdy e depois o Embaixador americano Eisenberg, içou a bandeira de estrelas e riscas, na Comuna.

Manlio Dinucci

Il manifesto, 11 de Setembro de 2018

Video em italiano com subtítulos em português :

Traduzido do italiano por Luisa Vasconcellos

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The successful realization of the E-40 waterway project, a little-known initiative to link the Baltic and Black Seas via a renovated system of canals, might be enough to disrupt Belarus’ delicate “balancing” act in favor of the West if its crucial Polish component is completed in the near future.

The NED-funded “EurasiaNet” outlet ran a story about the efforts of environmental protesters to disrupt a planned series of canals in Belarus that would form part of a larger network of waterways connecting the Baltic and Black Seas, a little-known project referred to as the E-40. (see map below)

Although initiated back in 2014, most of the global media ignored this game-changing vision of regional connectivity, but an excellent analysis about its geostrategic implications was written by Siarhei Bohdan at Belarus Digest. The expert concludes that Belarus would be able to diversify its export routes to the global marketplace and therefore lessen its dependence on Russia. Given that this outcome would naturally have consequences for the course of the New Cold War, it’s worthwhile to take advantage of the attention that “EurasiaNet” drew to the E-40 and examine this proposal more in detail.

The “Viking Silk Road”

The guiding concept behind this series of projects is to restore the Viking-era trade routes that used to run through the region over a millennium ago, thereby making it an indigenous European version of China’s famous Silk Road. According to the E-40’s official website, the main component that needs to be reconstructed is the canal system along eastern Poland’s Western Bug River between the capital of Warsaw and the Belarussian border city of Brest. Environmentalists object to the ecological impact that this could have on local flora and fauna, and they’re also equally worried about the smaller section that’s planned to run through southern Belarus’ pristine Pripyat River, too. Nevertheless, if these NGO obstacles can be surmounted – whether by ignoring their demands for rerouting part of the project or reaching some sort of compromise with them – then the E-40 is bound to revolutionize regional geopolitics.

Taken to its natural conclusion, the E-40 would lead to the disruption of Belarus’ delicate “balancing” act, elaborated on in detail by the author in a piece for Global Research earlier this summer, and possibly even see the Eurasian Economic Union-member drift away from Moscow like Armenia is presently doing in order to explore a trade deal with the EU. It’s been immensely challenging for Russia to counter the West’s structural subterfuge of its peripheral partners (and in the case of CSTO and EAU members Armenia and Belarus, legal allies), and it’s thus found itself in a quandary over how to respond out of concern that ignoring this trend would be strategically suicidal while reacting too decisively could be equally counterproductive. As Russia struggles with this dilemma, Belarus’ wily leader Lukashenko is masterfully exploiting it to his advantage to reap more benefits from Moscow and Brussels.

The Polish Pivot 

Over the past year, however, Lukashenko has also engaged in an informal rapprochement with neighboring nemesis Poland, which had hitherto been obsessively dedicated to his removal from office through its hosting of anti-government NGOs and consistent political opposition to his leadership in general. That evidently began to change after February 2017 when Lukahsneko began speaking out more forcefully against Russia, which the author provocatively addressed in his piece at the time wondering whether “Belarus Is On The Brink Of Pivoting Away From Russia”. The past 18 months must have been full of fruitful behind-the-scenes discussions between Belarus and Poland because of the three high-profile events and statements that just recently took place.

The Polish Ambassador to Belarus met with his host’s Chairman of the National Assembly last month and publicly revealed that trade was up an astounding 21% over the past two years and that both sides will continue to invest in one another.  Shortly thereafter, the Polish Investment and Trade Agency announced its eagerness to continue cooperating with Belarusian companies. Most surprising, however, was the Belarusian Defence Ministry declaring in late August that it’s holding consultations on regional and international military cooperation with Poland, NATO’s vanguard state in Central & Eastern Europe and the site of a planned US military base that’s riled Russia to no end.

Connecting The “Three Seas” To China

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Poland is China’s top partner in the Central & Eastern European space, thus making Warsaw’s “Three Seas Initiative” of crucial interest to Beijing. Accordingly, China might decide to export some of the products from the China-Belarus Industrial Park that it’s building in Minsk, which is one of its main Silk Road nodes on the continent, along the E-40 for easily connecting with the Scandinavian and Black Sea regional marketplaces. The latter could also link up with the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route that China’s streamlining through the Caucasus and Central Asia and which was mapped out by the author in an earlier analysis about the global significance of the Via Carpathia initiative in Romania. This could in turn guarantee Chinese-Belarusian trade even in the event that Minsk’s relations with Moscow deteriorate due to its Westward pivot.

For as apparently irrelevant as it might look at first glance, the successful renovation of the Polish canal system between Warsaw and the Belarusian border city of Brest could actually be a geopolitical game-changer in the Central & Eastern European theater of the New Cold War if it expectedly leads to Belarus binning its “balancing” act in favor of a more pronounced pro-Western pivot towards Poland, with all of the resultant implications for the Eurasian Economic Union, the “Three Seas Initiative”, and China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity. The first-mentioned would be thrown even deeper into the dilemma that Armenia first made for it after that EAU-member state pushed forward with its own EU trade agreement if Belarus decides to follow suit, which would naturally facilitate Minsk’s partnership with the “Three Seas” and resultantly serve as yet another trade corridor for China.

Russia is therefore left in a conundrum because it’s unsure of how to respond to this seemingly unexpected but not entirely unforeseeable scenario. Reacting too decisively risks “legitimizing” Lukashenko’s Westward pivot and serving as the tripwire for the EU to potentially offer Belarus a (Polish-led?) support package for relieving any adverse effects that could come from Russia curtailing valuable subsidies to the landlocked country, even if Moscow does so on what it claims is an unrelated and apolitical pretext. On the other hand, ignoring the reality of what’s unfolding risks “normalizing” Lukashenko’s pivot and implying that Russia is proudly subsidizing it for some inextricable reason. Either way, Russia’s “damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t” respond to Belarus, but regardless of what it may or may not do, the renovation of E-40’s crucial Polish canal component could proceed independently thereof and Moscow might not be able to do anything about its long-term geostrategic consequences.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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

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If anyone doubted that the top level of the intelligence agencies in Washington have dedicated themselves to ousting President Donald Trump, the past two weeks should have demonstrated precisely how such a plan of action is being executed. First came the leaked accounts of chaos in the Trump Administration derived from the Bob Woodward book Fear: Trump in the White House.

Then a New York Times op-ed entitled “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration” written by one Anonymous who claimed to be a senior official in the White House, exploded on the scene, describing how top officials were deliberately sabotaging Trump’s policies to protect the country.

Finally, another another op-ed “Why so many former intelligence officers are speaking out” by former CIA Acting Director John McLaughlin appeared, providing a rationale for intelligence officers to speak up against the White House.

There has been considerable chatter in the media regarding the Woodward book and the Anonymous op-ed, but relatively little concerning McLaughlin, who arguably has made the most serious case for pushback against Donald Trump from within the intelligence community. To sum up the op-ed, McLaughlin wrote that many former intelligence officers are beginning to speak out against the foreign policy of the Trump Administration because America’s institutions are being seriously damaged by an “extraordinarily unprecedented context” of threats emerging from both inside and outside the country due to a “president’s dangerous behavior.”

McLaughlin claims that “failure to warn is the ultimate sin in the intelligence world” and that is precisely why he and his colleagues now speak out. In particular, and perhaps inevitably, he cites the “refus[al] to combat a well-documented covert foreign attack on U.S. elections — in the process weakening efforts by others to do so and encouraging Russia to keep it up.”

McLaughlin also addresses the issue of the credibility of the intelligence community after Trump, i.e. will the public and many policymakers henceforth believe that the national security team is in fact politically biased, tainting the judgments that it makes when delivering its intelligence product. He argues somewhat evasively and not altogether clearly that “…we have to hope most people will understand why we reject silence: It’s because this is a threat that we cannot combat silently, as we have been able to do with foreign threats — overseas and out of the public’s eye.”

McLaughlin is praising himself and friends as constituting some kind of loyal opposition consisting of the good guys driven to protect “American values” and “American institutions” from Trump and his “deplorables.” His argument is carefully framed but ultimately self-serving. Witness his own career as Deputy Director of CIA under George Tenet, who famously sat in the United Nations sagaciously nodding to validate the argument that Saddam Hussein threatened the world with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist support. It was all a lie, leading to America’s greatest foreign policy disaster and McLaughlin was complicit. Did he ever apologize for what he did? No. He was also around when the CIA was “renditioning” people by snatching them off the streets and sending them to foreign lands to be tortured. Did he ever consider how that damaged America’s rule of law? And then there were the torture prisons. Again, silence from the suddenly-found-Jesus John McLaughlin.

And since that time, where was McLaughlin’s conscience when Barack Obama was sitting down with his intelligence advisor John Brennan and making up lists of American citizens to be killed by drone? Or planning the destruction of Libya? Apparently, the only threats that matter are those presumably generated by Donald Trump, who is particularly reviled because he has spoken of bettering relations with Russia. And when McLaughlin inevitably cites the threat from Moscow, he ignores the fact that the United States has been arming Ukraine while at the same time conducting military exercises right on Russia’s border. It has also been sanctioning Russians and Persona Non Grata’ing its diplomats regularly to punish it under Trump, making the bilateral relationship the worst it has been since the end of the Cold War. So where is the coddling of Moscow?

And McLaughlin is also wrong about the timing and substance of the intelligence officers’ speaking out. John Brennan, Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, James Woolsey and James Clapper all have been actively trying to discredit Trump since before he was nominated. Several of them have claimed absurdly that the president is a Russian spy, also suggested in some comments made by McLaughlin himself in July, including that Trump is an “intelligence recruiter’s dream.” So, it all would appear to be less a response to policies than it is a personal vendetta by a number of politicized senior officers who were lined up behind Hillary Clinton with hopes of being personally rewarded after her election.

Finally, though McLaughlin is claiming to support former intelligence officers who bravely speak out when the United States is threatened, he completely ignores a whole lot of them who have been doing just that for many years. They are sometimes labeled whistleblowers or dissidents, but McLaughlin probably considers them to be the lowest of the low. The whistleblowers and their allies have been calling for an end to the warfare surveillance state, which McLaughlin helped create and which he is still sustaining through his fearmongering, Russophobia being the wedge issue that drives both him and his “patriotic” friends. Introspection is apparently not McLaughlin’s strong suit, but he perhaps should pause and think for a second whether he and they are doing the American people any favors by their setting the stage for yet another war in their zeal to bring down Donald Trump.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

Featured image is from the author.

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Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibibi calls Alex Jones “the media equivalent of a trench-coated stalker who jumps out from behind a mailbox and starts whacking it in an intersection.” Good description but he rightly warned that “Censorship Does Not End We.”

Shortly after Alex Jones was kicked off Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, New York City residents let me know via email and Twitter that the Russian cable news outlet RT was gone in their area. They all reported the screen message, “Programming on this network is no longer available.” One said that he had called Spectrum customer service, where a representative confirmed that RT was no longer available, but with no further information. He complained and the rep said she’d pass it upstairs.

The RT website confirmed that Charter Spectrum covers the entire NYC area and northern New Jersey. ( Actually, their website still says Time Warner, although Time Warner has been subsumed by Charter Spectrum.)

I submitted a press inquiry as to whether or not RT is still available to Charter Spectrum subscribers in Los Angeles, but had not received a response as of September 11, aka 09/11. I couldn’t help noting that I found myself reporting this on the 17th anniversary of the day that hijacked planes crashed into NYC’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, creating an excuse for mass surveillance, the legalization of domestic psyops, and every US war since, whatever your theory as to what really happened. Trump and his administration now waffle about whether they’re fighting Syria, Russia, or terrorists, but Russia is clearly the ascendant bogeyman.

RT was taken off cable in Washington, DC on April 1st, though the Kremlin had said the move looked “illegal and discriminatory” according to US law. At the same time Bloomberg News reported the decision and the legal complexity facing cable companies who want to drop RT. That report began by citing US intelligence agencies who describe RT “as part of Moscow’s ‘state-run propaganda machine.’”

US, UK, and France going to war with Russia, Syria, and Iran?

I messaged Hungarian scholar George Szamuely, a fellow at New York City’s Global Policy Institute, who tried to find RT on his TV and got the same “no longer available” screen. He then had this to say:

“Well, I think it’s really alarming that we’re on the eve of what could be a very serious military confrontation in the Middle East, with the United States and the UK and France threatening to go to war in Syria against Russia, Syria, and Iran. At this moment, this very very dangerous moment, we can’t just rely on official sources and officially sanctioned media like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, which are not only using lies of omission but also willfully disseminating disinformation.

“So, while we don’t necessarily have to accept everything we hear on RT as true, it is clearly a disservice to democracy when it is taken off the air. Moreover, it is being taken off the air because of the content of its broadcasts. And that’s very worrying. We need as many sources of information at our disposal as possible. When we hear only one side, we go badly wrong. This is happening right now when mainstream media are putting out the ridiculous, evidence-free assertions that Assad is 100% certain to use chemical weapons. The public is being prepared for a war without any chance of debate. We went through this in 2003, and we don’t want to go through it again, especially with the heightened danger of a nuclear exchange.”

A nuclear exchange?

I can’t imagine that either of the world’s greatest nuclear powers are going to start a nuclear war in Syria, first and foremost because it would be bad for business. There’s no doubt a lot of money to be made in rebuilding Syria from the rubble, as there was in Iraq, but that won’t be possible if it’s a radioactive “exclusion zone” like Chernobyl. There’d also be enough radioactive and political blowback to threaten the survival of either nuclear power.

However, there’s always the possibility of an accident, especially when tensions are this high. Whether it goes nuclear or not, there’s an ugly exchange already underway and sure to get worse. The UN Security Council met at length on September 7 and yet again failed to resolve the conflict. The Council is now deadlocked in a standoff between Eastern and Western powers, as it was throughout the Vietnam War.

Russia’s military engagement in Syria accords with international law because the internationally recognized Syrian government asked them for help. This is one of the lies of omission told by official Western sources and their officially sanctioned media. The US and allies’ engagement violates international law, but if any of you reading this can cite a single example of the US respecting international law, please message me.

The USA’s compliant corporate media reports that Syria is planning a chemical weapons attack in its own Idlib Province and that the Pentagon is strategizing about how to respond. RT reports that the US and its allies are planning a false flag chemical weapons attack and that the US is already using white phosphorous bombs. RT also reports that local residents of Jisr al-Shughur, a city in Idlib, observed a staged chemical weapons attack being filmed to create footage for broadcast after it’s published on social media. (Whether you can still get RT cable or not, you can still get RT online for now.)

Germany is reported to be considering joining the US, UK, and France in Syria “if chemical weapons are used.” After the alleged chemical weapons attacks in April, German hawks were eager to join in, but it was reported that Germans widely believed the attacks were staged, and reason won the day.

YouTube blocks Syrian government channels

Shortly after RT disappeared in NYC and northern New Jersey, YouTube terminated Syrian government channels. As of September 11, RT had not reported the latest censorship of its own network, but they did report “Syrian state YouTube channels ‘terminated’ amid fears of looming false-flag chemical attack.” I checked the three channels they cited and confirmed that they were gone. YouTube left messages that the Syrian Presidency’s channel “has been terminated due to a legal complaint” and that SANA, the Syrian News Agency, “has been terminated for a violation of YouTube’s Terms of Service.” They left no explanation for terminating the Syrian Ministry of Defense Channel.

“Orient News” a Dubai-based news service on the Middle East with particular focus on Syria, is still streaming and reporting from inside jihadi-held territory. It’s owned by Syrian businessman and opposition figure Ghassan Aboud.

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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].

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National Security Adviser John Bolton appears to be spiraling down into the same miasma of madness that possesses other members of the Trump administration– perhaps caused by a microbe carried in Trump’s sniffle. This week he threatened justices of the International Criminal Court in the Hague with physical abduction were they to dare indict an American for war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute, which went into effect in 2002 has been ratified by 123 nations of the world. Most of Europe and all of Latin America and half of African states have signed. Virtually the only deadbeats are countries whose officials are afraid of being indicted by the court for serious human rights crimes, such as Syria, China, India, Sudan, Israel, Russia and . . . the United States of America (actually the latter four signed but they pulled out when they realized that they had exposed their state officials to prosecution, what with the war crimes they are constantly committing).

The ICC undertook to try dictator Moammar Gaddafi, but he was killed before he could be brought before it; it still has an outstanding case against the dictator’s son Seif. For Bolton to menace it in this way makes clear that he is in the Gaddafi category, which is why he fears the institution.

Bolton has no particular expertise in anything at all, he is just an angry shyster lawyer picked up by the more insane elements of the Republican Party. He once denied that the United Nations exists, then tried to make himself US ambassador to the United Nations (he wasn’t confirmed, but served briefly on a sneaky Bush recess appointment).

So here are five crimes that this authors alleges Bolton has committed, for which he by all rights should face justice at the Hague, at the hands of the same ICC judges that he just brutishly threatened:

1. Bolton played a key role in hoodwinking the American public into the 2003 US war of aggression on Iraq, for which there was no legitimate casus belli or legal basis for war. The UN Charter forbids the initiation of a war except where a country is attacked and responds in self-defense or where the UN Security Council designates a government as a threat to world order (as it did Gaddafi’s Libya). These attempts to outlaw wars of aggression were a reaction against the Nazi invasion of Poland, etc. People like Bolton, who don’t want any constraints on his power from the international rule of law, are just trying out for the role of people like Nazi generals Günther von Kluge and Gerd von Rundstedt, who led the assault on Poland. (Like Bolton in regard to Iraq, they maintained that they were only defending themselves from a menacing Poland, but nobody believed this lie).

Bolton is manifestly guilty of the crime of aggression under the Rome Statute and its 2010 enabling statutes adopted at Kampala: Article 8 bis, para 1, says: For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.

As Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security under Bush, Bolton was clearly a high executive officer of a government guilty of the crime of aggression.

2. As National Security Adviser, Bolton has supported the Apartheid policies of the far-right extremist government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu toward the Occupied Palestinians.

Apartheid is a crime under the Rome Statute:

‘The crime of apartheid’ means inhumane acts . . . committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

He also supports the transfer of Israeli citizens into the Occupied West Bank as squatters on Palestinian land.
8.2.b.viii stipulates as a war crime

“The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory.”

Bolton strongly supports and enables a whole range of war crimes of the Likud regime in Tel Aviv against the Palestinian people, above all keeping them in a condition of abject statelessness and continually stealing their property.

Under war crimes comes “Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

It could be argued that Israel could not engage in these illegal violations of Palestinian rights save for the American veto, so that high US officials who conspire to enable crimes like Apartheid and usurpation of Occupied Territories are even more guilty than Israeli officials.

3. Bolton is in the back pocket of, has spoken for,  the People’s Jihadis (Mojahedin-e Khalq), a group that has been on the US State Department terrorist watch list and which has killed civilians with bombings and attacks in Iran. They even had a base given them for these purposes by Saddam Hussein, in whose company Bolton has fallen, given their alliance with this same Iranian cult.

Screenshot NY Review of Books , July 2018

The MEK is guilty of “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” and under this heading, of murder. In fact, it has killed Americans.

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In a speech to the Federalist Society September 10th National Security Adviser John Bolton announced the U.S. will not cooperate in any way with the International Criminal Court. Speaking for the President and Trump administration Mr. Bolton says the U.S. considers the International Criminal Court illegitimate, and he threatens its judges with denial of entry to the States, and impounding their financial assets, and with arrest, if they pursue cases which might “unjustly” place in jeopardy U.S. citizens. This threat extends to those assisting the Court.

The policy presents an attempt to shield from prosecution “by any means necessary,” U.S. Armed Forces personnel, intelligence agents, and government officials such as himself. By placing these above the law Bolton is threatening the American people with the Trump administration’s impunity. While the policy may allow war crimes and crimes against humanity in U.S. client states, it will also encourage the 123 nations who subscribe to the ICC to view the U.S. as a rogue state and fascist entity.

North Americans concerned with prevention of genocide will note that Bolton’s wish to “let the ICC die” would remove a primary international legal mechanism for calling U.S. leaders to account for crimes such as genocide, aggression, torture. Without the resistance available at least on paper from the ICC, governments such as the Trump administration would have a much freer hand in alleged crimes such as torture in Afghanistan, in black operations sites throughout the world, as well as implication in the use of death squads by U.S. client states or what might be considered the kidnapping of migrant children at American borders.

American law if honestly applied has little to fear from international law so the Trump administration’s further severance of the U.S. from the ICC points up the administration’s exception to the global consensus on a decent standard of human rights. Bolton’s revelations express a movement within U.S. extreme right-wing circles which finds burdensome an ongoing struggling tradition safeguarding American human rights (ie. The Bill of Rights).

The thinking which initiated the presidential killing list under George W. Bush, continues to gain strength, asserting itself at this point due to an ICC investigatory report suggesting that war crimes have been committed in Afghanistan, primarily in 2003-4, where Afghan security forces, U.S. forces and CIA personnel are allegedly implicated.

Afghanistan is a member state of the ICC and the ICC has jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed there. To quote CTV News:

The 181-page prosecution request, dated November 2017, said “information available provides a reasonable basis to believe that members of United States of America (US) armed forces and members of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations, principally in the 2003-2004 period.”

During three months (November and December 2017 and January 2018) allegations of 1.7 million war crimes were sent to the ICC from European and Afghan organizations. There is only a slight chance the Trump administration would not consider ICC prosecution of Americans responsible for these crimes, “unjust”. There is no indication that any of the 1.7 million complaints have been addressed by the U.S. system of justice.

Bolton has made a point of assuring Israelis the same protections as American citizens: the ICC is currently considering whether to prosecute Israel’s alleged war crimes against the people of Gaza. The Palestinian request to the ICC for an investigation is given as the reason for the U.S. recent closure of Palestinian Liberation Office in Washington D.C..

Despite these threats the ICC intends to continue its work.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site at  Night’s Lantern 

Partial Sources Online

“US threatens sanctions against International Criminal Court, will close PLO office in Washington,” Elise Labott and Hilary Clarke, Sept. 11, 2018, CNN;

“John Bolton threatens ICC judges with sanctions,” Sept. 10, 2018, Al Jazeera;

“Rights groups warn against U.S. flouting international court,” Kathy Gannon (AP), Sept.11, 2018, CTV News;

“John Bolton threatens war crimes court with sanctions in virulent attack,” Sept. 10, 2018, The Guardian;

“ICC will continue ‘undeterred’ after US threats,” Sept. 11, 2018, The Guardian;

“Israel lodges official protest to International Criminal Court,” Barak David, Aug. 14, 2018, Channel 10 News.

Featured image is from Julie Maas.