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Andrés Manuel López Obrador looked out at the crowd of reporters at a Mexico City Hilton Hotel the night of July 1. It was a moment that he had waited years for: his victory speech for the Mexican presidency.

To win in his third presidential campaign, López Obrador, a left-wing populist whose roots are in the oil-producing state of Tabasco, had to calm business leaders, who warned that foreign investment would flee the country if he took office. However, the candidate who once said he would overturn Mexico’s 2013 reforms privatizing its energy sector — which opened the oil and gas industry to foreign investment and created a subsequent pipeline boom — struck a different tone on election night.

“The contracts in the energy sector with private companies will be reviewed to prevent corruption and illegal acts,” he said, firmly, in his slow, steady style.

But, he assured the crowd, he will respect investors.

Just minutes later, López Obrador was headed to the Zocalo, Mexico City’s most important public plaza, to address 80,000 people gathered to celebrate his victory. The second speech was rousing, replete with promises to represent the most vulnerable Mexicans.

“We are going to fulfill all of our commitments. I will not fail you,” he assured the crowd. “You will not be deceived.”

As a renegade politician turned President-Elect, López Obrador has many promises to keep. Communities impacted by oil and gas pipeline expansions, a result of the energy reforms, wonder which López Obrador will prevail: the one who called for a reversal of energy privatization reforms, or an appeaser who seeks to build trust with the business elite.

Many signs, to date, point to the latter.

And yet, in the months and years preceding the election, a pipeline opposition movement has arisen in Mexico, communicating its intentions to stand in the way of pipeline development, even in light of the election of López Obrador. That movement is led by indigenous peoples.

A Growing Opposition

Outgoing president Enrique Peña Nieto signed the energy reforms in late 2013, opening the previously state-owned oil and gas sector monopolized by the company Pemex (Petróleos Mexicanos) to direct foreign investment. The privatization effort was pushed by the U.S. Department of State, as first reported by DeSmog, under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

With little popular fanfare, the floodgates are now open for international business, and since 2013, foreign companies have invested heavily in pipeline infrastructure set to transport oil and natural gas predominantly obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the U.S. across the border into Mexico.

Despite that push to expand Mexico’s pipeline grid and oil and gas market, communities and indigenous groups have managed to halt construction on at least four pipelines owned by TransCanada and Sempra Energy in Mexico. Their tactics range from refusing to issue permits to taking legal and regulatory system action, and in some cases, actually physically blocking or sabotaging construction itself. TransCanada is best known for its ownership of the Keystone Pipeline System, including the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, slated to run from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.

Raymundo Espinoza Hernández, a lawyer representing communities impacted by a TransCanada pipeline, told DeSmog in an interview that

“July 1 will come and go, but we will continue organizing.”

The communities Espinosa Hernández represents have sent a clear message:

They will continue to protest TransCanada’s Tula-Tuxpan pipeline even with López Obrador in office. Tula-Tuxpan, which connects to the cross-border and underwater Sur de Texas-Tuxpan pipeline, is at the center of a growing movement of indigenous resistance against oil and gas pipelines in the country.

TransCanada has four pipelines already in operation in Mexico. Another three pipelines are slated to run along the Gulf Coast and into central Mexico from Brownsville, Texas, to Tuxpan, Veracruz; from Tuxpan to Tula, Hidalgo; and Tula to Villa de Reyes, San Luis Potosí. However, these three have all been delayed due to local opposition.

A Sempra pipeline that crosses from Arizona into Sonora is also stalled, after a Yaqui indigenous community blockaded the construction site in the Mexican state. In many of these cases, indigenous communities are arguing either they were not properly consulted on the pipelines, as required under the new privatization law, or that companies used intimidation tactics to elicit support.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador at a rally for the swearing of Enrique Peña Nieto in December 2012. Credit: ProtoplasmaKid, Wikimedia Commons, CC–BY–SA 4.0

According to the Mexican newspaper El Financiero, construction delays have cost TransCanada $300 million to date. The same report says that TransCanada’s total investment in Mexico tops $5 billion.

York University researcher Anna Zalik told DeSmog in an interview that TransCanada increased its investments in Mexico due to the high costs of doing business in the U.S. and Canada, after years of sustained resistance to pipelines including Keystone XL. One Bloomberg article reported that “Mexico opened its arms” to TransCanada investment following those setbacks, a trend DeSmog reported at the time as well.

TransCanada won the contract for the Tula-Tuxpan pipeline in November 2015, just after then-President Barack Obama denied TransCanada’s attempt to build Keystone XL. President Donald Trump has since undone Obama’s rejection, approving that pipeline via a presidential permit in March 2017.

Lack of Consultation

The Tula-Tuxpan pipeline route covers 177 miles, affecting 459 communities in four Mexican states: Veracruz, Hidalgo, Puebla, and the State of Mexico. However, TransCanada only held consultations with 15 communities along the route. Most of the communities are indigenous, from the Nahua, Totonaca, and Otomí tribes.

Oliveria Montes Lazcano is the spokesperson of the Regional Council of Indigenous Peoples in Defense of the Territory of Puebla and Hidalgo, an umbrella organization for the communities in resistance to the Tula-Tuxpan pipeline. DeSmog spoke with her and the lawyer representing the council, Raymundo Espinosa Hernández, who serves as a legal representative for the National Assembly of People Affected by the Environment, an organization that brings together rural and urban communities against the “degradation, destruction, and dispossession” of natural resources, according to its mission statement.

“The consultation was not ‘prior,’ ‘free,’ or ‘informed,” Montes Lazcano told DeSmog, referring to the international human rights standard of free, prior, and informed consultation (FPIC) with indigenous peoples over policies and projects affecting them. “Many people didn’t know it was a consultation. The company came in offering handouts.”

Members of the Regional Council have brought five legal cases against TransCanada and the Mexican federal agencies that approved the pipeline, including the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and Energy Secretariat (SENER). The first case argues that they did not properly consult all communities that would be impacted by the pipeline.

The council’s legal strategy goes beyond consultation, however, disputing the pipeline’s proximity to sacred sites and water sources, and calling out the lack of employment for local people in its construction. Furthermore, they say that the project’s environmental and social impact statements lacked key information about the area’s ecology and culture.

In short, TransCanada has in many ways replicated the practices it has used to push through pipelines in the U.S. and Canada, this time in Mexico. If it sounds similar to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight against the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota, it should. That’s because indigenous peoples’ opposition to that project also centered around what they felt fell short of consultation requirements under U.S. federal law.

“Consultation legalizes dispossession,” said Espinosa Hernández, explaining that the consultation process can legitimize problematic development projects, as previously reported by DeSmog. “But disputing the consultation process buys us time and allows us to organize more effectively [while waiting for the court decision].”

In June, the Regional Council filed a complaint with the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples, taking issue with TransCanada’s conduct toward indigenous peoples in the area.

The complaint alleges that TransCanada has used “blackmail, deception, and violence to impose a private business such as the Tuxpan-Tula gas pipeline, using public resources and attacking the national interests and the rights of our peoples,” while also allegedly partaking in the “falsification of the signatures of some indigenous people” to give the apperance of public support for its pipeline project.

More than half of the pipeline has been constructed, but since December 2017, construction was halted at two points along its route, Cuautepec and San Pablito, due to legal rulings. Espinosa Hernández says it will take years for the council’s five legal cases involving TransCanada to be decided. He says this is a good thing, because the company loses money every month that construction is stalled.

Montes Lazcano explains that the company tried to co-opt the authorities in municipalities through which the pipeline passes. However, the Regional Council is re-invigorating indigenous forms of governance. In many parts of Mexico, indigenous communities govern themselves through systems of “uses and customs,” which often exist alongside political parties.

While the communities partake in indigenous forms of governance, they did follow the 2018 political campaign closely. In addition to López Obrador’s victory, his left-leaning Morena party, which he formed after splitting from the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) following his second, failed presidential bid in 2012, made strides in the states the pipeline passes through. The Morena candidate for governor won in Veracruz. In Puebla, the right-wing candidate from the PAN, the wife of the outgoing governor, was named the winner in a close race against Morena. However, Morena is seeking to have the results annulled due to alleged fraud.*

Montes Lazcano says that organizing the Regional Council has empowered people to think critically about the political situation.

“People now have the volition to speak their mind,” she said. “They are building their social consciousness.”

These local battles over pipelines have already become a major headache for the oil and gas industry. Bloomberg reported in the summer of 2017 that a “glut” of natural gas has swelled on the U.S.-Mexico border due to delays in pipeline construction in Mexico.

Wary Investors Ease Skepticism

Despite that opposition, López Obrador has stated that he will not cancel already-existing contracts, nor will he nix the privatization policy at-large. His top adviser recently told Bloomberg that privatization is here to stay and that López Obrador will instead focus on rooting out corrupt energy deal contracts.

“If you read the balance of what he’s saying you still sense a commitment to growing the energy sector,” Tony Garza, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico under President George W. Bush and current attorney for the firm White and Case in Mexico City, recently told the Houston Chronicle. “A lot of this is TBD. Now it’s time to take a deep breath and say, ‘What is this transition going to look like?’”

Indeed, some things have already been determined.

For example, López Obrador has announced a plan to renovate and retool Mexico’s six existing oil and gas refineries, while pledging to build two more in the Mexican states of Campeche and Tabasco. Another indication that the new presidency will maintain friendly relations with the oil and gas industry is none other than López Obrador’s choice for Energy Secretary, Rocío Nahle García, a former petrochemical engineer for Pemex.

That much is clear.

What is less clear is whether López Obrador will support a re-nationalization of the oil and gas industry, or encourage more foreign investment. So far, his team openly stated that privatization will proceed and auctions for oil and gas acreage will continue. In fact, Reuters reported on July 1 that López Obrador told Wall Street investors exactly this during a trip he took to New York City.

TransCanada Hires Lobbyists

While the populist lore of López Obrador lives on in Mexico and beyond in the aftermath of his election, York University’s Zalik believes that the shift in energy policy towards foreign ownership has already stamped a dependency on foreign fuel sources in Mexico, particularly for natural gas. She compares the energy reforms to NAFTA, which created a dependency on imported corn, and decreased food sovereignty, in Mexico.

“The money invested creates an imperative that will keep this model in place,” she explained. “If you’re trying to support energy sovereignty and renewable sources, you don’t want an expensive infrastructure built that’s in competition with that.”

As if on cue, Sempra Energy announced on July 9 that it will invest $150 million to build a fuel terminal in southern Mexico to store petrochemical products via its subsidiary, iEnova.

In a July 10 article reacting to López Obrador’s election, the corporate law firm Holland & Knight laid out what comes next from a corporate point of view. In a word: lobbying.

“A large and intense wave of lobbying and reactions to the country’s energy future is expected in the upcoming months,” wrote the firm, adding that “because in order to carry out this type of investment, long-term certainty is required.”

Also taking its cue, TransCanada posted three job openings on July 10 in the area of lobbying. Those employees would work out of its office in Mexico City.

Though López Obrador’s plans for energy infrastructure have yet to fully materialize, the lawyer Espinosa Hernández says there are reasons to be hopeful. That’s despite what looks like a more amicable approach toward the oil and gas industry for the President-Elect going forward.

“[López Obrador winning] isn’t a revolution, but it is a different scenario where social movements have space to breathe,” he told DeSmog. “[He] can have a better attitude towards communities that are defending their territory.”

The new administration has announced it will roll out its official energy policy beginning in September, which will likely shape the contours of the fight over Mexico’s energy reform for both proponents and opponents for months and years to come.

 

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Christians are no longer welcome in the Holy Land. This was the shocking message from a visiting Palestinian Christian delegation currently in South Africa.

In an interview with the Afro-Palestine Newswire Service on Sunday, Father Jamal Khader and Dr. Rifat Kasis painfully documented the discrimination facing Christians, and how they are being denied the right to worship at Christianity’s most sacred sites in the Holy Land. This has led to a drastic decline in the Christian population there. The chief cause of the Christian exodus, according to Khader and Kasis, is Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

Khader, a Catholic pastor, described how during Easter  (one of the holiest times of the year for Christians), the sacred Church of the Holy Sepulcher – “a site central to Jesus’s death, crucifixion and resurrection” – resembles a military barracks. Barriers are set up in the early hours of the morning to keep people out of the courtyard of the Church. Israeli army officers are present around the gates of the Old City and passages that lead to the Holy Sepulcher, as well as inside the Church itself and on its roof. These measures restrict freedom of movement for Palestinians, preventing Palestinian Christians from worshipping at the Church during this auspicious period. Even priests are not allowed to move freely.

Khader also explained how Palestinian Christians living in Bethlehem (the city of Jesus’ birth) – located just ten kilometers from Jerusalem – require special permits from Israeli authorities to enter Jerusalem to worship in the sacred city. Christians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip also cannot enter Jerusalem without an Israeli permit.

“This is what I mean when I say that Christians are not welcome in the Holy Land”, says Khader.

Christian-owned land has also been confiscated to make way for illegal Israeli settlements. For instance, in Beit Jala – a Christian-majority town just outside Bethlehem – the 133-year old Cremisan Monastery, as well as its neighboring convent, winery and school, have all been earmarked for Israeli settlement expansion.

“We, Palestinian Christians, suffer along with the rest of Palestinians from occupation and hardships. Muslims and Christians suffer equally, as there is no difference in suffering for any of us,” says youth activist, Muna Nasser.

According to Nasser, many Christians feel that there is little hope for a better future for their children, and this has contributed to the growing emigration of Palestinian Christians.

“I hope that they do not move. Our mere existence on this land is resistance to the occupation.”

According to the delegation, the chief cause of the decline in the Christian population of Palestine is not due to so-called Islamic fundamentalism or the persecution of Christians by their Muslim neighbors. These are misrepresentations used to distract from the realities of occupation. It is the occupation that has made life so difficult that many Christians have left Palestine.

Bethlehem was 85% Christian in 1947, the year before Israel became a state. Today, it is less than 20%.  In Jerusalem, the Christian population in 1947 was 19%. Now it is just 2%.

The delegation will be speaking to various church, student and political groups in South Africa, and has a strong message for the South African government. “If South Africa wants to respect its history and respect the solidarity it received from the rest of the world, then this country should be the first to sanction and boycott Israel,” says Kasis, a Lutheran cleric.

The South African Council of Churches (SACC) has condemned Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians:

“Israel is structured in a way that fits and even surpasses the description of an Apartheid State, which robs Palestinians of their citizenship and treats them in a discriminatory way. With our experience of Apartheid that the whole world recognized and condemned as a crime against humanity, we see the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel as worse than Apartheid,” SACC leaders said during a visit to occupied Palestine in June last year.

The SACC has also called on its members to look critically at theological perspectives that tend to veer in the direction of Christian Zionism which supports the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.

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Featured image is from The Palestinian Information Center.

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Featured image: Aftermath of one of the suicide blasts in Sweida. Via SANA

The deadliest terror attack in Syria in the last two years just rocked a city in southern Syria, yet few in the West will likely ever hear of it even as the reported death toll soared late in the day to over 215 civilians killed, with over 180 more wounded.

The Eiffel Tower won’t be lit up with colors of the Syrian flag in memory of victims, nor will viral #neverforget hashtags make the rounds on social media — and we don’t expect too many official condolences issued from European or Western political leaders, as has happened with terror attacks that hit the Western world over recent years (though to its credit the US State Department tonight belatedly condemned the “barbaric ISIS-claimed attacks that took place”).

This in spite of the fact that as ISIS is on its last legs in the tiny southwest pocket of southwest Syria adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan and the Jordanian border, and as Syrian and Russian jets continue to pound Islamic State positions, “whole families were butchered, scores of on the spot executions, children, women & elderly killed in their homes, another dark day for Syria,” in the description of Syrian-British reporter Danny Makki.

Early Wednesday morning four suicide bombers stuck a popular open-air market and other locations in Sweida city, a provincial capital in the country’s south. Syrian state media said a motorcycle bomber detonated himself in the marketplace just after dawn, after which a series of other ISIS attacks followed.

Islamic State media channels quickly claimed responsibility for the massacre, even as the Syrian Army continues to advance against ISIS and other al-Qaeda terrorists in Daraa and Quneitra provinces, where the particular ISIS group near the Israeli border goes by the name of Jaish Khaled Bin al-Waleed.

#SAA recaptured some villages from #ISIS/#Daesh militants since they occupied them from #FSA on 19 July #Quneitra #Syria pic.twitter.com/Shcarjm4Sc

— Islamic World Update (@islamicworldupd) July 24, 2018

Syrian State media reports that authorities thwarted other potential attacks and “hunted down two terrorist suicide bombers who had been wearing explosive belts and killed them before they were able to blow themselves up in the residential areas in the city.”

The chaotic aftermath, reportedly with bodies strewn about the crowded marketplace, made casualty counts hard to come by, as initially Reuters counted 50 among the dead, but late in the day reported 215 killed and 180 injured, including 75 ISIS fighters.

Some of the terrorists involved in the coordinated attacks and who apparently survived the initial attacks were reportedly rounded up by mobs of angry Sweida residents and hung in front of a public building.

If 166 people were killed anywhere other than #Syria in the world it would be breaking news, not to mention #ISIS being the main cause of those deaths. #Sweida

— Danny Makki (@Dannymakkisyria) July 25, 2018

Journalist Danny Makki, reporting from on the ground in southern Syria, observed “ISIS isn’t finished, its nowhere near finished, it managed to kill over 150 people in one of Syria’s safest provinces in one day.”

As ISIS continues to go underground while facing defeat under Syrian and Russian bombardment, many more such suicide attacks are likely to continue.

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UNICEF reports on the latest Saudi coalition attack on a water system in Saada. This is the third time that the same site has been bombed:

UNICEF deplores in the strongest terms yet another attack on vital and lifesaving water systems in Yemen.

A large water facility in Sa’ada, northwest of the country, came under attack this week. This is the third such attack on the same facility. More than half of the project is now damaged, cutting off 10,500 people from safe drinking water.

Continuous attacks on water systems in Yemen are cutting off children and their families from water; increasing the likelihood of water-borne diseases spreading in the war-torn country.

The Saudi coalition deliberately attacks civilian targets in Yemen. Just as they struck the MSF-run cholera treatment center once and then blew it up again after it had been rebuilt, they have repeatedly attacked this vital infrastructure needed to provide clean drinking water to Yemeni civilians in Saada. This is the second time the coalition has struck this site this year. I wrote about the previous attack back in April:

The destruction of infrastructure needed to provide clean drinking water for civilians is clearly a violation of international law, and the fact that the same system has been targeted more than once should put to rest the idea that the coalition strikes these targets only by accident. Just as it has systematically and deliberately attacked food production and distribution inside Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition repeatedly strikes at the infrastructure that the population needs for water and sewage treatment.

The coalition is repeatedly striking at the medical facilities and infrastructure needed to prevent the spread of cholera in a country suffering from the worst modern cholera epidemic on record. There have already been well over a million cases, and the deteriorating conditions in the country could cause that number spike upwards. The coalition obviously carries out these attacks on purpose, and they keep doing it because they are never held accountable for their crimes. The Saudis and their allies use both starvation and disease as weapons against the civilian population of Yemen in a policy of cruel collective punishment. The U.S. continues to provide unstinting support to the coalition campaign and makes attacks like this possible. Congress needs to cut off all U.S. support for the war on Yemen now, and every day that U.S. involvement continues our government is complicit in crimes like the one committed against these civilians in Saada.

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A spike in oil prices as a result of a temporary halt in shipments through the strategic Bab el Mandeb strait may be short-lived, but the impact on Yemen’s three-year-old forgotten war is likely to put the devastating conflict on the front burner.

The halt following a Saudi assertion that Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen had attacked two Saudi oil tankers traversing the waterway drives home the threat the conflict poses to a chokepoint in international trade and the flow of Gulf oil to world markets. The Houthis said they had attacked a Saudi warship rather than oil tankers.

An estimated 4.8 million barrels of oil are shipped daily through Bab al Mandeb that connects the Red Sea with the Arabian Sea off the coast of Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea.

The halt of oil shipments could provoke an escalation of the conflict with external powers intervening in a bid to assist Saudi Arabia and the UAE in defeating the Houthis and dealing a blow to Iran’s regional presence.

By the same token, the halt potentially offers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates an opportunity to focus international attention on resolving a civil war aggravated and turned into a regional conflict by the two Gulf states’ military intervention in March 2015.

Rather than proving to be a swift campaign that would have subdued the Houthis, the intervention has turned into a quagmire and a public relations fiasco for Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

International criticism of their conduct of the war is mounting as a result of its devastating human cost. Voices in the US Congress, the British parliament and other Western legislatures as well as human rights groups calling for a halt of arms sales to Saudi Arabiaare growing ever louder.

The armed services panels in the US House and Senate released earlier this week joint defense legislation that demands that the Pentagon tell Congress whether US or Arab coalition forces violated federal law or Pentagon policy. Another provision restricts mid-air US refuelling of coalition aircraft if the UAE and Saudi Arabia fail to demonstrate efforts to support United Nations-backed peace talks, resolve the growing humanitarian crisis, and cut down on civilian deaths.

The war has killed at least 10,000 Yemenis and left more than 22 million people –three-quarters of Yemen’s population – in need of humanitarian aid. At least 8 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine, and 1 million are infected with cholera.

In a most immediate response to the halt, the United States and Britain, eager to benefit from increased arms sales, are likely to step up their support of the Saudi-UAE effort in the Yemen war.

Viewed from Washington as well as Riyadh, the war is one more front in US efforts to force Iran to halt its support of Middle Eastern proxies.

Since the war began, the US and the UK have sold more than $12bn worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia alone – including some of the warplanes and the payloads they drop.

The US military, moreover, provides mid-air refuelling for Saudi and UAE aircraft, and both British and US personnel assist the Saudis as they target their strikes.

The US, Britain and other powers could look at expanding operations of an anti-piracy alliance in the region created in 2008 in response to Somali piracy. The alliance includes warships patrolling regional waters from all five United Nations Security Council permanent members – the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France – as well as other European and Latin American nations, Australia, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Thailand.

The potential for a breakthrough in peace efforts increases when the halt to oil shipments is coupled with a Saudi-UAE threat to besiege the strategic port of Hodeida that could jeopardize the crucial for the flow of humanitarian supplies potentially creates an opportunity for more forceful efforts to bring the Yemen war to an end.

In a letter to US congressional leaders, UAE ambassador to the United States Yousef al-Otaiba said in June that the Saudi-led Arab force fighting in Yemen is giving the Iran-backed Houthi rebels “the greatest possible opportunity” for a peaceful withdrawal from Hodeida.

UN envoy Martin Griffiths last week put forward a proposal that would avert a fight for Hodeida that has yet to be accepted by all parties.

The plan reportedly calls for a phased Houthi withdrawal from Hodeida and two other nearby ports, a gradual pullback of UAE forces, UN assistance in staffing the port with Yemenis who would also govern the city of 60,000, and the revival of stalled peace talks.

The possibility of the halt to oil shipments propelling efforts to end the war is enhanced by the fact that the Saudi move has ramifications that go beyond energy security.

The Middle East’s multiple conflicts, including the Saudi-Iranian rivalry and the dispute between Qatar and a Saudi-UAE-led alliance that has imposed a 14-month old diplomatic and economic boycott of the Gulf state has spilled across the Horn of Africa with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and China competing for influence by gaining control of ports and establishing military bases.

The UAE’s strong military and commercial presence in the region is one reason why Chinese President Xi Jinping recent stopped in the Emirates for three days on his way to a tour of Africa.

China likely would favour capitalizing on the Saudi halt to propel peace efforts while the Trump administration more probably will lean towards military intervention that confronts Iran.

Said scholar and author Ellen R. Wald:

“The Red Sea is a very important shipping lane. If there is a major disruption European powers, Egypt and the United States would all have reason to intervene. They have significant interests in protecting the freedom of the seas through the passageway. An international intervention against the Houthis may be just what Saudi Arabia wants.”

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario,  Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and the forthcoming China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

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On July 19, 2018, the Israeli Knesset enacted a law that illegally enshrines a system of apartheid. The legislation, which has the force of a constitutional amendment, strips away any pretense that Israel is a democracy. Moreover, it violates customary and treaty-based international law.

The “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People” says,

“The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” It continues, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

Absent is any guarantee of self-determination for the 1.8 million Arabs who comprise 20 percent of Israel’s population. But, “we refuse to be second-class citizens,” said Ayman Odeh, chairman of the Joint List, the Palestinian parties in the Knesset. Odeh added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime is “digging a deep pit of fear, racism and authoritarianism to divide us from each other. But they can never erase us from the homeland we share.”

Members of the Knesset — Israel’s parliament — had tried for seven years to enact such a law. Although Barack Obama, like US presidents before him, supported Israel’s apartheid policies, Donald Trump took that support to a new level by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017.

In spite of the well-established status of East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, the Basic Law states,

“Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”

Adding insult to injury, the new law proclaims Hebrew the official language of Israel, with Arabic granted “a special status.”

Only Jews are welcome to emigrate to Israel under this law. And it purports to legalize the illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, stating,

“The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, declared that the

new law “entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality.”

In a statement analyzing the law, Adalah refuted Israel’s claim of being a democracy:

“No country in the world today is defined as a democratic state where the constitutional identity is determined by ethnic affiliation that overrides the principle of equal citizenship.”

Although Israel has long practiced discrimination against Palestinians, the Basic Law will pose obstacles to litigation in support of human rights.

“It will make it much harder for us to challenge any cases of discrimination against Palestinians, because this racist notion of Judaization will become a constitutional norm,” Adalah attorney Suhad Bishara said. “Before this law, there have been opportunities to challenge these practices based on constitutional norms. This space to challenge will disappear, because Jewish superiority is now constitutional.”

The Basic Law Violates Customary and Treaty-Based International Law

Israel’s Basic Law violates several treaties as well as customary international law.

Moreover, the prohibition against apartheid is so serious that — like slavery, torture, genocide and wars of aggression — it is considered a jus cogens prohibition. Jus cogens is a peremptory norm, the highest form of customary international law. Countries cannot pass legislation that violates a jus cogens prohibition. The Basic Law enshrines a system of apartheid in Israel and is thus prohibited by jus cogens.

The new law violates the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid; the United Nations Charter; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the Fourth Geneva Convention; and the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court.

Only Jews in Israel have the right to self-determination under the new law. That runs afoul of the UN Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which Israel has ratified. They guarantee all peoples the right to self-determination.

This law does not even mention non-discrimination, equality or minority rights, and thus violates the Convention Against Racial Discrimination, a treaty Israel has ratified. That convention requires states parties to “condemn racial segregation and apartheid and undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature in territories under their jurisdiction.” Racial discrimination is defined in the convention as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”

Furthermore, the new law’s encouragement of the building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands violates the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute. Both treaties prohibit an Occupying Power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. And both treaties consider such transfer to be a war crime.

The Basic Law Institutionalizes the System of Apartheid in Israel

Israel has long maintained a system of apartheid. Israel controls all ingress and egress to Gaza, limits Gazans’ access to medicine, subjects Palestinians to arbitrary arrest, expropriates their property, maintains separate areas and roads, segregated housing, different legal and educational systems for Palestinians and Jews and prevents mixed marriages. Only Jews, not Palestinians, are allowed to return to Israel-Palestine, in spite of international laws guaranteeing the Palestinians’ right of return.

“The Nation-State bill that Israel passed … cements Israel as an apartheid state — from the West Bank to Gaza to Jerusalem to Haifa,” Rabbi Alissa Wise, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said in a statement.

The Apartheid Convention defines apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

That includes “legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms.”

Moreover, under the Rome Statute, “inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutional regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group, with the intent to maintain that regime” constitute apartheid.

Both the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute classify apartheid as a crime against humanity.

Israel has not ratified the Apartheid Convention or the Rome Statute. But apartheid is prohibited by jus cogens.

Last year, Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories and professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Virginia Tilley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University and an authority on apartheid, co-authored a report commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

That report found “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians constitutes “the crime of Apartheid,” which the authors characterized as a “crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”

The report concluded by recommending participation in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a nonviolent worldwide movement challenging the Israeli occupation.

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

The BDS movement was launched in 2005 by representatives of Palestinian civil society. They called upon “international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era … [including] embargoes and sanctions against Israel.”

This call for BDS specified that “these nonviolent punitive measures” should last until Israel fully complies with international law by 1) ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the barrier wall; 2) recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and 3) respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as stipulated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

“If ever there was a time for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel’s system of oppression, it is now,” saidOmar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement, in response to Israel’s Basic Law. “No Israeli law will erase our right to self-determination in our homeland or the right of our refugees to return home. No Israeli far-right government, with all the … support it receives from xenophobic and outright fascist forces in the United States and Europe will ever extinguish our aspiration for freedom, justice and equality.”

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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. An updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was recently published. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Irish Times.

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The New Development Bank (NDB), the financing arm of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) bloc, is ready to provide $8-billion for infrastructure in South Africa — but critics say the bank has so far failed key tests, especially that of transparency.

There are also concerns that most of the loans to date have been dollar denominated, exposing the borrower to currency risk. They also do not appear to have been concessional, and there are fears that not enough due diligence was done in granting a recent loan to Transnet.

The vice-president of the NDB, Leslie Maasdorp, told the Mail & Guardian at the bank’s recent annual meeting in Shanghai that the $8-billion will be allocated to fund South Africa’s infrastructure gap.

The NDB, led by new board chairperson Nhlanhla Nene, has announced total funding of $5-billion for projects in Brics countries. Transnet has been given a $200-million loan to rehabilitate the Durban port’s container terminals and increase their capacity.

But Professor Lumkile Mondi of the University of Witwatersrand says the NDB has not lived up to expectations, and transparency is a concern.

“We are very worried about how this bank is operating because even that loan given to Transnet recently was not made very public. When there is a loan in process at the World Bank, there is a record that state-owned company ‘X’ has applied for a loan and discussions are under way.

“They [the NDB] must be transparent and be in partnership with South Africans, because we need to ensure that the money in our state-owned companies is being used legitimately for development and is not repurposed,” Mondi says.

He also questions whether South Africa is holding its NDB partner China to account. With the Brics summit due to take place in Johannesburg next month, at which South Africa will take over the chairmanship, Mondi says it could be an opportunity for the country to review its role in the group.

“Our membership in Brics may seem as though we are complacent about China’s behaviour on the continent. It has not created any number of jobs but instead it has brought a shipful of Chinese workers and built poor infrastructure.”

Professor Patrick Bond of the Wits School of Governance is concerned about the bank’s due diligence practices.

“The $200-million loan to expand the Durban port-petrochemical complex via Transnet for sure will disrupt the communities and the environment, and will generate a major backlash protest,” he says.

Transnet said it would not comment on the loan agreement until it had been finalised.

Bond is also critical of the bank’s funding model, saying the loan terms mirror those of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“We have never had access to the specific terms and conditions of Brics loans, but we know that 70% of the first batch are in US dollars, which makes repayment of these loans onerous,” he says.

There has been no indication that the NDB is offering a middle-income country like South Africa any concessional credit, Bond says.

According to media reports in South Africa, most of the loans have gone to India and China, raising the question of whether they are being given preferential access to funding.

But Nene says this is not the case. Despite the fact that “the roll-out of the projects has been uneven, this cannot be blamed on the bank itself as, if a country does not have a well-functioning system, it takes longer for projects to take off”.

He says South Africa lags behind because bankable projects have not yet been identified.

The NDB has set up a regional office, the Africa Regional Centre, to co-ordinate requests for infrastructure funding, headed by former treasury deputy director general Monale Ratsoma. Nene believes more projects will be submitted now that the office is up and running.

In 2016, of the $1.5-billion in loans approved by the NDB for seven projects, Eskom received a R2.4-billion loan, which was later placed in abeyance. Last year, the bank approved a further $1.8-billion for six projects.

This year, the bank approved another six projects, at a total of $1.7-billion, pushing its loan book to $5.1-billion. These include India’s $350-million loan for a rural roads project and China’s $350-million to fund the Chongqing small cities sustainable development programme.

At the NDB’s annual meeting in Shanghai, president KV Kamath told the media that, starting in the second half of this year, the bank will issue loans in local currencies to reduce the effects of exchange rate volatility and the borrowing costs of member countries.

Maasdorp says the bank will open its doors to non-Brics members, including African countries, as soon as it receives its credit rating.

“Fifty-five percent will remain owned by the five founding members and 45% will be split among the other countries,” he says.

Although the NDB’s website suggests it sees itself as an alternative to the IMF and the World Bank, it appears its aspirations seem modest, and it is planning to work with existing development institutions, both public and private. It intends forming partnerships to cofinance projects with the Development Bank of South Africa, the Industrial Development Corporation and the African Development Bank, as well as commercial banks, says Maasdorp.

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Thulebona Mhlanga is financial trainee journalist  at the Mail & Guardian, currently enrolled for a masters in politics at the University of Johannesburg. In addition to her fervent interest in business writing, reading and educating others around issues of financial literacy, she volunteers her time to projects assisting women and promoting social justice. 

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Introduction

Journalists, academics, pundits and experts have ignored the complexity of President Trump’s impact on the state of the US Empire.

To properly assess the geopolitical configuration of power, we will consider the military, economic, political and diplomatic advances and setbacks of the Trump regime in Latin America, the European Union and Asia (including the Middle East).

Secondly, we will examine the time frame – the shifting direction of the present configuration of forces.

We will conclude by discussing how the influence and results of foreign policy shape domestic political power.

Background to President Trump’s Empire Building

First and foremost, we must take account of the fact that much of Trump’s policies build on and reflect the policies of his predecessors, namely Presidents Bush and Obama.

The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were started by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, The US bombings of Libya and the destruction and uprooting of millions of Africans was inaugurated by Obama.

The expulsion of millions  of Central American and Mexican immigrants from the US  was common practice prior to Trump.

In brief President Trump continued, and in some cases exacerbated, the socio-economic and military policies, of his predecessors.  In a few areas Trump reversed policies, as was the case with Obama’s Nuclear Agreement with Iran.

The successes and failures of Trump’s empire building policies cannot be attributed solely to his regime.  Nevertheless, President Trump must be held responsible for the current state of the empire and its direction.

President Trump Marches Forward in Latin America

President Trump has built upon and extended US imperial victories throughout most of Latin America.  Satellite regimes are in place in Brazil thanks largely to judicial-legislative coup which overthrew President elect Dilma Rousseff. The puppet regime of Michel Temer has privatized the economy, embraced Trump’s dominance and aligned with efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s government.

Similarly, Trump inherited from Obama the present client regimes in Argentina (President Mauricio Macri), Peru (President Martin Vizcarra), Honduras (President Hernandez) Paraguay (President Cartes), Chile (President Piñera), Ecuador (President Moreno), and most of the ruling elites in Central America and the Caribbean.  Trump has added to the list current efforts to overthrow the Daniel Ortega regime in Nicaragua.

Under President Trump, Washington succeeded in reversing relations with Cuba and the so-called peace accord in Colombia between the guerrillas and the Juan Manuel Santos regime.  In July 2018, Trump succeeded in backing the accession to power of Ivan Duque a protégé of the far-right party of Alvaro Uribe in Colombia.  President Obama’s reversal of center-left regimes via coups have been consolidated and expanded by Trump with the important exception of Mexico.  

Trump partially reversed Obama’s opening of relations with Cuba and threatens to militarily invade Venezuela.

Trump’s imperial empire in Latin America is, for the most part, inherited and largely sustained . . . for now.

But there are several crucial caveats.

Mexico’s new President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is likely to pursue independent and progressive foreign and domestic policies, renegotiating NAFTA, oil contracts and border disputes.

Secondly, Brazil and Argentina’s neo-liberal economic policies are in deep crises and the incumbent puppet regimes are economically unstable, face  mass social opposition and likely will suffer electoral defeats in 2018.

Thirdly, Venezuela and Cuba have successfully resisted economic and diplomatic sanctions.

Militarily, President Trump retains US military bases in Colombia and has incorporated Bogata into NATO and he has secured military operations in Argentina and Ecuador.

The biggest challenge to Trump’s empire building in Latin America is in the all-important economic realm.  

Trump has failed to gain ground in trade, investment and raw materials in the face of competition with China.

Despite the political and military subordination of Latin American regimes to Washington, the bulk of their trade ties are with China.  Moreover, Brazil and Argentina will increase their agro-exports to China in line with Beijing’s trade tariffs on US exports.  In the so-called trade war not a single Latin American client state has sided with the US.  On the contrary, all are taking advantage of Washington’s loss of the China market to enhance their exports.

Clearly the US does not exercise ‘hegemony’ over Latin America’s trading relations.

Worse still, Trump’s dumping of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and threats to withdraw from NAFTA have reduced Washington’s leverage over Latin America and Asia.

Trump’s boasts and claims of dominance over Latin America is largely a product of his predecessors’ imperial policies.

At most, Trump’s policies have hardened the far right, which however, is weakening politically and economically and has provoked the rise of the left to power in Mexico and increased opposition in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina.

In sum the Trump regime’s empire building retain decided influence in Latin America but faces major challenges – and reversals.

Trump in Asia: One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward

Washington has gained prestige for its diplomatic overtures to North Korea but is losing the trade war with the world’s second greatest power, China.

China, faced with Trump’s economic war, has diversified its trading partners thus undermining key US agro-business enterprises.

China has implemented tariffs on: canola, soybeans, corn, cotton, pork and beef.

Moreover, China has replaced the US as the main trading partner throughout Asia.

While Japan, South Korea and Australia provide military bases for the US   they are eager to replace Washington’s export to China.

Moreover, China’s multi-billion dollar, Belt and Road Initiative has secured sixty-eight nations as partners, with the prominent absence of the self-excluded USA.

US economic sanctions against Iran have failed to undermine the governments’ oil exports, while banking transactions and imports of manufacturing and service products are replaced by China, Russia , India and most of Asia.  All of whom will increase their trade with Teheran.

In the Middle East and South Asia, the US can no longer count on clients or allies except for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, the Saudi’s rejected Trump’s demand to increase oil production to lower oil prices for  US consumers.

Israel is a ‘loyal ally’ to Washington when it suits their own economic advantages and hegemonic aspirations.  For example, Israel has continued to expand ties with Russia even in violation of US sanctions.

Pakistan, Myanmar and Cambodia have moved closer to China as a result of increasing financial and infrastructure aid.

In balance, the US continues to exercise military dominance in Asia via its bases in South Korea, Japan and Australia.  However, it is losing economic influence and presence in the rest of Asia.  If history is any precedent, imperial empires without economic foundations, sooner or later crumble, especially when rising regional powers are capable of replacing them.

The European Union and Trump’s Empire:  Partner, Client or Rival?

The European Union (EU) is the largest market in the world and yet remains a political and military dependency of Washington.

The EU has suffered from its lack of an independent foreign policy – its reliance on NATO, a US subsidiary is one of the main reasons.

President Trump has exploited the EU’s weakness to defy its policies on several strategic issues,  ranging from the Paris Agreement on climate change, to the nuclear agreement with Iran, to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Trump’s tariff on EU exports is the latest and most provocative effort to defy and dominate the region.

Moreover, the EU is increasingly divided over immigration, the UK departure (Brexit), as well as the economic and political and economic split between Germany, Italy and Poland.

In effect the Trump regime can no longer count on a powerful unified alliance at its behest,in its quest for a global empire.

Rather, under Trump, the US seeks to secure economic supremacy and supreme political-military dominance.

President Trump demands that the EU countries double their military budgets in order to increase the Pentagon’s arms spending.

As a result of the divisions and hostilities between the US and EU, President’ Trump’s imperial policies have adopted a contradictory strategy of enhancing economic protectionism with overtures to ‘enemy’ Russia.  By adopting the nationalist slogan, “Making America Strong” by ‘Making the EU Weak’  it appears Trump pursues nationalist slogans to promote   imperial goals.

Domestic Growth and Imperial Decline

To date, mid 2018, Trump is riding a wave of domestic growth of the economy, trade and employment.

Critics claim that this is a short-lived conjuncture which faces powerful counter-currents.  They argue that the trade war and decline of the overseas markets of China, the EU, Mexico, Canada and elsewhere will provoke a decline of the US.

Trump’s strategic gamble is that the US trade war will succeed in opening China’s market while reducing China’s exports.  Trump hopes US  MNC will relocate to the US and increase jobs and exports.  So far this is a pipe dream.

Moreover, the corporate tax windfall has not been accompanied with a decrease in inequalities and increases in wages.

The result is that Trump faces  the real prospects of a decline in exports and popular electoral support – especially from those adversely affected by declining markets and  deep cuts in health, education and the environment.

Political Consequences of ‘America First’ in a Corporate Setting

Trump’s nationalist economic policies are highly unlikely to enhance empire building ; on the contrary, the trade war will force the major corporate tax beneficiaries to turn against Trump.  Their overseas trade links with the EU, North America and China will cause them to turn against Trump.

Empire building  trumps America First.  Without an economic empire the US will lack the means to secure the markets necessary to stimulate local exports and production.

Conclusion

President Trump has benefited, and to some extent, succeeded in temporarily gaining dominance in Latin America, expanding the domestic economy and imposing demands on China, the EU and North America.

Nevertheless, his policies have undermined allies, antagonized competitors and provoked retaliation.  All of which increases the economic cost of running an empire.

Trump has failed to provide viable substitutes for the EU and China markets. Nor has he secured the markets of his remaining clients in Latin America.  The notion that Trump can build ‘national capitalism in one country’ is a chimera. At most it would require intensive exploitation of US labor and high rates of investment, sacrificing profits and salaries.  The electoral oligarchy and the mass media will force him to retreat from the trade wars and surrender to the globalizing elites.

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

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Truthful Satire

 

First published by Global Research in April 2016

The Main-Stream Media (MSM) or corporate media has recently began making moves to replace humans with robots or “automated journalism” to produce its news stories. Not to say that the corporate media journalists who currently work under the propaganda machine are independent and are committed to the truth. However, more than ever, corporate media conglomerates are slowly replacing those same traditional journalists with robots that can produce twice the amount of stories at a faster rate to beat out their competition is just one of the reasons for the change.  But there is a bigger picture to this new advanced technology.

Robots as we know, have replaced humans in several industries especially in the automobile industry where robots are already replacing humans on production lines. The media is no exception. Recently the New York Post (a tabloid propaganda newspaper) reported that Bilderberg attendee and Bloomberg’s Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait told Bloomberg’s 2,400 journalists in an internal office memo that he was creating a 10-person team that will study how to “use more automation in writing and reporting.” Micklethwait reportedly said:

“Why do we need you, if the basic idea is to get computers to do more of the work?” Micklethwait asked in the memo, obviously addressing an unspoken concern among his staff.

One irony of automation is that it is only as good as humans make it. That applies to both the main types of automated journalism. In the first, the computer will generate the story or headline by itself. But it needs humans to tell it what to look for, where to look for it and to guarantee its independence and transparency to our readers. In the second sort, the computer spots a trend, delivers a portion of a story to you and in essence asks the question: Do you want to add or subtract something to this and then publish it? And it will only count as Bloomberg journalism if you sign off on it.

“Done properly, automated journalism has the potential to make all our jobs more interesting,” he said

New York Magazine published an article in 2014 titled ‘Robots Are Invading the News Business, and It’s Great for Journalists’ interviewed an independent analyst by the name of Ken Doctor:

Ken Doctor, an independent analyst who studies the news industry, told me this week that the rise of robot reporting is a product of the times — both technologically and in terms of the troubled economics of the news industry, which has led media organizations to search for ways to reduce their costs. “The robots are just another tool of new journalism,” he said. In the future, Doctor predicts, robots won’t just be reporters’ competitors. They’ll collaborate with us by preparing data-dense paragraphs that we can then supplement with our own analysis, producing a hybrid story that’s better than our human efforts alone.

“Journalism is becoming a more highly skilled job,” Doctor said. “Simply showing up, in the Woody Allen sense — being able to read a press release or interview a single person, and write up a story that is understandable in 750 words — that’s not going to be enough. The optimistic part of this is that we’d use computers to do the basic work of organizing facts, and that the judgment and analysis, the interpretation, the experience is brought to it by humans”

In 2014, the Associated Press partnered with Automated Insights (AI) to produce automated quarterly earnings reports by using AI’s Wordsmith platform. According to AI’s website:

The Associated Press, working with Automated Insights and Zacks Investment Research, uses automation technology to write earnings stories. Previously, AP’s reporters wrote such stories. AP now produces nearly 3,700 quartlery earnings stories for US and Canadian companies, over 12 times the number that AP reporters and editors produced manually

Robots taking the place of humans in the newsroom are just another way of eliminating journalists to cut labor costs. Just like McDonalds is eliminating their workforce and replacing them with robots to serve customers due to the $15 an hour increase in the minimum wage across the U.S. Although Ken Doctor said that the way robots (providing and organizing basic facts) would collaborate with humans who would then provide the experience and the final analysis to produce a “hybrid story” is nonsense, it’s about reducing costs for corporate news owners and executives. Another important factor to consider is that humans and robots collaborating to produce news are easily controlled by top management. According to a 2014 article from Politico by Charles Lewis, a former 60 Minutes “investigative” producer and founder and former Executive Director for the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) wrote a story titled ‘Why I Left 60 Minutes’ and said:

Fewer commercial news organizations support investigative journalism now than at any time in recent history, and reporters today—especially those who aggressively seek the truths that government, business and other powerful institutions seek to conceal—are arguably more alone, more exposed and more vulnerable to professional and even physical harm than they ever were. There has to be a better way

Charles Lewis left the CPI in 2005 which has been hijacked by the CIA-connected Ford Foundation, George Soros’s‘Open Society Foundation’ and other corporate foundations who are major contributors for the nonprofit organization. The corporate media will be a competitive market for journalists especially if they are competing against robots that do not require a salary, a retirement plan or healthcare benefits. It is not a hard choice for those who manage or own corporate media especially when it comes to their profits and political agendas.

 

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The police routinely do surveillance on suspects. We all know that.

The DEA, FBI, CIA and a whole host of other agencies also do surveillance on suspects. What we don’t know is how they pick their suspects, how they do surveillance and how long do they do surveillance for. Without a doubt, the number of suspects has increased since September 11th, 2001.

The New York Times featured an article on June 10th, 2016 titled “United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers” which casts doubts on whether gangs could commit crimes like stalking, harassing (and worse) against targeted individuals (TI’s) and repeatedly tries to plant seeds of doubt that TI’s may be mentally ill, delusional or psychotic.

When we replace the phrase “gang stalking” with “surveillance” and the term “targeted individuals” with “suspects” does anyone then think that suspects are mentally ill, delusional or psychotic for realizing that surveillance teams are doing surveillance on them, when surveillance teams are indeed doing surveillance on them.

We don’t know how many people are suspects because the police won’t comment on ongoing cases. Ditto for Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Dr. John Hall, a documentary film maker, author and expert on gang stalking, estimates that hundreds of thousands of Americans are currently being targeted, gang stalked and worse.

We don’t know how the police or Federal agencies do surveillance on people because they won’t say how they do surveillance. On occasion, there is news about people who were indicted that reveals surveillance went on for years, that undercover officers masqueraded as underage girls online or as sexy young adults preying on lonely (or excitable) young men. Undercover officers pretending to be religious, frequenting Mosques, asking nosy questions, offering freebies all around, free food, free drinks, free cash, free vans, free weapons to religious people, who pray often, yet live in economically cratering parts of the US.

There’s Congressional testimony from intelligence agency personnel about “dark arts” and “honey traps.” The specifics on how exactly they do surveillance (aka their “dark arts”) on suspects is sketchy at best.

Not so from the suspects, the targeted individuals that is. Dozens of books have been written, hundreds of gang stalking survivor groups have formed, mainly online, and thousands of sites and blogs exist on the topic. Just search terms like mind control, gang stalking and targeted individuals and you will find.

TI’s describe being gang stalked, harassed, many times a day every day, abused, terrorized, brutalized, tortured and many TI’s memorialize other TI’s who were killed. Descriptions get graphic and detailed, some with a unique vocabulary like “directed conversations,” “gas lighting,” “mobbing,” “street theater,” “man in the middle attacks,” “sleep deprivation torture” and so forth.

Directed conversations apparently are when police supervisors write out scripts for undercover officers (or informants) to recite in front of suspects. “Gas lighting” is when undercover officers (or informants) break into a suspect’s home and move things around or do intentional damage to utilities, appliances or clothes, for example.

“Mobbing” is often at work when several co-workers have agreed to become police informants (snitches) and they mob, surround and simultaneously bully a co-worker creating a hostile work environment. Some TI websites and groups mention mobbing in other contexts like stores or in public, suspects get enveloped by a swarm of irritating and menacing undercover officers (or informants).

One suspect from New York reported being menaced by pit bulls. When he left home in the morning, there would be 3 pit bull owners, chatting with each other, with their pit bulls blocking the front door. Followed by the subway entrance being blocked by 3 other pit bull owners with their pit bulls. Followed by horribly disfigured people getting onto the same subway car at the next stop, with handlers, then loudly describing the pit bull attacks that left them so disfigured. Then, the subway exit being blocked by 3 pit bull owners with pit bulls and so forth.

Street theater is when police bosses plan out skits for undercover officers (or informants) to act out in front of suspects. One suspect reported about several such skits. For example, a couple of undercover officers, one with a camera, the other with chalk drawing outlines like of corpses on the sidewalk while his partner snapped photos with flashes of the chalk outlines. PsyOp is synonymous with street theater.

Man in the middle attacks are when someone texts a friend, but the text goes to an undercover officer who reads and relays all or part of the message to the friend. The friend responds, but that text also goes to the undercover officer who reads it, then relays part or all of it to the suspect. Such man in the middle attacks can also occur with online chats, emails and some say calls with advanced computer programs that can mimic people’s voices (two men in the middle attacks, one to listen to the suspect and a second in the next room to relay the message (all or part) to the suspect’s friend). Any unnatural seeming pauses with texts, chats or calls may indicate man-in-the-middle attacks.

Sleep deprivation torture is undercover officers (or informants) making loud noises all night, so that suspects cannot sleep. Often the loud noises come from a nearby home, rented by the police to do surveillance, like loud music all night long. Other loud noises described by suspects include loud TV’s, prolonged chain sawing, power drilling, jack hammering and the like.

Some suspects report intensive sexual harassment and assaults. One suspect in New York reported years of more than 50 prostitutes a day stalking, harassing, assaulting and at times, attempting to rape. None of the prostitutes wanted money from their target. It’s widely known in Manhattan that certain Federal agencies have stables of prostitutes on their payroll because of the United Nations and Wall Street (and apparently for some suspects too).

For some, being harassed (assaulted, etc.) by so many prostitutes every day might sound hot. Pick the ones you want, or pick all of them for sex, for free.

But. If you’re a heterosexual man, they send frisky gay male prostitutes. If you’re a heterosexual woman, they send lesbian prostitutes. If you’re a gay man, they send heterosexual female prostitutes. If you’re a lesbian, they send heterosexual male prostitutes to sexually harass you, assault you, attempt to rape you, etc. Just say “surveillance” (wink wink).

Suspects who know why they are being targeted and are being targeted by local or state police, rarely report the swarms of prostitutes. Prostitute swarms harassing (assaulting, etc.) are more commonly reported by suspects who know why they are being targeted and are being targeted by the Feds.

(Many suspects do not know why they are suspects. Many suspects don’t realize for years that they are suspects.)

How long? One “suspect” reported being under “surveillance” for over 50 years. Long story short, his mother was some sort of Fed tasked with seducing a foreign leader (known for promiscuity) and getting pregnant. She succeeded and came back to Manhattan. 9 months later, she delivered at New York Presbyterian Hospital. The agency arranged an adoption and the natural mother got her $1 million in cash. (Moments later, outside the hospital, she was robbed and murdered.)

Anyway, the child was adopted by undercover officers, raised in a wealthy suburb on a block where many other undercover officers lived. He’s been under 24/7 “surveillance” throughout his childhood, teens, young adulthood and middle age years to present. Other targeted individuals (suspects) routinely report having been under surveillance for decades.

People put on the no fly list never get off the no fly list just as many suspects never get off the surveillance list. (Back in the day, Americans used to be innocent until proven otherwise.)

Gloria Naylor, an award winning author, reports in her book “1996” how a spat with a well connected neighbor led to her being declared a “suspect” and being put under intensive “surveillance” complete with harassment, stalking by surveillance teams, psychological abuse and torture, sabotage to personal belongings, loud noises, sleep deprivation torture, being threatened, menaced and terrorized 24/7/365 and worse.

The police and Feds refuse to state how long surveillance goes on for. The police and Feds also refuse to provide metadata like statistics (e.g. a range from shortest to longest surveillance times, average and median surveillance time periods). There’s a tab to taxpayers too, but, the police and Feds refuse to provide data on how much surveillance costs per day per suspect.

The police and Feds absolutely refuse to provide data on how many suspects are guilty and how many are innocent.

Widely published data reported that over 90% of the suspects incarcerated at Guantanamo were innocent of any crimes. They were imprisoned, without trial, tortured for years, then released. Because they’re innocent.

Two US Army (USA) Military Police (MP) escort a detainee, dressed in his new orange jumpsuit to a cell at Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay Navy Base, Cuba. Camp X-Ray is the holding facility for detainees held at the US Navy (USN) Base during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM.

The Feds still refuse to apologize to the innocent people they falsely imprisoned and tortured for years at the Guantanamo torture camp as surely as the Feds still continue their lingering military occupation of Occupied Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

We don’t know how many suspects put under surveillance are innocent, but we do know for sure from Guantanamo data that over 90% of the suspects there turned out to be innocent. Over 90% of suspects put under surveillance may also be innocent.

It was also widely reported that the Feds murdered some of the innocent suspects at Guantanamo, then tried (unsuccessfully) to make their murders look like suicides. It’s still unknown, however, how many innocent suspects under surveillance the police and Feds have murdered. Some TI websites report names and other facts about targets (suspects) who died under suspicious circumstances.

The practice of placing suspects under surveillance has increased throughout the history of the United States. The biggest increase has been 2001 to present.

There are too many unanswered questions about surveillance of suspects. Inquiries can be done by County Legislatures, City Councils, State Assemblies, Congress and investigative journalists to reveal how suspects are picked, how long are suspects put under surveillance, how exactly is surveillance done and how many suspects are found to be innocent (e.g. 90%, 95%).

Suspects (targeted individuals) have reported that surveillance teams have broken laws, committed misdemeanors, felonies, civil rights violations, human rights violations and crimes against humanity. Reports of serious crimes should be investigated. The people who do surveillance should be well policed. Anyone doing surveillance who has committed crimes needs to be held accountable: investigated, arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned for their crimes.

A step forward in fighting such abuses and crimes is increasing accountability, oversight, audits and placing effective checks and balances on police and the Feds. One small step forward would be hearings at local, state and federal levels on the scope and extent of the problem.

How many suspects are put under surveillance for decades? Why? Effective enforceable laws need to be passed and inaugurated to limit the amount of time a suspect can be put under surveillance (e.g. 1 or 2 years).

How many crimes have been committed by police and Feds doing surveillance and what kinds of crimes have they been committing against suspects? The police and Feds need to be policed more effectively. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, there should be independent audits, strong oversight, effective accountability and enforceable checks and balances on both police and the Feds.

If more than 90% of suspects are innocent of any crimes and large numbers of people have been labeled suspects and put under surveillance for decades, then discussion in the press, County Legislatures, City Councils, State Assemblies, Congress and the media-at-large needs to also turn to how these “suspects” can be apologized to and how can they be compensated for what was done to them.

Targeted individuals who are suspects under surveillance will gain more credibility when they acknowledge the fact they are suspects under surveillance and move forward to discussions and actions (e.g. lobbying for reforms, lawsuits, etc.) to ameliorate the status quo of how suspects are picked, how surveillance is done, and how long does surveillance linger on for. There is another group of targeted individuals who report they have been experimented on without their consent – this is a closely related topic for another article.

It’s a truism that everyone is a potential criminal just as everyone is a potential terrorist. Yourself included. You are no longer innocent until proven guilty in the USA. You are guilty until proven innocent (and that could take decades, or a lifetime, or longer). If you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing and do nothing while the number of “suspects” rises from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions, then who is going to speak up or do anything for you when you become a “suspect” and get put under 24/7 “surveillance” for years? Or decades. Or the rest of your life.

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This article was originally published on Reader Supported News.

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Of genocide one thing becomes clear: the perpetrators are usually governments. The perpetrators may be cliques within the government, using the government, but the organization of such cataclysmic events is beyond the skills of amateurs.

So it isn’t a surprise that the domain of preventing genocides is as tightly controlled as the mechanisms of punishment. A control not entirely foreseen by the conceptual author, Raphael Lemkin, was written-in to the Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, with the support of countries which had risen to power through colonialism. It is the word “intent” as in “intent to destroy”, which is now considered a requirement, if any attempt to destroy a “national, racial, ethnical or religious” group of people is to be considered a genocide.

The mass killing has to provably have the intention of destroying one of these groups protected by the Convention.

The vagaries of “intent” and the difficulties of ever proving “intention” deep within a perpetrator’s mind is a domain claimed by the government’s policy makers, academics, inevitably psychologists, and the judiciary, who keep the Convention on Genocide basically out of the hands of the people The people are universally the victims.

To move beyond this control we might put aside nationalism and look at governments on one hand, and peoples on the other as not always having the same interests.

The emergency brake of puzzlement about “intent” is customarily used to obstruct application of the Convention on Genocide. It’s the standard way genocidal governments seek to avoid responsibility for their actions. Still we recognize the horror of a genocide as it occurs, which is partly that we are not doing something to stop it.

For example, can the military forces of North American countries bomb the civilian water supply of Iraq, her civilian infrastructure, entire cities, museums, – bomb the country “back into the stone age,” without intention to destroy the national group? Civilian casualties were falsely referred to as “collateral damage.”

This assumed lack of intention spares our leaders and ourselves but is sophistry. Intention is established by repetition with similar result each time leading to the inevitable mass civilian deaths. North Americans find the meaning of “intention” difficult. Too many dead Aboriginals, slaves, prisoners of our histories clogging our minds, never dealt with, never admitted. Denying the people their history leaves no chance for rehabilitation.

The U.S. having signed and after forty years ratified the Convention on Genocide presents objections as “Reservations and Declarations”⁽¹⁾ which specifically underscore the need for intent to be present in the destruction of a group, if it’s to be considered genocide.

The Convention has already limited its own applicability to groups. It fails to specifically protect gender based and sexuality based groups, as well as the aged, the sick, ableist and groups defined by genetic traits, as well as groups defined by mental health, criminal records, or prisoners as a group. These are all vulnerable to genocide-like actions by fascist states as shown in the German Third Reich’s practices. A contemporary Convention on Genocide should include them. ⁽²⁾

The Convention on Genocide as it appeared in 1948 was a very narrowly conceived document in one sense: it addressed the safety of the powerful victim groups of Hitler’s inhumane policies while ignoring less powerful victim groups, which in many cases continue to be victimized.

Representatives of four states who ratified the Convention (Source: United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law)

“Understanding #4” of the U.S. objection s to the Convention prepares the U.S. for wars such as the destruction of Iraq by armed force. It’s very simple, it says: “4. That acts in the course of armed conflicts committed without the specific intent required by article II are not sufficient to constitute genocide as defined by this Convention” (Article II is where the Convention prohibits “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…”).

What could be interpreted at the diplomatic level as a threat to other countries, of war without quarter, possibly to assure their cooperation, was in Iraq a threat fulfilled. Through “Understanding #4” the U.S. could excuse itself from obligation at international courts as long as it controls the courts or interpretation of the law.

Not all countries agree that the U.S. can define applicability of the Convention on Genocide to itself, which the U.S. attempts in “Reservation #1” and “Understanding #5.” The Convention is considered currently applicable to actions in all countries signatory to the Convention. Under the World Court this could include the U.S., willing or not, with applicability a political issue not reliant on any statute of limitations.

Because of the U.S. extreme insistence on the element of “intent” (also specified in “Understanding #1”), as necessary to genocide, the interpretation of the Convention became slightly skewed.

The difficulty rises from an awareness which keeps asserting itself, that intent is very hard to prove. It becomes harder as perpetrators learn to disguise their intentions to avoid eventual prosecution. And harder as those who struggle to be moral, repress and twist their own motives to avoid the guilt of their own actions or inaction.

Protected from application of the Convention by the U.S. withdrawal from International Criminal Court U.S. writers and academics write more freely about genocides. Karen Goldsmith‘s work, “The Issue of Intent in the Genocide Convention”⁽³⁾ discusses this within academic traditions, aware of attempts historically to trap interpretation of the Convention into serving the powerful. She encourages a more relaxed approach.

Instead of acceding to an academic discussion of intention which has allowed the confusion of whether an instance of insane mass murder is a genocide or not, wouldn’t it be more wise to cede a situation to the laws against genocide without immediate consideration of the issue of intent?

It may be arrogant to ever suppose to know or understand what happens in another person’s mind. It may take a long time to identify a pattern of behaviour which might prove intent through points of evidence. Realizing that the Convention attempts to shield a number of groups deserving of its protection, logically one would assign the word genocide to situations where one group as defined, is being repetitively killed or deprived of necessities or of lives for its children. It is certainly genocide to its victims.

To suggest the academic or professional jurist’s difficulty with this I recommend some consideration of the work of Kai Ambos⁽⁴⁾ who is not only an academic (professor of international criminal law) but has served as a district judge and a judge at the International Court of Justice (at the Hague), and is comfortable with the differences available in “intent to destroy.”

Is this general intent and knowledge of what one is doing, or a “surplus” of intention, an ulterior intention which exceeds the persecution of a group, a “special” intention? While the study of projected meanings presents its own kind of hell of devils dancing on the head of a pin, it makes no difference at all to the victims, their family , and village slaughtered most probably by an array of expensive modern technology.

To ascertain guilt by identifying precisely the perpetrator’s state of mind is the result of an evolution in response to the Convention’s prohibition. It is also a distraction from what is moral. Or a distraction from the pain of confronting human nature. ‘Legalese,’ by removing a subject from day to day life and placing it in a domain which is not necessarily ruled by love, may spare the judges of humanity’s excesses suffering and an ongoing PTSD syndrome.

But people at large seem to be moving beyond “dolus generalis” and “dolus specialis” as categorizations of kinds of intent to what is more simply expressed and noted by both Ambos and Goldsmith: Article 30 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The ICC holds the Convention on Genocide within its jurisdiction since one of the Court’s purposes is to address the crime of genocide. Therefore the ICC’s interpretation of the Convention can solve years of puzzlement created by patriotic lawyers:

Article 30 Mental Element

1. Unless otherwise provided, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court only if the material elements are committed with intent and knowledge.

2. For the purposes of this article, a person has intent where:

(a) In relation to conduct, that person means to engage in the conduct;

(b) in relation to a consequence, that person means to cause that consequence or is aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events.

3. For the purposes of this article, “knowledge” means awareness that a circumstance exists or a consequence will occur in the ordinary course of sequence or events. “Know” and “knowingly shall be construed accordingly.

The Rome Statute’s definitions end run much of the smokescreen available in discussions of general intention versus special intention. This makes it much easier for countries subscribing to the International Criminal Court to address instances of genocide.

Because the path forward is in a way clear to address and consider instances of genocide currently in motion why haven’t the world nations attempted to honour their commitment to the Convention which demands some response when a genocide occurs?

Because a reader might not agree with one example I’ll point out four salient instances where the situation could be declared genocide by the courts:

1. The peoples of the The Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) are being destroyed in the battle for Congo’s resources, by foreign interests.

2. Palestinians, particularly of Gaza, are being destroyed as a national and as a religious group by the Zionist government in Israel.

3. In Myanmar the Buddhist Army found few impediments to its attempted destruction of the Muslim Rohingya people. Signatory governments are complicit through inaction.

4. Indigenous peoples of Canada are subjected to extreme conditions of life, health and water by the Government over a long period of time. The government’s inability to move beyond its denial, or educate Canadians to their full rights and responsibilities under human rights law can be equated with an attempt to destroy the victim group.

Any United Nations intervention to directly counter a genocide in progress would I think have to pass through the Security Council for approval, and could meet a U.S. veto.

The attempts to effect the Convention on Genocide have been obstructed by:

1. The difficulty of proving intent as a condition required for identifying a genocide.

2. Likely obstruction at the Security Council where the political and financial interests of one of its members can veto intervention.

3. Lack of public knowledge and misinformation campaigns (demonization of a targeted victim group’s leader).

4. National reluctance to identify genocide since under law a signatory nation is required to intervene.

5. The fact that genocides are almost exclusively effected by governments and the Convention on Genocide can only be effected by governments or possibly large international organizations.

While genocides are waged for national or corporate purpose by governments the Convention on genocide is a mechanism of protest, alleviation, intervention, at the service only of governments. In areas where the genocide might be of gain to many governments it is less likely that the Convention will be brought into play.

Note for example NATO’s attempt to force the overthrow of Syria’s leadership by making conditions of life unbearable for Syria’s people. This became a concerted military effort by France, England, the U.S., Turkey, Israel and others. The resulting partial destruction of the national group was an intended genocide with a deflection of its purpose by a “civil war” waged by a minority assuming responsibility for a rebellion initiated by the foreign powers who provided funding.

There are also policies which many governments can agree on and ignore when they share the guilt. A current example is the forcible transfer of children as a way of managing migrants and asylum seekers entering the U.S.. While this isn’t accompanied by an intention to destroy a portion of a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” it could be if the U.S. were considered responsible for destruction of the refugee’s country of origin. Both Canada and the U.K. separate children from their families when officials consider it in the “best interests of the child.” The issue has stronger interface in the area of transferring children to a country’s social services and the practices of ‘sponsoring’ the children of one protected group, with sponsors outside that group.

To address directly our own genocide defenses in North America: these almost exclusively rest with organizations funded by the government, at the service of government policy, staffed by academics with strong ties to government, or who have worked for the government, or will work for the government. Or who have government loans, or grants. The organizations’ political positions accommodate government policies, despite the innate confusion in identifying genocides, previously discussed here.

It’s unlikely that one will find in the active agendas of the genocide related NGOs any protests or any actions hampering government policy. This is particularly notable in the controversial area of Israel’s ongoing persecution of Palestinians.

If the issue may be considered within the multi-million dollar funded structure of the enterprise, or studied in a course from the hosting university, one might find that the well known NGOs are not usually allies in struggles to save the peoples oppressed criminally by the NGO’s host governments or its allies.

A run down of these specific non-governmental organizations, funded through service to the government either overtly or covertly, is avoided because much of what they accomplish does address the needs of victim groups. In a sense they pay off humanity by doing a portion of their job. The difficulty is that they refuse to address the crimes of our own governments. And they provide on occasion impetus for falsely raising the issue of genocide, in the service of government programs for corporate expansion which in situations of ‘genocide’ can threaten with military intervention. Powerful NGOs concerned with genocide risk at some point supporting government policies which are genocidal. When they do not purvey genocides as genocide which is the major portion of their usefulness, they become complicit.

Against these difficulties with the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” as it stands, and the difficulties of applying it, is the fact that it corresponds deeply to the beliefs of the largest portions of humankind. We believe it’s valid and necessary – not the law of it only, as much as its affirmation of our humanity – its refusal of the horror we find unacceptable.

In Rwanda after the genocide there were trials of the accused perpetrators under international law but also under Rwandan law, and then under village law in that the courts were held in the communities. In villages throughout the country people were brought together and found they had to account for themselves and explain what they did or didn’t do – their part in the genocide. These courts were known as Gacaca courts.⁽⁵⁾

What begins to evolve in the accounts of village trials is a world view of justice asserting itself in a landscape of the ultimate horror. And it has very little to do with arguments of what kind of intent was involved, or the mental state of the perpetrators, the Faculty coffee room, the judges or judicial chambers.

It has everything to do with surviving what the people never chose of their own accord. I think this defense might well be applied to a majority of North Americans as their corporations and capital continues to destroy less powerful nations. These instances of taking life are so much more clear in the Rwandan genocide.

This is the shadow which falls between the studies of genocide and the massive losses of humanity, decency, tenderness, life.

Prof. Giorgía Donà‘s study of “situated bystandership”⁽⁶⁾ explores the realities of the bystanders, those who were neither the victims nor the perpetrators of the genocide which by her figures killed close to a million Tutsi (April 7th through July 18, 1994).

This group most closely parallels the majority of North Americans during the destructions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria to begin a longer more complicated list of massive loss of life and destruction.

She notes both external bystanders such as the United Nations and signatories of the Convention who knew and did nothing, and the internal bystanders who might be thought of as the people, and bear the guilt of the people for crimes that came from beyond them, were broadcast to them, programmed into them like an experiment with Rwanda as its laboratory.

A terrible thing here is that the killing was accomplished by so many and by my understanding so many were forced into the conformity of killing others lest they be killed, and under pressures that might make our judgement of them and our concept of ‘heroism’ irrelevant. In some instances those who wouldn’t kill were killed. Those who hid fugitives, if caught were killed or forced to kill the fugitives they had harboured. Can this be considered within a context of law?

How deeply have North Americans responded to the massive death caused by our inception, our wars, armaments, economic needs, when our survival has had so many options other than war?

Donà’s paper suggests that in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide the majority of people tried to separate themselves from the perpetrators whom they considered “extremists” and evil. The bystander majority would consider itself as retaining moral values. The Kagame government at first promoted the assessment of morally guilty bystanders, complicit through inaction.⁽⁷⁾

This group of bystanders then sorts out into those who acceded to the perpetrators’ actions and those who attempted to resist under the tremendous pressure from the overall program to kill. Those who remained non-violent would have to hide as did the victims.⁽⁸⁾. When refusing to participate in the killing meant death, some then participated. At a local factual level this was understood by the Gacaca courts, because how does one judge this with reference to the intent of genocide.

While Gacaca courts prosecuted murder and rape they didn’t the crime of non-intervention,⁽⁹⁾ and so under the policy of the community courts non-intervention was no longer necessarily one of guilt. These courts also shifted guilt and the responsibility for a crime, from mass action to the individual.

Crimes during the mass killing of the genocide were no longer abstract or collective but personal. While many of the Hutu were found guilty, many were found innocent and were freed from the condemnation of collective guilt.⁽¹⁰⁾

The Gacaca courts present a challenge to academic studies, and what is often an intellectual or judicial tendency to categorize and perceive through the application of abstractions. The community level courts were more realistic and humane than the courts of international law? Possibly so. But then they were addressing the people who as victim, killer or bystander, were the objects of a planned and prepared-for national atrocity.⁽¹¹⁾

This focusing of attention on the bystander element of genocide may help many North Americans reconsider our own relationship to guilt, the ultimate price of silence, the relationship between our morality and what happens about us, realizing that despite the tremendous social pressures programming us by schools, corporately funded universities, from media, from history, by conformity and each other, we deserve to be judged for how we’ve responded to the crimes against others.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Night’s Lantern.

J. B. Gerald is a frequent contributor to Global Research

Notes

1. The “Declarations and Reservations” which at ratification the U.S. added to the Convention are generally kept out of sight so I list them here:
Reservations: 

1. That with reference to article IX of the Convention, before any dispute to which the United States is a party may be submitted to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice under this article, the specific consent of the United States is required in each case.
2. That nothing in the Convention Requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.

Understandings:

1. That the term ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such’ appearing in article II means, the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such by the acts specified in article II.
2. That the term ‘mental harm’ in article II(b) means permanent impairment of mental faculties through drugs, torture, or similar techniques.
3. That the pledge to grant extradition in accordance with a state’s laws and treaties in force found in article VII extends only to acts which are criminal under the laws both of the requesting and the requested state and nothing in article VI affects the right of any state to bring to trial before its own tribunals any of its nationals for acts committed outside a state.
4. That acts in the course of armed conflicts committed without the specific intent required by article II are not sufficient to constitute genocide as defined by this Convention. 5. That with regard to the reference to an international penal tribunal in article VI or the Convention, the United States declares that it reserves the right to effect its participation in any such tribunal only by a treaty entered into specifically for that purpose with the advice and consent of the Senate.
– According to “Multilateral Treaties deposited with the Secretary-General.” Status as of 31 December 1992. United Nations, New York.

2. I initially stated this suggestion in “An Essay on Genocide: or why the Convention on Genocide hasn’t worked,” peacemedianews (Netherlands), 1995. Reprint: Night’s Lantern[access:< http://www.nightslantern.ca/07.htm >].

3. Karen Goldsmith. “The Issue of Intent in the Genocide Convention, and Its Effect on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Toward a Knowledge Based Approach,” Vol. 5, 2010 (Issue 3, Article 3), Genocide Studies and Prevention: an International Journal (IAGS).

4. Kai Ambos. “What does ‘intent to destroy’ in genocide mean?” Vol.91, #876, December 2009, International Review of the Red Cross.

5. Giorgía Donà. “‘Situated Bystandership’ During and After the Rwandan Genocide,” Vol. 20, No.1, Journal of Genocide Research, 2018; passim

6. ibid.

7. loc. cit., p.8.

8. loc. cit., p.14.

9. loc. cit., p.17.

10. Concerning the issue of alleged massacres of Hutu by Tutsi I suggest the work of Professor Peter Erlinder (William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota), The Rwanda Documents Project [access:< http://www.rwandadocumentsproject.net/gsdl/cgi-bin/library >].

11. Alison Des Forges. “The Ideology of Genocide,” Volume 23 / Issue 2 / 1995. African Issues.

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Increasing evidence emerges that confirms what ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern suggests was a classic off-the-shelf intelligence operation initiated during the last year of Obama’s presidency against the Trump campaign by employees of, and others associated with, the CIA, FBI, and the NS. Yet the public is being counseled to ignore possible proof of state misconduct.

The historic and unprecedented timing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of twelve Russia military intelligence officers on the eve of Trump’s meeting with Putin, was clearly meant to undercut Trump’s authority. This still did not pique the journalistic curiosity of an ostensibly independent press to at least pretend to question the possible motivation for these indictments at such a specific moment.

Instead of critical questions, Democrats, along with the corporate liberal media flipped the script and suggested that those questioning the allegations of Russian manipulation of the 2016 U.S. elections, which supposedly included the active or tacit support of the Trump campaign, was ipso-facto evidence of one’s disloyalty to the state – if not also complicit with implementing the Russia inspired conspiracy.

This narrative has been set and is meant to be accepted as veracious and impermeable to challenges. Powerful elements of the ruling class, operating with and through the Democratic party in an attempt to secure maximum electoral success, decided that Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia shall be the primary narrative to be utilized by democrats -from the increasing phony opposition represented by the Sanders wing of the party, to the neoliberal, buck-dancing members of the Congressional Black Caucus. All are expected to fall in line and do thy ruling class’s bidding.

When Trump met with the arch-enemy Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and didn’t declare war on Russia for conspiring against Clinton, charges of treason were splashed across the headlines and editorial pages of the elite press with some of the loudest denunciations coming from Black liberals.

Not being at war with Russia, at least not in the technical sense, was just one of those inconvenient facts that didn’t need to get in the way of the main objective which was to smear Trump

Peter Strzok, Jeff Sessions, Lisa Page (Source: The Doctor of Common Sense)

And while evidence of collusion continues to surface, it’s actually not between Trump and the Russians; rather it’s between intelligence officials in the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. The latest revelation of this evidence was reported by John Solomon in “The Hill,” a Washington insider publication. According to Solomon, former FBI attorney Lisa Page gave testimony to the House Judiciary committee that seemed to confirm the partisan intentions of Peter Strzok and other high officials in the agency.

Page was one of the authors of the infamous text messages between her and Peter Strzok (the two were also in a personal relationship at the time) while they both worked together at the FBI. The texts soon became the objective of endless speculation ever since they were revealed last summer. Exchanges shared between Strzok and Page during the 2016 campaign season, appear to point to Strzok’s participation in a vast conspiracy to gather intelligence on the Trump campaign and then to undermine his presidency on the unexpected chance of his election.

Two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named Mueller as special counsel, Strzok, who at that time was the lead investigator on the Russia probe texted, “There’s no big there there.”

Peter Strzok wasn’t just a minor bureaucrat with the bureau, as some outlets tried to imply in their coverage of the issue. He was the Chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section, and lead investigator into Clinton’s use of a personal server. He then led the FBI’s investigation of Russia interference as the Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Division until he was replaced in the summer of 2017.

Page confirmed that the no “there there” was, in fact, the quality of the Russia investigation. This means that a special counsel was appointed even though key FBI officials knew that there wasn’t anything there.

Page’s testimony provides strong confirmation that the decision by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to name Mueller as special counsel, who then brought in Strzok to lead the Russia-gate team, was not an objective, innocent affair. In actuality, it points to criminal use of the government’s counterintelligence capabilities to engage in a partisan manipulation of the electoral process.  

Some liberals, and even some radicals, pose the questions like “Even if those officials engaged in questionable activity, why should that be of concern for progressive forces, especially since this presidency represents the forefront of a neo-fascist movement in the U.S?”

There are three interconnected reasons why progressives should be concerned:

First:  The normalization of the assault on bourgeois democracy:  If elements of the capitalist class, in coordination with the major intelligence agencies, can successfully conspire to undermine and/or control an individual duly elected by the processes of U.S. democracy, as flawed as it may be, what does it suggest for a strategy that sees the electoral arena as a primary space for advancing progressive candidates and oppositional movements?

The ruling class will go to great depths to maintain power: The fact that elements of the ruling class are prepared to undermine a member of their own class because that individual represents social forces that the financial and corporatist elite have determined are a threat to their interests must make us question “What would happen if a true radical was able to win high office?  Therefore, the support and alignment with these forces by so-called progressives and radicals because of their understandable hatred for Trump is still objectively an alignment with reaction.

The critique and rejection of NATO, supporting de-escalation of tensions with Russia, exposing hegemony of finance capital, revealing the anti-democratic nature of the European Union, opposing international “trade” agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and trans-Atlantic Investment Partnership, demanding that U.S. forces withdraw from Syria and questioning the role of Saudi Arabia in spreading right-wing Wahhabism throughout the world, are now positions taken up by the right because the imperial left has aligned itself with the agenda of transnational capital and its imperialist objectives in lieu of presenting a people’s agenda.

Third: Consequently, the criticism of Trump’s foreign policies, including approaches on North Korea and Russia by democrats, is coming from positions to the right of Trump! The result is a political environment in which the possibility of escalating military conflicts with Russia, Iran or even at some point with China, is becoming a more normalized and realistic possibility.

The Clinton News Network (CNN) along with MSNBC, the Washington Post and New York Times are desperately trying to salvage the underlying theme of the assault on the Trump administration: that its supposed collusion with foreign sources, specifically the Russians, may have had a significant impact on why Clinton lost the election. And they also hold that any deviation from that declaration by Trump and his administration are just attempts at obstruction of justice.

With the revelations about the role and activities of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the Comey leak to the press, with the express purpose to create pretext for the appointment of a special counsel, the placing of an FBI informant in the Trump campaign, the role Andrew McCabe in covering up for his subordinates and leaking classified information to the press, the “primary narrative” of the democrat party and liberals is starting to unravel.

Abuse of state power is nothing new.

This would not be the first time that powerful unelected elements in the state have moved to manipulate political outcomes based on an agenda that the public had no knowledge of or even to remove a president. People have forgotten or didn’t make the correct connection that the famous source of information that brought down Richard Nixon, Bernstein’s and Woodman’s “deep throat” was Mark Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI!

And like the question raised to Nixon and Watergate then, but will only be raised by the Black Agenda Report today is, “What did Obama know and when did he know it?”

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This article was originally published on the author’s website at AjamuBaraka.com

Ajamu Baraka is a board member with Cooperation Jackson, the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch.

Ajamu Baraka is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

He can be reached at www.AjamuBaraka.com Read other articles by Ajamu, or visit Ajamu’s website.

Mentre la trattativa non ha ancora prodotto fatti, l’opposizione alla trattativa si esprime non solo a parole ma soprattutto con i fatti. Vanificando il clima distensivo del Summit di Helsinki, il sistema bellico planetario degli Stati uniti sta intensificando i preparativi di guerra dall’Atlantico al Pacifico.

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ISIS remains a force to be reckoned with as long as it’s supported by the US, NATO, Israel, the Saudis and Jordanians.

In June, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov said “remaining pockets of resistance of ISIS terrorists in Syria are only in areas controlled by the United States,” adding:

“Further expansion of ISIS in Syria became possible due to criminal inaction of the US and the so-called ‘international coalition,’ which resulted in quickly gaining control by ISIS militants over the main oil-bearing areas of Eastern Syria and constant flow of funds from the illegal sale of oil products.”

Washington and its imperial partners continue supplying ISIS and other terrorist groups with funding and heavy weapons.

Last week, SouthFront said Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces launched attacks aimed at eliminating ISIS cells where they’re active in the country.

AMN News issued a similar report, saying Iraqi security forces and tribal fighters launched a military operation in the “Rawa, Rutba and al-Waleed region to secure the Iraqi-Syrian borders and the western desert (to) eliminat(e) the presence of Islamic State cells, along with destroying tunnels and hideouts that could be used by the militants.”

The battle to eliminate ISIS in Iraq continues with no end of it in prospect any time soon.

A year after Iraqi forces and US-led terror-bombing raped and destroyed Mosul on the phony pretext of defeating ISIS, its sleeper cells remain active – undermining security, preventing the restoration of peace in the country.

Endless conflict and turmoil serve Washington’s imperial agenda. Peace and stability defeat it.

Earlier known as the “highway of death,” the Baghdad/Kirkuk highway remains one of the dangerous roadways in Iraq because of the presence of US-supported ISIS fighters.

A cab driver explained the danger, saying

“(d)riving to Baghdad is getting riskier every day, and we only drive during daylight because now it is impossible to drive after sunset,” adding:

“We hear about more and more kidnappings and fake checkpoints by Daesh. We don’t know how long it will go on like this and at what point it becomes the highway of death again” – making it impossible to travel on it any time.

Hostages are frequently taken. Corpses show up dumped along roadways and elsewhere in the country.

According to an unnamed Iraqi military source,

ISIS “switched to sleeper cell tactics and took refuge in the rural areas around Diyala, Kirkuk and the Hamrin mountains that are far from the outposts of government forces.”

“Their fighters shaved off their beards and wear normal civilian clothes. They might be walking (in public) as we speak.”

They “have no mercy and they don’t spare anyone coming their way, which makes it harder for us to gather information about their movement in such areas.”

Unknown numbers of ISIS elements remain active in the country, carrying out numerous attacks.

US-installed Iraqi puppet prime minister Haider Abadi’s declaration of victory over ISIS last July was public posturing alone, far from reality on the ground.

A Final Comment

Protests continue in Iraq over unaddressed massive corruption and indifference by the Abadi regime to economic crisis conditions affecting millions of impoverished, unemployed and internally displaced Iraqis.

Its oil wealth fails to address vital needs of ordinary Iraqis, basic services lacking throughout the country.

According to Iraqi news sources on Tuesday, Abadi regime security forces killed 14 protesters, hundreds more injured and arrested.

Demonsrations begun two weeks earlier in oil-rich Basra spread to Baghdad and elsewhere in the country.

Iraqis have been suffering for decades with no relief in prospect, victims of US imperial viciousness.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

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Paul Scharre’s new book on autonomous weapons begins with an account of an incident he experienced while on patrol as a US Army Ranger in Afghanistan in 2004.  A young girl of five or six years old herding a couple of goats approached Scharre’s team while they were taking cover in the mountains.  As she looped around them, frequently glancing towards them, they realised she had a radio and was reporting their position, acting as a spotter for Taliban fighters.

What should the soldiers do?  According to the laws of war, the girl was an enemy combatant whom they were allowed to shoot.  If a person is participating in hostilities, regardless of their age, they are a lawful target for engagement.

Scharre and his squad had no doubt that it would have been quite wrong to kill the little girl, and so they moved away and regrouped in a safer area.  But what would a machine have done in their place?  If it had been programmed to kill enemy combatants lawfully, it would have attacked the child.  The incident highlights one of the gravest concerns in the debate over whether to develop autonomous weapon systems – could a robot ever know when it is lawful to kill, but wrong to do so?

‘Army of None’ takes us into the future world of emerging weapons technology – lethal autonomous weapon systems, or ‘killer robots’, driven by artificial intelligence and able to wage war without the need for human command.  Although they sound like the plot of a science fiction movie, the technology needed to build autonomous weapons already exists, and such systems are on the point of development.

Advanced weapons currently in service, such as the Brimstone missile, Israel’s Harpy drone, and the US Navy’s Aegis combat system, already show many autonomous features and give a hint of possibilities for the future.  Rapid advances in computing technology, robotics, and the development of high definition sensors will soon enable the creation of weapons that are able to ‘think’ for themselves and undertake combat tasks without the need for a commander ‘in the loop’.

Perhaps optimistically, Scharre considers it unlikely that state-based military forces will use truly autonomous weapons without human supervision while waging war.  His view is that humans and machines working as teams – ‘centaur warfighters’, named after the mythical half-human, half-horse creature – will provide the most advantageous combination between the precision of automation and the flexibility of human intelligence.  However, he rightly highlights concerns that terrorist groups, criminals, and non-state actors could easily develop their own home-built autonomous weapons and use them without safeguards, employing off- the-shelf consumer drone and electronic technology and open source software.

The risk of accidents involving autonomous weapons is another area of concern.  A fascinating section of the book documents a series of accidents caused by automated weapon systems such as the Aegis and Patriot air defence systems – and the biases and misunderstandings on the part of their human operators which led to the accidents.  Scharre describes how ‘flash crashes’ caused by artificial intelligence systems used by banks and traders have resulted in lightning-fast and unpredictable slumps in prices on international stock markets, and draws frightening parallels with the rapid escalation that could develop during combat involving autonomous weapon systems to highlight the risks to strategic stability which these weapons pose.

‘Army of None’ doesn’t shy away from probing the intensely difficult moral and ethical issues which are the most problematic issue raised by the development of autonomous weapons.  The book explains legal and ethical issues relating to the laws of armed combat in clear and simple terms, and presents a range of expert opinions from leading thinkers in the field whom Scharre has interviewed.  Disappointingly, however, he argues that the development of precision weapons has reduced casualties in modern warfare and advances the suggestion that autonomous weapon systems may do likewise without exploring the counterview that the benefit of reduced casualties as perceived by governments may increase the risk that war becomes a more ‘thinkable’ and accepted method for resolving conflict.

The book’s finale is a thoughtful analysis of international arms control treaties over the course of history, as part of an examination of steps that could be put in place to curb the spread of autonomous weapon systems.  Scharre argues that arms control treaties work well when they apply to weapons with horrific effects, which have limited military utility, and are possessed by a relatively small number of states.  Unfortunately, he concludes, an all-out global ban on autonomous weapons is unlikely to work because of their perceived military value and their development by a wide range of militarised nations.  He highlights difficulties in defining autonomous weapons in a way which would discriminate them from existing highly automated systems such as Brimstone and Aegis, which possessing states would be unlikely to want to surrender, and in ensuring that any international ban is not flouted during wartime.

However, ‘Army of None’ proposes a number of realistic alternatives to a ban treaty, including a ban on antipersonnel autonomous weapon systems, which might work because such systems would have a low military utility but a high potential for causing harm; a non-legally binding code of conduct to help establish norms for the control of autonomous weapons; and the establishment of a general principle that human judgment must always be involved in war and that there must always be a positive human involvement in lethal force decisions.   The book’s conclusion is a powerful call for restraint, and an appeal for states and society to urgently develop an understanding of which uses for autonomous systems are acceptable, and which go too far.

Paul Scharre is well placed to write about autonomous weapon systems.  After his tour in the US Army he worked as an analyst at the Pentagon, playing a leading role in developing policies on unmanned and autonomous systems and emerging weapons technologies for the US Department of Defense.  He now directs the technology and national security program at the Centre for a New American Security – a centrist think tank specialising in US national security issues.

Scharre’s book tells you much of what you need to know about autonomous weapons, drawing from his own insider knowledge and adding insight from a series of expert interviews.  The book does not go into as much detail as some of the specialist technical papers that Scharre has published, but instead provides a readable and accessible basic text on the topic.  ‘Army of None’ is an important contribution to the debate on autonomous weapon systems and should definitely be read by anyone who wants a sound introduction to this worrying subject.

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The end of the Islamic State (ISIS) occupation of a third of Iraq and the return to control by Government forces of the entire territory is not giving peace and stability to Mesopotamia.

People took to the streets in many southern provinces protesting about the lack of basic services the country has been suffering from for over a decade. In addition, despite an all- party agreement over the results of the last parliamentary elections, the choice of a Prime Minister is not going to be easy. And that is not all: Mesopotamia’s problems continue with the bras-de-fer between Iran and the US, which is intensifying. The actual Prime Minister Haidar Abadi is no longer Iran’s favourite candidate but to the US and its regional Middle Eastern partners he remains so. The big question remains: in the event of successfully backing “their” candidate, who would be the winner, Iran or the USA? Both are determined not to lose and are using all available means to promote their own candidate-agenda.

Interim Prime Minister Haidar Abadi is managing for now to absorb the anger of the population, who took to the streets. They were demonstrating about the lack of jobs, the rationing of fresh water in the southern city of Basra, the regular power cuts in the very hot weather in southern and central Iraq, and they were revolting against the overwhelming corruption Iraq has suffered from since the US occupation in 2003.

Some of the demonstrators destroyed public institutions (the airport of Najaf), burned private shops and homes belonging to some members of the parliament and local organisations, and this justified the intervention of the security services. They arrested many individuals, and designated a specific place for demonstrators to manifest their freedom of expression. The security services opened all closed roads, even the ones between Basra and Kuwait.

That most oil-rich city, Basra, is characterised by its situation on a giant oilfield, the largest in the world, and its ample resources of oil and gas. It produces an average of 3.2 million barrels per day (b/d) and exports an estimated 4.6 million b/d through its southern port. The Rumaila field on its own, one of the biggest fields of Basra (with 340 oil wells), contains the finest oil in the world. However, despite the high oil yield in the south of Iraq (in the provinces of Basra, DhiQar, Maysan, Muthanna and Wasit), very little has been done for its population who right till today are still suffering from the absence of basic services.

Iraq sold 3.84 million b/d in June, increased it to 4.5 million b/d in the same month and would reach 4.7 million b/d this month of July even if OPEC limit was set to 4.35 million b/d for Iraq. Political parties in Mesopotamia are calling the government to detach itself from OPEC and go for unlimited daily production. The country needs money and has invested hundreds of billions in fighting and defeating the “Islamic State” group (ISIS).

Southern Iraq, despite its riches in oil and gas production, desperately lacks electricity. Basra and other provinces receive electricity from Iran that has delivered back-up supplies to Iraq since 2012: Khoramchehr supplies Basra, Karkhah supplies Amara, Mirsad supplies Diyalaand Serpil Zahab supplies Khaniqin. Iraq has suffered a shortage of electrical power since 1990.

Following the US invasion, corruption within the central government and many terrorist attacks on electric facilities caused a huge increase in power cuts each day, cutting the electricity supply from twenty hours to eight hours per day, and this in a country where the temperature can reach 58 degrees Celsius (I have experienced for many years the July temperature, where without electricity the indoor temperature reached 49 degrees Celsius. People were managing to sleep on the roof for a few hours after midnight). However, at one stage Iran halted over 1200 MW of electricity supplies to Iraq, due to over $1bn accumulated debt.

This is where the problem starts:

Iraq paid $100 million of Iranian debts but is faced with the US sanctions on Iran. Iraq, under Abadi, would like to abide by the US measures. Sources in the office of the Prime Minister said “the US is trying to substitute the Iranian supply of electricity by putting pressure on two main neighbouring countries (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) to support Iraq with its basic needs and inviting them to offer their structural capabilities to Abadi offering electricity in exchange of oil. The aim is to push Iran away and limit its influence in Mesopotamia”.

Indeed, US Ambassadors based in the Middle East and the US special presidential envoy to Iraq Brett McGurk are doing their best to convince Gulf countries of the necessity to support Haidar Abadi and Moqtada al-Sadr and promote these so they can gain power in the new government selected, and stand against Iran and its allies in Iraq. They are asking neighbouring countries (rather than Iran) to provide Iraq with electricity so that the Iranian economy does not benefit.

“US envoy Brett McGurk visited us in Baghdad and asked us to support Moqtada and Abadi in one coalition to re-elect the actual prime minister. We told him that Moqtada al-Sadr is unpredictable and can’t be considered reliable. Your (US) policy in Iraq has never been successful and your choices are not in our interest” said the highest two political Sunni authorities in Iraq visited by the US envoy. Ambassador McGurk, said the sources, apparently didn’t like this unexpected answer: if Iraqi leaders don’t abide by the US’s” recommendations”, he threatened reprisals.

“We told Ambassador Brett that if he is threatening us he will receive no collaboration from our side and will create a negative outcome for all”, said the sources.

And the Sunni are not the only ones refusing to support Moqtada and Abadi. The US envoy visited Kurdistan and received similar answers from the Kurdish leaders.

The US is also calling upon Shia party leaders, especially Sayyed Ammar al-Hakim, who seems the most docile of all those contacted, and shows himself very willing to collaborate.

It seems the chances of Haidar Abadi of renewing his mandate for another four years are becoming slimmer by the minute. Iran and its allies, or perhaps the anti-US parties in Iraq among Shia, Sunni and Kurds, are prevailing. There was a time when both Iran and the US agreed on the same candidate, the actual Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi. Today, the US has declared economic war on Iran to cripple its capabilities, affecting the Iranian people and its local currency. The embargo will seriously begin in August and will intensify in November.

Therefore, Iran can’t accept a hostile government in Baghdad, and the US finds it difficult to see Iraq on Iran’s side, particularly as this threatens the effectiveness of its “unilateral” embargo. Iraq could help to sell Iran’s oil and increase commerce and trade with Tehran, thus spoiling Donald Trump’s plan to force the “Islamic Republic” into some kind of submission.

Moreover, the US feels very uncomfortable with the Iraqi security forces, Hashd al-Shaabi, created in 2014 to fight ISIS, following the Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s call for Jihad against the terror group (wrongly accused of being under Iran’s command). These forces have taken up positions along the border between Iraq and Syria.

On the 18^thof June, Israeli jets bombed and destroyed Iraqi security forces HQ on the borders with Syria. The Hashd’s position served to monitor ISIS movement from Syria into Iraq. Due to the presence of ISIS in the US controlled area in the north-eastern Syria, no regular ground troops, Syrian or Iraqi, are allowed to attack and pursue ISIS in the territory it controls. This is what pushed Hashd al-Shaabi to:

1. Launch a clear threat to the US forces, promising to return the hit against its forces that caused the death of 24 Iraqi security members (no obvious reaction from Baghdad). The Hashd considers the US in control of the sky over Iraq, therefore, no Israeli attack could have taken place without the US approval. The Iraqi forces will, without any doubt, retain the right to retaliate even if the balance of power shifts in Mesopotamia so that the Iraqi government decides to side with the US against Iran.
2. Take the decision to surround the entire area where ISIS is based. Moreover, Hashd has pushed its forces further: in agreement with the Syrian army, both forces in respective countries have surrounded the US base in al-Tanf to limit the movement of these forces on the ground.

The US forces had imposed a 50-mile (80 Km) safety circle around its bases in Syria and Iraq. Both countries respect the US procedure but have established static forces around the base, creating a real feeling to these forces that they are unwelcome, since their function is limited to occupying Syrian territory and preventing commercial exchanges between the two countries. There is no ISIS in the eastern Tanf crossing.

Moreover, Hashd commanders believe the US is aiming to establish several military bases in Iraq and in particular close to the borders with Syria. The Iraqi security forces believe it is capable of standing against any ISIS resurrection or attack and therefore is not in need of not even one single military base in the country. Also, there is no longer a need for a US-led military coalition in Iraq, only trainers and an exchange of experiences and intelligence for fighting terrorism, according to Hashd commanders.

In many past circumstances, Abadi wanted to remove the vice head of Hashd al-Shaabi Jamal Jaafar Mohammad Ali, aka Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes. He is Iran’s man and that “said it all”. However, the Iraqi prime minister is not in a position today to create a reaction against him from Hashd al-Shaabi, a group that is very popular in Iraq. This is why Abadi has visited Hashd HQ to meet Mohandes and put an end to these rumours (for the time being). It is known among decision makers that US has accepted the role of Hashd and its inclusion within the Iraqi security forces but would like to see Mohandes removed from power.

The US is in constant arm-wrestling with Iran over Mesopotamia and the Levant. It is trying to reduce Iran’s possibilities in the Middle East so as to prepare for the embargo by the end of the year. The US agreed to promote even Moqtada al-Sadr, the one responsible for killing many US soldiers during their occupation in 2003-2011 to the country!

He gained points because he expressed himself against Iran on a few occasions and has visited certain neighbouring countries, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, who hold animosity against Iran.

Actually, Moqtada is not pro-American nor pro-Saudi but is trying to achieve a personal identity and adopt the role of supreme leader in Iraq. However, he is imposing himself on Mesopotamia not through charisma (which he is lacking), but through silent terror as he directs his “Saraya al Salam” militants towards manifestations or bullying. This is making him a feared personality.

Moqtada, in fact on many occasions, requested shelter in Iran during the US occupation of Iraq, and was financed by IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) general Qassem Soleimani for years. Still today he meets with the Iranian general and asks him to include him, rather than letting him be isolated from any large coalition that is expected to form the new government.

Abadi and Moqtada are creating today, along with al-Hikma of Sayyed Ammar al-Hakim, a possible coalition to oppose another coalition within the Shia community led by Nuri al-Maliki and Hadi al-Ameeri. Abadi’s chances are steadily reducing in the eyes of many Iraqi leaders, who are dwelling on two names, Ameri and Faleh al-Fay’yad, the head of Hashd al-Shaabi, to lead the new government.

The last word has not been pronounced, but is expected by the end of this summer. Who will win? The US – with certain of Iraq’s neighbours – promoting Abadi? Or Iran, successfully tempting candidates away from the US’s orbit?

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All images in this article are from the author.

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As FAIR has noted before (1/8/18, 3/20/18), to MSNBC, the carnage and destruction the US and its Gulf Monarchy allies are leveling against the poorest country in the Arab world is simply a non-issue.

On July 2, a year had passed since the cable network’s last segment mentioning US participation in the war on Yemen, which has killed in excess of 15,000 people and resulted in over a million cases of cholera. The US is backing a Saudi-led bombing campaign with intelligence, refueling, political cover, military hardware and, as of March, ground troops. None of this matters at all to what Adweek (4/3/18) calls “the network of the Resistance,” which has since its last mention of the US’s role in the destruction of Yemen found time to run over a dozen segments highlighting war crimes committed by the Syrian and Russian governments in Syria.

By way of contrast, as MSNBC was marking a year without mentioning the US role in Yemen, the PBS NewsHour was running a three-part series on the war, with the second part (7/3/18) headlined, “American-Made Bombs in Yemen Are Killing Civilians, Destroying Infrastructure and Fueling Anger at the US.” The NewsHour’s Jane Ferguson reported:

The aerial bombing campaign has not managed to dislodge the rebels, but has hit weddings, hospitals and homes. The US military supports the Saudi coalition with logistics and intelligence. The United States it also sells the Saudis and coalition partners many of the bombs they drop on Yemen.

MSNBC chat show/Starbucks commercial Morning Joe did run one segment (4/25/18) that vaguely mentioned the war on Yemen, but failed to note the US’s role in it at all, much less that Washington is arming and backing the conflict’s primary aggressor. Instead, they did the perverse inversion––previously mastered by Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl (FAIR.org, 6/27/17)—of not only ignoring the US’s major role in killing thousands, but painting the US as a noble haven for refugees. The schlocky segment, an interview with writer Mohammed Al Samawi, was a shallow mixture of “interfaith” pablum, poverty porn and self-congratulations to the US for taking in refugees (without, of course, acknowledging that they’re seeking refuge from a crisis the US has created).

For a bit more context, in the time period of July 3, 2017, to July 3, 2018, MSNBC dedicated zero segments to the US’s war in Yemen, but 455 segments to Stormy Daniels. This isn’t to suggest the Stormy Daniels matter isn’t newsworthy—presidential corruption is per se important. But one has to wonder if this particular thread of venality is 455 stories more important than Trump aggressively supporting a war that’s killing hundreds of people a month, injuring thousands, and subjecting millions to famine and cholera. Did MSNBC editors, poring over the latest academic foreign policy literature, really come to the conclusion Trump’s war in Yemen isn’t important? Or is MSNBC simply fueled by partisan Russia dot-connecting and stories that allow them to say “porn star” as much as possible?

What seems most likely is MSNBC has found that attacking Russia form the right on matters of foreign policy is the most elegant way to preserve its “progressive” image while still serving traditional centers of power—namely, the Democratic Party establishment, corporate sponsors, and their own revolving door of ex-spook and military contractor-funded talking heads (3/26/18). After all, Obama backed the war on Yemen—though not nearly as aggressively as Trump has—and it’s difficult to make a coherent left-wing, anti-war criticism when the current Republican in office is simply carrying out your guy’s policy, but on steroids.

In any event, it’s not like any Yemenis are going to pull ads, turn down appearances, or phone Comcast higher-ups complaining. So, who cares? To be poor and brown—to say nothing of not serving the immediate partisan interests of the Democratic party—is evidently to not matter much in the eyes of MSNBC producers and on-air talent.

ACTION ALERT:

Please tell MSNBC to pay serious attention to the US role in the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Yemen.

Contact: Deb Finan, Senior VP, Programming and Production

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @MSNBC

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Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org.

Featured image is from the author.

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Given the overwhelming evidence that activist efforts are failing to halt the accelerating rush to extinction precipitated and maintained by dysfunctional human behavior, it is worth reflecting on why this is happening.

Of course, you might say that the rush to extinction is being slowed.

But is it? Even according to BP’s chief economist: ‘despite the extraordinary growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years. The share of coal in the power sector in 1998 was 38% – exactly the same as in 2017…. this is one area where at the global level we haven’t even taken one step forward, we have stood still: perfectly still for the past 20 years.’ See ‘Analysis – Spencer Dale, group chief economist’.

And, to choose another measure that highlights our lack of ‘progress’: species extinctions proceed at a rate of 200 each day, which is vastly greater than the long-term background rate, with another 26,000 species already identified as ‘under threat’. See ‘Red list research finds 26,000 global species under extinction threat’.

But it wouldn’t matter what measure you analyzed – efforts to prevent cataclysmic nuclear war, to halt the many ongoing wars, to contain and reverse the prevalent and grotesque economic exploitation, to end slavery or the sex trafficking of women and children, to halt or even slow the rampant destruction of the biosphere, including the rainforests and oceans – we are rapidly losing ground (and often despite some apparent gains such as adoption of the ‘Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’ by many non-nuclear states on 7 July 2017).

Not only are we destroying the rainforests – currently at the rate of 80,000 acres each day: see ‘Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World’s Rainforests’ – and oceans – see ‘The state of our oceans in 2018 (It’s not looking good!)’ – as a fellow long-standing nonviolent activist, Kelvin Davies, recently observed to me: the oceans and remaining rainforests are ‘being emptied of life’ as impoverished people, forced to the economic margin, hunt remaining wildlife, including tropical fish, for food and/or trafficking.

Before we blame impoverished people for their destruction however, it is the consumption by those of us in industrialized countries that is generating the adverse circumstances in which they are forced to survive. For one simple example of this, related to our diet alone, see ‘Emissions impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet’.

Of course, you might object that it is not activist efforts that are responsible for the failure to halt elite violence and our complicity in it. It is the failure of corporatized society to seriously consider and respond intelligently to the scientific and other evidence in relation to all of the violence in its many manifestations. However, any explanation of this nature fails to understand and appreciate why progressive change has always occurred in the past.

Social progress is the result of people of conscience strategically challenging elite power in such a way that new norms become so widely accepted that elites are compelled to work within them. This has always been essential for the simple reason that elites are insane and have never acted sensibly, whatever the issue. Elites have only ever orchestrated events to maximize their own power, profit and privilege whatever the cost to the rest of us and the Earth itself. Hence, violence, war, grotesque economic exploitation and ecological destruction are rampant across the planet; that is the way elites want it; that is what maximizes elite power, profit and privilege. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

As an aside: if you aren’t convinced that the global elite is insane, then perhaps you might ponder the possible implications of the recent call by US President Donald Trump, for the creation of a new Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. military – ‘We must have American dominance in space’ – in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. See ‘Trump Orders Establishment of Space Force as Sixth Military Branch’.

While this enterprise, if it gets Congressional approval, would be staggeringly profitable to the global elite while further gutting social and environmental programs to pay for it, the proposal also raises the possibility, as Professor Karl Grossman graphically expressed it (given that there is no way to have the envisaged weapons in space without nuclear power) that ‘the heavens are going to be littered with radioactive debris’ for millennia (but in substantially greater amounts than is already there). See ‘Trump’s Space Force: Military Profiteering’s Final Frontier’ and ‘Star Wars Redux: Trump’s Space Force’.

Of course, if you want even more evidence of elite insanity, then look no further than the current hysteria generated by Donald Trump’s supposed ‘treason’ for having a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki with the intention of improving mutual understanding and the prospects of peace between the two countries. For a sample of the literature that discusses this summit intelligently, which you won’t find in the corporate media, see ‘US Media is Losing Its Mind Over Trump-Putin Press Conference’, ‘Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia?’, ‘Helsinki Talks – How Trump Tries To Rebalance The Global Triangle’ and ‘Trump, The Manchurian Candidate: “Conspiracy” to Destabilize the Trump Presidency’.

Some informed and thoughtful analysts believe this could lead to an elite coup to remove Trump from the US presidency. See ‘Coming Coup Against Trump’ and ‘The Coming Coup to Overthrow President Trump: Sedition at the Highest Levels’.

So, to consolidate the information presented above, let me encapsulate the nature of geopolitics in one paragraph:

The military forces of the United States are not intended to defend the United States against military attack. The military forces of the countries in NATO are not intended to defend the respective member countries against military attack. The military forces of the United States and NATO are controlled by the global elite and used by the global elite to aggressively attack, in violation of all relevant national and international laws, any country that seeks independent control and development of its resources, particularly fossil fuels, strategic minerals and water. The global elite, which is in total control of the global economy and world affairs generally, does this in order to expand its own power, profit and privilege. It does this no matter what the cost to any individual (outside the elite), people, country and the biosphere. Why does the global elite do all of this? The global elite does this because it is completely insane.

Hence, to return to my point about the driver of social progress historically: Did the trans-Atlantic slave trade end because elites decided to halt the practice? Did gains for some women during the 21^st century occur because elites committed themselves to ending patriarchal privilege? Did the British walk out of their colony in India because the British elite suddenly perceived the injustice of their violence and exploitation?

Despite the successes of activists of earlier generations, however, those of us who identify as activists of this generation are failing, quite comprehensively, to respond intelligently, powerfully and strategically to the vast challenges posed by an elite that has expanded its capacity to intimidate, outflank and overwhelm us (which is why, incidentally, slavery is now far more widespread than during any earlier period in human history, violence against women still manifests in a grotesque variety of forms all over the planet and even India has strayed monstrously from Gandhi’s vision).

In essence, strategic lessons learned by earlier generations of activists are forgotten or ignored as we stumble powerlessly to the extinction that is shortly to claim us all.

While I could write at some length about our shortcomings as activists in the era of perpetual violence and war, grotesque economic exploitation and pervasive climate and environmental destruction, I would like to focus on what I regard as the two key issues: strategy and conscience.

The global elite is deeply entrenched and manages world affairs, particularly through its capitalist economy. The global elite has developed over hundreds of years during which time it has fully and deeply penetrated all of the major power structures in world society, most of which it created (or moulded during their creation), so that the primary levers of power in the modern world – key financial institutions such as central banks, the major asset management corporations and the giant corporations in key industries (such as, but not limited to, the banking and weapons industries) – as well as the instruments through which its policies are implemented – including governments, military forces (both national and as ‘military contractors’ or mercenaries), key ‘intelligence’ agencies, legal systems and police forces, key nongovernment organizations such as the Vatican, and the academic, educational, media, medical, psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries – are all fully responsive to elite control.

More precisely than this, as explained in his forthcoming book ‘Giants: The Global Power Elite’, Professor Peter Phillips identifies the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under management, as the giants of world capitalism. The total capital under management on behalf of all seventeen corporations is in excess of $US41.1 trillion; it represents the wealth invested for profit by thousands of millionaires, billionaires and corporations. These seventeen giants operate in nearly every country in the world and are ‘the central institutions of the financial capital that powers the global economic system’. They invest in anything considered profitable, ranging from ‘agricultural lands on which indigenous farmers are replaced by power elite investors’ to public assets to war.

Phillips goes on to note that the global elite develops and coordinates its policies through a variety of private planning fora such as the Group of Thirty, the Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Council which determine the policies and issue the instructions for their implementation by transnational governmental institutions like the G7, G20, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Elite policies are also implemented following instruction of the relevant agent, including governments, in the context. These agents then do as they are instructed.

Or, if they do not, they are overthrown. Just ask any independently-minded government over the past century. For a list of governments overthrown by the global elite using its military and ‘intelligence’ agencies since World War II, see William Blum’s book ‘Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II’ or, for just the list, see ‘Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List’.

As a result of coordination through the above elite fora, for example, gigantic media, public relations and entertainment corporations are used to reinforce elite dogma promulgated through national educational institutions so that most western humans become powerless consumers of elite product, informational and material, as the elite pursues ever-increasing profit, power and privilege. Oblivious to the way in which they are caught up in the elite drive to make us consume, even most western activists are major consumers, failing to limit their consumption in line with some appreciation of the per capita ecological carrying capacity of the Earth.

Hence, as should be obvious by now, with a deeply entrenched global elite in total control of major economic/financial, political, military, legal and social (including educational and media) power structures, only a comprehensive and sophisticated strategy has any prospect of succeeding, whatever the issue, and certainly the fundamental one: elite power.

In other words, if we want to end war (or even just one war), halt exacerbation of the climate catastrophe (in a region, country or the world), end environmental destruction on a vast range of fronts, terminate economic exploitation including (modern) slavery, end the sex trafficking of women and children, end the military occupation of Palestine, Tibet, West Papua… then we are going to have to think, plan and act strategically, which includes engaging and mobilizing, in a focused way, a significant proportion of the human population. Simply ‘campaigning’ on the basis of a few ideas and tactics that we think worked in the past, is not enough. Campaigning without strategy – and all that strategic thinking, including a penetrating analysis of the very nature of society and its power structure, entails – is a waste of time.

This is why most work of virtually all ‘activist’ NGOs is useless. They work within the elite-designed and managed global power structure, fearfully self-limiting their actions in accordance with elite-approved processes, such as those ‘within the law’ and lobbying elite-controlled governments and institutions, as well as international organizations such as the UN. By participating in elite-controlled processes, our dissent is absorbed and dissipated, as the elite intend.

This is the great achievement, from an elite perspective, of ‘democracy’: to the extent that people can be persuaded to participate in the delusion that democracy exists (anywhere on Earth) and that voting and lobbying changes anything important, they are unwitting victims of elite-manipulated processes and propaganda.

This also explains why virtually all NGOs invariably end up promoting elite-sponsored delusions such as, for example, those in relation to the climate catastrophe which talk of an ‘end of century’ timeframe (about 70 years more than we actually have), staying within 2 (or 3 or 1.5) degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level (rather than the .5 degrees that is actually necessary) and, the most fundamental delusion of all, that we must substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels (which is certainly necessary), rather than (in addition) profoundly reduce – by at least 80% – consumption generally, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding our individual and community self-reliance if all environmental concerns are to be effectively addressed.

But elite-sponsored delusions are widely promulgated by its corporate media on a vast range of issues with only the rarest ‘activist’ NGO, concerned to focus on what it defines as its primary mission, taking a stand on these apparently ‘separate’ issues. So, for example, elite-sponsored delusions that are widely promulgated by its corporate media convince huge numbers of people that US-NATO wars against impoverished and militarily-primitive countries are in ‘self defense’ and that terrorists are a genuine threat to ‘national security’. At a more mundane level, elite-sponsored delusions propagated through its corporate media promote everything from genetically-mutilated, poisoned and junk food to psychiatric drugs. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’. These products are also highly profitable but because their insanity includes lacking any sense of morality, elites are unconcerned about the damage they inflict on us in these regards just as in all others.

Some grassroots activist groups are more politically savvy than NGOs but usually still lack comprehensive and sophisticated strategies. On rare occasions, it should be noted, one of these campaigns or national liberation struggles succeeds, because of such factors as the raw power of nonviolent action (even without strategy) or because they could rely on the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) effect to facilitate mobilization of significant numbers of people in a local area.

However, the global elite is unconcerned about the occasional local ‘setback’ which does not adversely impact its global agenda and where minor gains by grassroots activists can, if necessary, be subsequently reversed (including by simply violating the law, as the elite routinely does with impunity). Consider again, the above example of Trump’s call to violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty or routine violation of legally-declared (and sometimes World Heritage-listed) national parks in Africa, Asia and Central/South America as major corporations seek to exploit oil and mineral wealth. The law is designed to intimidate and impede us; it is rarely used in an attempt to hold elites accountable and has little, if any, impact when it does: a corporation may, occasionally, be fined (an expense against generating monstrous profit). Fundamentally, elites are above the law: they draft it to defend their interests against the rest of us.

But to reiterate the main point: given the sheer number of (sometimes even large-scale) mobilizations on one issue after another around the world that achieve nothing of substance in relation to the issue itself (consider the demonstrations against the imminent war on Iraq, held in over 600 cities around the world and involving as many as 30 million people, on 15 February 2003), it is painfully clear that most grassroots activists have no conception of strategy either, including the appropriate strategic focus for their tactics.

And this applies equally to those national liberation activists in occupied countries such as Palestine, Tibet and West Papua, as well as those activists living in the many countries, such as Cambodia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, run by dictatorships or where the elected government, such as that of Brazil, has been removed in a coup.

As touched on above, however, lack of sound strategy (including the structural analysis on which it must be based) is not the only shortcoming in our efforts to halt elite (or even our own) violence.

In the past, a primary motivator of activists, and particularly the great ones such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, was their conscience: The ‘inner voice’ that called them to action on both the personal and political levels.

But there is more to conscience than being called to action. So what is so important about conscience? Conscience is the mind function that asks the deeper questions such as ‘What is the right way to go about this?’, ‘How must I behave if I am to model what I ask of others?’ and ‘How will we design this campaign so that its conduct helps to create the world we envision?’ (rather than the simpler question ‘How will we win this campaign?’).

Moreover, living by one’s conscience requires courage: This includes making strategic choices to take significant or, occasionally, even great risks when elite violence threatens to intimidate a struggle into submission and silence.

It was his unyielding conscience, deeply guiding his personal and political behaviour (including his commitment to nonviolence and his extraordinarily austere lifestyle), and his superlative understanding of strategy that made Gandhi the great activist that he was. Why?

Because Gandhi’s nonviolence was based on certain premises derived from his conscience – including the importance of the truth, the sanctity and unity of all life, and the unity of means and end – his strategy was always conducted within the framework of his desired political, social, economic and ecological vision for society as a whole and not limited to the purpose of any immediate campaign.

It is for this reason that Gandhi’s approach to strategy is so important. He is always taking into account the ultimate end of all nonviolent struggle – a just, peaceful and ecologically sustainable society of self-realized human beings – not just the outcome of this campaign. He wants each campaign to contribute to the ultimate aim, not undermine vital elements of the long-term and overarching struggle to create a world without violence.

So what do we do?

If you would like to better understand why so many human beings, including those within the elite, are devoid of anything resembling a conscience, you can do so by reading what happened to them as a child in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you are interested in acting in ways that maximize the chance that elite opponents and their agents will reflect, deeply, on what they are doing, while fundamentally changing the power relationship between you and your opponents, then you are welcome to consider acting strategically in the way that Gandhi did. Whether you are engaged in a peace, climate, environment or social justice campaign or a national liberation struggle, the 12-point strategic framework and principles are the same. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

The strategic aims and a core list of strategic goals to end war and to end the climate catastrophe, for example, are identified in ‘Campaign Strategic Aims’ and the strategic aims and a core list of strategic goals to defeat a political or military coup, remove a military occupation, remove a dictatorship or defeat a genocidal assault are identified here: ‘Liberation Strategic Aims’.

If you would like a straightforward explanation of ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’ and an introduction to what it means to think strategically, try reading about the difference between ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’.

If you anticipate violent repression by a ruthless opponent, make sure that you plan and implement any nonviolent action as history has taught us: ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

If you are interested in nurturing children to live by their conscience and to gain the courage necessary to resist elite violence fearlessly, while living sustainably despite the entreaties of capitalism to over-consume, then you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’. After all, capitalism and other dysfunctional political, economic and social structures only thrive because of our dysfunctional parenting which robs children of their conscience and courage, among many other qualities, while actively teaching them to over-consume as compensation for having vital emotional needs denied. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

Why this emphasis on children you might ask? For good reason. It is dysfunctional human behavior that got us into this civilizational mess and allowed the emergence of exploitative social, political and economic structures. So if we do not emphasize the importance of profoundly changing the way in which we nurture children so that they behave functionally in context, everything else we do to preserve humanity and the biosphere must ultimately fail. The onslaught of our dysfunctional species will simply overwhelm the biosphere, sooner or later, whether it is this generation or the next.

But we don’t have to settle for improving our parenting. We can improve our own functionality and access our conscience and courage too. How? See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you are already guided by your conscience to act powerfully in response to elite violence, you might also consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’, which outlines a simple plan for people to systematically reduce their consumption while progressively increasing their self-reliance, and consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

You may believe that you can halt elite violence without engaging your conscience (and the deep internal search that this requires) and without using Gandhian nonviolent strategy. Even if you are right, the key question is then this: Is the world you will get any better than this one?

And don’t forget the timeframe. Major historical struggles, including those noted above, took decades (whatever the merits and shortcomings of their strategies) or, as in most cases, are ongoing. How long do you want to wait before you invest time in learning how to think, plan and act strategically when the future of humanity and the biosphere is now at stake?

So, to conclude: The global elite controls all significant human affairs and even exercises almost total control over the individual lives of human beings. Because the global elite is insane and its psychological (and hence behavioral) dysfunctionality is of a particular kind, it cannot pull back from its existing regime of violence and exploitation, even in response to imperatives from the biosphere.

In this circumstance our choice is simple: near-term human extinction based on our unwitting complicity in elite violence or a conscientious, courageous and strategic response that fundamentally undermines elite power.

This will require a significant number of interrelated nonviolent strategies that each tackle elite violence in one context or another.

You are welcome to consider the options presented just above for your own involvement.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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“I have great admiration for Israel’s nation-state Law. Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans.” – Richard Spencer, poster boy for the ‘Alt-Right’ and White Nationalist Movement.

The aforementioned statement, sent out by Spencer as a tweet on July 21st, was made in response to the passage through the Israeli Knesset of the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. It was his acknowledgement of Israel’s formal declaration of itself to be a racialist, ethno-state.

It is important to clarify what the primary objective of Political Zionism was from the outset: This was to found a Jewish state centered in Palestine to the exclusion of all other races and religions.

The founding of the State of Israel would entail ethnically cleansing the territory earmarked for colonisation, with the inhabitants being supplanted mainly by Jews from Eastern European lands. It was never intended to be a multi-racial state, but a ‘Jews only’ state, something which the founders of Zionism envisaged would be achieved by ‘transferring’ the indigenous Muslim and Christian Arab population to outlying Arab territories.

The term ‘transfer’ as used by Theodor Herzl and David Ben Gurion was Zionism’s euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Where Herzl envisaged this as been achievable through the offer of inducements: by alternately getting property owners to vacate their land by paying them off at higher than market prices, and by securing employment in “transit countries” for the “penniless population” (failing which they would be “discreetly and circumspectly” spirited “across the border”), Ben Gurion and the leaders of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, although supposedly representing the ‘Accomodationist’ wing of Political Zionism, knew like the Revisionist Zionist apostles of Vladimir Jabotinsky that this would only be achieved by force of arms.

This was largely accomplished through the implementation of ‘Plan Dalet’ during the war of 1948.

Israel’s Basic Law, which stipulates that only Jews have the right to self-determination in the country, merely formalises what was already at the heart of the philosophical and ideological foundations of Israel.

Its drift to a more obvious form of a racial-based state was predicted by a group of Jewish intellectuals including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, who felt compelled to write an open letter to the New York Times in 1948. It was an action prompted by the formation of the Right-wing Herut Party by Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun terror group, in the same year. The establishment of Herut was, they believed, a development full of ominous portent that would lead Israel down the path which would legitimise “ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.”

Herut was the precursor of the Likud Party, which first came to power in 1977, and which has ruled Israel for the majority of years since, usually at the head of a coalition of parties with extreme social, political and military agendas.

It is clear why Richard Spencer approves of the Basic Law. He and like-minded white nationalist ideologues envisage a ‘whites first’ form of governance in European countries as well as in the European-majority nations of North America, Australia and New Zealand.

It is not the first time that Spencer has spoken favourably about Israel serving as a beacon for the new order racial societies desired by the alt-right movement.

Speaking before an audience at the University of Florida in October last year, Spencer ruminated over those states from past to present which have influenced his thinking and concluded:

“the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state, the one that I turn to for guidance, even though I might not always agree with its foreign policy decisions – the Jewish state of Israel.”

He is not the only one on the political Right to think this way. Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who has never failed to express his affinity and admiration for Israel, praised the Israeli move by referring to it as “fantastic” and an “example to us all”. Wilders elaborated:

Let’s define our own nation-state, our indigenous culture, our language and flag, define who and what we are and make it dominant by law.

And while Israel and its supporters rail against those who claim that Israel’s laws and values should not be construed as being similar to those of the now dismantled apartheid regime of South Africa, Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime architect of the system, said the following in response to an Israeli vote against apartheid at the United Nations in 1961:

Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude … they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.

And with laws which include prohibitions against the renting and selling of properties to Arabs and to African migrants, secret policies which sterilised Jewish Ethiopian women, and proposed legislation aimed at making DNA testing a mandatory requirement for an immigration system predicated on a Jews-only Law of Return, who can argue against the proposition of it being a racialist apartheid state?

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This article was originally published on Adeyinka Makinde’s blog.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. His tweets can be read at @AdeyinkaMakinde. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

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Another Liberal broken promise. Before becoming prime minister, Justin Trudeau promised to re-engage with Iran. His government has failed to do so and is beginning to echo the warmongers in Washington and Tel Aviv.

“I would hope that Canada would be able to reopen its mission [in Tehran],” Trudeau told the CBC in June 2015. “I’m fairly certain that there are ways to re-engage [Iran],” he said.

Nearly three years into their mandate the Liberals haven’t restarted diplomatic relations with Iran. Nor has Trudeau removed that country from Canada’s state sponsor of terrorism list (Syria is the only other country on the list).

Numerous Canadian sanctions targeting Iran remain and Ottawa continues to present a yearly UN resolution critical of the human rights situation in Iran. Similarly, Liberal MPs participate in the annual “Iran Accountability Week” on Parliament Hill, which showcases individuals such as Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which helped kill the nuclear deal and is pushing harsh sanctions against any country doing business with Iran.

Dubowitz is a senior research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. In 2015 Global Affairs Canada gave the Munk School’s Digital Public Square $9 million to expand an anti-Iranian initiative, which the Trudeau government appears to have maintained.

Trudeau has continued important components of the Stephen Harper government’s “low-level war against Iran”. One major exception had been on the rhetorical front, but that’s changing. In January foreign minister Chrystia Freeland put out a statement saying,

“Canada is deeply troubled by the recent deaths and detentions of protesters in Iran” and two months ago tweeted, “Our government is committed to holding Iran to account for its violations of human and democratic rights.”

Last month Liberal parliamentarians supported a Conservative MP’s private member’s motion that “strongly condemns the current regime in Iran for its ongoing sponsorship of terrorism around the world, including instigating violent attacks on the Gaza border.” In effect, the resolution makes Iran responsible for Israel killing Palestinians peacefully protesting the US Jerusalem embassy move, siege of Gaza and historic theft of their land. The motion also called on Canada to “immediately cease any and all negotiations or discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran to restore diplomatic relations” and to make the highly provocative move of listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity.

The Liberals hardline on Iran coincides with Trump withdrawing from the “p5+1 nuclear deal” with Iran and re-imposing tough new sanctions. Now, Washington is threatening to sanction any country that buys Iranian oil. (If the US succeeds Tehran says it will seek to block oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.)

The US and Israel recently created a “working group” to foment internal protests in Iran. (Demonstrating once again the hypocrisy of US complaints about other countries interfering in its elections.) According to Axios,

“Israel and the United States formed a joint working group a few months ago that is focused on internal efforts to encourage protests within Iran and pressure the country’s government.”

In May the Washington Free Beacon reported on a three-page paper discussed by the US National Security Council to spark regime change in Iran.

Image on the right: Rudy Giuliani (Source: Israel National News)

Three weeks ago Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, called for regime change at a National Council of Resistance of Iran conference in Paris. (Harper also spoke at an event led by the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a cultish group that was previously deemed to be a terrorist organization.) Previously Giuliani said,

“we got a president who is tough, who does not listen to the people who are naysayers, and a president who is committed to regime change [in Iran].” (In “Follow The Money: Three Billionaires Paved Way For Trump’s Iran Deal Withdrawal” Eli Clifton describes the role of arch Zionist donors, notably casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, in shaping US Iran policy.)

In April Trump appointed John Bolton as his national security advisor. An important proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bolton has called for bombing Iran, penning an op-ed in the New York Times headlined “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”.

By breaking his promise to restart diplomatic relations with Iran Trudeau has enabled US-Israeli hawks. In taking up their rhetoric the Liberal Party is further empowering those hurtling towards a major conflict. Shame.

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

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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.

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Year: 2015

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According to Chris Black: “This same US president, who claims to want to resolve things with Russia, is the same man who bullied the NATO gang members to cough up more money for war preparations against Russia, who supports the on going Neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine slaughtering the people of the Donbass, who increases the build up of NATO forces on Russia’s borders, 

Does it not sound contradictory?

Is Trump working with  or against the “Deep State”? ( (M.Ch, GR Editor)

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Well, my friends, I started to write an essay about the Brussels Declaration issued by NATO at the end of the American shakedown meeting with its allies on July 11, that, beneath the platitudes about “democracy” and “shared values” “defensive alliance,” respect for international law” and layer upon layer of lies about “Russian aggression,” is nothing less than a declaration of war. For that is what that document amounts to. Those interested can go to the NATO website and read it for themselves as paragraph after paragraph of fantasy and distortions are set out in that smug tone the war crowd likes to use to fool the rest of us. But be prepared for your mind to be polluted with every word.

So I stopped writing that piece, tore it up, and I stopped because how often can any reasonable person write about the same thing, the same war propaganda dished out with breakfast, lunch and dinner on every TV channel, every radio channel, every newspaper, time after time, without being numbed by it all.

I started to write another piece about the Skripal affair but then news came that the British police claim to have identified two “suspects” in the original incident, and let it be leaked that, of course, they are Russians, no doubt named Boris and Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon, though the British government, to draw more attention to the leak, cautioned that the news may not be confirmed. But you can bet it soon will be, maybe by the time you read this. It’s difficult to keep up with the propaganda the forces for war are putting out on a daily basis.

I started to write another about the Trump-Putin meeting but once again, only succeeded in making myself depressed as I watched the US news media, from the so called “left” to the right, accusing Trump of treason for talking to president Putin about peace and cooperation instead of war and destruction. All the mass media of the western world, that tragic array of countries led by charlatans, fools, gangsters and crooks that are the real face of capitalism, joined in with their fake gasps of consternation at the antics of the American president, all calling for the head of Vladimir Putin to be put on a spike next to Donald Trump’s.

Not since the days of the assassination of President Kennedy have we witnessed such malice and hatred against an American president. Not since the witch hunts of the McCarthy period when American society turned itself inside out has this level of hysteria been generated by the people that control the media and the government machinery. Turn on the news, read a journal, and what you will see is not news but the ravings of secret service officials, interviewed by criminals with the morality of Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist hanged at Nuremberg, telling us they are the voice of truth and the rest of us better just shut up and take it. I even heard one of them make the laughable statement that Putin’s gift of a soccer ball to Trump at their joint press conference, a mere souvenir of the World Cup, and a reminder to Trump that the Russians presented the best World Cup experience ever, is proof positive that Putin is “playing Trump”. I kid you not, and yes, they are that idiotic and that dangerous.

And yet, this same US president, who claims to want to resolve things with Russia, is the same man who bullied the NATO gang members to cough up more money for war preparations against Russia, who supports the on going Neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine slaughtering the people of the Donbass, who increases the build up of NATO forces on Russia’s borders, who supports the coup attempt against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, against Maduro in Venezuela, who has slapped the Palestinians in the face, arranged for the White Helmet terrorists to be rescued from Syrian justice by Israel, and now Canada, who is harassing China with his navy and is intent on beggaring the world with a trade war so “America can be great, again.” One has to wonder whether Trump is a willing dupe in the anti-Russian hysteria contrived by the war fanatics and willingly plays the foil so the hysteria can be raised to a crisis point. Trying to make sense of it all is a maddening affair, unless one goes back to basic principles of how the world works.

In his First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War Marx wrote:

“If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure? We defined the foreign policy aimed at by the International in these words: vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relation of private individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations.”

Yet, where does that exist now? Even president Xi of China recently wrote a letter to Paul Kagame, the mass murderer installed in power in Rwanda by the west, praising him and ignoring the millions of African dead that Kagame, among others, is responsible for. Morality is impaled on expediency and cynical opportunism. The great powers make international agreements and create institutions that temporarily establish how their competition for world plunder will be regulated and the rest of us be damned.

They did it after the First World War. In twenty years that word order resulted in a bigger, more destructive, war. At the end of the Second World War, another world order was established in which the US tried to destroy the socialist movements of the world while the Soviet Union and Red China resisted in war after war after war; until the counter-revolution in the USSR produced the weaker successor state of Russia, China began the slide back towards the rule of capital and the US declared a New World Order in which it planned to dominate and exploit the people of the world. It then attacked Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria and on and on. But their attempt to create this new order has met resistance in every region of the world and as the situation of the people deteriorates, especially in the USA, the reaction becomes more and more irrational and desperate and dangerous to our survival. Even as our industrial civilization brings us all to the edge of extinction, they bang the drums of war.

These successive world orders are continually upset by the very conditions and circumstances they produce as capital searches for ways to increase its exploitation of resources, including human beings who are seen as just another resource to be used and destroyed, for new ways to secure more profit. And so at each new historical phase, a new balance of world forces is established by fresh military conflict, followed by a fresh set of agreements, followed by new conflicts ad infinitum as the dialectic requires in a logic that only a socialist world order can stop.

International relations are a reflection of the contradictions existing in a world economy of competing national state and the class divisions within those states. The economy is global in character and so the struggle for the appropriation of global profit has become acute among the major economic powers with the United States facing a crisis that seems to be so deep that even world war is actively considered as a way out. Capital has problems the world over, proved by the continuous push to squeeze the workers until we are just dry husks the world over. US capital has even bigger problems as its economy and influence weaken. So it is following the logic of war. If the system doesn’t favour you and you have the power to change it, change it to your benefit. That’s what they are doing, but in the doing they don’t care about life, or morality, or us.

Little the war crowd care about the working classes. They are capital. They are the dictatorship. We are the helots who they spit upon with every false word out of their mouths, who steal our money and who steal our lives so they can gorge themselves until they vomit and then gorge themselves the more. So I did not succeed in writing what I intended but you have to forgive me because I’m beyond fed up with that dictatorship, with that system and their gorging while we starve and suffer their wars and decadence. I’m sure you are too. For there is only one world order that I can accept, that can lead us, the working people of the world, out of the cul de sac we find ourselves in, a new world order founded upon morality and justice than can only come with the great emancipation of the working classes of the world, that possible dream, that only struggle can realise.

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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

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As the Trump administration’s court-ordered deadline approaches for reuniting all the families it has forcibly separated at the U.S.-Mexico border, Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers advised a U.S. District Court that as many as 463 parents may have already been deported, jeopardizing reunification with their children.

The news comes weeks after reports that many parents had been asked to sign away their rights to asylum by completing so-called “voluntary departure orders” with the understanding that they could be reunited with their children if they agreed to deportation.

BREAKING: Trump admin releases new numbers on family reunifications. They still say more than 900 parents are "ineligible" to get their children back. For the first time, they disclose that more than 400 have been deported without their kids. pic.twitter.com/1faKDZQbtE

— Alice Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) July 23, 2018

Trump snatched these children away from their parents and then deported the parents… The horror of this story is only growing…

"Trump administration says 463 parents of migrant children may have been deported" https://t.co/ProO6JfF3t pic.twitter.com/mWxJuIhLes

— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) July 24, 2018

This is a long fight ahead. This is truly terrible.https://t.co/4MQ0tRcuo2

— Alida Garcia (@leedsgarcia) July 24, 2018

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One of the reasons why it has seemed so bizarre that the United States would engage in a trade war with its largest creditor in China, is that China has a move that the United States simply can’t defend against.

In terms of any sort of engagement between the United States and China, for at least the last decade or so, it’s always seemed to me that China has an incredibly large amount of leverage over the United States. To the degree that if push comes to shove, China has available actions that the U.S. simply has no answer to.

For the simple reason that they do have the ability to end the U.S. Treasury scheme at any point in time. Because if China did just dump its U.S. Treasury holdings, that would very well likely end the debt bubble overnight.

Of course things are not always quite so simple. Because that means China would take a massive loss on its own position. And to the degree that such an event would also have an impact on global economic conditions, it’s a nuclear option not to be exercised lightly.

My best guess is that the Chinese would prefer an environment of free and fair trade, where everyone prospers. Yet to the degree that if they are pushed into a corner, they do have the ability to respond.

Because the situation is somewhat analogous to someone who has found themselves in a gambling debt that’s larger than they could conceivably imagine a way to be free of. And the lender is faced with the choice of continuing to extend more credit, or accepting that further borrowing is just going to increase the ultimate loss.

Of course if China has also been taking steps to mitigate the impact of such an action, that would further suggest that whether they have to use such an option or not, they have quietly insulated themselves from the fallout, should such an option need to be used.

In terms of prepping for a trade war with the U.S., China has implemented several important steps. For example, for at least the past 10 years the country has been shifting away from a pure export economy and reducing its reliance on sales of goods to the U.S. In 2018, Chinese consumer purchases of goods are expected to surpass that of American consumers. For the past five years, domestic consumption in China accounted for between 55% to 65% of economic growth, and private consumption was the primary driver of the Chinese economy — NOT exports.

The argument that China is somehow dependent on U.S. markets and consumers in order to keep its economy alive is simply a lie. China is now just as enticing a retail market as the U.S., and its domestic market can pick up some of the slack in the event that U.S. markets are suddenly closed to Chinese exports.

This was part of an excellent article by Brandon Smith of alt-market.com, and it’s really worth reading and considering. He raises a lot of points that I have agreed with for a long time, and feel are not often voiced as publicly as some of the other perspectives out there.

Again, you would like to think that the world can agree on a fair and just economic system without resorting to further escalation of a trade war. Yet more and more I continue to wonder if some sort of debt reset, or global default is not rapidly becoming inevitable. 

Although perhaps in the end it’s all digital and paper money at this point anyway. Which has long ago lost touch with underlying economic reality. And hopefully when the bubbles collapse, what rises from the ashes will be a monetary system that serves the people, rather than the banking cartel.

It’s interesting to note that in Venezuela where the currency collapse is already in a later stage than that of many of the developed paper currencies, reports of the people going back to a barter economy continue to surface. 

Similar to what happened in this fascinating Greek Village (that I actually had the blessing of visiting in person back in 2014), where once again it was evident that even when the paper currencies collapse, what’s valued is our true natural abilities and contributions.

I continue to remain fascinated to see how all of the events ultimately unfold. And I agree with Brandon Smith, that whether it’s ultimately used or not, China does have knockout punch to which the U.S. cannot respond. 

*

Chris Marcus is a former Wall Street options trader turned Austrian Economist and writer.

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Corporate Spin: Genetically Modifying the Way to Food Security?

By Colin Todhunter, July 24, 2018

There are major uncertainties concerning the technology (not least regarding its precision and health safety aspects), which are brushed aside by claims of ‘the science’ is decided and the ‘facts’ about GM are indisputable. Such claims – alongside the attempt to sideline non-scientists from the debate – are merely political posturing and part of the agenda to tip the policy agenda in favour of GM.

UK Favours Extremism Over Democracy in Syria

By Mark Curtis, July 24, 2018

How does a British government respond when an allied state invades another territory with the backing of jihadists, overthrows a democratic experiment and consolidates an occupation? Judging by what Turkey is doing in the Afrin district of northern Syria, the answer is: by supporting it.

Israel: The Ultimate Racist Colony. The Jewish Nation State Law

By Dr. Elias Akleh, July 24, 2018

All these privileges for the Jews come on the expense and nullification of the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. This law violates international laws, UN resolutions, peace process and political agreements, and most importantly human morality. It totally negates the existence of Palestinians;the rightful owners of the land. It cancels the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their own homes and towns as guaranteed by international laws. It negates their history, their language, their culture, their religion and their humanity.

What Should “We” Do About Julian Assange?

By Kim Petersen, July 24, 2018

Ecuador’s president Lenín Moreno is reportedly close to reneging on asylum granted to WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange by Ecuador. Assange, who holds Ecuadorian citizenship and is entitled to protection as such by his country of citizenship, is expected to be turned over to the UK very soon.

BRICS and the Fiction of “De-Dollarization”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 24, 2018

hree out of the five BRICS member states are full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) including China, Russia and India.

Brazil and South Africa are heavily dollarized economies, with governments broadly committed to the tenets of neoliberalism. Both Brazil and South Africa are experiencing deap-seated political crises which in large part are attributable to US imperial policies.

Son of Frankenstein? UK Body Backs Human Embryo Gene Editing

By F. William Engdahl, July 24, 2018

Though the announcement is couched in terms that make it seem humanitarian, as potentially a huge advance in science, an agency tied to the British government is encouraging efforts in gene-editing of the DNA of human embryos. It belongs in the category of eugenics. Not surprisingly, the footprints of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller eugenics circles, and major pharma groups as well as GMO seed companies are found here.

The Expansion of U.S. Military Installations in Argentina and Their Implications for Argentine Sovereignty

By Dr. Birsen Filip, July 24, 2018

Argentina is currently among the countries considered likely destinations for new American military installations in the foreseeable future, despite the fact that such arrangements have been rejected by both the population and former leadership of the country in recent years. In fact, all military exercises between Argentina and the U.S. were suspended from 2007 to 2015, as the successive governments of Nestor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sought to reorient Argentine foreign policy away from the U.S. in an attempt to combat imperialism and strengthen regional integration.

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Featured image: Ahmad

Four days ago Ahmad was dumped on again. This time it was a social worker with an assistant who arrived at his house with a young man from Afghanistan. This 23 year old refugee had taken an overdose. He was completely out of it. Barely able to walk or talk he had been taken to the hospital, on foot, but according to the social worker there was no psychiatrist in the hospital. So they walked to Ahmad’s house and asked him to look after the young guy until the morning, when they would return and take him to the hospital. The social worker said if he should cause any difficulty he should call the police who would take him to the cell.

Ahmad is a refugee from Syria who has been on the island for over two years. He is well known amongst the refugees and the refugee agencies. He helps out doing many things. The social worker knew that she had a good chance that Ahmad would help. As he said, what choice did he have even though he was very unhappy.

“If something bad happened to this guy it would be on my shoulders. But if I refused he would be locked in the cell. This would be terrible for him.”

So along with some friends they took him in and tried to settle him down. They made him drink salt water which made him vomit but “cleaned his stomach” and they sat with him and made sure he didn’t hurt himself.

“He talked as if very drunk and we knew that he was suicidal and desperate. Fortunately by the next morning he felt well enough to go back to his place in the camp. The social worker never returned.”

This was no isolated incident. According to Ahmad these events are regular. This is not surprising. It was not so long ago that MSF published a damning report of the mental health crisis in the camps on Lesbos and Samos (Reporting on a Catastrophe: Mental Health Crisis of Refugees on Samos and Lesvos, MSF, October 2017). There can be no disputing that the situation facing the refugees on the frontier islands is profoundly threatening to their physical and mental health. Some can survive the onslaught. Others not and in a wide variety of ways they turn the inhumanity they experience in on themselves whether its alcohol, drugs, self harming, crazy behaviours or paralysing depression. And as Ahmad notes it is largely the other refugees who do what they can to support and help those who are suffering.

Not Trusted, Not Competent

I wanted to know more. Much of what Ahmad told me came as no surprise. Despite the epidemic of psychological despair in the Camp there are virtually no services. The psychiatrist in the hospital is overwhelmed and with few exceptions, many of the social workers and psychologists are next to useless. But more importantly, Ahmad said that generally the refugees did not trust these people. They don’t like the fact that the primary medical intervention is tablets – sedatives – even for traumatised young children. Many get thrown away. They see that most of the social workers and psychologists have no understanding either of their culture and backgrounds or the refugee trauma. Above all, Ahmad complained, many of these people show no respect for the religions and beliefs of the refugees. Women refugees with mental health problems were especially vulnerable. He told me that many would never go to seek external help and suffered out of sight in their tents and containers. Yet again refugees, both women and men, talk of not being able to trust the interpreters, especially in cases of sexual violence and abuse.

These factors alone make the possibility of any effective therapeutic intervention virtually impossible. As far as Ahmad is aware the welfare workers have had no training or education about how to work with refugees from diverse cultures. Above all so many are simply not up to the job. They simply lack experience. Even the most veteran social workers and psychologists would be challenged by the extreme problems presented by the refugees. But on Samos these welfare workers have neither professional supervision nor are they offered access to welfare workers who are familiar and experienced in dealing with the mental health problems confronting refugees. Such resources are widely available in the world today. But as Ahmad points out the camp authorities are not interested. And, he added, they would never think that they might learn something from the refugees themselves who are doing so much to help. In such a context, MSF’s demand to increase psychological resources in the Camps is not sufficient without considering the kinds of resources needed. Simply more of the same is not what is needed.

I asked Ahmad how he understood the behaviours of the psychologists and social workers. Why for example do they not press for the right kind of support that could help them be more effective? How can a social worker just dump a person clearly in crisis? He thought there were many factors which varied from individual to individual. There were some he said who tried to do their best and were humane and kind. Many more he said seemed to be confused about their job. As Ahmad rightly notes psychological reports are used in the asylum process. So many refugees go to a psychologist in the hope they will write a compelling report outlining their traumas and problems which in turn they hope will positively influence their applications. Just how significant they are is unknown but this is what the refugees believe. However, Ahmad noted that when refugees go to the psychologist searching for help with their mental health difficulties some have been told by the psychologist that they cannot help as this is not their job. Their task is to compile reports not offer treatment.

Most of them he continued, seemed obsessed with ‘the rules’. They could only do what the rules (whatever they are, as they are never explained) allowed. Rules seem to dominate them. They seemed scared to challenge in any way, he said. But there again if the psychologists and social workers are out of their depth, and maybe aware of their own short-comings, it is perhaps not so surprising that they fall back on the rules to justify their role.

Abuse

But as Saad pointed out there is one area where some of these workers are prepared to break the rules: sex. He told me many stories of how refugees, both men and women by agreeing to have sex with a social worker or psychologist were able to pass through the Camp quickly, get their papers, and even be given a good place to stay when they got to Athens. And he said there were also examples where refugees who refused to have sex found themselves facing problems such as being rejected for asylum. Whilst preparing this article I discovered that a good friend from Syria who managed to get to Germany clandestinely earlier this year had such an experience. He refused to have sex with the psychologist and he ended up with 2 rejections and was facing possible deportation to Turkey. For this reason he was forced to go underground to get out of Samos. (He now has asylum in Germany.) On reading a draft of this article, Saad replied as follows:

“I say thanks again for writing about this. I think many know about this problem but they say nothing. People around the world need to know what is happening to us and how important it is for refugees to have a strong dick or a good body if they want to get asylum and be out of the Camp quickly.”

The time has long past for this abusive behaviour to be thoroughly investigated and stopped. But as ever, we expect nothing.

There is still a big story to be told about the ‘rules’ framework that dominates refugee policy and practice in Samos and Greece. We know that the Greek state has demanded obedience to its authority from all who are involved with refugees whether individual volunteers or global NGOs. MSF when it was on Samos made all their paid workers sign an incredibly lengthy contract in which they promised at all times to obey the Greek authorities and never to disclose any information arising from their work. Such contracts are the norm here. Obedience is the main pre-condition for their involvement. But given the incompetence of the state agencies why do so many grant them their compliance? It cannot be said that there is no evidence to support the terrible consequences (for the refugees) of their enduring failures. The acceptance of the rules regime almost defies explanation.

It is profoundly disturbing. For example Ahmad explained that none of the agencies and their workers feel any need to justify their decisions or practices. “All we get told is that is the rule. No more.” The decisions of the Camp Manager can never be challenged. She is the boss. “What she says is the law”. The rules regime provides the framework within which power goes unchallenged: no questions are allowed or encouraged. From what Ahmad has observed too many of the workers are prepared to tolerate this work environment and are all too ready to hide behind the regime of rules. But we should not assume that all the workers accept this state of affairs. Sadly we have seen few signs internal opposition. Interestingly, the police federation has been one of the exceptions and has periodically complained about the stresses facing their members such as detaining refugees in the police cell which is a total horror story.

The kinds of criticism raised by refugees such as Ahmad and Saad are intended to make life better for the refugees and indeed for those working with them. To reach better policies and practices we must in part learn from the mistakes of the current system; from top to bottom. This is why it is so important that those employed in the ‘refugee business’ should find ways to speak out and share their experiences. That they have no whistle-blower protections here means that we have to explore and create channels of communication that will offer safety.

Ahmad’s and Saad’s words are important.

They remind us that services and interventions which are not appropriate are worse than useless. They remind us that a total reliance on wholly western psychological /social work practices and theories are also worse than useless and can deepen problems. They remind us that amongst the refugees there are many talents and human resources which are brought to bear both to understand what they face and to find ways of coping with daily life in and around the Camp. They remind us that for all the money spent by the EU to supposedly provide appropriate services for the refugees, that it is the refugees themselves who are carrying the burden of the mental health disasters in the Camps. And finally, they remind us where unchallenged authority is exercised in a context of massive inequalities of power as is the case with refugees and the agencies, then abuse of many kinds flourishes.

(With thanks to Tony, Ahmad, Saad, Sofiane, Misk, and Mohammad for their help.)

*

This article was originally published on Samos Chronicles.

Chris Jones is a frequent Contributor to Global Research

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The pundits and politicians generally take it for granted that President Trump lacks a coherent foreign policy. They believe that he acts solely out of spite, caprice, and political opportunism — lashing out at U.S. allies like Germany’s Angela Merkel and England’s Theresa May only to embrace authoritarian rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. His instinctive rancor and impulsiveness seemed on full display during his recent trip to Europe, where he lambasted Merkel, undercut May, and then, in an extraordinary meeting with Putin, dismissed any concerns over Russian meddling in the 2016 American presidential election (before half-walking his own comments back).

“Nobody knows when Trump is doing international diplomacy and when he is doing election campaigning in Montana,” commented Danish defense minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen following the summit. “It is difficult to decode what policy the American president is promoting. There is a complete unpredictability in this.”

While that reaction may be typical, it’s a mistake to assume that Trump lacks a coherent foreign-policy blueprint. In fact, an examination of his campaign speeches and his actions since entering the Oval Office — including his appearance with Putin — reflect his adherence to a core strategic concept: the urge to establish a tripolar world order, one that was, curiously enough, first envisioned by Russian and Chinese leaders in 1997 and one that they have relentlessly pursued ever since.

Such a tripolar order — in which Russia, China, and the U.S. would each assume responsibility for maintaining stability within their own respective spheres of influence while cooperating to resolve disputes wherever those spheres overlap — breaks radically with the end-of-the-Cold-War paradigm. During those heady years, the United States was the dominant world power and lorded it over most of the rest of the planet with the aid of its loyal NATO allies.

For Russian and Chinese leaders, such a “unipolar” system was considered anathema.  After all, it granted the United States a hegemonic role in world affairs while denying them what they considered their rightful place as America’s equals. Not surprisingly, destroying such a system and replacing it with a tripolar one has been their strategic objective since the late 1990s — and now an American president has zealously embraced that disruptive project as his own.

The Sino-Russian Master Plan

The joint Russian-Chinese project to undermine the unipolar world system was first set in motion when then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin conferred with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin (image on the right) during a state visit to Moscow in April 1997. Restoring close relations with Russia while building a common front against U.S. global dominance was reportedly the purpose of Jiang’s trip.

“Some are pushing toward a world with one center,” said Yeltsin at the time. “We want the world to be multipolar, to have several focal points. These will form the basis for a new world order.”

This outlook was inscribed in a “Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order,” signed by the two leaders on April 23, 1997.  Although phrased in grandiose language (as its title suggests), the declaration remains worth reading as it contains most of the core principles on which Donald Trump’s foreign policy now rests.

At its heart lay a condemnation of global hegemony — the drive by any single nation to dominate world affairs — along with a call for the establishment of a “multipolar” international order. It went on to espouse other key precepts that would now be considered Trumpian, including unqualified respect for state sovereignty, non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states (code for no discussion of their human rights abuses), and the pursuit of mutual economic advantage.

Yeltsin would resign as president in December 1999, while Jiang would complete his term in March 2003. Their successors, Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao, would, however, continue to build on that 1997 foundational document, issuing their own blueprint for a tripolar world in 2005.

Following a Kremlin meeting that July, the two would sign an updated “Joint Statement of the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation Regarding the International Order of the 21st Century.”  It was even more emphatic in its commitment to a world in which the United States would be obliged to negotiate on equal terms with Moscow and Beijing, stating:

“The international community should thoroughly renounce the mentality of confrontation and alignment, should not pursue the right to monopolize or dominate world affairs, and should not divide countries into a leading camp and a subordinate camp… World affairs should be decided through dialogue and consultation on a multilateral and collective basis.”

The principal aim of such a strategy was, and continues to be, to demolish a U.S.-dominated world order — especially one in which that dominance was ensured by American reliance on its European allies and NATO. The ability to mobilize not only its own power but also Europe’s gave Washington a particularly outsized role in international affairs. If such ties could be crippled or destroyed, its clout would obviously be diminished and so it might someday become just another regional heavyweight.

In those years, Putin was particularly vocal in calling for the dissolution of NATO and its replacement by a European-wide security system that would, of course, include his country. The divisions in Europe “will continue until there is a single security area in Europe,” he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2001. Just as the Warsaw Pact had been disbanded as the Cold War ended, he argued, so Western Europe’s Cold War-era alliance, NATO, should be replaced with a broader security structure.

Donald Trump Climbs on Board

There is no way to know whether Donald Trump was ever aware — no matter how indirectly — of such Sino-Russian goals or planning, but there can be no question that, in his own fashion and for his own reasons, he has absorbed their fundamental principles.  As his recent assaults on NATO and his embrace of the Russian president suggest, he is visibly seeking to create the very tripolar world once envisioned by Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin and zealously promoted by Vladimir Putin ever since he assumed office.

The proof that Trump sought such an international system can be found in his 2016 campaign speeches and interviews. While he repeatedly denounced China for its unfair trade practices and complained about Russia’s nuclear-weapons buildup, he never described those countries as mortal enemies.  They were rivals or competitors with whose leaders he could communicate and, when advantageous, cooperate. On the other hand, he denounced NATO as a drain on America’s prosperity and its ability to maneuver successfully in the world.  Indeed, he saw that alliance as eminently dispensable if its members were unwilling to support his idea of how to promote America’s best interests in a highly competitive world.

“I am proposing a new foreign policy focused on advancing America’s core national interests, promoting regional stability, and producing an easing of tensions in the world,” he declared in a September 2016 speech in Philadelphia.

From that speech and other campaign statements, you can get a pretty good idea of his mindset.

First, make the United States — already the world’s most powerful nation — even stronger, especially militarily. Second, protect America’s borders. (“Immigration security,” he explained, “is a vital part of our national security.”) Third, in contrast to the version of globalism previously espoused by the American version of a liberal international order, this country was to pursue only its own interests, narrowly defined. Playing the role of global enforcer for allies, he argued, had impoverished the United States and must be ended.

“At some point,” as he put it to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and David Sanger in March 2016, “we cannot be the policeman of the world.”

As for NATO, he couldn’t have been clearer: it had become irrelevant and its preservation should no longer be an American priority. “Obsolete” was the word he used with Haberman and Sanger.

“When NATO was formed many decades ago… there was a different threat, [the Soviet Union,]… which was much bigger… [and] certainly much more powerful than even today’s Russia.”

The real threat, he continued, is terrorism, and NATO had no useful role in combating that peril.

“I think, probably a new institution maybe would be better for that than using NATO, which was not meant for that.”

President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation | July 16, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

All of this, of course, fit to a T what Vladimir Putin has long been calling for, not to speak of the grand scheme articulated by Yeltsin and Jiang in 1997. Indeed, during the second presidential debate, Trump went even further, saying,

“I think it would be great if we got along with Russia because we could fight ISIS together.”

Though the focus at the moment is purely on President Trump and Russia, let’s not forget China. While frequently lambasting the Chinese in the economic realm, he has nonetheless sought Beijing’s help in addressing the North Korean nuclear threat and other common perils. He speaks often by telephone with President Xi Jinping and insists that they enjoy an amicable relationship. Indeed, to the utter astonishment of many of his Republican allies, he even allowed the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE to regain access to essential American technology and computer chips after paying a $1 billion fine, though the firm had been widely accused of violating U.S. sanctions on trade with Iran and North Korea. Such a move was, he claimed, “reflective” of his wish to negotiate a successful trade deal with China “and my personal relationship with President Xi.”

Trump’s World Reflects That Sino-Russian Plan

Although there’s no evidence that Donald Trump ever even knew about the Sino-Russian blueprint for establishing a tripolar global order, everything he’s done as president has had the affect of facilitating that world-altering project. This was stunningly evident at the recent Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, where he repeatedly spoke of his desire to cooperate with Moscow in solving global problems.

“The disagreements between our two countries are well known and President Putin and I discussed them at length today,” he said at the press conference that followed their private conversation. “But if we’re going to solve many of the problems facing our world, then we’re going to have to find ways to cooperate in pursuit of shared interests.”

He then went on to propose that officials of the national security councils of the two countries get together to discuss such matters — an extraordinary proposal given the historical mistrust between Washington and Moscow.

And despite the furor his warm embrace of Putin triggered in Washington, Trump doubled down on his strategic concept by inviting the Russian leader to the White House for another round of one-on-one talks this fall. According to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, National Security Advisor John Bolton is already in preparatory talks with the Kremlin for such a meeting.

The big question in all this, of course, is: Why? Why would an American president seek to demolish a global order in which the United States was the dominant player and enjoyed the support of so many loyal and wealthy allies?  Why would he want to replace it with one in which it would be but one of three regional heavyweights?

Undoubtedly, historians will debate this question for decades. The obvious answer, offered by so many pundits, is that he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing, that it’s all thoughtless and impulsive. But there’s another possible answer: that he intuits in the Sino-Russian template a model that the United States could emulate to its benefit.

In the Trumpian mindset, this country had become weak and overextended because of its uncritical adherence to the governing precepts of the liberal international order, which called for the U.S. to assume the task of policing the world while granting its allies economic and trade advantages in return for their loyalty. Such an assessment, whether accurate or not, certainly jibes well with the narrative of victimization that so transfixed his core constituency in rustbelt areas of Middle America. It also suggests that an inherited burden could now be discarded, allowing for the emergence of a less-encumbered, stronger America — much as a stronger Russia has emerged in this century from the wreckage of the Soviet Union and a stronger China from the wreckage of Maoism. This reinvigorated country would still, of course, have to compete with those other two powers, but from a far stronger position, being able to devote all its resources to economic growth and self-protection without the obligation of defending half of the rest of the world.

Listen to Trump’s speeches, read through his interviews, and you’ll find just this proposition lurking behind virtually everything he has to say on foreign policy and national security.

“You know… there is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore,” he told Haberman and Sanger in 2016, speaking of America’s commitments to allies. “You know, when we did those deals, we were a rich country… We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We’re not anymore.”

The only acceptable response, he made clear, was to jettison such overseas commitments and focus instead on “restoring” the country’s self-defense capabilities through a massive buildup of its combat forces. (The fact that the United States already possesses far more capable weaponry than any of its rivals and outspends them by a significant margin when it comes to the acquisition of additional munitions doesn’t seem to have any impact on Trump’s calculations.)

This outlook would be embedded in his administration’s National Security Strategy, released last December. The greatest threat to American security, it claimed, wasn’t ISIS or al-Qaeda, but Russian and Chinese efforts to bolster their military power and extend their geopolitical reach. But given the administration’s new approach to global affairs, it suggested, there was no reason to believe that the country was headed for an inevitable superpower conflagration. (“Competition does not always mean hostility, nor does it inevitably lead to conflict. An America that successfully competes is the best way to prevent conflict.”)

However ironic it might seem, this is, of course, the gist of the Sino-Russian tripolar model as embraced and embellished by Donald Trump. It envisions a world of constant military and economic contention among three regional power centers, generating crises of various sorts, but not outright war. It assumes that the leaders of those three centers will cooperate on matters affecting them all, such as terrorism, and negotiate as necessary to prevent minor skirmishes from erupting into major battles.

Will this system prove more stable and durable than the crumbling unipolar world order it’s replacing? Who knows? If Russia, China, and the United States were of approximately equal strength, it might indeed theoretically prevent one party from launching a full-scale conflict with another, lest the aggrieved country join the third power, overwhelming the aggressor.

Eerily enough, this reflects the future world as envisioned in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 — a world in which three great-power clusters, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, contend for global dominance, periodically forming new two-against-one alliances. However, as the United States currently possesses significantly greater military power than Russia and China combined, that equation doesn’t really apply and so, despite the mammoth nuclear arsenals of all three countries, the possibility of a U.S.-initiated war cannot be ruled out. In a system of ever-competing super-states, the risk of crisis and confrontation will always be present, along with the potential for nuclear escalation.

One thing we can be reasonably sure of, however, regarding such a system is that smaller, weaker states, and minority peoples everywhere will be given even shorter shrift than at present when caught in any competitive jousting for influence among the three main competitors (and their proxies). This is the crucial lesson to be drawn from the grim fighting still ongoing in Syria and eastern Ukraine: you are only worth something as long as you do the bidding of your superpower patron.  When your utility is exhausted — or you’re unfortunate enough to be trapped in a zone of contention — your life is worth nothing. No lasting peace is attainable in such an environment and so, just as in Orwell’s 1984, war — or preparing for war — will be a perpetual condition of life.

*

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National Security, will be published in 2019.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation.

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On July 23, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies kicked off a military operation to defeat ISIS terrorists in southern Syria, east of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Government forces liberated the villages of Ma’alaqah and Um Lawqas as well as some nearby hills in the northern part of the ISIS-held pocket.

On July 24, the SAA-led force continued its advance aiming to capture the town of Tasil and the nearby villages of Saudah, Ain Thakar and Adawan. The general goal of the effort is to shorten the frontline against ISIS. This will allow the SAA to focus their main efforts on more fortified areas located in the central and southern parts of the pocket.

Separately, the SAA retook a post of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) at the village of Al-Rafeed. Thus, the only areas de-facto controlled by members of the Free Syrian Army and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham east of the Golan Heights are Baqira, Beerajam, Quneitra and Jubata al-Kashab.

On July 23, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) employed David’s Sling aerial defense systems against rockets launched near the Syrian-Israeli contact line. According to the IDF, Israel launched two interceptors. It is unclear if the interceptors hit any target. However, the IDF says that there were no injuries or damage from the rockets, which had been launched during fighting between the SAA and militants.

It is interesting to note that the Israeli Air Force carried out no airstrikes on Syria in response to this incident, something unexpected considering the general attitude of Tel Aviv to the conflict.

Later on the same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the chief of the military’s General Staff General Valery Gerasimov held talks in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After the meeting the Russian Foreign Ministry said that during the talks

“the parties tackled various aspects of the Middle Eastern agenda, attaching primary significance to the situation in Syria and its vicinity.”

Netanyahu discussed the situation in Syria with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow two weeks ago. The intensified contacts between the sides is another signal that southern Syria will soon be returned to the full control of the Assad government allied with Iran and Tel Aviv has no realistic options to prevent this. The 1974 Agreement on Disengagement between Israel and Syria will be a basis to de-escalate, at least partly, tensions between Damascus and Tel Aviv.

The Russian Centre for the Reception, Allocation and Accommodation of Refugees in Syria has prepared more than 336,000 places to accommodate returning refugees and temporarily displaced people in Syria. The places are located in the provinces of Aleppo, Rif Damashq, Homs, Hama and Deir Ezzor.

The Russian military says that a total of 1.7m refugees may return to Syria from Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and various European countries. The Russians are actively assisting the Damascus government to prepare for this.

83 medical facilities, 213 educational institutions, 73 power stations, 69 water supply facilities and 2 fuel and energy facilities as well as 244km of roads have been restored with the help of Russia.

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It is commonly known that when a ship is sinking, the crew does not board the lifeboats before the passengers. Most noble of all is when the captain and crew go down with the ship. Then with what level of ignobility should we assess the so-called “Syrian Civil Defense” more commonly referred to as the White Helmets?

We are told that Syrian forces backed by Russian airpower are brutalizing the remnants of “rebels” in southern Syria near the Jordanian border and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Surely now more than ever do the people of southern Syria need the “bravest of the brave” – as UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt described them on social media.

Yet instead of rushing to where the cannons sound loudest, the White Helmets slunk across Syria’s borders with the aid of the Israeli Defense Forces, onward to Jordan, where the UN is working to relocate them – allegedly to Europe and North America.

It is a final act laying to rest once and for all a monumental lie – that the White Helmets were anything more than an extension of the foreign-funded proxy war aimed at overthrowing Damascus.

And now that overthrowing Damascus is no longer a possibility, the White Helmets are being evacuated to lie another day.

An Acting Troupe

The White Helmets were never “rescuers,” but a public relations wing of Al Qaeda and its various affiliates. The US did not arm and funded terrorists for years to ravage Syria only to “also” fund groups to help save lives. Instead, the White Helmets’ only real mandate was to augment the proxy war, exploiting humanitarian themes similar to how the US and NATO justified and executed the destruction of Libya.

Videos of clearly uninjured individuals – showered in dust and red paint – rushed to awaiting ambulances often feature more cameramen in the frame than supposed rescue workers. Absent from the vast majority of the White Helmets’ videos is the actual gore, horror, and misery of real war – gaping wounds, dangling or missing limbs, burnt flesh and hair – all the horrors real Syrians faced daily since 2011 when the US-backed proxy war began.

During the 2016 “Save Aleppo” protests held by the Syrian opposition across Europe, actors were dressed up, dusted and painted up with artificial blood, then posed in scenes indistinguishable from their Syrian-based counterparts’ videos. What was supposed to be another emotional gimmick aimed at manipulating the Western public to back wider Western military intervention, instead served as an indictment of precisely the game the White Helmets had been funded by the US and British governments to play amid Syria’s ongoing war.

The Guardian in a hastily written rebuttal to avalanches of evidence exposing the White Helmets of not only producing war propaganda, but doing so on behalf of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, would claim:

The White Helmets, officially known as the Syria Civil Defence, is a humanitarian organisation made up of 3,400 volunteers – former teachers, engineers, tailors and firefighters – who rush to pull people from the rubble when bombs rain down on Syrian civilians.

They’ve been credited with saving thousands of civilians during the country’s continuing civil war.  They have also exposed, through first-hand video footage, war crimes including a chemical attack in April. Their work was the subject of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary and the recipient of two Nobel peace prize nominations.

Indeed, the White Helmets have provided evidence of chemical weapons attacks – as noted by multiple OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) reports – but it is evidence the OPCW has never been able to verify.

Al Qaeda’s Propagandists

The reason why the OPCW was never able to verify the evidence was because the White Helmets who allegedly collected and transferred it over to OPCW investigators operate exclusively in territory held by terrorists fronts – most notably Al Qaeda’s various affiliates.

The OPCW would report regarding the April 2017 alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhun that (emphasis added):

…it was determined that the risk of a visit to the incident area would be prohibitive for the team. Therefore, the team could not visit the site shortly after the allegation to observe, assess, or record the location of the alleged incident, could not canvass directly for other witnesses, and could not collect environmental samples and/or remnants of the alleged munitions.

This meant that all evidence and witness testimony considered by the OPCW was handed to them. The OPCW admits (emphasis added):

Through liaison with representatives of several NGOs, including Same Justice/Chemical Violations Documentation Centre Syria (CVDCS), the Syrian Civil Defence (also known as White Helmets, and hereinafter “SCD”), the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), and the Syrian Institute for Justice (SIJ), the FFM identified a number of witnesses to be interviewed. These witnesses were expected to provide testimony and potentially relevant evidence.

The report admits it was the White Helmets who allegedly were first to arrive at the scene of the attack and repeatedly cites them throughout the report as the primary source of accusations regarding the attack. The report would note (emphasis added):

At the time of handover, the team was informed that all samples provided on 12 and 13 April 2017 were taken by the chemical sample unit of the SCD [White Helmets]. A member of the chemical sample unit who took the samples was present at the handover and provided information on every sample.

As to what risks prevented the OPCW team from collecting the evidence itself instead, a Deutsche Welle article titled, “Death toll rises in Syria ‘gas attack’,” would provide a clue:

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Syrian government forces have uncovered a considerable amount of Israeli-made medicine and medical supplies in a field hospital belonging to foreign-sponsored Takfiri militants in the country’s strategic southwestern province of Quneitra.

Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Syria’s official news agency, SANA, that army soldiers made the discovery in the town of Naba al-Sakher on Monday as they were conducting a clean-up operation in the area to beef up security and stability and prepare repatriation of local residents.

The sources added that the field hospital had several operating rooms, laboratory equipment and medical supplies in addition to a warehouse, where large quantities of Israeli- and Jordanian-made medicine were being kept.

Takfiri militants in Naba al-Sakher had turned one of the town’s schools into a field hospital to treat their wounded comrades.

This picture, provided by Syria’s official news agency SANA, shows a field hospital belonging to foreign-backed Takfiri militants, which Syrian government forces discovered in Naba al-Sakher town, southwestern Syria, on July 23, 2018.

The development came only a few days after Syrian government forces and fighters from popular defense groups liberated nearly two dozen towns and villages in Quneitra Province.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country.

On May 21, the General Command of the Syrian Army and Armed Forces announced in a statement that complete security was restored to Damascus and its countryside after al-Hajar al-Aswad district and al-Yarmouk camp were totally purged of Daesh terrorists.

The development was preceded by flushing the Takfiris out of the towns of Yalda, Babbila and Beit Sahem on the southern outskirts of Damascus.

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All images in this article are from SANA.

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Post industrial mankind’s fascination with material progress has, since the industrial revolution, played the dominant role in the direction taken by Westernised societies. ‘The machine’, along with the material and financial wealth necessary to own and operate it, has steadily subsumed more human centred values that preceded its dominance.

Fascination with so called modern technologies of the present day, represent an extension of the general obeysance paid to the rising totem of technological ‘advances’ over the past three centuries.

It has led to the point where such innovations no longer claim to be about ‘lessening the work load’ , but almost openly proffer the claim of being convenience drugs without which much of Westernised society could barely function at all.

Controversially, each step along the way to this point of abstraction has involved leaps of imaginative thinking that draw upon universal energetic principles. The genius of Nicolas Tesla being an example of such. Yet, simultaneously, each ‘advance’ has brought with it a swathe of deficits to the health and welfare of the natural environment, man, animals and insects; threatening to undermine the very fabric of planetary sustainability.

The synthetic microwave energy that has gained such prominence over the past twenty years, has aped the rhythm and pulse of universal energy, and in so doing it has offered mankind a parallel model to live by. A synthetic reality, not our true reality as spirit-energy led beings.  

I am putting the question of whether such ‘innovations’ take mankind – closer to or further from – the place which our hearts call upon us to go? That enlightened state which our deeper consciousness constantly calls upon us to express and live by in the here and now.

If it takes us closer, then why is the incremental price being played by people, plants and insects, so high? Quite possibly so high as to undermine the living fabric of the planet to a point where no natural return is possible. To a state where planetary life becomes a ‘virtual’ copy of the original. A gene modified substratum of real life.

The contradictions stare us in the face: distort natural ecological and human rhythms in order to reach some form of technological enlightenment?

What in the West we call ‘a high standard of living’ now demands access to a whole range of electromagnetic, microwave and electronic gismos that have exploded onto world markets in the past two decades – creating a permanent cloud of electromagnetic smog – and fitting neatly into ‘the hidden hand of control’s’ preferred form of imprisonment of mankind.

A key component of this take-over of the human brain is the so-called ‘singularity’ event: a cross-over point in which computerised power overtakes the capacity of the sentient human brain to exercise normal daily decision making procedures. A place where genetic engineering and nanotech synthetic realities become the norm, and humans cross the red line that keeps humanity separate from being subsumed into a race of technologically programmed cyborgs. At which point the human race will have lost touch with both its cosmic and earthly reality altogether. 

Let’s consider this straight-on. How do you stand with the cell phone/Ipod/Wifi revolution of the past two decades? Do you own one of these inventions? (I did, but I dumped it). Where do you want these ‘oh so clever’ technologies to take you? Is it really worth cooking your brains and interfering with the natural rhythms of wave form universal energy, just to be a more ‘smart’ business man or woman?  Just to have almost instant access to friends, family and associates? Just to make it possible to hold mindless conversations that achieve nothing other than a vague sense of comfort – and are just about as useful as the processed junk food in a typical supermarket chain store?  

For those dimly aware that the electromagnetic microwaves that emanate from these gismos –

and from the sinister towers that provide their pulsed signals – may also be disrupting the background resonance (Schumann Resonance) that provides balance to the human brain and heart, the flight of birds, bees and other insects, plant growth and the very stability of the atmosphere itself  – is it too much to expect that those who possess these gadgets will work at freeing themselves from their toxic convenience addictions?

Are we allowing our lives to be dominated by a simulated electronic pulse that is the perfect tool for mass mind control? Or, are we seeking to attune ourselves  a natural pulse which is guiding the subtle sensibilities of our very own hearts?

To which of these do you give priority in your daily life?

The heart is not a technological construct. It operates on a wavelength which is critical to the flowering of our spiritual path. It responds to a Universal rhythm of which man is an integral part and which is every individual’s birth-rite. Had we been consciously operating on this heart and spirit led frequency over the past centuries, mankind and planet Earth would not be in the perilous psycho-physical state of imbalance it is in today. 

If all technology had been kept to largely benign and human scale proportions, it would have been inconceivable to have come up with weapons of mass destruction our nations arm themselves with today; or indeed the uranium fuelled nuclear power stations that provide their fissionable materials. 

As we stand today – at the eleventh hour of our demise or possible reprieve – these issues stand starkly in front of us. Something has to give.

The rapidly approaching threat of a WiFi 5G roll-out, with its violent, volatile microwave transmissions tuned to almost exactly the same wave length as the human neocortex, must serve as the red line technology that simply cannot be allowed to happen. For it quite literally cannot be tolerated by our living organism: physically, psychologically, mentally or spiritually. 

The entire animal and plant kingdom, already battered by 2, 3 and 4G microwaves, cannot survive any further bombardment and retain any chance of remaining sentient, sensitive and truly alive. All those who are aware, however dimly, of the harm we are doing to ourselves, others and our shared environment by carelessly adopting the latest pocket sized weapons of mass destruction and the ‘internet of everything’ which they plug into – have just a few months to join in a mass protest to prevent the 5G horror from becoming reality. 

We are at a turning point in the affairs of man. A new ‘awareness-energy’ is emerging within all of us; an energy which is the antithesis of the synthetic variety. It is a God given energy, a gift which is bestowed upon us as an integral part of our condition of being human.

Now is the time for us to use this gift and to turn the tide on our misadventure. A misadventure under the jackboot of a centralised global cabal that cares not one iota for the fate of our planet, other than the fact that it is held captive and submissive. However, it is a force which pales into insignificance when compared with the full power of awakened consciousness. Yet it has nevertheless been allowed (by us) to turn this planet into something approaching an emotional, spiritual and physical desert. 5G is perhaps the ultimate tool of repression, because it comes disguised as a seeming technological break-through that the unknowing will adopt without giving a thought of what it actually is.

5G is scheduled to be put into affect next year, 2019. The plan is for more than four thousand satellites to be launched into the planet’s upper atmosphere over a two year period. These satellites are designed to blanket cover every square inch of the planet with a Wifi web of unparalleled output. Nowhere will escape the affects of the 360 degree microwave grid. Meanwhile millions of new ‘masts’ will be constructed to transmit the extra short Wifi pulses to cities, towns and countryside locations throughout the planet. 2,3 and 4G transmissions have already raised deep scientific worries about their affects on humans, animals, insects and plant life; 5G is set to vastly escalate existing concerns. It presents an almost unimaginable danger to life on Earth. 

Should such a scenario ever be fulfilled, mankind will have ‘souled-out’ to a lethal technological toy whose only claim to fame is that it will provide ‘instant’ access to fake news and mega volumes of corporate enriching junk information.

Are we going to continue to allow ourselves to be led into a world dominated by a processed Wifi microwave pulse tuned so as to directly interfere with our natural communication channels? Channels to and from the Divine source of all life on this Universe?

Are we going to completely submit our God given creativity to be hacked by a ‘smart’ mechanical construct controlled by a less than human corporate cabal? Are we going to continue to idly flirt with a Cyborg Transhumanist agenda that promotes a technology that ‘does our thinking for us’? Are we seriously ready to abandon ourselves and our planet to the neutering, sterilising affects of the engineered electromagnetic microwave?  I ask all these questions because that is the way it looks like going – unless a big wake-up call swings humanity into a another trajectory.

That trajectory involves us seizing hold of the genuine creative upsurge that fuels our quest for truth – and  learning to align ourselves with the synergistic harmony of our quantum universe. 

The road of truth cannot be be walked by following the ‘convenience script’. So kiss goodbye to the toxic cell phone; throw out the mind control machine called television; start the process of saying bye bye to the corporate controlled energy grid – and start a new life – while you still can. 

Whatever you do, get involved in all efforts to block 5G from gaining momentum – or start your own initiative. As a precondition for the sanity of human kind – it must be stopped.

Take back control of your destiny as an individual able to think outside the box, and learn to retune yourself to the infinite wavelength of conscious awareness. Let it direct you out of the godless prison so cunningly devised by our oppressors.

See this.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. Julian is the author of two acclaimed titles: Changing Course for Life and In Defence of Life. You can find out more by visiting www.julianrose.info. Julian is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Trump is going to seek to revoke Obama era standards that gave California that power to fight smog and auto emissions.

Bloomberg reported:

The proposal, expected to be released this week, amounts to a frontal assault on one of former President Barack Obama’s signature regulatory programs to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. It also sets up a high-stakes battle over California’s unique ability to combat air pollution and, if finalized, is sure to set off a protracted courtroom battle.

…

As part of the effort, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose revoking the Clean Air Act waiver granted to California that has allowed the state to regulate carbon emissions from vehicle tailpipes and force carmakers to sell electric vehicles in the state in higher numbers, according to three people familiar with the plan. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will likewise assert that California is barred from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from autos under the 1975 law that established the first federal fuel-efficiency requirements, the people said.

This is a major policy shift. It has long been expected that Trump was going to kill Obama’s increased fuel efficiency standards, and thus do something that auto manufacturers and consumers don’t want. One of the keys to the lower gas prices that the country had during the Obama years was increased vehicle fuel efficiency. There is zero demand in the market for gas guzzlers, but Trump is going to take America back to the 1950s no matter what the marketplace and the American people want.

California has been expecting this move from Trump and officials have been preparing for long legal battle since he took office. Donald Trump literally wants to poison the people of California, not for any good policy reason, but because he views the destruction of the Obama legacy as the mandate for his presidency.

Trump is going to go to court, and if recent history is any sort of guide, he will lose.

Californians take pride in their clean air, and they are not about to let Donald Trump wreck their environment without a brutal legal fight.

In 1995, a PH.D candidate in Maritime Studies (specifically Chemical Pollution), by the name of H. Lindsey Arison III, wrote a report entitled “The ‘Cover-Upof Gulf War Syndrome’ A Question of National Integrity,” where he discussed the toxic chemicals that American service personnel were exposed to during the first American invasion of Iraq and how that exposure may have been the cause or one important contributing factor to the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome that plagued so many soldiers and their families upon returning home.

Dr. Arison concluded:

The Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Veterans Affairs have been lying to the U.S. Congress, Gulf War veterans, and the American people about coalition forces’ exposure to chemical and biological agents during the war. This criminal, reprehensible, shameful, dishonorable, and egregious act on their part has caused incalculable pain and suffering, caused many who risked their lives for our flag to die, inflicted severe financial hardships, caused many veterans’ children to be born deformed and disabled, caused many veterans’ children to become diseased, destroyed marriages and families, and eroded the trust of the American people in the institutions they once revered. Gulf War veterans are truly the victims of patriotism. What they have suffered is the great American tragedy.Those who have perpetrated and perpetuated this lie must be held fully accountable.It should be noted that Dr. Anison was an aide to the Undersecretary of the United States Air Force at the Pentagon.

Prior to Dr. Anison’s report, the US Congress was forced to hold an investigative committee regarding the testing of chemicals, radiation, and other substances on military service personnel without their knowledge or consent. Of course, the committee only discussed experimentation which was already declassified and, for the most part, publicly available. It did not discuss secret and classified experimentation or ongoing experimentation either.

Nevertheless, the report did collect a number of important bullet points of experimentation on American military personnel including mustard gas, lewisite agents, hallucinogens, radiation, “investigational drugs,” and others.

Click here to read full report which many Americans might find surprising. One should also consider the fact that the report is now nearly 24 years old and that experimentation on American soldiers has not ended, despite not being discussed publicly since the report was published. It goes some small length in describing how American service personnel have been used as guinea pigs for decades upon decades, a practice that shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

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Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies,Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria,and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 1,000 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

In a piece for the Atlantic (6/20/18), former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum countered statements by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, in which Hayes described a harrowing first-person account of a mother forcibly separated from her child at the US/Mexico border as reading like “the literature of a totalitarian government”:

As Hayes elaborates his horror at the separation of mother from child, he seems to arrive at a conclusion that there is something inherently oppressive about any kind of immigration rule at all….The border crosser goes to them. She is not just “living her life … and then all of a sudden, the state can come in and wrench your life apart.” She, of her own volition, traveled hundreds of miles to challenge the authority of a foreign state to police its frontiers. When her challenge failed—when she was apprehended and detained—what happened next must have felt harsh and frightening. But dictatorial? Totalitarian? In democracies, too, the wrong side of the law is an inescapably uncomfortable place to find yourself.

Frum’s argument presents the US as unimplicated in the surge in Central American migration except as its victim, a “sovereign state” that must “police its frontiers.” His concluding worry about “the surges that will soon follow from the rest of the planet if the present surge is not checked” suggests he’s given little thought to the particular forces driving people from that region, much less how those relate to US foreign and economic policy.

Why those countries?

The immigrants that Frum is speaking of come largely from the Central American countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, an area known as the Northern Triangle. According to the Pew Research Center, there are 3 million total immigrants from these countries in the US, and about half of those immigrants are undocumented. While Mexican immigration has been falling in recent years, Central American immigration has increased: from 2007 through 2015, the total number of Northern Triangle immigrants rose by 25 percent.

Yet much media coverage of immigration misses out on why large numbers of people from the Northern Triangle are migrating to the US in the first place.

Over the past three generations, the Northern Triangle countries, long marked by profound levels of inequality, have each experienced horribly destructive civil wars and military coups. Unsurprisingly, the United States has been intimately involved in each of these, supporting anti-Communist regimes during the Cold War and protecting US business interests with truly disastrous results.

In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup to remove President Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, at the behest of United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), the country’s largest landowner. During the subsequent civil war that lasted until 1996, the US gave military and financial support to a succession of right-wing governments that committed large-scale human rights abuses that killed hundreds of thousands.

In Honduras in the 1980s, the CIA trained right-wing death squads like Battalion 316 that tortured and assassinated the government’s left-wing political opponents. In 2009, the US State Department under Hillary Clinton supported the overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya by graduates of the School of the Americas, a notorious US military training academy. The coup created waves of protests and escalated murders of hundreds of activists, including indigenous leader Berta Cáceres.

In El Salvador, when a military coup in 1979 sparked the formation of a leftist guerilla movement known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), first the Carter and then the Reagan administration backed the anti-Communist junta in the ensuing civil war by supplying training, military equipment, arms and financial support totalling $6 billion. Much of the aid and arms ended up supporting the junta’s paramilitary death squads. In 1980, these death squads assassinatedCatholic Archbishop Oscar Romero during a sermon, and later that year raped and murdered four American nuns. In 1981, junta forces massacredover a thousand people, mostly women, children and the elderly, in the village of El Mozote. The perpetrators, the Atlacatl Battalion, had recently completed training with the U.S. military at Fort Bragg prior to the massacre. The CIA also funded presidential candidate and junta leader Napoleon Duarte prior to his election in 1984 in order to throw a wrench in peace talks, a move that dragged the war on for another eight years.

The Salvadoran civil war, which ultimately ended along with the Cold War in 1992, is estimated to have claimed the lives of up to 75,000 Salvadorans, including over 50,000 civilians, with 85 percent of deaths at the hands of the Salvadoran government and its paramilitary allies. Top US officials like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick each denied or obscured the human rights abuses and massacres in El Salvador order to maintain congressional funding for the Salvadoran military junta and other anti-Communist authoritarian regimes throughout Central America. Abrams later called the Reagan administration’s record in El Salvador “one of fabulous achievement.”

MS-13 a Policy Backfire

El Salvador provides perhaps the most striking case of how US responsibility is obscured in the current immigration debate, based on the notoriety of Mara Salvatrucha, a predominantly Salvadoran street gang better known as MS-13.

MS-13 has become a major scapegoat for Donald Trump and right-wing media in rationalizing harsh immigration policies. The Trump administration has referred to MS-13 gang members as “animals” who “infest” the United States—rhetoric that, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent (5/25/18) noted, “slaps the dehumanizing slur on the least sympathetic subgroup and then conflates that subgroup with the larger group that is the real target.”

This scapegoating seems to have worked: According to a recent HuffPost/YouGov survey, over 85 percent of Trump voters believe that MS-13 is a major threat to the United States as a whole. This level of anxiety seems misplaced, considering that even the Justice Department claims MS-13 has only about 10,000 members in the US.

Image on the right: Corporate media sources have engaged in a flurry of MS-13 coverage over the past two years.

For Salvadorans, though, the fear is very real: In 2017, El Salvador had the most murders per capita on the entire planet (109 per 100,000), followed by Honduras (64 per 100,000), with Guatemala coming in at number nine (31 per 100,000). And with stories like “In El Salvador, the Murder Capital of the World, Gang Violence Becomes a Way of Life” (ABC News, 5/17/16) and  “Organised Violence Is Ravaging Central America and Displacing Thousands” (Guardian,6/29/17), media have used that violence to fan fears of MS-13 making inroads into US cities and suburbs.

But what Trump’s racist rhetoric and fearmongering media alike ignore is that MS-13 is partially a product of US policy. The gang was actually founded in the Pico Union neighborhood of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, by Salvadoran immigrants and refugees from its civil war. Its subsequent growth from a small street gang in the US to a transnational criminal organization based out of the Northern Triangle  provides an illuminating case study of how US foreign policy choices can backfire spectacularly.

Deportation’s Boomerang Effect

The violence of the Salvadoran civil war sparked a mass exodus of Salvadorans to the United States. In 1970, there were only 15,717 Salvadoran born immigrants living in the US. By 1980, there were 94,447 Salvadoran-born immigrants in the US, shooting up to 465,433 by 1990. Undocumented Salvadorans were granted Temporary Protected Status from 1990 through 1994; TPS was extended following a catastrophic earthquake in 2001, and has been periodically renewed since. However, the Trump administration recently revoked TPS for El Salvador, effective September 2019.

During and after the civil war, a majority of Salvadoran-born immigrants ended up in Southern California, particularly in ethnically segregated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, which was at the time in the midst of violence gang turf wars stemming from the crack cocaine epidemic—itself partially the product of plummeting cocaine prices as the result of drug-smuggling by the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels. In this atmosphere, young, impoverished Salvadoran immigrants formed small street gangs like MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street Gang (also known as Barrio 18) for protection from local African-American and Mexican gangs.

Image below: Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in El Salvador overseeing repatriation of undocumented immigrants from the US in 2016.

Following the end of the civil war in the ’90s and continued gang violence in Southern California and the Washington, DC, metro area—the other major destination for Salvadoran immigrants—the Clinton administration engaged in a policy of mass deportation of immigrants with criminal records, beginning with the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. This was a continuation of policies of the Reagan administration, who deported thousands of Salvadorans seeking asylum from the civil war. An estimate by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime counted almost 46,000 deportations of immigrants with criminal records (undocumented or not) to El Salvador from the US between 1998 and 2005.

El Salvador, just off its decade-plus-long civil war, was hardly equipped with the institutions necessary to deal with a massive influx of gang members from the United States. Gangs like MS-13 quickly integrated with already established street gangs within the country, bringing back elements of US gang culture such as symbols, identities and norms like tattoos or graffiti that helped bring local gang sets under the MS-13 umbrella.

The response of the Salvadoran government (and other Northern Triangle countries) was to crack down and lock up large numbers of suspected gang members in the early 2000s, a policy known as mano dura, or “firm hand.” Over 30,000 arrests were made under the policy in El Salvador, although many cases were thrown out due to illegal arrests and lack of evidence. Despite this, the arrests concentrated large numbers of gang members in one place: Jails and prisons served as effective locations for centralizing the organization of gangs that were previously only loosely affiliated.

While these newly integrated gangs in El Salvador are still less centralized than Mexican drug cartels, the mano dura policies nonetheless allowed gangs to better coordinate across varied gang sets, and expand extortion rackets to tax neighbors and businesses on their turf, using threats of violence. These extortion rackets, along with continued violence between gangs over turf, have created an atmosphere of fear that Salvadoran families quite reasonably want to get away from.

Pouring Fuel on the Fire

Increased deportations of Salvadoran gang members during the Trump administration will likely have the effect of further swelling gang membership numbers in El Salvador, which will in turn lead to more migration as Salvadorans flee gang extortion rackets and violence. Even police have reservations about the harsh immigration policies, and MS-13 gang members have acknowledgedthat deportation policies help expand their numbers.

Continued gang crackdowns by the Salvadoran government over the past few years are also an issue that the US has a hand in: Salvadoran security forces accused by the UN of extrajudicial killings of gang members have received millions in US aid and training from the FBI and DEA. Ongoing violent confrontations between Salvadoran law enforcement and gangs also contribute to a climate of fear and resentment among Salvadorans as well. Just as tough-on-crime policies have generally failed to reduce crime in the US, in El Salvador and the other Northern Triangle countries they have just as bad a track record, as shown by the failure of the mano dura policies.

The end of Temporary Protected Status for over 200,000 Salvadorans, and their likely subsequent deportation, will also have a major effect on the Salvadoran economy by decreasing remittances from the United States, which account for over about a sixth of the country’s GDP. The end of TPS, combined with high levels of unemployment and underemployment that are partially attributable to US neoliberal economic policies like the 2006 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), will likely increase the poverty that feeds youth gang membership and immigration. As Mark Tseng-Putterman noted in Medium(6/20/18),  “There are few connections being drawn between the weakening of Central American rural agricultural economies at the hands of CAFTA and the rise in migration from the region in the years since.” Indeed, the destructive impact of US trade policy in Latin America over the years has been actively obscured by the devotion of corporate media to “free trade” nostrums. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained when he endorsed CAFTA in a 2006 CNBC interview: “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.”

While the United States does not necessarily deserve 100 percent of the blame for the conflicts and economic policies that have led to increases in Northern Triangle violence or immigration, it is certainly a major culprit, and has poured fuel on the fire every time it has had the opportunity to do otherwise.

Ignoring the Context

Image on the right: One of the few Washington Post articles (6/14/18) to mention the Salvadoran civil war in regards to the issue of immigration.

Yet media ignore this crucial context when discussing current American immigration policies. The Washington Post’s pieces on immigration or MS-13 have seldom mentioned the Salvadoran civil war when discussing immigration, let alone the outsized US involvement in the conflict. Out of hundreds of Post articles on Latin American immigration in the past six months, only a few even mention the Salvadoran civil war (1/11/18, 1/31/18, 2/12/18, 3/12/18, 5/30/18, 6/29/18, 7/2/18). One article in the DC Metro Weekend section (6/14/18) did mention immigration in relation to the civil war, but only in the context of where to get some tasty Salvadoran food in Maryland, while another article (3/2/18) on Venezuelan immigration mentioned the Salvadoran civil war in passing. Only Jose Miguel Cruz’s January 31 article and Micaela Sviatschi’s February 12 article mentioned any US involvement in the Salvadoran civil war. While the Post has explored the connection in greater detail in the past, one would think that the current child migrant separation policy and continuing high levels of Northern Triangle immigration would warrant nuanced and detailed coverage now.

The New York Times fared little better, only mentioning the Salvadoran civil war in the context of immigration or MS-13 a handful times in the past six months (1/13/18, 1/18/18, 1/31/18, 2/8/18, 2/17/18, 3/1/18, 4/30/18, 5/23/18, 5/26/18, 6/12/18), including a book review roundup (1/27/18) and a factchecking article on Trump’s claims about MS-13 (7/1/18). Yet of these articles, only three contained any mention of US involvement in the civil war: the January 13 op-ed by Lauren Markham, the January 18 op-ed by Linda Greenhouse and the May 26 article by Elizabeth Malkin. (Malkin’s piece was less focused on current immigration issues, centering on the El Mozote Massacre.) The rest of the articles only briefly mentioned the Salvadoran civil war.

The corporate press has done a generally good job of covering the staggeringnumber of human rights abuses of ICE, including the presence of immigrant detainment camps and the separation of over 2,000 child migrants and asylum seekers from their parents at the US/Mexico border. Other outlets have been better on connecting the imperialist history of US foreign policy with the current immigration issues, like Current Affairs (8/1/16), Vox (5/21/18), The Conversation (5/8/17), Vice (6/28/18) and the Philadelphia Inquirer (6/21/18). Even the Atlantic has published pieces (1/20/18, 3/4/18) that explore the web of US policies that have contributed to the current immigration crisis in Central America.

The fact that neoconservatives like David Frum continually obscure the blowback of imperialist US foreign policy is unsurprising. Perhaps more outrageous is the failure of the establishment press, especially the Washington Post and the New York Times, to grapple with how current immigration issues are connected to US intervention in Central America, and the subsequent gang violence it helped trigger. As Mark Tseng-Putterman (Medium, 6/20/18) aptly put it, the US empire thrives on amnesia. It is the job of the media to inform the public with the nuance and context necessary to understand America’s role in the current Central American immigration crisis.

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Justin Anderson is a writer based in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter at @_JustAndFair.

Featured image is from the author.

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There can be no doubt that there is a new, immediate threat of destabilization, if not war, against Iran. As reported in major media and detailed in several articles on this website, the Trump administration, in tandem with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, has been signaling its bellicose intentions loudly. The cancellation of US participation in the Iranian nuclear deal and the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital were the stepping-stones towards subsequent threats of “CONSEQUENCES…” twittered by the rowdy US President. Whether Trump intends to start a war or to attempt regime-change (see Trita Parsi), the intention is to shift the kaleidoscope of geopolitical relations once again, with the aim of establishing Israel as the regional hegemon.

“Clean Break”

Israeli strategists do not think in terms of years, but centuries, as Netanyahu never tires of reminding us. And it is useful to look back twenty years or so to review a major strategy document then coordinated by the Bush neocons and Netanyahu, that outlined long-term aims. I presented the matter in my book in the following terms: 

In 1996, the Cheney teams issued “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.” The title referred to the opportunity and need, in the event of a new Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu, to make a total break with the Oslo Accords of 1993, which had promised progress towards peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, Israel should work closely with its neighbors Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll back some of its most dangerous threats. Instead of pursuing a comprehensive peace, Israel should resort to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power. To deal with its perceived regional threats, Israel should “engage” Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah (considered as “agents” in Lebanon), and not exclude military forays into Lebanon. Israel should “contain” Syria and reject any land for peace deals on the Golan Heights. Israel should “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq,” and should curry favor with the Hashemite regime in Jordan to ensure its support. The paper endorsed a “Change in the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society.” The thrust of the document was that the entire Middle East should be reshaped through regime change in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon (either by war or other means), and the parallel consolidation of nuclear-armed Israel as the regional hegemonic power. The “Clean Break” paper was delivered to Benjamin Netanyahu who, days later, presented the overall political thrust to a joint session of the U.S. Congress as his government policy.

President Clinton conducted air raids against Iraq in an undeclared war over the 1996-1998 period, but stopped short of the full-scale aggression that the Cheney grouping sought. That became possible only when the dubious 2000 elections brought Bush-Cheney to power. The events of September 11, 2001 provided them the pretext to move into high gear…. After Afghanistan came the second Anglo-American war against Iraq. The governments in both Kabul and Baghdad were overthrown through military means, and the long, tragic process of occupation began. Syria was destabilized after the February 2005 assassination of Lebanese former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was blamed on Damascus and Syrian troops were forced to leave the country. Lebanon underwent its own version of regime change. Then, Iran became the new bull’s eye. All in sync with “Clean Break.”

In 2006 Israel waged war against Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah, and attacked Hamas in Gaza. At the end of 2008 came another Gaza war, which implemented the new approach to the Palestinians detailed in the “Clean Break” paper: “First and foremost, Israel’s efforts to secure its streets may require hot pursuit into Palestinian controlled areas, a justifiable practice with which Americans can sympathize. …” The Bush regime did indeed sympathize. By 2008, the aims of the doctrine had been pursued in Lebanon and Iraq. The Israelis, who had been clamoring for years for a green light from the Bush-Cheney regime for a “preemptive” strike against Iran’s nuclear installations, had been prevented in late 2007 by the National Intelligence Estimate report which said that Iran did not possess a nuclear weapons program. 

There was never any doubt that Iran was the enemy. Neocon John Bolton was explicit. The former US ambassador to the UN said on December 31, 2008 that the Gaza campaign was a stepping-stone toward war against the Islamic Republic. FOX news quoted him saying:

“I don’t think there’s anything at this point standing between Iran and nuclear weapons other than the possibility of the use of military force possibly by the United States, possibly by Israel.” He added: “So while our focus obviously is on Gaza now, this could turn out to be a much larger conflict. We’re looking at potentially a multi-front war.” 

It did not happen then, but Israeli military planners did not give up on a future strike against Iran. And in preparation, they had to neutralize those factors which could be activated in sympathy with the Islamic Republic. Hamas was attacked again in Gaza in 2014.

Looking at the region today from the standpoint of the strategic aims of “Clean Break,” Israeli planners must be checking off items on the list: Syria has not only been contained, but through prolonged war the country has been largely destroyed; Saddam Hussein is gone from Iraq; Hezbollah and Lebanon represent no existential threat to Israel; as for the Palestinians, there has been a “change in the nature of relations” indeed, with Hamas being militarily attacked and economically choked in Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority faces a fait accompli in Jerusalem and the new law on the Jewish state. And though the Bush crowd is gone, Bolton and company are back and Trump has endorsed the entire agenda.

From this viewpoint, Iran is being isolated and there should be no doubt, considering the recent moves in Washington and Tel Aviv, that the Islamic Republic is next on the hit list.

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The author can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. Through the Wall of Fire: Armenia-Iraq-Palestine; From Wrath to Reconciliation, Ithaca Press, Reading, 2012.

2. ”A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,“ www.iaps.org/strat1.htm. This document was the application to the Middle East of the so-called “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” or plan to establish the U.S. as the sole dominant world power. It was authored by Cheney aide David Wurmser, his wife Meyrav, Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, Jonathan Torop, among others.

3. https://www.globalresearch.ca/after-the-national-intelligence-estimate-nie-on-iran-let-the-great-debate-begin/7722

4. See https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-target-is-iran-israel-s-latest-gamble-may-backfire/11747 and https://www.globalresearch.ca/today-gaza-tomorrow-iran/5395359 and   https://www.globalresearch.ca/preparations-for-a-hit-against-iran-stopping-israel-s-next-war/18235

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook.

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Over the weekend, and as MintPress predicted last Tuesday, the controversial Western government-funded “humanitarian” group, the Syrian Civil Defense — popularly known as the White Helmets — were evacuated from southern Syria as the Syrian government continues to gain ground in its offensive throughout the country’s southwest. However, sources from within the Syrian opposition have revealed that the White Helmets were not the only ones evacuated from Syrian territory, as four top “rebel” commanders were also among the evacuees, undermining the heavily promoted narrative that the evacuation was purely “humanitarian” in nature.

According to Al Masdar News, four rebel commanders were evacuated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which oversaw the evacuation operation: Moaz Nassar and Abu Rateb, of Fursan al-Golan (the Knights of Golan); Ahmad Nahs, of Alwiyat Saif al-Sham (Sword of al-Sham); and Alaa al-Halaki; of Jaish Ababeel. Al Masdar’s sources also stated that those same four commanders had previously been recruited by Israeli intelligence early in the conflict and had maintained ties with the Mossad over the years.

#Quneitra – Maadeh Nassar "The Commander of the 'Golan Knights Brigade", Ahmad Al-Nuhas Commander of the "Brigade of the Sword of the Levant", Alaa Halaki "Commander of the Ababel army" and Abu Ratib Nassar, leader of the 'Golan Knights Brigade" escape to #Israel today morning. pic.twitter.com/tPe2OSAGrG

— maytham (@maytham956) July 22, 2018

Israeli ties to Syrian rebel groups

Though Al Masdar’s claims may seem shocking to some, there is plenty of evidence explaining why Israel would be interested in protecting commanders from these specific rebel brigades. In the case of Fursan al-Golan, for instance, the Wall Street Journal wrote last year that the Israeli government paid the rebel group an estimated $5,000 a month and a special Israeli army unit was created to oversee Israel’s support for Fursan al-Golan and other groups. Israel’s support for the group has been so great that it’s spokesperson, Moatasem al-Golani, told the Journal that “we wouldn’t have survived without Israel’s assistance.”

Israel’s backing of the group is believed to have begun back in 2013 under orders from former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who sought to cultivate the presence of Wahhabi rebels along the border between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as a “buffer zone.”

Given that Israel had spent over $60,000 a year supporting the group financially, it would make sense for Tel Aviv not only to develop and maintain ties with their commanders, but to rescue those commanders as the Syrian government continues its advance. Otherwise, the capture of the commanders by Syrian forces could reveal further proof of the web of connections between their group (and other related groups) and the Israeli government, as well as other foreign governments, including the United States.

A photo from the Israel, Syrian border along the Golan Heights shows IDF soldiers conversing with suspected Jabhat al Nusra fighters.

Indeed, the United States – Israel’s greatest ally – has also supported both Fursan al-Golan and Alwiyat Saif al-Sham, as both groups were trained and equipped by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) back in 2013. Alwiyat Saif al-Sham, for example, obtained TOW anti-tank missiles from the United States in the process. Though the group was “vetted” by the CIA, it joined forces in 2015 with the Jaish al-Haramon coalition, a group based in southern Syria and led by al-Nusra Front – the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda.

#SRO | INFOGRAPHIC – EXCLUSIVE – Rebellion forces in Hermon Mount area (S-W #Syria) creating the Jaysh al-Haramon. pic.twitter.com/OesGoXL69k

— Syrian Rebellion Obs (@Syria_Rebel_Obs) June 16, 2015

The assertion made by Al Masdar that the rescued rebel commanders had connections to Mossad is also in keeping with precedent, as the intelligence agency has long helped bolster terror groups throughout the region. For instance, Mossad has supported the terror group Jundallah, active in Iran and Pakistan, and the Iranian terror group Mujahedeen Khalq (MEK). And, as MintPress has previously reported, even some commanders of ISIS (Daesh) were later revealed to actually be Mossad agents following their capture.

Assertions of an Israeli evacuation of rebel commanders, if confirmed, would prove Israel’s “humanitarian” rescue of White Helmets members and their families was aimed at protecting assets of Israeli and Western intelligence that had helped to prolong Syria’s now seven-year-long civil war.

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

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Future historians may well identify Russian President Vladimir Putin’s landmark March 1 speech as the ultimate game-changer in the 21st-century New Great Game in Eurasia. The reason is minutely detailed in Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, a new book by Russian military/naval analyst Andrei Martyanov.

Martyanov is uniquely equipped for the task. Born in Baku in the early 1960s, he was a naval officer in the USSR era up to 1990. He moved to the US in the mid-1990s and is now a lab director in an aerospace firm. He belongs to an extremely rarified group: top military/naval analysts specializing in US-Russia.

From quoting Alexis de Tocqueville and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace to revisiting the balance of power during the Soviet era and beyond, Martyanov carefully tracks how the only nation on the planet “which can militarily defeat the United States conventionally” has reacted to a situation where any “meaningful dialogue between Russia and America’s politicians is virtually impossible.”

What is ultimately revealed is not only a case of disregarding basic Sun Tzu – “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles” – but most of all undiluted hubris, turbocharged, among a series of illusionistic positive feedback loops, by Desert Storm’s “turkey shoot” of Saddam Hussein’s heavily inflated, woefully trained army.

The United States’ industrial-military-intel-security complex profits from a compounded annual budget of roughly US$1 trillion. The only justification for such whopping expenditure is to manufacture a lethal external threat: Russia. That’s the key reason the complex will not allow US President Donald Trump even to try to normalize relations with Russia.

Yet now this is a whole new ball game as the US faces a formidable adversary that, as Martyanov carefully details, deploys five crucial capabilities.

1. Command, control, communications, computers, intel, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities equal to or better than the US.
2. Electronic warfare capabilities equal to or better than the US.
3. New weapons systems equal to or better than the US.
4. Air defense systems that are more than a match for US airpower.
5. Long-range subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles that threaten the US Empire of Bases and even the entire US mainland.

So how did we get here?

Debunking American military mythology

Martyanov argues that Russia, all through the first decade of the millennium, spent enough time “defining herself in terms of enclosed technological cycles, localization and manufacturing.”

In contrast, Germany, even with a large, developed economy, “cannot design and build from scratch a state-of-the-art fighter jet,” while Russia can. Germany “doesn’t have a space industry, and Russia does.”

As for those who pass in the US for Russian “experts,” they never saw these techno-breakthroughs coming; they “simply have no grasp of the enormous difference between the processes involved in a virtual monetized economy and those involved in manufacturing of the modern combat informational control system or of the cutting-edge fighter jet.”

Martyanov produces plenty of snapshots. For instance, “Russia …without any unnecessary fanfare, launched a complete upgrade of her naval nuclear deterrent with state of the art ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) of the Borey-class (Project 955 and 955A)…. This is the program which most Russia ‘analysts’ were laughing at ten years ago. They are not laughing any more.”

A central tenet of the book is to debunk American military mythology. That must include in-depth reappraisal of World War II and a re-examination of how the Soviet Navy was closing the technological gap with the US Navy already by the mid-1970s, even as it remained “a dedicated sea denial force designed strictly for deterrent.” The Soviet Navy, as the Russian Navy today, “was built largely for a single purpose: to prevent a NATO attack on the USSR from the sea.”

Moving to the post-USSR era, it’s inevitable that Russia had to come up with a concerted strategy to counteract the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s relentlessly moving east – a clear violation of the (verbal) agreement between George Bush Senior and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And that leads us to the holy of the holies concerning the favorite Beltway mantra, “Russian aggression.” Even as Russia “does have the capability to deal major damage to NATO,” as Martyanov reminds us, “why would Russia attack or damage European countries which are worth way more for Russia free and prosperous than they would be if damaged and, theoretically, subjugated?”

The caliber of Brzezinski’s nightmare

The book’s Chapter 7, titled “The Failure to Come to Grips with the Modern Geopolitical Realignment,” brings us back to another game-changing moment: the 2015 Victory Parade in Moscow, with Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping sitting next to each other, graphically exposing the worst Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski nightmare of the “two most powerful Eurasian nations declaring full independence from the American vision of the world.”

And then there was Russia’s campaign in Syria; on October 7, 2015, six 3M14 Kalibr cruise missiles were launched in intervals of five seconds from the Russian Navy’s small missile ships in the Caspian Sea, aimed at Daesh targets in Syria. The USS Theodore Roosevelt and its carrier battle group immediately understood the message – exiting the Persian Gulf in a flash.

Since then, the message has been amplified: the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, or “the Russian Navy’s Pacific zones of responsibility” are becoming “completely closed zones for any adversary.”

The lesson from the Kalibr-in-the-Caspian saga, writes Martyanov, is that “for the first time it was openly demonstrated, and the world took note, that the American monopoly on symbols of power was officially broken.”

As Martyanov shows how “in both Donbass and especially in Syria, Russia called the American geopolitical and military bluff,” there’s no question this Syria-Ukraine interconnection – which I analyzed here – is the foundation stone of the current “historically unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria in the US.”

So the ball – just like the one offered by Putin to Trump in Helsinki – is in the United States’ court. What Martyanov describes as “the deadly combination of contemporary American elites’ ignorance, hubris and desperation,” though, cannot be underestimated.

Already during his election campaign, Trump announced multiple times that he would contest the post-Cold War international (dis)order. Helsinki was a graphic demonstration that now Trump’s “drain the swamp” faces a massive immovable object, as the swamp will take no prisoners to preserve its trillion-dollar power.

In contrast, Russian diplomacy, as explicitly reaffirmed once again this week by Putin himself, is adamant that anything is permitted when it comes to avoiding Cold War 2.0.

But just in case, Russia’s new-generation weapons have now been formally unveiled by the Defense Ministry, and some of them are already operational.

‘Pearl Harbor meets Stalingrad’

It’s crystal clear that President Trump is applying Kissingerian divide-and-rule tactics, trying to reduce Russian political/economic connectivity with the two other Eurasian integration poles, China and Iran.

Still, the swamp cannot possibly contemplate The Big Picture – as this must-watch conversation between two of the very few Americans who actually know Russia in-depth attests. Professor Stephen Cohen and Professor John Mearsheimer go to the jugular: Nothing can be done when Russophobia is the law of the land.

Over and over again, we must go back to Putin’s March 1 speech, which presented the US with what can only be described, writes Martyanov, as “a military-technological Pearl Harbor-meets-Stalingrad.”

Martyanov goes all the way to explain how the latest Russian weapons systems present immense strategic – and historical – ramifications. The missile gap between the US and Russia is now “a technological abyss,” with ballistic missiles “capable of trajectories which render any kind of anti-ballistic defense useless.” Star Wars and its derivatives are now – to use a Trumpism – “obsolete.”

The Kinzhal, as described by Martyanov, is “a complete game-changer geopolitically, strategically, operationally, tactically and psychologically.” In a nutshell, “no modern or prospective air-defense system deployed today by NATO can intercept even a single missile with such characteristics.”

This means, among other things – and stressing it is never enough – that the whole Eastern Mediterranean can be closed off, not to mention the whole Persian Gulf. And all this goes way beyond asymmetry; it’s about “the final arrival of a completely new paradigm” in warfare and military technology.

Martyanov’s must-read book is the ultimate Weapon of Myth Destruction (WMD). And unlike the Saddam Hussein version, this one actually exists. As Putin warned (at 7:10 in the video), “They did not listen to us then.” Are they listening now?

“Vocês atacaram a nossa democracia. Para nós, não interessa os vossos desmentidos de habilidosos inveterados. Se insistirem nesse procedimento, considerá-lo-emos um acto de guerra “: assim é que Trump deveria ter declarado a Putin, na Cimeira de Helsínquia.

Afirma-o em La Repubblica, Thomas Friedman, conhecido editorialista do New York Times, acusando o Presidente russo de ter “atacado a NATO – pilar fundamental da segurança internacional, fazendo perder a estabilidade à Europa, bombardeado milhares de refugiados sírios, fazendo-os refugiar-se na Europa”. Acusa, igualmente, o Presidente dos Estados Unidos de ter “rejeitado o juramento da Constituição” e de ser “um operacional dos serviços secretos russos (Br. Inteligência)” ou de querer desempenhar essa função.

O que Friedman designa como linguagem ofensiva, é a posição de uma poderosa frente interna e internacional (da qual o New York Times é um dos principais porta-vozes) oposta às negociações USA-Rússia, que deviam prosseguir com o convite de Putin à Casa Branca. No entanto, existe uma diferença fundamental. Embora as negociações ainda não tenham produzido ocorrências, a oposição a essas mesmas negociações manifesta-se não só por palavras, mas sobretudo, por factos.

Deteriorando o clima descontraído da Cimeira de Helsínquia, o sistema bélico planetário dos Estados Unidos está a intensificar os preparativos de guerra, desde o Atlântico ao Pacífico:

Ø  Depois de ter desembarcado em Antuérpia,  uma brigada blindada USA com uma centena de tanques e um milhar de veículos militares, chegou a Roterdão uma brigada aérea USA com 60 helicópteros de ataque. Estas e outras forças USA/NATO estão instaladas perto do território russo, no âmbito da operação Atlantic Resolve, lançada em 2014, contra a “agressão russa”.

Ø  Numa atitude contra a Rússia, a Polónia solicitou a presença permanente de uma unidade blindada USA no seu território, oferecendo-se para pagar anualmente, de 1,5 a 2 biliões de dólares.

Ø  Ao mesmo tempo, a NATO intensifica o treino e o armamento de tropas, na Geórgia ena Ucrânia,candidatas a tornarem-se países membros da Aliança na fronteira com a Rússia.

Ø  Entretanto, o Congresso dos EUA recebe com todas as honras, Adriy Parubiy – fundador do Partido Nacional Socialista de acordo com o modelo do Partido Nacional Socialista de Adolf Hitler – chefe dos grupos paramilitares neonazis utilizados pela NATO no putsch da Praça Maidan.

Ø  O Comando NATO, de Lago Patria (JFC Naples) – às ordens do Almirante James Foggo, que também comanda as Forças Navais USA na Europa e as destinadas à África – está em plena actividade para organizar o grande exercício Trident Juncture 18, no qual participam  40.000 militares, 130 aviões e 70 navios de guerra de mais de 30 países, incluindo a Suécia e a Finlândia, membros da NATO. O exercício, que ocorrerá em Outubro, na Noruega e nos mares adjacentes, simulará um cenário de “defesa colectiva”, evidentemente, contra a “agressão russa”.

Ø  No Pacífico, acontece de 27 de Junho a 2 de Agosto, o grande exercício naval RIMPAC 2018 – organizado e dirigido pelo U.S. Indo-Pacific Command/USINDOPACOM, o Comando USA que abrange os oceanos Índico e Pacífico – com a participação de 25.000 marinheiros e fuzileiros navais, mais de 50 navios e 200 aviões de guerra.

Ø  O exercício – no qual também participam a França, a Alemanha e a Grã-Bretanha – é, nitidamente dirigido contra a China, que o Almirante Phil Davidson, Comandante da USINDOPACOM,designa como “grande potência rival que prejudica a ordem internacional para reduzir o acesso USA à região e tornar-se a potência preponderante”.

Quando Trump se encontrar com o Presidente chinês, Xi Jinping, Friedman acusá-lo-á de conivência não só com o inimigo russo, mas também com o inimigo chinês.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 24 de Julho de 2018

VIDEO PandoraTV :

 

La risposta bellica alla trattativa

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

«Voi avete attaccato la nostra democrazia. A noi non interessano le vostre smentite da giocatori d’azzardo incalliti. Se insisterete in tale atteggiamento, lo considereremo un atto di guerra»: così Trump avrebbe dovuto dire a Putin al Summit di Helsinki.

Lo sostiene su La Repubblica Thomas Friedman, noto editorialista del New York Times, accusando il presidente russo di aver «attaccato la Nato, pilastro fondamentale per la sicurezza internazionale, destabilizzato l’Europa e bombardato migliaia di rifugiati siriani facendoli riparare in Europa».

Accusa quindi il presidente degli Stati uniti di aver «ripudiato il giuramento alla Costituzione» e di essere «un asset dell’intelligence russa» o di volere interpretare tale parte.

Quella che Friedman esprime con linguaggio provocatorio è la posizione di un potente fronte interno e internazionale (di cui il New York Times è uno dei principali portavoce) contrario alla trattativa Usa-Russia, che dovrebbe proseguire con l’invito di Putin alla Casa Bianca.

C’è però una differenza sostanziale.

Mentre la trattativa non ha ancora prodotto fatti, l’opposizione alla trattativa si esprime non solo a parole ma soprattutto con i fatti. Vanificando il clima distensivo del Summit di Helsinki, il sistema bellico planetario degli Stati uniti sta intensificando i preparativi di guerra dall’Atlantico al Pacifico:

Ø  Dopo che è sbarcata ad Anversa una brigata corazzata Usa con un centinaio di carri armati e un migliaio di veicoli militari, è giunta a Rotterdam una brigata aerea Usa con 60 elicotteri da attacco.

Ø  Queste e altre forze Usa/Nato vengono schierate a ridosso del territorio russo, nel quadro dell’operazione Atlantic Resolve, lanciata nel 2014 contro l’«aggressione russa». In funzione anti-Russia, la Polonia ha richiesto la presenza permanente di una unità corazzata Usa sul proprio territorio, offrendosi di pagare 1,5-2 miliardi di dollari annui.

Ø  Allo stesso tempo la Nato intensifica l’addestramento e armamento di truppe in Georgia e Ucraina, candidate a divenire membri dell’Alleanza ai confini con la Russia.

Ø  Intanto il Congresso Usa riceve con tutti gli onori Adriy Parubiy, fondatore del partito nazionalsociale sul modello del Partito nazionalsocialista di Adolf Hitler, capo delle formazioni paramilitari neonaziste impiegate dalla Nato nel putsch di piazza Maidan.

Ø  Il Comando Nato di Lago Patria (Jfc Naples) – agli ordini dell’ammiraglio statunitense James Foggo che comanda anche le Forze navali Usa in Europa e quelle per l’Africa – è in piena attività per organizzare la grande esercitazione Trident Juncture 18, cui partiperanno 40.000 militari, 130 aerei e 70 navi da guerra di oltre 30 paesi. comprese Svezia e Finlandia partner Nato.

Ø  L’esercitazione, che si svolgerà in ottobre in Norvegia e nei mari adiacenti, simulerà uno scenario di «difesa collettiva» evidentemente contro l’«aggressione russa».

Ø  Nel Pacifico, si sta svolgendo dal 27 giugno al 2 agosto la grande esercitazione navale Rimpac 2018 – organizzata e diretta dallo UsIndoPacom, il Comando Usa che copre gli oceani Indiano e Pacifico – con la partecipazione di 25000 marinai e marines, oltre 50 navi e 200 aerei da guerra.

Ø  L’esercitazione – cui partecipano anche Francia, Germania e Gran Bretagna – è chiaramente diretta contro la Cina, che l’ammiraglio Phil Davidson, comandante dello UsIndoPacom, definisce «grande potenza rivale che mina l’ordine internazionale per ridurre l’accesso Usa alla regione e divenire egemone».

Quando Trump incontrerà il presidente cinese Xi Jinping, Friedman lo accuserà di connivenza non solo col nemico russo ma anche con quello cinese.

Manlio Dinucci

Il manifesto, 24 luglio 2018

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Those familiar with the debate around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) may be forgiven for thinking that science alone can solve the world’s food problems. The industry asserts that GMOs are vital if the world is to increase agricultural productivity and we are going to feed a growing global population. There is also the distinct impression that the GMO issue is all about ‘science’ and little else. 

People who question the need for and efficacy of GM have been labelled anti-science elitists who are responsible for crimes against humanity as they supposedly deny GM food to the hungry. Critics stand accused of waging a campaign of fear about the dangers of GM. In doing so, the argument goes that, due to ideology, they are somehow denying a technological innovation to farmers.

Critics have valid concerns about GMOs and have put forward a credible evidence to support their views. But instead of engaging in open and honest debate, we see some scientists hardening their positions, lashing out at critics and forwarding personal opinions (unrelated to their specific discipline) based on their perceived authority as scientists. There’s a fine line between science and industry-inspired lobbying and spin. Unfortunately, a number of scientists have difficulty locating it.

The problem: global food regime or GM technology itself

An accusation sometimes levelled at critics of GM is that they have trouble when it comes to differentiating between the technology and the companies who have come to dominate GM: they are thus overly concerned with waging an assault on big business and capitalism, losing site of the potential benefits of GM.

For sure, GM technology has become associated with large conglomerates that have rolled it out as a tool to further consolidate their dominant market position. These corporations are embedded in a system of capitalism that facilitates corporatisation of the global food regime and all that entails: for instance, a push towards seed monopolies, the roll-out of highly profitable proprietary inputs and chemical/biotech treadmills, leverage over legislation, trade deals and treaties and the general boosting and amalgamation of corporate power (as seen by recent mergers and acquisitions).

However, it is unfair to accuse critics of being unable to differentiate between the food regime and GM itself. Both scientists and non-scientists have concluded that genetic engineering poses unique scientific risks and has political, cultural, ethical and economic ramifications.

There are good reasons why in Europe robust regulatory mechanisms are in place for GM. GM food/crops are not substantially equivalent to their non-GM counterparts. More and more studies are highlighting the flawed premise of substantial equivalence. Given the risks, the precautionary principle is recognised as a sensible approach.

International consensus exists that the products of genetic engineering are not equivalent to their conventional counterparts. Many of the potential hazards are inherent in the GE process itself, and “are not techniques used in traditional breeding and selection” (Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, on page 7 of this document, where the example of GM maize and the amino acid lysine is also discussed; in addition, see references 5-10 at the bottom this page here).

There is sufficient reason to hold back on commercialising GM and subject each GMO to independent, transparent environmental, social and health impact evaluations: there can be no blanket statement that all GMO crops/foods are safe or somehow ‘good’. The claim of substantial equivalence is an industry get-out tactic to avoid the inconvenience of proper assessment and regulation. And any claim that there is consensus on the safety/efficacy of GM within the ‘scientific community’ is based on spin rather than reality. This, along with the claims that ‘the science is decided’ on GM is mere rhetoric designed to close down debate.

There are major uncertainties concerning the technology (not least regarding its precision and health safety aspects), which are brushed aside by claims of ‘the science’ is decided and the ‘facts’ about GM are indisputable. Such claims – alongside the attempt to sideline non-scientists from the debate – are merely political posturing and part of the agenda to tip the policy agenda in favour of GM.

We must consider too that many things that scientists are trying to achieve with GMOs have already been surpassed by means of conventional breeding. We should not accept the premise that only GM can solve problems in agriculture. Non-GMO options and innovations have out-performed GM. So why press ahead with a technology that changes the genetic basis of food with all that entails for human health and the environment?

Despite critics’ concerns, they continue to be attacked for supposedly being anti-science and anti-choice. For instance, the pro-GMO line of blaming people in richer countries for denying the benefits of GM to others elsewhere has become part of industry rhetoric. The case of Golden Rice is often used as an example. UK politician Owen Patterson is on record as saying that wicked activists are denying food to little children.

Glenn Stone and Dominic Glover (Washington University and the University of Sussex) have noted that this claim just does not stack up. Golden Rice has not come to market because ongoing tests show it has failed to deliver as a technology. Meanwhile, Vitamin A deficiency is falling dramatically in the Philippines, while the claims about Golden Rice remain wishful thinking.

It is a convenient and misleading to accuse ‘privileged activists’ in affluent countries of denying choice to poor people by preventing the commercialisation and cultivation of GM crops across the globe. In  South America and Africa, for example, it is not some affluent bunch of activists in rich countries who are against GM. It is local farmers and it is because corporations with US govt help and philanthropic colonialists like Bill Gates are moving in to assert their leverage in agriculture and over indigenous farming.

According to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (ASFA):

“White male European so-called experts are channelling the message of the biotech industry, heavily controlled by US-European seed and chemical giants Monsanto/Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer. The message once again is that failure of African farmers to adopt GMO technology is the root cause of hunger and poverty on the continent. It is ironic that GMO foods are banned by law as unsafe in the European home countries of those giving the advice. Meanwhile the African biotech scientists seem more concerned that the strict liability measures will chase away donor funding and investment for their costly and “prestigious” research.

“They blame the anti-GMO activists, rather than their own technological failure, for the impasse. They claim that if only the activists would shut up and go away, the industry backed researchers could fix the food insecurity problem once and for all!  Once again Africa is being compelled to adopt others’ views, others’ technologies, others’ interests. Have we not seen this before? They claim to have ‘sound science’ on their side but what kind of science resolutely ignores the evidence? What has actually happened in those African countries where GMOs have been rolled out? Let’s take a look at the facts.”

ASFA then goes on to highlight the false promises and failures of GM in Africa. Clearly, it is not just the politics of GM that ASFA has concerns about: it is the technology itself.

It is misleading when supporters of GM call people’s attention to apparent public sector funding of GM and the apparent altruism that is claimed to underpin the GM project. Even when not directly pushing GM to boost the bottom line, big business (and US state interests) is certainly present in the not too distant background. As with the current push for GM mustard (also misleadingly portrayed as a public service endeavour ) in India, ‘pioneering’ crops have a role in opening the GM floodgates in a region or country (there are sound reasons for rejecting GM mustard as described by Aruna Rodrigues in her submitted court documents).

But is this type of ‘activism’ denying choice to farmers? Not at all, as I have outlined elsewhere. If anything, large corporations do their best to break traditional practices and environmental learning pathways developed over time with the aim of getting farmers on technological treadmills. These same companies also exert their leverage on a wider level via the WTO, Codex and various international agreements.

But you never see supporters of GM campaigning against any of this. Perhaps they are too busy helping the process along via the right-wing neoliberal think tanks they are associated with. Instead, they fixate on Greenpeace or ‘activists’ whose leverage is dwarfed by the power of these corporations.

Pro-GMO activists make great play about ‘potential’ benefits of GM and roll out examples to ‘prove’ the point. Fine, if these benefits really do stack up in reality; but we need to look at this objectively because plenty of evidence indicates that GM is not beneficial and that non-GM alternatives are a better option. Most of all, we need to put commercial interests and the career/funding interests of scientists to one side when determining the need for and the efficacy of GM.

Solution based on food sovereignty

Banning GMOs will not solve the problems associated with lobbying and corruption, the adverse impacts of pesticide use, corporate monopolies, monocultures, food commodity speculation, the denial of peasant’s land rights or any other problems associated with the capitalist food regime. But neither will GM lead to ensuring global food security.

We must look away from the industrial yield-output paradigm and adopt a more integrated, systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for many different factors, including local food security and sovereignty, local calorific production, cropping patterns and diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures. This is precisely why, from Africa to India, locally owned, grass-root agroecology and zero budget farming are gaining traction.

Scaling up agroecology offers potential solutions to many of the world’s most pressing problems, whether, for instance, climate change and carbon storage, soil degradation, water shortages, unemployment or food security. Working with the natural environment (as Bhaskar Save notes) involves a different mindset from that which wants to genetically engineer it and all the risks and unforeseen consequences that it inevitably entails. If readers take time to click on the previous link for Bhaskar Save, it becomes patently clear that undermining or eradicating one system of farming by imposing another has serious ethical, environmental, social and political ramifications. Something that scientific research does not concern itself with.

The consequences of GM do not just relate to unpredictable changes in the DNA, proteins and biochemical composition of the resulting GM crop. Introducing GM can involve disrupting cultures and knowledge systems and farmers’ relationships with their environments. Who is to say that GM is somehow ‘better’ or should take precedence over these traditional systems?

Corporate boardroom executives or well-funded microbiologists each with their own agendas and looking at things from their own blinkered perspectives? Once those systems are disrupted, the knowledge and practices that underpin them become lost forever. For instance, in terms of an integrated pest management strategy, Devinder Sharma talks of women who can identify 110 non-vegetarian insects and 60 vegetarian insects. Can such knowledge survive? To be wiped out for corporate profit and a flawed GM experiment?

As described in this paper, for thousands of years farmers experimented with different plant and animal specimens acquired through migration, trading networks, gift exchanges or accidental diffusion. By learning and doing, trial and error, new knowledge was blended with older, traditional knowledge systems. The farmer therefore possessed acute observation and has traditionally engaged in risk minimising strategies. Farmers took measures to manage drought, grow cereals with long stalks that can be used as fodder, engage in cropping practices that promote biodiversity, ethno-engineer soil and water conservation, use self-provisioning systems on farm recycling and use collective sharing systems such as managing common resource properties.

Farmers know their micro-environment, so they can plant crops that mature at different times, thereby facilitating more rapid crop rotation without exhausting the soil. Today, however, large-scale industrial-based agricultural production erodes biodiversity by depleting the organisms that live in soil and by making adverse changes to the structure of the soil and the kind of plants that can be grown in such artificially-created environments.

Many of the practices of small farmers are now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate. It is no surprise therefore that various high-level reports have called for agroecology and smallholder farmers to be prioritised and invested in to achieve global sustainable food security. Instead, what we see is the marginalisation traditional organic agriculture by corporate interests.

Traditional food production systems depend on using the knowledge and expertise of village communities and cultures in contrast to prioritising imported ‘solutions’. The widespread but artificial conditions created by the latter work against the survival of traditional knowledge, which creates and sustains unique indigenous farming practices and food culture.

None of this is based on a romantic yearning for the past or ‘the peasantry’. It is for good reason that the reports referred to call for investment in this type of agriculture centred on small farms: despite the pressures (including the fact that industrial agriculture grabs 80%of subsidies and 90% of research funds), it continues to feed most of the world.

Cultural, ethical, political and environmental considerations matter just as much – even more – than the science of GM. And that’s even before we consider how the ill thought out introduction (or imposition) of GM can have dire financial impacts for communities, as has been the case with Bt cotton in many areas where it has been adopted.

In acknowledging the type of food regime that exists and the risks, motives and implications of GM, pushing back against the large corporations that hold sway over the global food system, food sovereignty based on localisation and (political) agroecology is necessary. This involves reclaiming the food system and challenging the leverage that private capital has over all our lives.

In the meantime, we are not talking about ‘banning’ anything. Where GMOs, gene editing, synthetic biology or other similar technologies are concerned, we require a responsible approach based on transparent social, health and environmental impact assessments. In the absence of this, there should be a moratorium because the potential for a responsible approach is most definitely lacking: Rosemary, Mason, Carol van Strum, the late Shiv Chopra, Evaggelos Vallianatos and others have described how high-level institutions responsible for food and environmental safety have been subverted and corrupted over the years by commercial interests.

Decades on from Rachel Carson, have we learned nothing? If the people listed above tell us anything, it is that the ‘pesticide revolution’ was based on widespread fraud. We are now trying to deal with the health and environmental impacts of dousing the land with agrotoxins year in, year out.  They also tell us that commercial interests should not determine regulatory regimes. We need transparency, democratic accountability, science untainted by corporate interests and robust public institutions which guard against commercial interests that undermine regulatory decisions.

While the pro-GM lobby rushes to experiment with the genetic core of the world’s food and leave a potentially detrimental legacy for future generations, the question remains:

“How is it possible that in the 21st century the world has the capacity to feed every single human being on the planet, yet the majority of people in Africa and the rest of the Global South, who are poor – whilst obesity soars in the West – go rampantly hungry?” – Walden Bello 

It is because food and agriculture have become wedded to power structures that have created food surplus and food deficit areas and which have restructured indigenous agriculture across the world and tied it to an international system of trade based on export-oriented mono-cropping, commodity production for a manipulated and volatile international market and indebtedness to international financial institutions.

Once you understand how global capitalism and its corporate food regime operates and how private capital shapes and benefits from a food regime based on an exploitative ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy, you realise that genuine political and economic solutions are required if we are to feed the world and ensure equitable food security.

We must not be deterred by the “haughty imperialism” that exists in scientific circles that aggressively pushes for a GMO techno-fix. We must not be distracted from the root causes of poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

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

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

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

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

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

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How does a British government respond when an allied state invades another territory with the backing of jihadists, overthrows a democratic experiment and consolidates an occupation? Judging by what Turkey is doing in the Afrin district of northern Syria, the answer is: by supporting it.

Britain, far from helping to defeat terrorism in Syria, is once again aiding it.

Turkey’s military intervention in Afrin was launched on 20 January and largely concluded on 18 March, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that his forces were in control of Afrin city. In that two-month period, over 200,000 people fled, and human rights groups accused Turkish forces of shelling civilians, killing scores, and indiscriminately shooting at refugees attempting to cross into Turkey.

British backing

Turkey’s wrath was launched against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the dominant element in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighting the Islamic State (IS) in northern Syria – but which Erdogan calls a “terror army” linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group in Turkey.

Ankara has wanted to stop the US plan to stay in Syria and form a 30,000-strong force with the SDF to protect Syrian territory held by its mainly Kurdish allies. Turkey’s war aim appears to be to create a sphere of influence in northern Syria free from the Kurds.

Britain has backed the intervention in Afrin, saying it recognises “Turkey’s legitimate interest in the security of its borders” – an apologia for Turkish actions that prompted a senior Turkish official to say that Ankara “appreciates” the UK stance. While London did go through the motions of calling for “de-escalation”, it rejected a call for a ceasefire.

Throughout the military operation in Afrin, the UK was in “close communication” with Turkey and said it “cannot categorically state” that British weapons were not used. Last year, the UK already signalled it would do nothing to prevent a Turkish attack on Afrin.

Britain has also helped Turkey out diplomatically by its ambassador to Ankara, Sir Dominick Chilcot, who has said the UK has “a lot of respect and consideration” for Turkey’s views on the YPG, and referred to the “potential threat posed by the YPG” and said it had “very close links” to the PKK.

On the side of jihadists

British support for Turkey is especially noteworthy in light of UK military support to the force it is fighting, the SDF. Although the UK is not known to have supplied arms to the YPG, unlike the US, the UK has carried out airstrikes to support the SDF that are “likely to have assisted the YPG”, a British parliamentary committee concluded.

Moreover, in March, a British Special Air Service (SAS) soldier embedded with US forces was killed fighting with local Kurdish troops to stabilise the northern city of Manbij. SAS sources revealed that those who planted the bomb could belong to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the same affiliation of militias, including jihadists, being backed by Turkey to take over Afrin.

Journalist Patrick Cockburn reported that Turkey also recruited and trained ex-IS fighters to drive the YPG out of Afrin: Of the 10,000 FSA forces who crossed into Syria on 20 January with 6,000 Turkish troops, “most” were ex-IS and many were “open about their allegiance to al-Qaeda and its offshoots”.

It can be presumed that Britain knows all about Turkish collaboration with jihadists. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, has, for example, said that Turkey cooperates best with the US and UK in terms of intelligence-sharing on foreign fighters who want to use Turkish territories when entering or exiting Syria.

May’s support for Erdogan

As Britain arms Turkey, there is a real risk that such military equipment can end up in the hands of jihadists. Yet the British government defines Turkey as a priority market for promoting arms sales that have been worth more than £200 million ($265m) since 2016, including aircraft, helicopters, drones, grenades, small arms and ammunition.

In January 2017, British Prime Minister Theresa May visited Ankara and signed a £100m deal to sell British warplanes to Turkey. Earlier this year, Turkish fighter jets of unknown origin reportedly bombed the main hospital in Afrin as part of the Turkish offensive, killing 16 people.

Two months after the conquest of Afrin was completed, May welcomed Erdogan to London, where he also met the Queen. In a government statement, May said Ankara was an ally in the fight against terrorism, failed to mention Afrin at all, and only mentioned Kurds in the context of “Kurdish terrorism”.

In a phone call with Erdogan last month, May said the UK would “continue working in partnership” with Turkey in Syria, showing that London is intensely relaxed about its ally’s collaboration with the jihadists it is meant to oppose.

Once again, it can be seen that the UK’s principal aim in this part of the Middle East is not to fight terrorism, but to maintain its alliance with Turkey, sell arms and counter the Assad regime in Syria. This strategy has led it to undermine its main ally in the region fighting IS – the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the YPG, which the Foreign Office recognises “make an important contribution to counter-[IS] efforts”.

The case of Rojava

Although the UK proscribes the PKK in Turkey as a terrorist organisation, it does not so regard the YPG in Syria; the minister of state for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, has said they are “separate organisations”.

The PYD declared a self-governed territory that it refers to as Rojava, or the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. Rojava showed a significant commitment to promoting multi-ethnic governance and women’s rights, having held elections in September last year. This experiment was demolished by Turkey’s takeover of Afrin, with Turkish forces taking over homes and seizing farms, while 134,000 Afrin residents remain displaced and face restrictions in returning.

To students of British history, Britain’s favouring of Islamist-backed military conquest over more liberal, democratic forces comes as no surprise – rather, it is a leitmotif of British foreign policy in the Middle East.

*

This article was originally published on Middle East Eye.

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

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Back in April 2018,  The United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres explained at a conference in Geneva that three-quarters of the Yemeni population were in desperate need of aid and protection as the war continued to rage.

He explained that

over 8 million people in Yemen “did not know where they will obtain their next meal,” and that “every ten minutes, a child under five dies of preventable causes” and because of this, “nearly two-thirds of girls are married before the age of 18, and many before they are 15.”

It is clear that there is a significant humanitarian disaster occurring in Yemen that is mostly being ignored internationally as the world keeps its eyes on Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. So why then is Yemen being ignored?

To answer this question, we must ask why Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea are the focus. The most straight forward way to answer this critical question is by highlighting that neither of these four countries are under the orbit of American imperialism and are therefore targeted whether it be by military means and/or by severe economic sanctions in the hope that they become compliant and open their economy to corporate domination and US dollar hegemony. Accompanied with these acts of economic subversion are the constant accusations of human rights abuses made by Washington and their allies against these governments. They are accused of perpetrating human rights abuses against their own people.

But with Yemen having a food shortage crisis with ports blockaded, a cholera crisis, and civilians targeted by double-tap airstrikes, including attacks against schools, hospitals, weddings, funerals and any other social event possibly imaginable, why is there little international condemnation against the main perpetrator, Saudi Arabia?

Turkish energy analyst and the Chairman of Ankara-based Institute for Energy Markets and Policies, Dr. Volkan Ozdemir, said in an interview with Sputnik Turkiye in 2017 that:

“For the last 44-45 years, the petrodollar system has been ruling the world, which means that the international oil trade had been mostly paid for in US dollars. It stems from the Middle Eastern crises of the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia bound itself to selling oil only in US dollars. Given that Saudi oil has played the major role in the US dollar becoming the world’s reserve currency, the US turned into the guarantor of the security of Saudi Arabia. Being the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar has remained the foundation of the US’ global hegemony.”

As Dr. Ozdemir explains, there is a very intimate relationship between Saudi oil and the US dollar. So long as the dollar hegemony is not threatened, any state can perpetrate human rights atrocities as Saudi Arabia perpetrates against its own people and Yemenis on a daily basis, but threaten this hegemony, then the full force of American might will be felt.

Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had ambitions to unify Africa through a single currency called ‘the Dinar’ that would be backed by gold and would liberate the continent from the US Dollar monopoly. The new gold-backed currency would have meant African states would have traded its vast and precious resources for gold, thus undermining the dollar that is literally only paper. What we saw in 2011 was his capture, torture, sodomization and murder by US-backed militants. This was also repeated earlier in the Muslim World with long-time Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein dumping the Dollar to trade Iraq’s oil in Euros; this being one of the main reasons for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea in different manners are either outside the orbit of the US Dollar or have challenged its hegemony. Their resistance to being economically dominated by the US Dollar and to achieve, or maintain, sovereignty over their own economic destinies has seen the constant accusations of human rights abuses levelled against them.

However, as Saudi Arabia is a compliant state to US imperialism and is a bulwark of protecting the Dollar hegemony on the global economy, it can escape all criticisms and allegations made against it. It is for this reason that Saudi Arabia can escape sanctions and criticisms despite its use of cluster munitions and White Phosphorus, killing journalists, attacking facilities run by aid organizations, and while all this occurs, the US and the UK have accelerated weapon sales to the puritanical kingdom.

Rather, Washington and London should have at the minimum taken on the example made by Islamabad who were asked by Riyadh to join in the coalition against Yemen, but maturely opted to remain neutral in such an aggression against the Arab world’s most impoverished state. This is unsurprising as we continue to see Pakistan liberate itself from US control that previous leaders put the country under and we now see Islamabad operate mostly independently to make decisions that are in the best interests, at least in foreign policy, of the Pakistani people.

So long as Saudi Arabia continues to help preserve the hegemony of the US Dollar, it will be able to continue human rights abuses, including the starvation of the Yemeni population, to achieve its goal of regional hegemony. Saudi Arabia believes that it is countering Iranian influence on its southern border, but this is literally coming at the price of thousands of deaths because of preventable diseases, starvation and airstrikes. The question then remains whether we can take US accusations against other states of human rights abuses seriously when considering the daily human rights abuses perpetrated by Saudi Arabia?

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Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

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After 70 years of Israeli colonization of Palestine and discrimination against the Palestinians treating them as subhuman goyims, Israelis; the racist self-proclaimed holy people, light on all nations, have just crowned their racist ideology with a new law; Jewish Nation-State Law, that was passed on July 19th.

This law defines the Zionist Israeli colony in Palestine as a state that belongs exclusively to the “Jewish people”. It totally disregards and cancels the citizenship of the indigenous Palestinians numbering more than 50% of all the recent population and whose roots in the land go back thousands of years in history even before the alleged existence of ancient Israel. 

This law considers the “land of Israel” (all historical Palestine) as the historical homeland of the Jewish people, where they can fulfill their alleged cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination that is unique and exclusive to the Jewish people. It stipulates that al-Quds (known as Jerusalem), complete and united, as the capital of Israel. It grants automatic citizenship to world Jewry and encourages all Jews, and only Jews, to immigrate to Israel. To accommodate these new immigrants this law views the expansion and development of new Jewish settlements (colonies) as a national value. To make this Jewish Zionist Israel more unique and more exclusive than the rest of the world this law paints it with Hebrew language and Hebrew calendar as the official language and calendar of the state.

All these privileges for the Jews come on the expense and nullification of the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. This law violates international laws, UN resolutions, peace process and political agreements, and most importantly human morality. It totally negates the existence of Palestinians; the rightful owners of the land. It cancels the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their own homes and towns as guaranteed by international laws. It negates their history, their language, their culture, their religion and their humanity. What is most dangerous is that it paves the way for more ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and more theft of their land to build more Jewish colonies.

In short, this law is a flagrant discrimination against Palestinians. This Jewish discrimination has a long history that started 100 years ago and gradually grew in intensity until it culminated with this Jewish National-State Law. Israel does not allow Palestinians to buy or rent any land because the Israeli government claims the whole Palestine as Jewish owned granted by divine land deed. Palestinian towns are considered contaminants on sacred Jewish land that need to be extricated. Thus, Israeli governments pursued a policy of graduated demolition of Palestinian homes and villages. The recent demolition of Palestinian Khan el-Ahmar village last week is the latest example. Palestinian existence is tolerated as long as they are perceived as slaves; animal souls born in human bodies whose sole existence is to serve the god’s chosen people; the Jews.

Israel has finally admitted what all the world has known since the beginning of its illegal colonial establishment as the ultimate racist apartheid in the whole world. Israel is a colonial project based fundamentally on the racist religious faith of Judaism with a genocidal real estate racist god, who favors one alleged nation over the rest of his creations to be the light on nations and assigns them a promised piece of land as a homeland. Let us remember that Judaism is a religion not a nationality, and that “Jewish people” is just a religious farce, for modern Jews came from different nationalities, and Israeli Jews are Jews, who adopted the Zionist colonial ideology.

This law openly declares that Israel is an apartheid regime that is worse even than the old South African apartheid regime. It clearly exposes the fallacy that Israel is the “only democracy” in the Middle East for in actuality Israel has been the only racist and Jewish exclusive state in the Middle East. The region does have some Arab democratic regimes such as that of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt where government is elected in as a democratic fashion as the American elections. Unlike Israel that considers itself Jewish only, these Arab countries have citizens who are members of different religions and creeds and are from different ethnicities.

This Israeli law embodies the ugliest form of racism far worse than the Nazi’s motto of “Deutchland über alles” (Germany above all).

Racism is the most fundamental building block of Zionism/Israel and is an intrinsic characteristic of the Zionist colony so much so that Zionist Jews do not just discriminate against all goyims; non-Jews, but they also discriminate against different factions of Jews among themselves, and segregate each faction from the others; Ashkenazim, Haredim, Sephardim, Mizrahim, and black African Jews, Oriental Jews, Russian Jews European and American Jews. This intra-racism is so strong that white Jewish Israelis regularly commit hate crimes against black Ethiopian Jewish Israelis and refuse to have them live in the same neighborhood or shop in the same grocery stores, or work in the same office, or even buried in the same grave yards. This racism is implanted early in the minds of their children in public schools, where black Jewish Israeli children are segregated from white Jewish Israeli children.

This intra-racism is not restricted to individual Jews, Jewish gangs, or certain Jewish Israeli neighborhoods or cities, but it is also a governmental policy adopted by governmental as well as civil and private institutions. The well-publicized cases of forcibly injecting Jewish African immigrant women with birth control on their first entry to the state, building walls isolating Ethiopian communities from white communities, the dumping in trash of donated black Jewish blood believing it is religiously unfit for white Jews, the theft of thousands of African Jewish new-born babies from their newly immigrated mothers claiming them as born dead while giving them to white Jewish families, among other similar cases of extreme intra-racism and discrimination are examples of racist policies perpetrated by the Zionist governments.

This racism and segregation breed hatred and violence that is encouraged in the Israeli educational system since kindergarten classes. Students are taught that the Jewish race is a special race, a holy race, light upon all nations; god’s chosen people, while the Others are defiled races.

This racist apartheid law is the major premise in the Zionist colonial ideology. The Israelis did not dare to declare it in the past for fear of global reprimand. But now with the American support at its zenith with Trump’s administration declaring al-Quds (Jerusalem) as the Israeli capital, and with the timid objections from global communities, who seem to be unwilling to hold Israel responsible for its many crimes, Israeli leaders are emboldened to despise all international laws and to pursue their brutal racist colonial project of Greater Israel in the Middle East.

It is still not clear to many nations and their political leaders that the ultimate goal of this Greater Israel Project is not just to colonize and control only Palestine, but also the whole Middle Eastern region as its second phase.

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Featured image is from The Tyee.

Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen.

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On July 20, the US Defense Department announced in a statement that it will provide $200 million to Ukraine in security-cooperation funds earmarked for additional training, equipment, and advisory efforts to build the defensive capacity of its armed forces.  The funds are intended to enhance Ukraine’s command-and-control and situational-awareness systems, secure communications, military mobility, night-vision capabilities, and military medical treatment. “This reaffirms the long-standing defense relationship between the United States and Ukraine,” the statement noted.

The package includes equipment to support ongoing training programs and operational needs, including counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, night-vision devices, electronic warfare detection, secure communications, and medical equipment. The total of US security-sector assistance to Ukraine since 2014 will now top $1 billion in aid. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the founder the Senate Ukraine Caucus, hailed the announcement, which he called “a clear message that America stands with the Ukrainian people in their struggle … against Russian aggression,” as he put it.

In March, the State Department cleared a $47-million sale of FGM-148 Javelin portable anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.  The package specified 210 missiles and 37 launchers. Ukrainian personnel have been training with the new weapons since May. Sending US military on an advice and training mission is tantamount to indirect involvement in Ukraine’s internal conflict. Hundreds of US and Canadian military instructors have been training Ukrainian personnel at the Yavorov firing range since 2015. The US Navy operates a facility in Ochakov.

In June, Ukraine’s parliament approved the law “On Amending Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine (on the Direction of Ukraine’s Foreign Policy),” which set NATO membership as Ukraine’s foreign-policy goal, replacing the country’s non-aligned status. With the economy in pitiful shape, Ukraine’s defense expenditures already greatly exceed  2% of its GDP. Very few NATO members spend such a share of their GDP on military needs, despite the pledges they have made at summits.

Ukraine’s government says its military will meet NATO standards by or during the year 2020. But allocating a large percentage of GDP to military needs and getting bang for one’s buck are two different things. Natan Chazin, a former advisor to the chief of the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces, believes the military reforms have gone nowhere. According to a sensational story in the New York Times, corruption is widespread in the ranks of Ukraine’s military. If so, who can guarantee that the US-supplied weapons would not fall into the wrong hands and be used against the US military somewhere outside of Europe?

The US 2018 fiscal year (FY) defense budget allocates $350 million for security assistance to Kiev. In the draft budget for FY 2019, Ukraine is included in the list of countries to be granted security assistance under the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program.

The sum of $200 million was allocated months ago as part of the defense budget, but was kept on hold pending “a series of defense reforms” Washington was demanding from Kiev. The passage of Ukraine’s new national security law, signed by the Ukrainian president on July 5, met the requirements enshrined in the US legislation, thereby allowing the Pentagon to release the funds.  The Law on National Security provides a legislative framework for aligning Ukraine’s national security architecture with Euro-Atlantic principles. It is perceived as a major step toward achieving NATO interoperability.

The timing has a symbolic impact.  US President Donald Trump has come under harsh criticism for the remarks he made during a joint press conference after the summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 16.  The announcement on military aid to Ukraine came on the same day the White House rejected a proposal from Russia to hold a referendum in eastern Ukraine on the fate of the region.   The possibility was raised by Vladimir Putin during the talks. Addressing Russian diplomats on July 19, President Putin said that any country pushing Ukraine or Georgia into the NATO fold “should think of the possible consequences of this irresponsible policy” because Russia would “respond in kind to any aggressive steps that directly threaten Russia.” Indeed, why should the US provide lethal weapons and training to a neighbor of Russia, not to mention its military presence in Ochakov? Russia has not sent weapons to any neighbors of the US, nor does it have a military presence near America’s borders.

Military cooperation between the US and Ukraine is a multilateral process that is moving forward. A US-Ukraine cyber-security bill has passed in the House.

So, cooperation in various areas is thriving, despite human-rights violations in Ukraine. This fact has been confirmed by a report from the State Department. The corruption in Ukraine is an internationally acknowledged problem. Popular protests are commonplace, despite the fact that the conflict in the Donbass is being used to distract the public from their domestic woes. Many in the West are frustrated with the way Kiev is implementing reforms and with the political influence of the oligarchs.  A study by the prestigious Brookings Institute has confirmed the fact that the reforms in Ukraine have foundered. The country’s politicians are embracing extremist rhetoric.

But a blind eye is being turned to all of this, as Kiev grows obsequious and ready to comply with instructions from Washington. In late June, the Ukrainian government made a decision to buy American coal from Pennsylvania, which is said to be almost twice as expensive as what is locally sourced in the Donbass.  It has also decided to rely on cooperation with Westinghouse, in an attempt to maintain its nuclear energy capacity. The deal assumes that the spent fuel will be stored near the surface, turning the country into a nuclear dump.

Kiev has recently been rewarded with an official status in NATO. The 2018 NATO summit confirmed its support for Ukraine’s membership. To display its diligence Kiev has recently joined a new three-nation anti-Moscow alliance.

With the US-Russia two-way dialog on Ukraine stalled, Washington is no longer viewed as a mediator, but rather an accomplice who is fueling the conflict. America’s vigorous political support and security assistance is enticing Kiev into seeking a military solution to the crisis in the Donbass. Where could that lead? Russia can supply the self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine with weapons systems, including the Kornet anti-tank system, which has better specs than the US Javelin. Moscow could recognize the republics as independent states, once the Minsk II accords wash out. If Russian forces are invited in by the governments of those new republics, Moscow may agree to those requests, which would be an action strictly in compliance with international law. This is the scenario the US and Ukraine may provoke.  They will have no one to blame but themselves.

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Arkady Savitsky is a military analyst based in St Petersburg, Russia.

Featured image is from the author.

This week,  leaders of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will be meeting in Johannesburg amidst an evolving trade war sponsored by the Trump administration. The venue will be attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

To what extent will the BRICS countries respond to the wave of economic sanctions and trade measures. China has intimated its resolve to implement bilateral trade deals which bypass the dollar. 

What is the nature of the BRICS project? How will it evolve in relation to the current trade environment?

Three out of the five BRICS member states are full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) including China, Russia and India.

Brazil and South Africa are heavily dollarized economies, with governments broadly committed to the tenets of neoliberalism. Both Brazil and South Africa are experiencing deap-seated political crises which in large part are attributable to US imperial policies. 

Will the BRICS initiative be in a position to effectively challenge US dollar hegemony? 

Global Research will covering the BRICS venue which will be dominated by debate concerning the US imposed trade restrictions. 

The following background article first published by GR in April 2015 focusses on some of the inherent contradictions of the BRICS initiative, which still prevail today. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 24, 2018

 

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The financial media as well as segments of the alternative media are pointing to a possible weakening of the US dollar as a global trading currency resulting from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) initiative. 

One of the central arguments in this debate on competing World currencies hinges on the BRICS initiative to create a development bank which, according to analysts, challenges the hegemony of Wall Street and the Washington based Bretton Woods institutions.

The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) was set up to challenge two major Western-led giants – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. NDB’s key role will be to serve as a pool of currency for infrastructure projects within a group of five countries with major emerging national economies – Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa. (RT, October 9, 2015, emphasis added)

More recently, emphasis has been placed on the role of China’s new Asia Infrastructure Investment  Bank (AIIB), which, according to media reports, threatens to “transfer global financial control from Wall Street and City of London to the new development banks and funds of Beijing and Shanghai”.

While the creation of BRICS has significant geopolitical implications, both the AIIB as well as the proposed BRICS Development Bank (NDB) and its Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA) are dollar denominated entities. Unless they are coupled with a multi-currency system of trade and credit, they do not threaten dollar hegemony. Quite the opposite, they tend to sustain and extend dollar denominated lending. Moreover, they replicate several features the Bretton Woods framework.

Towards a Multi-Currency Arrangement? 

Heavily indebted under the brunt of their external creditors,  all three countries are faithful pupils of the IMF-World Bank. The central bank of these countries is controlled by Wall Street and the IMF. For them to enter into a “non-dollar” or an “anti-dollar” development banking arrangement with multiple currencies, would have required prior approval of the IMF.

The Contingency Reserve Arrangement

The CRA is defined as a “framework for provision of support through liquidity and precautionary instruments in response to actual or potential short-term balance of payments pressures.” (Russia India Report April 7, 2015). In this context, the CRA fund does not constitute a “safety net” for BRICS countries, it accepts the hegemony of the US dollar which is sustained by large scale speculative operations in the currency and commodity markets.

In essence the CRA operates in a similar fashion to an IMF precautionary loan arrangement (e.g. Brazil November 1998) with a view to enabling highly indebted countries to maintain the parity of their exchange rate to the US dollar, by replenishing central bank reserves through borrowed money.

The CRA excludes the policy option of foreign exchange controls by BRICS member states. In the case of India, Brazil and South Africa, this option is largely foreclosed as a result of their agreements with the IMF.

The dollar denominated $100 billion CRA fund is a “silver platter” for Western “institutional speculators” including JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Goldman Sachs et al, which are involved in short selling operations on the Forex market. Ultimately the CRA fund will finance the speculative onslaught in the currency market.

Neoliberalism firmly entrenched

An arrangement using national currencies instead of the US dollar requires sovereignty in central bank monetary policy. In many regards, India, Brazil and South Africa are (from the monetary standpoint) US proxy states, firmly aligned with IMF-World Bank-WTO economic diktats.

It is worth recalling that since 1991, India’s macroeconomic policy was under under the control of the Bretton Woods institutions, with a former World Bank official, Dr. Manmohan Singh, serving first as Finance Minister and subsequently as Prime Minister.

Moreover, while India is an ally of China and Russia under BRICS, it has entered into a  new defense cooperation deal with the Pentagon which is (unofficially) directed against Russia and China. It is also cooperating with the US in aerospace technology. India constitutes the largest market (after Saudi Arabia) for the sale of US weapons systems. And all these transactions are in US dollars.

Similarly, Brazil signed a far-reaching Defense agreement with the US in 2010 under the government of Luis Ignacio da Silva, who in the words of the IMF’s former managing director Heinrich Koeller, “Is  Our Best President”, “… I am enthusiastic [with Lula’s administration]; but it is better to say I am deeply impressed by President Lula, indeed, and in particular because I do think he has the credibility”  (IMF Managing Director Heinrich Koeller, Press conference, 10 April 2003 ).

In Brazil, the Bretton Woods institutions and Wall Street have dominated macro-economic reform since the outset of the government of Luis Ignacio da Silva in 2003. Under Lula, a Wall Street executive was appointed to head the Central Bank, the Banco do Brazil was in the hands of a former CitiGroup executive. While there are divisions within the ruling PT party, neoliberalism prevails. Economic and social in Brazil is in large part dictated by the country’s external creditors including JPMorgan Chase, Bank America and Citigroup.

Central Bank Reserves and The External Debt

India and Brazil (together with Mexico) are among the World’s most indebted developing countries. The foreign exchange reserves are fragile. India’s external debt in 2013 was of the order of more than $427 Billion, that of Brazil was a staggering $482 billion, South Africa’s external debt was of the order of $140 Billion. (World Bank, External Debt Stock, 2013).

External Debt Stock (2013)

Brazil  $482 billion

India   $427 billion

South Africa  $140 billion

All three countries have central banks reserves (including gold and forex holdings) which are lower than their external debt (see table below).

Central Bank Reserves (2013)

Brazil  $359 billion

India:  $298 billion

South Africa $50 billion

The situation of South Africa is particularly precarious with an external debt which is almost three times its central bank reserves.

What this means is that these three BRICS member states are under the brunt of their Western creditors. Their central bank reserves are sustained by borrowed money. Their central bank operations (e.g. with a view to supporting domestic investments and development programs) will require borrowing in US dollars. Their central banks are essentially “currency board” arrangements, their national currencies are dollarized.

The BRICs Development Bank (NDB)

On 15 July 2014, the group of five countries signed an agreement to create the US$100 billion BRICS Development Bank together with a US dollar denominated  ” reserve currency pool” of US$100 billion. These commitments were subsequently revised.

Each of the five-member countries  “is expected to allocate an equal share of the $50 billion startup capital that will be expanded to $100 billion. Russia has agreed to provide $2 billion from the federal budget for the bank over the next seven years.” (RT, March 9, 2015).

In turn, the commitments to the Contingency Reserve Arrangement are as follows;

Brazil, $18 billion

Russia $18 billion

India  $18 billion

China $41 billion

South Africa $5 billion

Total $100 billion

As mentioned earlier, India, Brazil and South Africa, are heavily indebted countries with central bank reserves substantially below the level of their external debt.  Their contribution to the two BRICs financial entities can only be financed:

• by running down their dollar denominated central bank reserves and/or
• by financing their contributions to the Development Bank and CRA, by borrowing the money, namely by “running up” their dollar denominated external debt.

In both cases, dollar hegemony prevails. In other words, the Western creditors of these three countries will be required to “contribute” directly or indirectly to  the financing of the dollar denominated contributions of Brazil, India and South Africa to the BRICS development bank (NDB) and the CRA.

In the case of South Africa with Central Bank reserves of the order of 50 billion dollars, the contribution  to the BRICS NDB will inevitably be financed by an increase in the country’s (US dollar denominated) external debt.

Moreover, with regard to India, Brazil and South Africa, their membership in the BRICS Development Bank was no doubt the object of behind closed doors negotiations with the IMF as well as guarantees that they would not depart from the “Washington Consensus” on macro-economic reform.

Under a scheme whereby these countries were to be in be in full control of their Central Bank monetary policy, the contributions to the Development Bank (NDB) would be allocated in national currency rather than US dollars under a multi-currency arrangement. Needless to say under a multi-currency system the contingency CRA fund would not be required.

The geopolitics behind the BRICS initiative are crucial. While the BRICS initiative from the very outset has accepted the dollar system, this does not exclude the introduction, at a later stage of a multiple currency arrangement, which challenges dollar hegemony.

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The 10^th BRICS Summit will take place in Johannesburg from 25-27 July and will see the most important figures from the emerging Multipolar World Order congregate together on the African continent. This is an historical moment in and of itself that’s made all the more special by the invitations that the host country extended to Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Turkey to participate in this event because of their roles in various international organizations of significance such as the G20 and other integrational platforms. Although a wide array of topics are expected to be discussed, it can be certain that South Africa will do its utmost to keep Africa as the subject of conversation whenever possible, knowing that the dozens of countries on the landmass collectively represent the verge of economic development this century that’s made all the more promising by the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) that they’re working to create. 

Russian scholar and visionary thinker Yaroslav Lissovolik recently wrote an enlightening policy paper for the prestigious Valdai Club titled “BEAMS Of The Sunrise: A Look At BRICS 5-Year Cycles” that focuses on the many complementarities that BRICS has with other organizations. His thesis is that BRICS’s evolution to BRICS+ (a concept that he first described in his June 2017 piece about “The Mechanics Of BRICS+: A Tentative Blueprint”) has seen it expand its influence throughout the regional integrational blocs that its members are a part of, with the second step of BRICS++ (described in detail in his February 2017 work about “Re-Thinking The BRICS: On The Concepts Of BRICS+ And BRICS++”) envisioned to connect each of these multilateral bodies together and even involve their partners. Per his first-mentioned article, he believes that relations between BIMSTEC, the Eurasian Economic Union, the African Union, Mercosur, and the SCO (BEAMS) will be the driving force behind this process.

In practice, the guiding strategy as proposed by Mr. Lissovolik is to have BRICS function as the ultimate platform for managing multipolarity as this organization gradually surmounts its Western counterparts in importance and eventually comes to involve almost the entirety of the non-Western world. The relevance that this has for Africa is that he thinks that the African Union component of BEAMS (which itself is the embodiment of BRICS+) could streamline more solid continental integration through its various sub-blocs like he wrote in his December 2017 article concerning “A BRICS+ Framework For Africa: Targeting Regional Connectivity”. This proposal dovetails perfectly with the continental building blocks of the CFTA, but this grand vision requires the crucial participation of BRICS members China, India, and Russia if it’s to ultimately be successful. The first two are economic powerhouses with limitless potential for transforming the continent, but they might require their mutual Russian partner’s managing efforts to cooperate in Africa.

Trust between these two Asian Great Powers is lacking after last summer’s Donglang/Doklam incident even though it’s been on the rise lately following Prime Minister Modi’s informal summit with President Xi in Wuhan and India’s growing economic friction with the US over its newly implemented tariffs. Even so, India’s own protectionist measures vis-à-vis Chinese products and its unflinching opposition to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that it regards as transiting through Pakistani-controlled territory that it claims as its own are serious obstacles that make any full-fledged economic – let alone strategic – rapprochement between the two unlikely no matter the high-sounding slogans that they and their media surrogates chant from time to time for domestic political reasons. As a case in point, the newly unveiled joint Indo-Japanese “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” (AAGC) is poised to compete with China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) vision of New Silk Road connectivity instead of cooperate with it.

“Friendly competition” between these two developmental models concentrating mostly on soft and hard infrastructure respectively could end up being to Africa’s advantage if its countries properly leverage this, though they’re nowhere near as organized as they’d have to be in order to effect any positive influence on this process, nor is South Africa in any position to do so either. Therefore, the most realistic prospect is for Russia to take the lead in “balancing” between both of its privileged partners’ transcontinental infrastructure projects by seeking to involve itself in each of their African operations, which could make Moscow the “glue” that connects the two together and manages their rivalry. This in turn could improve their complementarity with one another and enable Africa to reap the full advantages of being the object of China and India’s economic competition, with Russia’s participation giving the host countries an additional qualitative benefit to each model.

For this to happen, however, Russia must use the opportunity of the 10^th BRICS Summit in Johannesburg to explore various avenues for multilateral economic cooperation with China and India in Africa, playing off of its silent return to the continent over the past year which the author described in detail in his May 2018 article about “Russia’s Grand Strategy In Afro-Eurasia (And What Could Go Wrong)”and the more specific one a month later on how “Russia’s Making Some Smart Moves In The Central African Republic”. If Moscow can make its partners in Beijing and New Delhi appreciate its newfound influence in Africa, then it can make the case for them to involve it in their OBOR and AAGC projects there, which could in turn result in Russia most effectively managing their competition to the continent’s supreme advantage. This would therefore make next week’s summit the best thing to ever happen to Africa if Russia’s creative “balancing” efforts succeed in unlocking its true BRICS+ potential.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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

Featured image is from the author.

President Trump was savagely attacked by the American political and academic community over the Helsinki summit, during which, in their opinion, he capitulated to President Putin on every issue.

All attempts to defend him have been in vain

The American press, who consider themselves to be the freest and most professional journalists in the world, continue their race to the bottom. First they humiliated their own president and country (there’s no other way to say it) during the Helsinki summit itself. Rather than asking about the most important issues on the global agenda, they were only interested in Russia’s interference in the American election. I guess that superpower has no other problems that are worth discussing with Russia (such as North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, Iran’s growing power in the Middle East, the failure to contain China, the collapse of the transatlantic alliance, or the inability to palm Ukraine off onto another financial sponsor), other than Moscow’s alleged influence on the US 2016 election. However, even if this is such a riveting topic, journalists should still ask questions, not simply make declarations that are all variations of “Why should the American people and Trump believe you when you say that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 elections?” Things got to the point that the American president was forced to defend his Russian counterpart in the face of their inappropriate behavior.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive in Helsinki, Finland, on Sunday ahead of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump is under increasing pressure to confront Putin directly about special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russians accused of conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election

And these reporters/peddlers of propaganda needed someone to apologize for them. A quick glance through the articles and commentary published by the US media following the summit confirms that they paid no attention to either Syria, Ukraine, disarmament issues, or the progress being made by diplomatic work sessions. Their focus was almost entirely centered on Trump’s “unacceptable” and “shameful” behavior. “The moment called for Trump to stand up for America. He chose to bow,” wrote the Washington Post. An article by columnist Thomas Friedman in the Seattle Times was actually titled “Trump and Putin vs. America.”

He didn’t back them

Naturally, most of the noise is coming from his personal enemies, who finally have the opportunity to challenge the main pillar of Trump’s legitimacy — his commitment to defending America’s national interests. Former FBI director James Comey wrote indignantly,

“This was the day an American president stood on foreign soil next to a murderous lying thug and refused to back his own country.”

Mr. Comey was the one who supported the cruel and deceitful Hillary, refusing to obey the law and protect his own country from an attack against his own president and constitution.

However (unfortunately for Trump), even many Republicans have added their voices to the howl of criticism. Republican senator Jeff Flake holds the same opinion, claiming that he did not think that he would live to see such a day. The Republicans were displeased, first of all, that in Putin’s presence Trump questioned the national intelligence agency’s findings about Russian interference during the run-up to the election. And though the American president has already retreated a bit  —  claiming that although he places a high value on the work of the intelligence community, he simply wants to leave the past in the past  —  even so, the wave of rage has not subsided.

Stupidity, treason, or the nation’s best interests?

In terms of tone, the press articles only diverged in regard to their differing assumptions about the motives behind Trump’s capitulation to Putin. Some wrote that Trump lacked professionalism and backbone. According to the Washington Post, prior to the summit his aides had prepared as many as 100 pages of briefing materials offering advice and strategies to help Trump negotiate with Putin from a position of strength  —  but that the president ignored almost all of it.

Others claim that the problem isn’t that there’s something deficient about the American president, but that the Russian leader has something extra.

“President Trump’s weakness in front of Putin was embarrassing, and proves that the Russians have something on the president, personally, financially or politically,” declared House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

And former CIA Director John Brennan bluntly labeled the US president’s actions as treasonous. It will be interesting to see if the Democrats continue to advance this idea, because treason, unlike many of other charges that the establishment is pursuing against Trump, is a clear-cut basis for launching impeachment proceedings.

Treason did actually occur  —  however it wasn’t Trump who was guilty of it, but rather the political and academic community. A few voices of reason, such as Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen, tried to explain the obvious. Trump is doing what other American presidents before him have done  —  he is meeting with the head of the Kremlin in order to prevent a nuclear war. In addition, the US president is trying to start afresh with Russia and turn that rival into an instrument of US foreign policy  —  a means to help contain Iran or China. However, the liberals and globalists who have declared war against him are undermining every effort by the occupant of the Oval Office and thus weakening the US position on the global stage. And of course no one is going to try to impeach them  —  in the end, they don’t have to answer for anything, and, according to Trump, “[all they] know how to do is resist and obstruct.” And unlike them, the president would rather “take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics.”

What did the American president accomplish?

What specific goals did President Trump manage to achieve during the Helsinki summit?

First of all, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin reached an agreement to resume their dialog on strategic stability and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Given the past few years of escalating tensions surrounding these issues, plus recent events during which the whole world was literally on the verge of nuclear war, this step represents a real breakthrough. During that very meeting, the American president received specific proposals from his Russian counterpart, which have not yet been announced.

Second, as a result of the negotiations, agreement was reached in regard to the most important aspect of US policy in the Middle East: reducing Iran’s influence in Syria. President Putin affirmed Russia’s commitment to reestablishing full compliance in the Golan Heights with the 1974 agreement on disengagement between Syria and Israel.

Third, the American president managed to establish the prerequisites for constructing a new architecture for the global market for carbon emissions, in order to safeguard US economic interests.

In addition, during the final press conference after the summit, Donald Trump was handed a real bargaining chip by his Russian counterpart, which he can use in his political battle at home against his relentless opponents. In response to questions about Russia’s alleged interference in the US presidential election, Vladimir Putin announced that William Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital  —  which has been accused of tax evasion on $1.5 billion of its Russian earnings that were taken out of the country  —  had actually funneled $400 million into campaign contributions for Hillary Clinton.

Thus, in addition to the US president’s previous demands that the Democratic Party provide the FBI with access to its computer servers that were supposedly hacked “on orders from Moscow,” Donald Trump now has public testimony that Hillary Clinton’s election campaign was financed by “dirty money.”

Developments in the very near future will show how the US president will deal with the aftermath of the summit with his Russian counterpart. Whether or not he will be able, or allowed, to implement the agreements that were reached will largely depend on the outcome of the next round of the domestic political battles in Washington.

*

All images, except the featured (from NPR), in this article are from Oriental Review.

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Though the announcement is couched in terms that make it seem humanitarian, as potentially a huge advance in science, an agency tied to the British government is encouraging efforts in gene-editing of the DNA of human embryos. It belongs in the category of eugenics. Not surprisingly, the footprints of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller eugenics circles, and major pharma groups as well as GMO seed companies are found here.

Following a well-placed article by Microsoft founder and major GMO supporter Bill Gates in the prestigious New York Council on Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs, strongly endorsing the development of so-called genetic editing, the UK’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a part Government-funded advisory body, has now released a report titled Genome Editing and Human Reproduction.

The report and the people behind it, including the Government’s Medical Research Council, indicate that a major push is underway to convince the public that genetic manipulation of human embryo DNA, so-called gene editing, is desirable and beneficial.

Among its conclusions the report states,

“use of heritable genome editing interventions to influence the characteristics of future generations could be ethically acceptable.” It adds that, “research should be carried out on the safety and feasibility of heritable genome editing interventions to establish standards for clinical use.”

With many sentences stressing that the decision should only be licensed “on a case-by-case basis subject to assessment of the risks of adverse clinical outcomes for the future person,” by a national competent authority; and “strict regulation and oversight,” the report opens a Pandora’s box of eugenics issues, the long-standing agenda of circles such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller University, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others.

The focus is use of new technologies for gene editing, including CRISPR-Cas9, to “alter a DNA sequence(s) of an embryo, or of a sperm or egg cell prior to fertilisation. The aim would be to influence the inherited characteristics of the resulting person.” They elaborate,

“We refer to these as ‘heritable genome editing interventions’ since the altered DNA may be passed to future generations…”

They suggest that

“One use of heritable genome editing interventions would be to have a child while excluding a particular heritable disorder that the child might have inherited from their biological parents.” 

The person heading the new study is Birmingham University Prof. Karen Yeung, a professor not of biology, but of law and ethics and an expert in Artificial Intelligence. Yeung told the UK Guardian,

“It is our view that genome editing is not morally unacceptable in itself. There is no reason to rule it out in principle.”

The issuance of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics report marks a major advance to creation of radical new laboratory interventions into human embryos to create what critics call “designer babies.”

The problem is that the technology of gene editing is anything but precise, contrary to what its advocates like Bill Gates may claim. The methodology of manipulating a specific part of a DNA chain to change human embryos is based on flawed scientific reductionism, which ignores the complexity of biophysical reality and of the fundamental laws of nature.

Risk to future generations

Take the statement from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics report:

“We refer to these as ‘heritable genome editing interventions’ since the altered DNA may be passed to future generations…”

The altered DNA may be passed to future generations?… And what if the altered DNA goes awry and that too is passed to future generations?

The scientist who first suggested developing gene drives in gene editing, Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt, has publicly warned that development of gene editing, in conjunction with gene drive technologies, have alarming potential to go awry. He notes how often CRISPR messes up and the likelihood of mutations arising, making even benign gene drives aggressive. He stresses,

“Just a few engineered organisms could irrevocably alter an ecosystem.”

Esvelt’s computer gene drive simulations calculated that a resulting edited gene, “can spread to 99 percent of a population in as few as 10 generations, and persist for more than 200 generations.”

He was discussing gene editing of mosquitoes. Now the debate is moving on to gene editing of human embryos.

UK Francis Crick Institute

The experiments have already begun, though researchers rush to stress they are with “donated embryos,” not implanted after into the womb of a woman, but killed after several days of lab experimenting. Two years ago, researchers in China used human embryos given by donors of embryos that could not have resulted in a live birth, to edit a specific gene. The results were a bad failure. The tested cells failed to contain the intended genetic material. Lead researcher Jungiu Huang told Nature,

“That’s why we stopped. We still think it’s too immature.”

Two years prior to the recent call by the UK’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics to, in effect, give a broad green light to experiments with gene editing of human embryos, the UK Government’s so-called “fertility regulator,” the Orwellian-sounding Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), gave permission to scientists at London’s Francis Crick Institute to do limited experiments involving gene editing modification on human embryos.

The HFEA is part of the UK Department of Health and Social Care. It was the first time a national government approved use of the DNA-modification technique in human embryos. The researchers reportedly alter genes in donated embryos, which will be destroyed after seven days.

The Francis Crick Institute opened that same year, 2016, so the gene editing of human embryos was one of its first projects. Notably, the institute has 1,500 staff, including 1,250 scientists, and an annual budget of over £100 million, making it the biggest single biomedical laboratory in Europe. Among its first donors was the UK pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, giving funding and personnel.

Also notable is the CEO and Director of the Francis Crick Institute, Sir Paul Nurse, geneticist and former President of the Rockefeller University in New York. In 2009 Nurse hosted an exclusive meeting at the Rockefeller University of hand-picked billionaires, invited by Bill Gates and David Rockefeller, to discuss the problem of “over-population.” They reportedly called their group The Good Club, and it included, according to reports, billionaire financiers Warren Buffett, George Soros and Michael Bloomberg.

Grave Concerns

The fact that today the same Sir Paul Nurse heads one of the world’s largest and best financed biomedical laboratories where they are doing gene editing of “donated” human embryos, suggests that a very dangerous agenda is being advanced under the banner of gene editing. And the fact that Bill Gates and his huge foundation, a major investor of Monsanto (now Bayer AG), have been funding experiments in gene editing for more than a decade, including CRISPR, suggests that gene editing could soon become a new name for human eugenics.

Gene editing itself is hugely flawed and unregulated by governments. It has been shown repeatedly that only a small minority of cells into which CRISPR is introduced, usually by a virus, actually have their genomes edited as intended. Indeed, the risks of human embryo gene editing are such that an open appeal published in Nature magazine from Edward Lanphier, Fyodor Urnov and a number of other leading gene editing researchers declared,

“Don’t edit the human germ line.”

The appeal of the scientists stated,

“There are grave concerns regarding the ethical and safety implications of this research… In our view, genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable. Such research could be exploited for non-therapeutic modifications.”

The gene scientists added the alarming warning,

“The precise effects of genetic modification to an embryo may be impossible to know until after birth. Even then, potential problems may not surface for years.”

They called for a voluntary scientific moratorium on human gene editing.

The term “non-therapeutic modifications” might very well include genetic editing of certain “undesirable” human races, to program them for biological extinction, the eugenics ultimate dream for over a century. Is that unthinkable? Not to some minds to be sure.

*

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

Featured image is from the author.

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

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

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

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

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Most Canadians believe the dominant narrative from our controlled, monopoly media. But the dominant narrative is a lie. Russia is not the enemy.  We are.  We are the one’s supporting al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, not Russia.

Recently, for example, the Canadian government announced that it will welcome 50 White Helmets and their families into Canada.  Here they will have a safe haven.¹

The Canadian government and its agencies extol the imagined virtues of these “first responders”. 

 Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, tweeted:

The White Helmets are courageous volunteers and first responders who risk their lives to help their fellow Syrians. Our thanks to Israel, Jordan, US, UK, Germany and our other partners who have worked closely with Canada to make the evacuation of WH possible.

— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) July 22, 2018

But we know, and it is well-documented, that the White Helmets are al-Qaeda auxiliaries.² They stage false flags. They fight alongside their al-Qaeda/al-Nusra Front and affiliated terrorist brigades.

The White Helmets are part of a “smart power” complex³ that disguises terrorism and wars of conquest as “humanitarian”. These terrorists are not independent.  The West, including Canada⁴, supports them financially. 

None of this international criminality will ever benefit Canadians, and all of it is to the detriment of humanity.

If Canadians knew the truth, they would not support policymakers who are making decisions in favour of terrorism and never-ending wars of aggression.

Canadians need to know the truth.

*

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

Notes

1. «Le Canada va accueillir des héros d’« Al-Qaïda avec un lifting. » Le Tribunal de l’infaux
Crimes et délits des médias dominants. 22 July, 2018.( https://tribunaldelinfaux.com/2018/07/22/le-canada-va-accueillir-des-heros-d-al-qaida-avec-un-lifting/) Accessed 23 July, 2018.

2. Mark Taliano, “The White Helmets are “Black Helmets”, They are Al Qaeda| And Canada Supports Them.” Global Research. 2 April, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-white-helmets-are-black-helmets-they-are-al-qaeda/5634301) Accessed 7 July, 2018.

3. Mark Taliano, “The War on Syria: Driving Home the Truth and the Need to Act Now.” Global Research. 12 July, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-war-on-syria-driving-home-the-truth-and-the-need-to-act-now/5647214) Accessed 23 July, 2018.

4. Ken Stone, “TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT ADMITS TERRORIST AUXILIARIES TO CANADA.” 23 July, 2018. (https://www.facebook.com/notes/hamilton-coalition-to-stop-the-war/for-immediate-release-hamilton-monday-july-23-2018/2586684938024128/) Accessed 23 July, 2018.

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

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

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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The fact that Canada is admitting as refugees at least 250 White Helmets and their family members exposes the involvement of the Trudeau government, like the Harper government before it, in the illegal, US-led, regime-change operation in Syria.

These two federal governments are collectively responsible for setting up and continuing the international coalition that produced the proxy war against Syria, using terrorist mercenaries as its footsoldiers; leading the international regime of brutal economic sanctions against Syria which turned about four million Syrians into refugees – (the international sanctions regime was drawn up in a meeting in Ottawa in June 2013); demonizing the legitimate government of Syria, breaking off diplomatic relations with it, and trying to delegitimize it in international forums; supporting armed rebels against Syria, a member state of the United Nations, by bringing their leaders to Ottawa and giving them funds; overflying Syria on military missions without the express consent of its government; and supporting the propaganda arm of the regime change operation through the White Helmets.

Now that the Syrian government has liberated Daraa, where the western-sponsored regime-change operation began in 2011, the “rebels” and their auxiliaries have had to scramble to find places of refuge. Thus, the Trudeau government has felt obliged to admit as refugees to Canada some of their foreign policy assets, namely the White Helmets.

Who are the White Helmets? The White Helmets claim to be a “fiercely independent” organization of volunteer first responders in Syria helping Syrian civilians injured in the war.

In fact, the White Helmets are a fiercely partisan organization of relatively well-paid employees, set up by British and US intelligence services inside of Turkey (a belligerent in the war against Syria) in 2013. A Madison Avenue public relations firm was contracted to develop the concept of the White Helmets as a humanitarian agency for public consumption in the West – to provide a ‘suger-coating’ to an ugly and illegal imperial war. John Lemesurier, a former British military intelligence officer and later “military contractor”, was hired to front the organization, which has been funded to the tune of about 150 million dollars by the governments of the USA, UK, France, Holland, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, and Canada, among others. In 2016, Canada donated $4.5 million dollars to the White Helmets. Currently, a Freedom of Information request is seeking to determine if the Canadian government has made repeated donations of $4.5 million in 2017 and 2018. On top of the donations, the Canadian government has organized two cross-Canada publicity tours of White Helmet personnel in recent years in various cities. This past March, a delegation of White Helmets was welcomed to speak to the Canadian parliament’s Human Rights Committee. In addition, the New Democratic Party endorsed the White Helmets for the Nobel Peace Prize, which it failed to win.

The White Helmets are embedded in the Al-Qaeda terrorist network and operate exclusively in terrorist-held areas of Syria. Though it also calls itself the Syrian Civil Defence, the government of Syria created the real Syrian Civil Defence in 1953 and was a founding member of the International Civil Defence Organization.

Once in place inside the terrorist-occupied enclaves inside of Syria, the true role of the White Helmets emerged. The group specialized in making videos of dramatically-staged rescues of children from among the rubble of part of cities which Al-Qaeda (and sometimes other terrorist groups) had managed to seize and occupy. Two notorious staged videos stand out: the staged rescues of Omran Daqneesh in Aleppo and Hassan Diab in Douma. Occasionally, however, the White Helmets joined in recreational video competitions, such as the Mannequin Challenge. The twofold principal purposes of the child-rescue videos was, first, to demonize the Syrian government as a brutal tyranny, even though it was lawfully defending its sovereign territory against foreign invasion, and, secondly, to promote the western regime change operation in Syria as a humanitarian intervention. Specifically, the White Helmet videos were timed to promote calls by western governments for directly military intervention in Syria by such means as a no-fly zone (similar to the one imposed on Libya in 2011) or a “civilian corridor”. And, on at least two occasions, the tactic worked. In April 2017, the White Helmets staged a false flag chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun which prompted a US missile attack on the Sharyat Air Base in Syria. A recent outstanding example of the propaganda use of such videos was the staging of a fake nerve agent attack in Douma, Syria, on April 7 of this year. The incident, later revealed as a hoax by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), nonetheless resulted in over one hundred missile strikes by the USA, UK, and France on Syria on April 13, 2018.

In addition, the White Helmets’ true role as an auxiliary to terrorism was captured on film on several occasions when they participated in Al-Qaeda summary executions and by Facebook postings by numerous White Helmets on their personal accounts showing themselves moonlighting as armed Al-Qaeda fighters and heaping praise on Al-Qaeda leaders. Contrarily, civilians inside the enclaves in Syrian cities liberated from Al-Qaeda and ISIS told many western reporters that the White Helmets provided no medical help or assistance to them, but rather only to the armed terrorists. Moreover, real Syrian Civil Defence workers testified that many of their comrades were killed by Al-Qaeda fighters and their equipment and vehicles given to the White Helmets.

The rescue of the White Helmet “rescuers” by Israel through the Golan Heights should not come as a surprize because Israel has been a major player in the illegal, failed, regime change operation in Syria. Israel has bombed Syria more than one hundred times during the war. Israel openly supported FSA fighters with arms, intelligence, and funding in southern Syria and routinely transferred wounded terrorists to hospitals inside Israel for medical treatment before returning them to the front. Israeli PM Netanyahu posed for photos in one of those hospitals at the bedside of wounded terrorists last year. Today (July 22, 2018), in a tweet, Netanyahu stated that both President Trump and Prime Minister Trudeau personally asked for his help in rescuing the White Helmets from Syria.

Syria is well rid of these White Helmets. But, if Canadians understood who these people really were, they would strongly object to the settling of terrorists in our midst. Last November in the House of Commons, Trudeau asserted that Canadians returning from terrorist activities in Syria and Iraq would not be charged with criminal offences. Rather, he asserted, “We also have methods of de-emphasizing or de-programming people who want to harm our society, and those are some things we have to move forward on.” At the end of the day, then, the Trudeau government in effect embraces terrorist fighters and their auxiliaries.

That the Canadian government is planning to admit White Helmets personnel to Canada as refugees should gravely concern Canadians. These civil defence poseurs are ideologically committed to terrorism, personally connected to Al Qaeda, and have the blood on their hands of many Syrians whose country they helped to invade and occupy. The potential for them to cause harm in Canada is high.

We urge Canadians immediately to contact their MP’s about this matter, to spread the alarm via social media, and to write letters to newspapers. We also urge the Canadian government to do the following:

1. withdraw from the US-led military coalition in Syria and Iraq;
2. end Canada’s punishing economic sanctions against Syria;
3. re-establish diplomatic ties with the Syrian government;
4. participate in the reconstruction of Syria through payments of reparation.

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At present, the US maintains more than 800 military bases in over hundred countries, which cost in excess of $100 billion annually to operate. That means the Americans currently have more military bases in foreign lands than any other nation or empire has ever possessed since the times of the ancient Greeks. America’s global military dominance becomes more apparent when considering that Russia only has military bases in nine countries, many of which are former soviet republics, the UK has ten, France has nine, and China has just one. American officials justify their extensive foreign presence and the associated costs by claiming that the United States is an exceptional country that is committed to safeguarding world peace and security. That being said, specific pretexts do differ depending on region, with the War on Drugs being frequently cited in Latin America, protecting countries from Russian aggression constituting the dominant rationale in Europe, containing Chinese influence and North Korea representing the main motivations in the Asia-Pacific region, and combatting terrorism and containing Iranian influence among the objectives in the Middle East.

Argentina is currently among the countries considered likely destinations for new American military installations in the foreseeable future, despite the fact that such arrangements have been rejected by both the population and former leadership of the country in recent years. In fact, all military exercises between Argentina and the U.S. were suspended from 2007 to 2015, as the successive governments of Nestor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sought to reorient Argentine foreign policy away from the U.S. in an attempt to combat imperialism and strengthen regional integration. However, that stance has effectively been reversed since the election of Mauricio Macri as President of Argentina in December of 2015. The Macri administration has prioritized strengthening diplomatic ties with Washington at the expense of regional cooperation, which entailed favouring pro-American foreign policies, while implementing neo-liberal economic reforms at home. This included signing security and defense ‘cooperation agreements’ with both the Obama and Trump administrations, permitting the U.S. to establish military bases throughout the country.

A number of US military bases have been established throughout Argentina since the election of president Macri. For example, a base was set up in Argentina’s Salta province, located near its borders with Bolivia and Chile, on the pretext of combatting drug trafficking. Another base was established in Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego province, at the southernmost tip of the country, only a few kilometres from the NATO base on the Falkland Islands and close to an important source of fresh water. Researchers have estimated that Ushuaia possesses the largest reserve of frozen fresh water in the world with enough capacity to meet the needs of the entire planet for next 200 years if properly managed.

In early 2018, Macri’s government also approved the construction of another American military base in the province of Misiones. This is a highly strategic position because the province is situated in the tri-border area (TBA) of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, which contains the Guaraní Aquifer, the largest subterranean drinkable and renewable fresh water reserve in the world. Specifically, of the 1.2 million square kilometers of land containing the Guarani Aquifer, 850,000 square kilometers are in Brazil’s territory, 225,000 square kilometers are in Argentina, 70,000 square kilometers are in Paraguay, and 25,000 square kilometers are in Uruguay. 

None of the foreign military bases constructed during Marci’s presidency were approved by Argentina’s congress, which is explicitly required under Argentine law. This practice was defended by Argentina’s Minister of Defense, Oscar Raúl Aguad, on the basis that congressional approval was not required for such joint military ‘cooperation agreements’, because American military forces were only providing technical assistance and military intelligence.  More precisely, the Macri government claimed that joint military exercises with the Americans were necessary in the TBA to combat terrorism and limit the global trafficking of drugs and weapons of mass destruction in the region, while scientific research was the basis for the American presence in Ushuaia.

 This sentiment was echoed by Argentina’s security minister, Patricia Bullrich, who explained that the government was creating ‘an analysis center with Paraguay and Brazil (and the U.S.) to figure out where, how and with whom narcotraffickers operate’ in the TBA. In other words, the main objectives for allowing growing numbers of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and FBI agents to operate on Argentine territory in the TBA, in addition to an increased presence of American military personnel, are to reduce narco-trafficking and counter terrorism. Minister Bullrich further a dds that part of the rationale for this decision is that Argentine law does not permit drug samples or materials related to terrorism to be sent abroad for analysis or investigation. 

According to Bullrich, this close relationship with the DEA and FBI has already proven to be invaluable in terms of reducing the instances of drug-related offenses and limiting the presence of international terrorist organizations like Hezbollah in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. Her enthusiastic support for the strategy was evident in her 2018 statement that ‘it’s important for our government to collaborate (with the U.S.) and that they collaborate with us. We’re going to work together at the triple border regarding terrorism. We think we’ll have DEA and other agencies there to better understand what’s happening in the region.’

There is little evidence to suggest that the increasing presence of foreign agents and soldiers is generating such enthusiasm among the Argentine populace and certain segments of its leadership. Meanwhile, the rationale put forth by the Macri administration to justify its agreement with the US, allowing for the establishment multiple foreign military bases throughout the country without seeking approval from the Argentine congress, has also been met with much skepticism. For instance, on July 10, 2018, a group of approximately 60 organizations, including ‘political parties, social organizations, human rights groups, workers’ unions’, arranged a protest against the establishment of a US military base in Neuquén, Argentina. There are two large rivers situated in Neuquén, the Limay and Neuquén rivers, which are important water sources that generate approximately one-quarter of all hydroelectric power produced in Argentina. Additionally, the Neuquén Basin is home to Vaca Muerta, a 36,000 km2 area that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), represents the second largest non-conventional gas resource and the fourth largest shale oil reserve in the world. As such, it should come as no surprise that Vaca Muerta has garnered the attention of some of the most prominent oil companies in the world, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and U.S. oil. At present, YPF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales), an Argentine company that that specializes in the exploration, production, refining and commercialization of petroleum, ‘owns 42% of the area, GyP, a state company of Neuquen, has 12%, and the remaining 46% is distributed among other companies that include ExxonMobil, Pan American Energy, Petronas, Pluspetrol, Shell, Tecpetrol and Wintershall, among others.’. 

The Macri administration has already enacted measures that make it easier for large corporations to invest in Vaca Muerta. According to Ernesto López Anadón, an engineer and president of the Argentine Institute of Oil and Gas (IAPG):

Vaca Muerta has many players who are working and obtaining optimal results with very good productivity. The costs are being lowered and is already an asset that has gained international relevance. For those who are looking for business opportunities to develop reserves, Vaca Muerta represents that attraction. Why is there a hurry to enter? Because there are still opportunities, areas that were not awarded and possibilities of partnership with other companies. This will allow the investor to be one of the leaders. We have gone from the exploration stage to the development phase in almost all the companies that approached to this project and the tendency is the momentum for expansion. Later entry will also likely be possible, but at a higher cost. 

The protestors did not believe claims emanating out of Washington and Buenos Aires that the facility in Neuquén was a humanitarian base as opposed to a military installation. This was evident in the official statement released by the protest group, contending that ‘the base is presented as humanitarian aid (to avoid) being called a military base, which would require approval of Argentina’s Congress.’

The TBA has long been regarded as a strategically important region by Washington, first being identified as such during the Reagan presidency. Subsequently, in early 2000, the Bush administration began fabricating stories about the presence of terrorist threats and fundraising activities for Islamic terror organizations taking place in the TBA, which were reported in the mainstream media. Among the claims made by officials was the notion that Ciudad del Este in Paraguay and Foz do Iguacu in Brazil were ‘a terrorist paradise’. American authorities also maintained that Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and, more recently, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) had conducted training exercises and obtained a significant amount of financing within the region. Such stories about a significant terrorist presence in the TBA have allowed for an unprecedented expansion of American military forces in the region since 2000.

In actuality, no hard evidence has ever been presented to back claims of a significant terrorist presence in the TBA of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, which was used to justify the establishment of a significant American military presence in the region.  On the contrary, a report by the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering confirmed that while the TBA is in fact an important location for money laundering, there is no evidence to demonstrate that Islamist terror organizations have generated any funding there, or that the region has been used as a training ground for Islamist terrorists. As a matter of fact, the last Islamic terrorist attack to take place in South America occurred in 1994, when the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires was targeted in a bombing that killed 85 people. The persistence of fabricated stories about the training and funding of Islamist terrorists in the TBA, despite the complete lack of any tangible evidence, is likely to justify the continued presence of American military forces in the region. As for the Americans, they are likely using the pretext of terrorism as a false flag to conceal their real motivation for maintaining and expanding the presence of their military in the region. Considering the history of American interventions, the fact that the region is rich in natural resources, including oil, gas and, particularly, freshwater reserves, could represent the US with an enticing incentive to increase its influence in the TBA.

At present, almost 50% of the global population does not have consistent access to a safe source of potable water. This figure is forecast to rise going forward, as the effects of climate change are likely to exacerbate water shortages. This deplorable inequality in the distribution of global freshwater resources illustrates the growing strategic importance of significant water reserves like the Guaraní Aquifer and the freshwater sources in Ushuaia. These realities make it easier to understand why the Americans are so keen to establish military bases in these regions of South American that are particularly rich in water resources. While American politicians and officials have a reputation for climate change denial, the Pentagon has no reservations with including it as a key factor in future conflicts in its assessments of combat readiness. In fact, the Pentagon released a study at the beginning of 2018 stating that extreme weather linked to climate change ‘endanger 1,700 military sites worldwide, from large bases to outposts’, which  ‘run contrary to White House views on global warming’.

According to the World Bank, Latin America will play in increasingly important global role if water shortages significantly worsen moving forward, given that the continent possesses some of ‘the largest freshwater reserves in the world’. There has already increased commercial interest expressed in the water reserves of the Guarani aquifer, in addition to political debates between the governments of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. This has come from a number of prominent multinational companies involved in the water market including Monsanto, Thames Water, Bechtel Company, and Vivendi.

History has demonstrated that the real motivation for the global expansion of American militarization has always been to dominate and control the world’s economy and natural resources, by influencing the political and market arenas of the host countries and their neighbours. Countries that resist or refuse to accept American hegemony often find themselves subjected to destabilization efforts directed by the US military aimed at overthrowing the incumbent government. The 20^th and 21^st centuries provides many examples of American military bases organizing, directing, and participating in interventions against the countries hosting them or other nations in the region. If and when a foreign intervention is deemed necessary by US officials, ‘Somehow they always manage to find the necessary pretext’. Typically, such interventions have been justified on the grounds of national security, with recurring pretexts including the Cold War, the Global War on Terrorism, the War on Drug, and immigration control. To be more precise, during the Cold War, the main impetus for the American military to establish foreign bases was the battle of ideologies against communism. Subsequently, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became the war on drugs and, more recently, the war on terrorism. 

Other key US objectives for establishing permanent military bases in foreign territories include: repressing social movements opposed to neo-liberal economic policies; preparing for future wars in the region by establishing a dominant military posture; and creating regional conflicts. It is reasonable to suspect that the Pentagon has been manufacturing false narratives to justify an American military presence in the TBA of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, as this would allow them to gain control over parts of the Amazon rainforest, the freshwater reserves of the Guarani Aquifer, natural gas reserves in Bolivia, carbon deposits in Brazil, and even the largest proven oil reserves in Venezuela. If the relatively conventional notion that future wars will be fought over the control and distribution of increasingly scarce fresh water and energy resources turns out to be true, then the TBA region represents a very strategic location for the US and its rivals.

Macri delivered strategic territories of Argentina situated in both the north and south of the country to the American military despite an abundance of historical evidence demonstrating that the interests of the host nation are rarely among the priorities of US military bases. Perhaps president Macri feels that he may need some assistance in oppressing the freedom and self-determination of his own electorate, given that his administration has already experienced three national strikes against his neo-liberal economic reforms in less than three years. Many Argentines are likely becoming increasingly frustrated with the rapid deterioration of their economic circumstances and prospects since Macri assumed the presidency. Further strikes and protests might be expected in response to the recent agreement with the IMF that will provide Argentina with a $50 billion loan, the largest in the institution’s history.

The expansion of American military bases throughout South America will undoubtedly continue in the absence of significant pushback. That being said, Argentines need to realize that the recent military cooperation agreements signed between the Macri administration and the US have neglected their country’s national interests. In particular, the agreement to permit the American military to establish permanent bases throughout the country is a matter national interest that should require some degree of public discourse. Furthermore, before permitting the Americans to take the lead in combatting terrorism in their country, Argentines should consider their previous performances in the Middle East, and North Africa. Similarly, they should also consider the poor track record of America’s Drug Enforcement Agency in attempting to eliminate the illicit drug trade via interventions in Colombia and Mexico. If Argentines do not react soon, they could lose sovereignty, independence and self-determination over important parts of their country, while the Argentine Army becomes increasingly subordinate to US interests, as has been the case in many countries throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. 

Any future government that seeks to reverse the present expansion of American military influence within Argentina should proceed with caution, as contemporary history includes many examples of countries being subject to military interventions for defying Washington’s dictates, resulting in catastrophic outcomes. With this in mind, Argentines should take heed of Hugo Chavez’s warning that: ‘When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force…Most governments in the United States in a hundred years have not respected the peoples of Latin America. They have sponsored coup d’états, assassinations.’ 

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Global Research contributor Dr. Birsen Filip holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Ottawa.

Notes

1. Russia currently has 21 military bases, mainly in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Syria. 

2. Before permitting the establishment of additional US military installations, Argentines should consider the American military’s reputation of creating environmental disasters. For example, rocket launches and the detonation of bombs in free fire zones emit a variety of toxic substances. Each year, American military bases also burn thousands of tons of trash in open areas, including hazardous materials like poisons, plastics, chemicals, medical and human waste, batteries, and weapons. Among toxins released into the environment from such practices are dioxin, cadmium, lead, mercury, and uranium, among others, which often enter the soil, oceans and freshwater resources, and subsequently make their way into the food chain. Furthermore, American military bases have always managed to avoid legal consequences for their actions, even though they led to locals being evicted from their homes (i.e. Alaska, Hawaii, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, South Korea, etc.), and often conduct training sessions that disturb the daily lives of civilians.

3. On November 22, 2015, Mauricio Macri won the presidential election. He was inaugurated less than one month later, on December 10, 2015, in the Argentine Congress.

4. The American military organized a training session in a section of the Amazon rainforest in Tabatinga, Brazil, which contains large reserves of hydrocarbons, water, niobium, titanium, tungsten, petroleum, gas, and uranium, from November 6 – 13 in 2017, as a rehearsal of potential future military actions in Latin America. This was the largest military exercise ever orchestrated in the Amazon.

5. In 2006, George W. Bush purchased more than 100,000 acres of land in Paraguay’s northern ‘Chaco’ region, which is situated near the Guaraní Aquifer and contains vast reserves of natural gas. Since then, thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops have been stationed in the vicinity and patrolled the area in order to protect Bush’s property.

6. The Guaraní Aquifer represents the fourth largest water reservoir in the world.

7. Therefore, 71% of the biggest reservoir of fresh, renewable, and potable water in the world lies under land belonging to Brazil.

8. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Argentina-Over-60-Social-Movements-Protest-US-Military-Base-20180712-0006.html 

9. Despite the benevolence of these stated objectives under the overarching theme of achieving world security, American military bases are often greeted with hostility and disdain by local populations. This is evidenced by the many protests that have been organized by residents of nearby communities in the vicinity of US military bases in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean, often supported by social groups and human rights organizations. Common complaints by locals include the loss of access to land and fishing resources, the destruction and degradation of the environment, and soldiers not being held accountable for misbehaviour and serious crimes.

10. ‘Capital attraction will be key to the development of these resources. It is estimated that Vaca Muerta will require an investment of US$ 120 billion up to 2030 (US $ 8,000 million per year).’ (https://www.pwc.com.ar/es/publicaciones/assets/vaca-muerta-energia-argentina-i.pdf).

11. YPF was privatized in 1993, but 51% of the enterprise was renationalized in 2012 by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

12. https://www.pwc.com.ar/es/publicaciones/assets/vaca-muerta-energia-argentina-i.pdf 

13. ‘The New Gas Plan that encourages investments in unconventional reservoirs in the Neuquen basin, guaranteeing for gas marketed in the local market a minimum price of US $ 7.50 / MMBTU for 2017 and 2018, US $ 7.00 for 2019, US $ 6.50 for 2020 and US $ 6.00 for 2021. Agreement with the Provincial Government of Neuquen, so that oil companies and unions would have greater competitiveness in Vaca Muerta and reduce labor costs. Project to reduce import tariffs of machinery used for the exploitation of hydrocarbons, which will have a 7% tariff’ (https://www.pwc.com.ar/es/publicaciones/assets/vaca-muerta-energia-argentina-i.pdf).

14. https://www.pwc.com.ar/es/publicaciones/assets/vaca-muerta-energia-argentina-i.pdf

15. History has shown that American military installations are characterized by a lack of transparency.

16. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Argentina-Over-60-Social-Movements-Protest-US-Military-Base-20180712-0006.html 

17. https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/31912.pdf 

18. http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/11/07/inv.terror.south/ 

19. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-military/climate-change-threatens-half-of-u-s-military-sites-pentagon-idUSKBN1FK2T8 

20. In the subsequent decades following the Second World War, the US took measures and enacted policies to solidify and expand its dominance, as embodied by American diplomat and historian George Keenan when he stated ‘we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security’. The establishment of an excess number of permanent military bases in foreign territories could be regarded as a part of that strategy, as it allows American forces to quickly deploy to counter challenges from rivals to its hegemonic interests in all regions.

21. Washington has a habit of supporting military interventions to reverse revolutions and eliminate government that oppose American interests, regardless of whether or not they were democratically elected. Examples of countries currently facing threats of military intervention from the US include Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. 

22. Fidel Castro at the United Nations General Assembly in 1960.  

23. Some European and American industries have also been taking measures to alleviate the extraction of domestic water resources by moving water-intensive economic activities to Third World countries, particularly in the agriculture sector.

24. In rare instances where American pressure to station soldiers in a particular country is resisted, Washington will often retaliate by threatening to cut or reduce foreign aid to that country. For example, in 2004, ten South American nations refused to guarantee immunity from prosecution for American soldiers in the event that they commit crimes while serving in their territories. The US responded by cancelling $330 million in economic aid. Subsequently, Paraguay reversed its decision and signed an agreement with the US the following year, which extended the stay of American soldiers stationed in the country from 6 to 18 months, while the country’s Congress passed legislation that protected American soldiers from prosecution for criminal activity. 

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More than 60 studies have shown increases of childhood leukemia around nuclear facilities worldwide. Despite this finding, there has never been independent analysis in the US examining connections between childhood cancer and nuclear facilities. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had tasked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to conduct such a study, but then withdrew funding, claiming publicly that it would be too expensive.

In fact, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process reveal that NRC employees had already determined the study would show no impact. Internal emails indicate that staff was presupposing a conclusion for which they had no evidence, demonstrated by statements like “even if you found something that looked like a relationship [between cancer and radiation], you wouldn’t know what to attribute it to,” and “[m]ost people realize that all the evidence shows you’re not going to find anything.” The evidence, however, had not yet been fully collected and examined.

Not protective and unaccountable

While the NRC claims it protects public health, its radiation exposure standards fail to account fully for:

• impacts on the placenta
• impacts on fetal blood forming cells
• impacts on fetal and embryonic organs
• estrogenic impacts
• disproportionate impacts on women
• genetic impacts past the second generation
• cumulative damage of repeated radiation exposure

NRC exposure data and modeling is designed to demonstrate compliance with the NRC’s regulations but not to assess health impacts. The NRC has already stated numerous times that it believes low doses of radiation, the kind NRC claims its licensees are allowed to release, pose risks so low that health impacts may not be discernible. We don’t know if NRC’s claims of no discernible or attributable public health impact from nuclear power are actually true since no one has ever looked properly.

Pregnancy and unborn children are the most vulnerable to serious damage from radiation exposure.

Studies in other countries show association between nuclear facilities and childhood cancer. However, given the demonstrable bias of the US NRC toward low doses having no health impact, it is essential that a US study go forward under the auspices of outside, independent experts, in order to examine what is happening in the US.

Ground-breaking study plans were threat to current health assumptions

Under the original and now canceled study, the NRC had tasked the NAS to use the most advanced methods in order to update the study the NRC currently uses to claim its reactors are safe. That study, published in 1990, had several shortcomings including the way the authors define and examine disease, assumptions about doses, location of cases, and who is examined.

The NAS was considering two study designs, one examining specifically children. This study type, dubbed by one expert as a case-control nested in a cohort, is very similar in basic design to studies conducted in France and Germany, which show increases in childhood leukemia around nuclear power facilities.

The NRC scuttled the NAS study in 2015, dubiously claiming it would have cost too much and taken too long. Upon examination, however, it is clear that the NAS study would have challengedthe fundamentals of the NRC’s health assessment regime.

To date, most radiation studies have routinely suffered from a host of improper methodologies, making it impossible to discern health impacts. The NAS was considering using new ways of examining the issue by implementing a more detailed, more thorough, publicly shared research protocol. The protocol included:

• Making the study process and underlying assumptions public while the study was being conducted
• Allowing public comment during the study process
• Standardizing raw health data and making it available to researchers and the public
• Standardizing and verifying pollutant data
• Integrating independently collected pollutant and meteorological data
• Examining and redoing the current health models
• Tailoring health studies to local conditions
• Creating new health models, specifically for the radionuclide carbon 14, which concentrates in fetal tissue more than maternal tissue.

This detailed and accessible protocol could have opened the NRC’s regulatory regime to exhaustive scrutiny, revealing just how inadequate it is for examining health impacts in the first place, never mind protecting public health. Further, with such careful research, NRC could have feared that the NAS study would point to an association between environmental radiation and cancer, as other studies have, although FOIA documents consisting mostly of internal emails did not specifically demonstrate this fear.

Moribund study could be revived, made better

While the NAS child study design and protocol had much to recommend it, it is unclear whether it would have been free of all of the flaws that have historically plagued radiation health assessments. At the point of study cancellation, independent experts still had concerns.

Historically, industry and radiation regulators have insisted that a causal link must be absolutely established between radiation and disease. For protection of the public, however, experts claim the standard should be a lower bar of association with disease. If this study moves forward under the NAS, it needs to relinquish concepts and methods that favor causation.

To date, researchers have started radiation health studies by presuming that there will be no impact because doses are too low — a contention that, in reality, remains scientifically unproven. Many studies reveal the opposite. Any new such research needs to ensure that the basis for health assessments is a focus on health outcomes, not dose models that are fraught with uncertainties.

While NRC licensees attempt to monitor environmental contamination, the NRC has never incorporated biological monitoring, which might prove useful after spike releases from various facility outages. There are several techniques that have been used in other health studies, which a revived cancer study could weave into any child or adult health assessment.

A truly independent and scientifically robust study would attempt to address these issues in addition to using the other enlightened protocols the NAS was considering. With the public process and protocol review suggested by the NAS for this now moribund study, perhaps these remaining shortcomings would finally have been addressed as well. The NRC made sure that did not happen. However, according to Ourania Kosti, NAS researcher coordinating the study, the NAS has left the door open to completing it.

“I think it is important to update the findings of the 1990 study using better methodologies and information,” Kosti said. “This is the reason the Academies agreed to carry out the update. The Academies remain willing to do the study, if asked to.”

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Cindy Folkers is the radiation and health specialist at Beyond Nuclear.

All images in this article are from the author.

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Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno traveled to London on Friday for the ostensible purpose of speaking at the 2018 Global Disability Summit (Moreno has been using a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery attempt). The concealed actual purpose of the president’s trip is to meet with British officials to finalize an agreement under which Ecuador will withdraw its asylum protection of Julian Assange, in place since 2012; eject him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London; and then hand over the WikiLeaks founder to British authorities.

Moreno’s itinerary also notably includes a trip to Madrid, where he will meet with Spanish officials still seething over Assange’s denunciation of human rights abuses perpetrated by Spain’s central government against protesters marching for Catalonian independence. Almost three months ago, Ecuador blocked Assange from accessing the internet, and Assange has not been able to communicate with the outside world ever since. The primary factor in Ecuador’s decision to silence him was Spanish anger over Assange’s tweets about Catalonia.

Presidential decree signed on July 17 by Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno, outlining his trip to London and Madrid.

A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the president’s office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to The Intercept that Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement to hand over Assange to the U.K. within the next several weeks. The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into such an agreement.

The consequences of such an agreement depend in part on the concessions Ecuador extracts in exchange for withdrawing Assange’s asylum. But as former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa told The Intercept in an interview in May, Moreno’s government has returned Ecuador to a highly “subservient” and “submissive” posture toward Western governments.

It is thus highly unlikely that Moreno — who has shown himself to be willing to submit to threats and coercion from the U.K., Spain, and the U.S. — will obtain a guarantee that the U.K. not extradite Assange to the U.S., where top Donald Trump officials have vowed to prosecute Assange and destroy WikiLeaks.

The central oddity of Assange’s case — that he has been effectively imprisoned for eight years despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime — is virtually certain to be prolonged once Ecuador hands him over to the U.K. Even under the best-case scenario, it appears highly likely that Assange will continue to be imprisoned by British authorities.

The only known criminal proceeding Assange currently faces is a pending 2012 arrest warrant for “failure to surrender” — basically a minor bail violation that arose when he obtained asylum from Ecuador rather than complying with bail conditions by returning to court for a hearing on his attempt to resist extradition to Sweden.

That offense carries a prison term of three months and a fine, though it is possible that the time Assange has already spent in prison in the U.K. could be counted against that sentence. In 2010, Assange was imprisoned in Wandsworth Prison, kept in isolation for 10 days until he was released on bail; he was then under house arrest for 550 days at the home of a supporter.

Assange’s lawyer, Jen Robinson, told The Intercept that he would argue that all of that prison time already served should count toward (and thus completely fulfill) any prison term imposed on the “failure to surrender” charge, though British prosecutors would almost certainly contest that claim. Assange would also argue that he had a reasonable, valid basis for seeking asylum rather than submitting to U.K. authorities: namely, well-grounded fear that he would be extradited to the U.S. for prosecution for the act of publishing documents.

Beyond that minor charge, British prosecutors could argue that Assange’s evading of legal process in the U.K. was so protracted, intentional, and malicious that it rose beyond mere “failure to surrender” to “contempt of court,” which carries a prison term of up to two years. Just on those charges alone, then, Assange faces a high risk of detention for another year or even longer in a British prison.

Currently, that is the only known criminal proceeding Assange faces. In May 2017, Swedish prosecutors announced they were closing their investigation into the sexual assault allegations due to the futility of proceeding in light of Assange’s asylum and the time that has elapsed.

The far more important question that will determine Assange’s future is what the U.S. government intends to do. The Barack Obama administration was eager to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified documents, but ultimately concluded that there was no way to do so without either also prosecuting newspapers such as the New York Times and The Guardian, which published the same documents, or creating precedents that would enable the criminal prosecution of media outlets in the future.

Indeed, it is technically a crime under U.S. law for anyone — including a media outlet — to publish certain types of classified information. Under U.S. law, for instance, it was a felony for the Washington Post’s David Ignatius to report on the contents of telephone calls, intercepted by the National Security Agency, between then-national security adviser nominee Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, even though such reporting was clearly in the public interest since it proved Flynn lied when he denied such contacts.

That the Washington Post and Ignatius — and not merely their sources — violated U.S. criminal law by revealing the contents of intercepted communications with a Russian official is made clear by the text of 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code, which provides:

“Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both” (emphasis added).

But the U.S. Justice Department has never wanted to indict and prosecute anyone for the crime of publishing such material, contenting themselves instead to prosecuting the government sources who leak it. Their reluctance has been due to two reasons: First, media outlets would argue that any attempts to criminalize the mere publication of classified or stolen documents is barred by the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment, a proposition the Justice Department has never wanted to test; second, no Justice Department has wanted as part of its legacy the creation of a precedent that allows the U.S. government to criminally prosecute journalists and media outlets for reporting classified documents.

But the Trump administration has made clear that they have no such concerns. Quite the contrary: Last April, Trump’s then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now his secretary of state, delivered a deranged, rambling, highly threatening broadside against WikiLeaks. Without citing any evidence, Pompeo decreed that WikiLeaks is “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” and thus declared,

“We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.”

The longtime right-wing congressman, now one of Trump’s most loyal and favored cabinet officials, also explicitly rejected any First Amendment concerns about prosecuting Assange, arguing that while WikiLeaks “pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice … they may have believed that, but they are wrong.”

Pompeo then issued this bold threat:

“To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions has similarly vowed not only to continue and expand the Obama Justice Department’s crackdown on sources, but also to consider the prosecution of media outlets that publish classified information. It would be incredibly shrewd for Sessions to lay the foundation for doing so by prosecuting Assange first, safe in the knowledge that journalists themselves — consumed with hatred for Assange due to personal reasons, professional jealousies, and anger over the role they believed he played in 2016 in helping Hillary Clinton lose — would unite behind the Trump Justice Department and in support of its efforts to imprison Assange.

During the Obama years, it was a mainstream view among media outlets that prosecuting Assange would be a serious danger to press freedoms. Even the Washington Post editorial page, which vehemently condemned WikiLeaks, warned in 2010 that any such prosecution would “criminalize the exchange of information and put at risk” all media outlets. When Pompeo and Sessions last year issued their threats to prosecute Assange, former Obama Justice Department spokesperson Matthew Miller insisted that no such prosecution could ever succeed:

For years, the Obama Justice Department searched for evidence that Assange actively assisted Chelsea Manning or other sources in the hacking or stealing of documents — in order to prosecute them for more than merely publishing documents — and found no such evidence. But even that theory — that a publisher of classified documents can be prosecuted for assisting a source — would be a severe threat to press freedom, since journalists frequently work in some form of collaboration with sources who remove or disclose classified information. And nobody has ever presented evidence that WikiLeaks conspired with whoever hacked the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta email inboxes to effectuate that hacking.

But there seems little question that, as Sessions surely knows, large numbers of U.S. journalists — along with many, or perhaps most, Democrats — would actually support the Trump Justice Department in prosecuting Assange for publishing documents. After all, the DNC sued WikiLeaks in April for publishing documents — a serious, obvious threat to press freedom — and few objected.

And it was Democratic senators such as Dianne Feinstein who, during the Obama years, were urging the prosecution of WikiLeaks, with the support of numerous GOP senators. There is no doubt that, after 2016, support among both journalists and Democrats for imprisoning Assange for publishing documents would be higher than ever.

If the US did indict Assange for alleged crimes relating to the publication of documents, or if they have already obtained a sealed indictment, and then uses that indictment to request that the U.K. extradite him to the U.S. to stand trial, that alone would ensure that Assange remains in prison in the U.K. for years to come.

Assange would, of course, resist any such extradition on the ground that publishing documents is not a cognizable crime and that the U.S is seeking his extradition for political charges that, by treaty, cannot serve as the basis for extradition. But it would take at least a year, and probably closer to three years, for U.K. courts to decide these extradition questions. And while all of that lingers, Assange would almost certainly be in prison, given that it is inconceivable that a British judge would release Assange on bail given what happened the last time he was released.

All of this means that it is highly likely that Assange — under his best-case scenario — faces at least another year in prison, and will end up having spent a decade in prison despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime. He has essentially been punished — imprisoned — by process.

And while it is often argued that Assange has only himself to blame, it is beyond doubt, given the grand jury convened by the Obama Justice Department and now the threats of Pompeo and Sessions, that the fear that led Assange to seek asylum in the first place — being extradited to the U.S. and politically persecuted for political crimes — was well-grounded.

Assange, his lawyers and his supporters always said that he would immediately board a plane to Stockholm if he were guaranteed that doing so would not be used to extradite him to the U.S., and for years offered to be questioned by Swedish investigators inside the embassy in London, something Swedish prosecutors only did years later. Citing those facts, a United Nations panel ruled in 2016 that the actions of the U.K. government constituted “arbitrary detention” and a violation of Assange’s fundamental human rights.

But if, as seems quite likely, the Trump administration finally announces that it intends to prosecute Assange for publishing classified U.S. government documents, we will be faced with the bizarre spectacle of U.S. journalists — who have spent the last two years melodramatically expressing grave concern over press freedom due to insulting tweets from Trump about Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd, or his mean treatment of Jim Acosta — possibly cheering for a precedent that would be the gravest press freedom threat in decades.

That precedent would be one that could easily be used to put them in a prison cell alongside Assange for the new “crime” of publishing any documents that the U.S. government has decreed should not be published. When it comes to press freedom threats, such an indictment would not be in the same universe as name-calling tweets by Trump directed at various TV personalities.

When it came to denouncing due process denials and the use of torture at Guantánamo, it was not difficult for journalists to set aside their personal dislike for Al Qaeda sympathizers to denounce the dangers of those human rights and legal abuses. When it comes to free speech assaults, journalists are able to set aside their personal contempt for a person’s opinions to oppose the precedent that the government can punish people for expressing noxious ideas.

It should not be this difficult for journalists to set aside their personal emotions about Assange to recognize the profound dangers — not just to press freedoms but to themselves — if the U.S. government succeeds in keeping Assange imprisoned for years to come, all due to its attempts to prosecute him for publishing classified or stolen documents. That seems the highly likely scenario once Ecuador hands over Assange to the U.K.

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In a late-night Twitter rant, President Donald Trump issued an all-caps threat to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The threat came after Rouhani urged Trump not to “play with the lion’s tail or else you will regret it.”

“You cannot provoke the Iranian people against their own security and interests,” Rouhani said later in his speech.

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

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

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

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Featured image is from The New Republic.

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Tony Blair is advising the Saudi government under a £9m ($11.8m) deal with his “institute for global change,” the Sunday Telegraph reported.

The former UK prime minister’s group reached an agreement earlier this year to help support Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman‘s modernisation programme under a “not for profit” arrangement, the Telegraph reported.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is a programme of reforms intended to open up and diversify the kingdom’s oil-centric economy by selling public assets, including a stake in the world’s biggest oil producer, Aramco, and reinvesting the funds.

The deal is the first major agreement to have emerged involving the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), which Blair established in 2016 after winding down his commercial operations, the Telegraph said.

Tony Blair is advising the Saudi government under a £9 million deal between the country and his 'institute' https://t.co/pcZKIoLcKz via @telegraphnews

— Dallo #JC9 (@dallo100) July 21, 2018

The newspaper said the institute received a $10m payment in January for the work, which is being carried out by its staff based in the Middle East.

The payment was made from Media Investment (MIL), a Guernsey-registered firm that is a subsidiary of the Saudi Research and Marketing Group, according to the Telegraph.

Sources told the newspaper that the total provided to the institute so far exceeded $12m. The funding is not mentioned on the institute’s website, in spite of a subsequent post praising Saudi Arabia and its crown prince.

Blair’s office said the institute was “under no duty to disclose donors or donations” and declined to say what discussions Blair had held with members of the Saudi royal family or government about the funding.

Asked about the deal, a spokesman confirmed to the Telegraph that TBI “has received a donation from MIL” for the “not for profit” work of the institution.

“We work to support the Saudi change programme,” the spokesman told the Telegraph, adding that the work would be included in the institute’s first annual report.

Last month in London, Blair reiterated a call for the West to ally with Russia to fight the threat of “terrorism”.

Blair said that although there would always be “disagreements” with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, the need to tackle militant activity made cooperation necessary.

Last July, a British court blocked an attempt by a former Iraqi general to bring a private prosecution against Blair over his government’s involvement in the Iraq war.

In 2016, Blair, who after leaving office embarked on a second career as a Middle East diplomat, was successful in hammering out a deal that saw Qatar pay $30m towards the wages of public-sector workers in Gaza, senior sources within Hamas told MEE.

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During the past three days, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies entered up to 40 villages and settlements in the southern provinces of Quneitra and Daraa after militants, mostly members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had surrendered in the area.

A few batches of radical militants and their families, consisting of dozens of buses, already left southern Syria towards the militant-held part of Idlib province. Militants also handed over more than 10 battle tanks to the SAA. On July 23, militants continued surrendering weapons to government forces and leaving towards Idlib.

Israel transported several hundred of the White Helmets and their families from the southwestern part of Syria to Jordan overnight July 21, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) reported saying this move was “a humanitarian effort” at the request of the US and European countries.

According to Jordan’s official Petra state media outlet, the number of evacuated persons included 800 White Helmets members and their families.

The IDF claimed Israel engaged in the “out of the ordinary” move due to the “immediate risk” to the lives of the civilians from the ongoing military operation in the area.

The White Helmets is an infamous Western-backed organization, which according to Syrian, Russian and Iranian governments as well as to independent researchers, has been involved in staging chemical attacks and other propaganda operations in order to assist the US-led block in its attempts to overthrow the Assad government. The organization operates only within the militant-held area, in a close cooperation with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

One of the most prominent cases of the White Helmets operations is the Douma chemical incident on April 7, 2018, which was used by the US, France and the UK to justify a massive missile strike on Syria on April 14.

According to Syrian experts, the key goal of the evacuation of the White Helmets members is to not allow forces of the Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance to question members of the organization over its activities coordinated with Western intelligences.

The repeatedly declared Israeli “noninvolvement” in the conflict continued on July 22 when four senior FSA commanders in southern Syria run away to Israel. Syrian opposition activists identified them as “Moaz Nassar,” the leader of the Golan Knights Brigade, “Ahmed al-Nahs,” a commander in the Saif al-Sham Brigades, “Alaa al-Halaki,” the leader of the al-Ababil Army and “Abu Rateb Nassar,” a commander in the Golan Knights Brigade.

Over the past few years, these armed groups have been repeatedly accused by the Damascus government of cooperating with the Israeli military and intelligence. Their evacuation is another sign that Israel and its allies are attempting to hide some of their operations in the war-torn country.

Russian forces intercepted at least two armed UAVs over the Khmeimim Air Base on July 20 and 21. Drones were launched by militants from the so-called de-escalation zone area, which includes Idlib and northern Latakia.

The continued attacks by militants on the Russian facilities in Syria are only nearing the Russian-backed SAA advance to put an end to this attacks and the presence of terrorists excluded from the ceasefire, like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in the area.

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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-8-4

Year: 2016

Pages: 240

Author: Tim Anderson

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The Dirty War on Syria 

by Professor Tim Anderson

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“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”— Professor Neil Postman

Americans have a voracious appetite for TV entertainment, and the Trump reality show—guest starring outraged Democrats, power-hungry Republicans, and a hodgepodge of other special interest groups with dubious motives—feeds that appetite for titillating, soap opera drama.

After all, who needs the insults, narcissism and power plays that are hallmarks of reality shows when you can have all that and more delivered up by the likes of Donald Trump and his cohorts?

Trump is inclined to denounce any news agencies and reports that paint him in a less than favorable light as “fake news,” which leaves only the Fox News channel to carry the president’s torch for media integrity.

Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.

In other words, it’s all fake, i.e. manufactured, i.e. manipulated to distort reality.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Likewise, “The Trump Show” keeps the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

Reality and fiction merge as everything around us becomes entertainment fodder.

We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguishbetween what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things happening to other people.

The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

This not only explains how a candidate like Donald Trump with a reputation for being rude, egotistical and narcissistic could get elected, but it also says a lot about how a politician like Barack Obama—whose tenure in the White House was characterized by drone killings, a weakening of the Constitution at the expense of Americans’ civil liberties, and an expansion of the police state—could be hailed as “one of the greatest presidents of all times.”

This is what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

Donald Trump is no exception to this Orwellian manipulation of language for dubious ends: labelling something as “fake news” is a masterful way of dismissing truth that may run counter to the ruling power’s own narrative.

As George Orwell recognized,

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses. In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).

Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.

Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.

In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.

Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.

Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.

While television news cannot—and should not—be completely avoided, the following suggestions will help you better understand the nature of TV news.

1. TV news is not what happened. Rather, it is what someone thinks is worth reporting. Although there are still some good TV journalists, the old art of investigative reporting has largely been lost. While viewers are often inclined to take what is reported by television “news” hosts at face value, it is your responsibility to judge and analyze what is reported.

2. TV news is entertainment. There is a reason why the programs you watch are called news “shows.” It’s a signal that the so-called news is being delivered as a form of entertainment.

“In the case of most news shows,” write Neil Postman and Steve Powers in their insightful book, How to Watch TV News (1992), “the package includes attractive anchors, an exciting musical theme, comic relief, stories placed to hold the audience, the creation of the illusion of intimacy, and so on.”

Of course, the point of all this glitz and glamour is to keep you glued to the set so that a product can be sold to you. (Even the TV news hosts get in on the action by peddling their own products, everything from their latest books to mugs and bathrobes.) Although the news items spoon-fed to you may have some value, they are primarily a commodity to gather an audience, which will in turn be sold to advertisers.

3. Never underestimate the power of commercials, especially to news audiences. In an average household, the television set is on over seven hours a day. Most people, believing themselves to be in control of their media consumption, are not really bothered by this. But TV is a two-way attack: it not only delivers programming to your home, it also delivers you (the consumer) to a sponsor.

People who watch the news tend to be more attentive, educated and have more money to spend. They are, thus, a prime market for advertisers. And sponsors spend millions on well-produced commercials. Such commercials are often longer in length than most news stories and cost more to produce than the news stories themselves. Moreover, the content of many commercials, which often contradicts the messages of the news stories, cannot be ignored. Most commercials are aimed at prurient interests in advocating sex, overindulgence, drugs, etc., which has a demoralizing effect on viewers, especially children.

4. It is vitally important to learn about the economic and political interests of those who own the “corporate” media. There are few independent news sources anymore. The major news outlets are owned by corporate empires. Moreover, even those “fake” news outlets denounced by Trump are enjoying significant sales and ratings boosts as a result of Trump’s so-called war on the media. Indeed, as one trade journal reports, “Trump, of course, has become the greatest source of lead generation the American press has ever seen.” In other words, to a dying news industry, the Trump presidency has been great for business.

5. Pay special attention to the language of newscasts. Because film footage and other visual imagery are so engaging on TV news shows, viewers are apt to allow language—what the reporter is saying about the images—to go unexamined. A TV news host’s language frames the pictures, and, therefore, the meaning we derive from the picture is often determined by the host’s commentary. TV by its very nature manipulates viewers. One must never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not see the actual event but the edited form of the event. For example, presenting a one- to two-minute segment from a two-hour political speech and having a TV talk show host critique may be disingenuous, but such edited footage is a regular staple on news shows. Add to that the fact that the reporters editing the film have a subjective view—sometimes determined by their corporate bosses—that enters in.

6. Reduce by at least one-half the amount of TV news you watch. TV news generally consists of “bad” news—wars, torture, murders, scandals and so forth. It cannot possibly do you any harm to excuse yourself each week from much of the mayhem projected at you on the news. Do not form your concept of reality based on television. TV news, it must be remembered, does not reflect normal everyday life. Studies indicate that a heavy viewing of TV news makes people think the world is much more dangerous than it actually is.

7. One of the reasons many people are addicted to watching TV news is that they feel they must have an opinion on almost everything, which gives the illusion of participation in American life. But an “opinion” is all that we can gain from TV news because it only presents the most rudimentary and fragmented information on anything. Thus, on most issues we don’t really know much about what is actually going on. And, of course, we are expected to take what the TV news host says on an issue as gospel truth. But isn’t it better to think for yourself? Add to this that we need to realize that we often don’t have enough information from the “news” source to form a true opinion. How can that be done? Study a broad variety of sources, carefully analyze issues in order to be better informed, and question everything.

The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, a populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

It’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state. If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

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