Global Research

The Supreme Court today rejected the challenge to President Trump’s Muslim Ban. In its 5-to-4 decision, the court failed to make good on principles at the heart of our constitutional system — including the absolute prohibition on official disfavor of a particular religion. The fight against the ban will continue, but the court’s decision is devastating. History will not be kind to the court’s approval of an unfounded and blatantly anti-Muslim order. 

By now the story of this shameful policy is familiar. During his campaign, Trump issued a statementcalling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — which remained on his website until well into his term in office. That was hardly a stray comment. Rather, over and over, both before and after the election, Trump expressed his animus for Islam and Muslims and tied that animus to his proposed immigration ban.

Just one week into office, Trump attempted to make good on the campaign promise, issuing a sweeping ban on over a hundred million Muslims without even consulting the government’s national security experts. Courts rejected that first version as well as the order the administration crafted to replace it. Finally, those temporary measures were replaced by the current proclamation, which likewise bans over 150 million people — approximately 95 percent of them Muslim. As Justice Sotomayor explained in her dissenting opinion, Trump’s consistent messages and actions paint a “harrowing picture, from which a reasonable observer would readily conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by hostility and animus toward the Muslim faith.”

Nonetheless, the court today rejected the constitutional challenge to the ban. Applying deference to the president despite the evidence presented, the court explained that it would “uphold the policy so long as it can reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds.” The court then concluded based on the record in the case that the ban had “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility.”

As Justice Sotomayor cogently explained, the majority could reach this conclusion only by “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals.”  In this respect, as she noted, the case repeats some of the worst mistakes the court has made in the past.  In particular, the parallels to Korematsu v. United States, the court’s 1944 decision upholding the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, are striking.

As in that case, the court today paid lip service to the vital constitutional values at stake, but it willfully ignored the reality of the situation. The majority today repudiated Korematsu, saying it “was gravely wrong the day it was decided.” But as Justice Sotomayor pointed out, then, as now, it was clear to those willing to look at the evidence that the government’s policy was not about safety but prejudice:

“By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another.”

Today’s decision is devastating. Whatever the court may have intended, the message it relays to Muslim communities around the country and around the world is that our Constitution tolerates transparent discrimination and animus against Islam. It undermines our standing to encourage tolerance and pluralistic democracy abroad, and it reinforces the intended message that Muslims — and immigrants, people of color, LGBT communities, and other marginalized groups — are not welcome in Trump’s America.

But this fight is not over.

Indeed, the greatest repudiation of Trump’s anti-Muslim policy to date was not delivered by any court. Instead, it was delivered by thousands of people spontaneously coming together at airports across the country to declare that we will not stand for hatred and discrimination.

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Cody Wofsy is Staff Attorney, ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Featured image is from the author.

It has often been said that Israel, since its establishment in 1948, has presided over the “miracle” of making the country’s “desert bloom.” That heavily promoted narrative — which asserts that the Palestinians have long lacked the capacity, knowledge or desire to properly develop agriculture in the region — has often been used as a legitimizing factor in Israel’s establishment. As former Israel Prime Minister Shimon Peres once said, “The country [Palestine] was mostly an empty desert, with only a few islands of Arab settlement; and Israel’s [cultivated] land today was indeed redeemed from swamp and wilderness.”

Were it not for Israel, the desert would have remained unproductive and fallow – or so the story goes.

There is, however, another side to this story, one that shows that the “blooming desert” of Israel is a convenient disguise for the degradation and destruction of Palestine’s natural resources, a means of obfuscating the worst of occupation by wrapping it in the cloak of Zionist mythology. While a central theme of Zionist mythology has long been the need for the Jewish Diaspora community to re-establish itself by returning to agricultural labor, the truth of Israel’s agricultural “success” involves the unsustainable use of occupied resources and the deliberate destruction of the land and water still used by Palestinians today.

Erasing a rich history

Though the official narrative of the state of Israel claims that it has turned the land it occupies from an empty desert into a lush, agricultural wonder, the actual fate of the land following Israel’s establishment in 1948 tells a very different story. Indeed, prior to 1948, the historical record demonstrates that Palestinian farms were very productive and that both Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers were successful farmers. For example, a UN report on agriculture in Palestine between 1945 and 1946 recorded that Palestinian-grown crops accounted for nearly 80 percent of Palestine’s total agricultural yield that season, with Palestinian farms producing over 244,000 tons of vegetables, 73,000 tons of fruit, 78,000 tons of olives, and 5 million liters of wine.

Two years later, when the majority of Palestinians were forced from their land during the “Nakba” that founded the state of Israel, the farms and orchards that had previously been tended by Palestinians were left abandoned, as their owners fled under the threat of death at the hands of Zionist militias.

As Israeli historian and journalist Meron Benvenisti detailed in his book Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948:

By April 1948 Jewish farmers had already begun harvesting the crops that had ripened in the abandoned fields and picking the citrus fruit in Arab groves. […] by mid-1949 two-thirds of all land sown with grain in Israel was abandoned Arab land.”

Thus, it was land theft that was largely responsible for Israel’s initial agricultural production, not the labor or agricultural expertise of Zionist settlers.

In addition, the claim that Israel turned an undeveloped desert into an agricultural wonder seems to be – in part – projection on the part of the Israeli state. Indeed, as Benvenisti noted, following the removal of Palestinians, the vast majority of centuries-old fruit orchards that had long been maintained by the native inhabitants of the land were untended, neglected and, in some cases, bulldozed to make room for ever-expanding settlements.

According to Benvenisti’s research, that neglect led to a situation in which “entire tracts of productive citrus trees, especially in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, were earmarked for the construction of housing developments,” as was the case for Palestine olive groves and pomegranate orchards that the land’s new occupants considered “an annoyance.” Part of the reason for the destruction of the land was that it would weaken Palestinian claims to return to the land, as keeping agricultural infrastructure intact “might have made possible the absorption of the returning refugees.”

Current Israeli government policy, particularly its support for the construction of illegal settlements on Palestinian land, is the continuation of this effort to erase Palestine’s history by targeting its agricultural heritage as well as its natural wonders. Indeed, Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted back in 2011 that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s steady push for Israeli expansion into Palestinian territory had been coupled with “his insistence on seeing nature and landscape as no more than an obstacle to the realization of his settlement vision.”

Covering a crime with water-sucking pines

Another project central to the “desert bloom” mythology is Israel’s “afforestation” of the desert, which has helped “turn the desert green” through the planting of non-native pine trees. These forests, largely planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), have been touted as a “miracle.” Yet, the pine stands, much like Israel’s treatment of Palestine’s agricultural legacy, have been motivated by a need to cover up the events that led to the creation of the Israeli state.

Indeed, more than two-thirds of all JNF forests and sites lie on top of the ruins of Palestinian villages demolished during and after the founding of Israel, and the group’s continuing afforestation efforts are aimed at acquiring land in the occupied West Bank to prevent “trespassing” and “conceal” Palestinian villages in order to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees.

Moreover, the effort to maintain a forest of non-native trees – regardless of whether its chief aim is to cover up the true history of Palestine or “green” a desert — has come at a great cost to the natural environment. As journalist Max Blumenthal has noted:

Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem.”

They also become fodder for forest fires that have caused major damage and mass evacuations throughout Israel over the years.

Another ecological consequence of JNF forests is their likely effect on Israel’s horrendous drought, considered to be the worst the region has faced in over 900 years. As studies have shown in other countries where non-native pine plantations have been introduced in vast numbers, pines consume a significant amount of water – leading to droughts and even the disappearance of entire rivers – as well as fundamentally alter and degrade the soil. While these forests have been presented as an ecological miracle, they are instead destroying the environment and degrading the land’s resources, suggesting that the main driver behind the long-standing project is aimed at covering up the ruins of Palestine.

Continuing the attack on Palestinian agriculture

Today, the stark difference in agricultural development in the land tended by Israelis and Palestinians derives from policies that often receive little coverage in the media and are largely absent from the “desert bloom” narrative. Indeed, much of the coverage the issue has received paints Palestinian agricultural successes as either the work of foreigners offering aid or resulting from the “theft” of Israeli-settlement agricultural infrastructure.

Palestinian water tanks vandalized by Israeli settlers in Hebron. (Photo: ISM Palestine / Flickr)

Such reports fail to acknowledge the realities of the issue, such as the illegal blockade of Gaza that has crippled its economy and agricultural sector, as well as Israel’s destruction of agricultural infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank. Gazan agricultural infrastructure was ravaged by Israel in times of war and, in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers regularly demolish rain cisterns, pipelines and irrigation systems installed by Palestinians, citing as a reason that such structures lacked the “proper authorization” from Israel. Farmers themselves, mainly in Gaza, are often targeted directly by Israeli soldiers if they come too close to the border fence.

The Israeli government has also targeted Palestinian agriculture through chemical warfare. The use of white phosphorus as a weapon against Gaza, for example, has had major consequences for the area’s farmers. In addition to the chemical weapon’s often deadly effects on the human body, it has destructive effects on the environment and plants, as its incendiary nature often leads to the spontaneous ignition and burning of trees, forests and farmland. It also lingers in the environment for several years.

Beyond the use of chemical weapons, Israel has also directly targeted Gazan farmland with herbicide. In 2015, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)admitted to using herbicides and germination inhibitors to kill off vegetation along the Palestinian side of the border, damaging over 420 acres of land. A year later, tactic was repeated, this time destroying around 400 acres of farmland. The IDF has stated that it sprays the chemicals over the vaguely defined “no-go zone” it has established along the border “in order to enable optimal and continuous security operations.” However, the area accounts for a third of Gaza’s arable land and 17 percent of the entire territory.

Furthermore, the herbicides, like white phosphorus, have consequences for the environment long after they are sprayed. As Anwar Abu Assi, manager of the chemical laboratory at Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture, told Al Jazeera in 2016:

Herbicides are sprayed in high concentrations. Thus, they remain embedded in the soil, and then find their way to the water basin. This constitutes a real hazard for the population.”

The targeting of Palestinian agriculture in the present and its treatment by the Israeli and American press suggest another and nefarious way in which Israel’s “desert bloom” mythology has manifested. In order for Israel’s agricultural “superiority” to remain unchallenged, Palestinian agriculture must also be suppressed. Were Palestinian agriculture able to develop unimpeded and flourish, it would call into question the idea that the land was barren before the Zionists, threatening the latter’s legitimacy.

The cover-story for all conquerors and colonizers  

The myth of Israel “making the desert bloom” has its basis in neo-colonial narratives that have long been used in other settler states such as Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Australia. In the cases of the latter countries, the native inhabitants and their culture have also inaccurately been depicted as “primitive” and incompetent, a narrative that suggests that the land would have remained “wild” and undeveloped were it not for the “fortunate” appearance of European settlers. Such narratives cast the settlers as both superior and normal while the natives become inferior and abnormal, thus obfuscating the settler’s status as foreigner and conqueror.

Zionist mythology reinforces similar themes. For example, as in the United States Native Americans were considered as uncivilized and wild as the natural environment, Zionist mythology reinforces the idea that all Arabs are “sons of the desert” while the desert similarly represents a barbaric obstacle to “progress” and development.

Another historical analogue is the 19th century concept of “manifest destiny” — the idea that the expansion of the United States had been preordained by God himself, which led the U.S. to break many of its numerous treaties with indigenous tribes and even go to war with Mexico in order to acquire the land it coveted. The Israeli government similarly sees its expansion and control of all of Palestine as a matter of fulfilling prophecy and “redeeming” the Holy Land. This effort of redemption continues to feed Israel’s expansion. As Netanyahu has said, Israel is “obligated to develop all parts of the country – the Galilee and the Negev [the West Bank].”

Living the myth and the lie

Yet, no matter how much evidence exists to the contrary, Israel will never tell the real story behind the “miracle” of making “the desert bloom.” It will never tell the real story precisely because it can’t – to do so would mean demolishing the neo-colonial narrative at the center of the settler state, a narrative that is the pillar of its legitimacy.

Indeed, if Israel has not actually improved the land by making “the desert bloom” but instead degraded the land, the legitimacy of the state of Israel itself becomes questionable, as it suggests that its native inhabitants – the Palestinians – were better caretakers of the land than the current occupiers. For this reason, Israel must continue to propagate the myth regardless of the facts, and continue to deny Palestine’s rich cultural history and agricultural legacy.

With Israel now facing the consequences of its mistreatment of the land and its resources, the historical revisionism once used to sell the disparity between Israeli and Palestinian agricultural prowess has become ineffective. For that reason, Israel must now use other tactics — chemical warfare through toxic agrochemicals, the physical destruction of Palestinian agricultural infrastructure, and illegal blockades – in order to keep the artificial narrative alive, creating the illusion of primitivism and scarcity where none exists.

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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.

Explicitly focusing on alleged anti-Israel bias the U.S. withdrew from further participation in the UN Human Rights Council. The only internationally credible basis for criticizing the HRC is its regrettable tendency to put some countries with the worst human rights records in leading roles, creating genuine issues of credibility and hypocrisy. Of course, such a criticism would never be made by the U.S. as it could only embarrass Washington to admit that many of its closest allies in the Middle East, and elsewhere have lamentable human rights records, and, if fairly judged, the U.S. has itself reversed roles since the year 2000, itself slipping into the category of the most serious human rights offenders. In this regard, its ‘withdrawal’ can be viewed as a self-imposed ‘suspension’ for falling short when it comes to the promotion and protection of human rights.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. was frustrated by its efforts to ‘reform’ the HRC according to its views  of the UN agency should function, and blamed its traditional adversaries, Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, along with Egypt, with blocking its initiative. It also must not have welcome the HRC High Commissioner, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, for describing the separation of children from their immigrant parents at the Mexican border as an ‘unconsciounable’ policy.

In evaluating this latest sign of American retreat from its prior role as global leader, there are several considerations that help us understand such a move that situates the United States in the same strange rejectionist corner it now shares with North Korea and Eritrea:

• the fact that the U.S. withdrawal from the HRC occurred immediately after the Israeli border massacre, insulated from Security Council censure and investigation by a U.S. veto, is certainly part of political foreground. This consideration was undoubtedly reinforced by the HRC approval of a fact-finding investigation of Israel’s behavior over prior weeks in responding to the Great Return March border demonstrations met with widespread lethal sniper violence;
• in evaluating the UN connection to Palestine it needs to be recalled that the organized international community has a distinctive responsibility for Palestine that can be traced all the way back to the peace diplomacy after World War I when Britain was given the role of Mandatory, which according to the League of Nations Covenant should be carried out as a ‘sacred trust of civilization.’ This special relationship was extended and deepened when Britain gave up this role after World War II, transferring responsibility for the future of Palestine to the UN. This newly established world organization was given the task of finding a sustainable solution in the face of sharply contested claims between the majority Palestinian population and the Jewish, mainly settler population.

This UN role was started beneath and deeply influenced by the long shadow of grief and guilt cast by the Holocaust. The UN, borrowing from the British colonial playbook, proposed a division of Palestine between Jewish and Palestinian political communities, which eventuated in the UN partition plan contained in General Assembly Resolution 181. This plan was developed and adopted without the participation of the majority resident population, 70% non-Jewish at the time, and was opposed by the independent countries in the Arab world. Such a plan seemed oblivious to the evolving anti-colonial mood of the time, failing to take any account of the guiding normative principle of self-determination. The Partition War that followed in 1947 did produce a de factor partition of Palestine more favorable to the Zionist Project than what was proposed, and rejected, in 181. One feature of the original plan was to internationalize the governance of the city of Jerusalem with both peoples given an equal status.

This proposed treatment of Jerusalem was never endorsed by Israel, and was formally, if indirectly, repudiated after the 1967 War when Israel declared (in violation of international law) that Jerusalem was the eternal capital of the Jewish people never to be divided or internationalized, and Israel has so administered Jerusalem with this intent operationalized in defiance of the UN. What this sketch of the UN connection with Palestine clearly shows is that from the very beginning of Israeli state-building, the role of the international community was direct and the discharge of its responsibilities was not satisfactory in that it proved incapable of protecting Palestinian moral, legal, and political rights. As a result, the majority of Palestinian people have been effectively excluded from their own country and as a people exist in a fragmented ethnic reality. This series of events constitutes one of the worst geopolitical crimes of the past century. Rather than do too much by way of criticizing the behavior of Israel, the UN has done far too little, not because of a failure of will, but as an expression of the behavioral primacy of geopolitics and naked militarism;

• the revealing stress of Ambassador Haley’s explanation of the U.S. withdrawal from the HRC gives almost total attention to quantitative factors such as the ‘disproportionate’ number of resolutions compared with those given to other human rights offenders, making no attempt whatsoever to refute the substantiveallegations of Israeli wrongdoing. This is not surprising as any attempt to justify Israeli policies and practices toward the Palestinian people would only expose the severity of Israel’s criminality and the acuteness of Palestinian victimization. The U.S. has also long struggled to be rid of so-called Item 7 of the Human Rights Council devoted to human rights violations of Israel associated with the occupation of Palestinian territories, which overlooks the prior main point that the UN is derelict in its failure to produce a just peace for the peoples inhabiting Mandate Palestine.
• withdrawing from international institutional arrangements, especially those positively associated with peace, human rights, and environmental protection has become the hallmark of what be identified as the negative internationalismof the Trump presidency. The most egregious instances, prior to this move with regard to the HRC, involved the repudiation of the Nuclear Program Agreement with Iran (also known as the JCPOA or P5 +1 Agreement) and the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Unlike these other instances of negative internationalism this departure from the HRC is likely to hurt the U.S. more than the HRC, reinforcing its myopic willingness to do whatever it takes to please Netanyahu and the lead American Zionist donor to the Trump campaign, Sheldon Adelson. Only the provocative announcement of the planned unilateral move of the American Embassy to Jerusalem last December was as explicitly responsive to Israel’s policy agenda as is this rejection of the HRC, both initiatives stand out as being contrary to a fair rendering of American national interests, and hence a show of deference to Israel’s preferences. Despite this unabashed one-sidedness the Trump presidency still puts itself forward as a peacemaker, and promised to produce ‘the deal of the century’ at the proper moment, even enjoying the backing of Saudi Arabia, which seems to be telling the Palestinians to take what is offered or shut up forever. Knowing the weakness and shallow ambitions of the Palestinian Authority, there is no telling what further catastrophe, this one of a diplomatic character, may further darken the Palestinian future. A diplomatic nakbamight be the worst disaster of all for the Palestinian people and their century-long struggle for elemental rights.

It should also be observed that the U.S. human rights record has been in steady decline, whether the focus is placed on the morally catastrophic present policies of separating families at the Mexican border or on the failure to achieve acceptable progress at home in the area of economic and social rights despite American affluence (as documented in the recent report of Philip Alston, UNHRC Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty) or in the various violations of human rights committed in the course of the War on Terror, including operation of black sites in foreign countries to carry on torture of terror suspects, or denials of the tenets of international humanitarian law (Geneva Conventions) in the administration of Guantanamo and other prison facilities;

• it is also worth noting that Israel’s defiance of internatonal law and international institutions is pervasive, flagrant, and directly related to maintaining an oppressive regime of occupation that is complemented by apartheid structures victimizing Palestinian refugees, residents of Jerusalem, the Palestinian minority in Israel, and imprisoned population of Gaza. Israel refused the authority of the International Court of Justice with respect to the ‘separation wall’ that back in 2004 declared by a near unanimous vote of 14-1 (U.S. as the lone dissent) that building the wall on occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful, that the wall should be dismantled, and Palestinians compensated for harm endured. There are many other instances concerning such issues as settlements, collective punishment, excessive force, prison conditions, and a variety of abuse of children.

In conclusion, by purporting to punish the Human Rights Council, the Trump presidency, representing the U.S. Government, is much more punishing itself, as well as the peoples of the world. We all benefit from a robust and legitimated institutional framework for the promotion and protection of vital human rights. The claim of an anti-Israeli bias in the HRC, or UN, is bogus, the daily violation of the most basis rights of the Palestinian people is a tragic reality. This is all we need to know.

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Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

According to the Washington Post (6/17/18), Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the frontrunner in Mexico’s July 1 election, “bears more than a passing political resemblance” to US President Donald Trump.

Indeed, they are practically the same person: In the late 1970s, AMLO—as López Obrador is sometimes called—was “taking on Mexico’s state-run oil company, Pemex, setting up protest camps outside its offices to force it to pay compensation to indigenous communities and campesinos whose lands it had polluted.”

Around the same time, in 1975, Donald Trump was busy settling a lawsuit with the US Justice Department that accused the company he owned with his father of refusing to rent or negotiate rentals “because of race and color,” “requir[ing] different rental terms and conditions because of race” and “misrepresent[ing] to blacks that apartments were not available.”

AMLO says that, if elected, he will explore the possibility of granting amnesty to those involved in Mexico’s bloody drug war in order to bring peace to the country. Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prosecutors to

pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences, in his first step toward a return to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in long sentences for many minority defendants and packed US prisons.

Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador “bears more than a passing political resemblance to President Trump,” according to the Washington Post editorial page (6/17/18).

As mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador subsidized subway fares and gave stipends to senior citizens and single mothers. As president, Trump and his allies in Congress doled out “close to $5 trillion in tax cuts almost exclusively for the wealthy,” including a corporate tax cut of $1.5 trillion that CEOs say they will keep rather than invest or use to increase workers’ wages, while raising taxes on lower earners by $5.8 billion, taking such measures as eliminating tax deductions for interest on student loans, medical costs and teachers’ out-of-pocket expenses.

Thus, the editorial’s entirely apt and not-at-all hallucinatory title reads in part, “Mexico’s Could-Be President Is a Lot Like Trump.”

The Post’s López Obrador/Trump analogy is a particularly pernicious (and dumb) instance of what Tariq Ali calls “the extreme center,” a dynamic that reduces politics to “a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market,” and one that has dominated the West since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The extreme center involves two political parties funded by the same sources carrying out very similar policies, including neoliberalism, austerity, mass surveillance and US-led wars. Centrists, extreme or otherwise, treat a departure from these practices as dangerous radicalism.

The one incredibly shallow sense in which Trump and López Obrador are comparable is that both have taken positions that fall out of the extreme centrist status quo. However, Trump challenges the center from the right and AMLO does so from the left. In conflating Trump and López Obrador, the Post emphasizes the sole superficial trait they share and skates over the manifold, substantive differences between the two. For example, the Post’s editorial concludes:

If Mexicans choose Mr. López Obrador, they will be, like the voters who backed Mr. Trump, blowing up the status quo without a reliable sense of what will replace it. The result is likely to be more trouble on both sides of the border.

It’s true that AMLO could mean “trouble,” but for a rather dissimilar constituency than Trump. López Obrador has vowed to reverse Mexican oil policies that led to a $15 billion energy trade deficit with the US in 2017, and is proposing “a sweeping reorientation of the nation’s energy policy with an emphasis on independence from the United States.” This “could slow oil production in Texas and impede deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by international oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron,” while hampering natural gas sales to Mexico “that are an important source of revenue for American oil and pipeline companies.” Trump, by contrast, has been “trouble” for Yemeni civilians, Puerto Rican hurricane victims, and migrant children, toddlers and babies.

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Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is published by OR Books.

Featured image is from the author.

On June 26th, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 5-4 majority decision in the landmark case of “Trump v. Hawaii”, about President Trump’s commonly misnamed ‘Muslim ban’. This decision probably established a new precedent: that national security is an interest that overrides the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Here is how it does this outrageous thing, which is so shocking for such persons — who are oath-bound to uphold the U.S. Constitution — to do:

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, in full:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The traditionally-called “Establishment Clause” is the part of the First Amendment that says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

On the opening page of its 92-page decision, the Supreme Court says,

“We now decide whether the President had authority under the Act to issue the Proclamation, and whether the entry policy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”

On the 7th page, it says,

“Plaintiffs [the ‘Hawaii’ side in the case of ‘Trump v. Hawaii’] further claimed that the Proclamation violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because it was motivated not by concerns pertaining to national security but by animus toward Islam.”

Page 26 says,

“The First Amendment provides, in part, that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ Our cases recognize that ‘[t]he clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another’.” 

The Court’s decision asserts, first, that Trump’s Muslim ban, of any immigrants from any of the five nations of Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya — all of which 5 nations have Muslim majorities — is not discriminatory on the basis of religion; and that therefore no religious denomination is being officially preferred over another, in that ban or “Proclamation.”

Second, here is how the decision asserts — at least provisionally, and (as will be shown) likely permanently — that national security overrides the Establishment Clause (and therefore overrides the Constitution itself): On page 29, it says,

“plaintiffs seek to invalidate a national security directive. … Their claim accordingly raises a number of delicate issues regarding the scope of the constitutional right [right to “the free exercise thereof”] and the manner of proof. The Proclamation, moreover, is facially neutral toward religion. Plaintiffs therefore ask the Court to probe the sincerity of the stated justifications for the policy.”

The Court’s decision then entirely ignores — and never even so much as touches upon — the “sincerity” matter, at all, or in any form. Therefore, the majority decision is implicitly asserting that the sincerity of the rationale that Trump gave for his “Proclamation” (his so-called ‘Muslim ban’) is immaterial to this case, not relevant to determining whether or not the Proclamation “officially” prefers any religion over any other. The 5-member majority are, in effect, asserting that, by the term “officially,” is meant “explicitly,” or publicly admitted. For example (in another hotly-debated historical instance): If Adolf Hitler did not publicly admit that his intention was to exterminate every Jew on Earth, then (according to this reasoning from those five jurists) he was not responsible for the Holocaust (the attempt by his followers to exterminate Jews, within each of those officials’ own sphere of authority, as granted to them by Hitler). Those five jurists are saying that, since Trump never publicly admitted that he was a bigoted person and never explicitly asserted that religion had anything to do with his Proclamation, Trump’s Proclamation simply did not violate the Establishment Clause. That’s the end of the story — Hawaii’s assertion that Trump’s publicly declared reason needs to be challenged on the basis of its sincerity is simply, and peremptorily, rejected — to “ask the Court to probe the sincerity of the stated justifications for the policy” is placed, by them, simply out-of-bounds.

However, prosecution for any crime requires any court to consider what the motivations of any possible defendant for that crime were in the given matter. To obtain a criminal conviction, the prosecution must establish the presence of two elements at the time of the alleged crime — namely, actus reus (“guilty act”) and mens rea (“guilty mind”); but these five members of the U.S. Supreme Court effectively rule out-of-bounds the very possibility that a U.S. President (or, specifically, this U.S. President) might, on any occasion (but specifically, this occasion), have been “insincere” (or had “a guilty mind” — guilty of actually having violated the First Amendment, in this case). So: these five jurists proved their ownguilty minds — and they thereby impose upon the entire nation this nullification of our nation’s Constitution, simply casting aside both executive accountability and the Constitution’s supreme legal authority in our land. Is that treasonous? It certainly violates their oaths-of-office. But is it treasonous?

It is, in any event, the way that these 5 judges dismissed any consideration of Trump’s motive for his ‘Muslim ban’ — this particular “entry policy” issued by the Proclamation. However, what about the question itself, of “whether the entry policy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” Well, if you aren’t being allowed to question what its motive was, then you aren’t being allowed to question the Constitutionality of the ban, either.

The Court’s mega-scandalous decision closes:

The Government has set forth a sufficient national security justification to survive rational basis review. We express no view on the soundness of the policy. We simply hold today that plaintiffs have not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their constitutional claim. 

[Section] V 

Because plaintiffs have not shown that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims, we reverse the grant of the preliminary injunction as an abuse of discretion. Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 555 

U. S. 7, 32 (2008). The case now returns to the lower courts for such further proceedings as may be appropriate. 

They declare (but are they sincere about this?) that “We express no view on the soundness of the policy.” They bounce the matter back down to “the lower courts,” without even so much as having considered the mens rea issue — which was central to the case before them. The President’s having avoided admitting the fact that bigotry was involved in his Proclamation, has been accepted as final on the matter, for these five jurists. But would it be final if Hawaii were to continue in “the lower courts” to challenge the Proclamation? According to CNBC’s news-report about the decision:

“Neal Katyal, attorney for the challengers, said in a statement. ‘Now that the Court has upheld it, it is up to Congress to do its job and reverse President Trump’s unilateral and unwise travel ban’.”

Obviously, Ketyal won’t take the matter back down to the lower court in the case. Perhaps his challenge to the ban had actually been only political, to embarrass Republicans, in order that the Democratic Party can continue to holier-than-thou moralize their supposed superiority above the bigotry and/or sheer stupidity, of the President’s (and Republican-supported) “ban.”

Here is the actual type of “establishment of religion” that I believe that Trump is here imposing (and which the five far-right jurists today are trying to help him to impose upon the nation) — it’s more against Shiite Muslims than against Sunnis — who constitute the vast majority of Muslims and virtually the entirety of the ones who have perpetrated terrorism anywhere other than in Israel (and this President is not supposed to be the President of Israel):

This case is not, as Hawaii (Ketyal) was asserting, a Trumpian bigotry against Islam. Only five nations were included in the ban, and so it applies to only a small percentage of the world’s Muslims. Though the Court accepted the President’s flimsy assertion that these, and only these, nations pose such a national-security threat to the United States as to warrant a total immigration-ban, the actual evidence regarding Islamic terrorism in the United States has been overwhelming that virtually only fundamentalist Sunnis have perpetrated it; no Shiites have. With the lone exception of Somalia, none of these five banned nations is Sunni majority and Sunni controlled — they’re all either Shiite majority or Shiite-dominated, or (in the case of Libya) failed states without any nationwide government because of the U.S.-and-allied invasion in 2011. (And so, Trump is banning refugees from that country which his Democratic predecessor Obama had destroyed — let them escape to Europe instead!) The U.S. Deep State has been trying since 1949 to overthrow Syria’s Government and replace it with one that would be controlled by the fundamentalist-Sunni Saud family who own Saudi Arabia and are allied with the U.S. aristocracy (America’s “Deep State”). Yemen right now is being bombed to smithereens by the U.S.-Saudi-UAE alliance, and this operation is supporting, instead of opposing, fundamentalist Sunnis (such as ISIS in Yemen, and Al Qaeda in Yemen, neither of which group of jihadists is in the Shiite region of Yemen, which we’re bombing and destroying, while we’re claiming that this is ‘anti-terrorist’). The actual facts indicate that any “Muslim ban” should be focused against Saudi Arabia — and this ban would be authentically to protect against terrorism, not to disadvantage any particular religion — but Trump instead sold the Sauds $350 billion of U.S.-made weapons. That global all-time-record high U.S. military sale to the Sauds gives them far more clout over the U.S. Government than the U.S. Government has over them. No wonder why the U.S. Government protects them for 9/11, etc.

Regarding Somalia, the only article online about “Somalia-United States Relations” is at Wikipedia and doesn’t indicate any terrorist incidents in the U.S. as having been at all Somali. Furthermore, Wikipedia’s article “Foreign Relations of Somalia” goes country-by-country, but doesn’t indicate anywhere any link to terrorism, against any country, at all.

However, notwithstanding the actual facts in this case, these five far-right jurists just trashed the U.S. Constitution, and thereby allowed this President’s bigoted and/or stupid Proclamation, which possesses no authentic national-security justification whatsoever, to become imposed, regardless even of whether it is sincere, or comports with the Establishment Clause. The precedent here is carte-blanche to this President and to any of his successors. A U.S. President’s will, supersedes the U.S. Constitution, if a ‘national security’ excuse — no matter how flimsy or even counterfactual — is being asserted. His/her sincerity — and even the facts as opposed to the mere allegations from a President — cannot be challenged in U.S. courts.

Hawaii’s (Ketyal’s) challenge, under the Establishment Clause, was sloppy, presuming as it did, that Trump is “anti-Musim” instead of anti-Shiite, which seems to be more like the reality. But, in any event, both the challenge, and the way that the U.S. Supreme Court handled it, were incompetent, at best. This pathetic Court decision establishes not only the precedent for banning consideration in U.S. courts of whether a sitting President may effectively be challenged as to his sincerity on a given matter, but also precedent for treating “national security” as being more important than the U.S. Constitution itself. If Trump had intelligently formulated his ban on the basis of the relevant data, then maybe these five jurists could have put together some sort of intelligent case to uphold his ban. But, instead, those jurists made a mess of everything, and a zero of the U.S. Constitution that they are duty-bound to uphold.

No lower court can make good on the harm that those jurists — Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kennedy — did and do. Mark Joseph Stern’s article at Slate opened with an accurate summary of it:

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court affirmed and expanded the president’s power to exclude entire classes of immigrants from the country. Its 5–4 decision in Trump v. Hawaii is a historic triumph for Donald Trump and a crushing blow to immigration activists, who had hoped the courts might rein in the president’s sweeping order. Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s appointee to the court, cast the decisive fifth vote to uphold the ban. While Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court strives to rise above politics, Hawaii will almost certainly be remembered as a deeply partisan opinion in which five Republican appointees willfully ignored the flagrant bigotry of a Republican president.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

By the time Donald J. Trump threw in the towel, who among us hadn’t seen or heard the chilling videos in which U.S. border officials shamelessly grabbed uncomprehending children and toddlers from their pleading mothers and fathers? Some were told they were being taken to bathe or shower by people with little sense of the resonances of history. They were, of course, creating scenes that couldn’t help but bring to mind those moments when Jews, brought to Nazi concentration camps, were told that they were being sent to take “showers,” only to be murdered en masse in the gas chambers. Some of those children didn’t even realize that they had missed the chance to say goodbye to their mothers or fathers. Those weeping toddlers, breast-deprived infants, and distressed teens were just the most recent signs of the Trump administration’s war against decency, compassion, and justice.

Because the victims were children, however, it was easy to ignore one reality: new as all this may have seemed, it actually wasn’t. Dehumanized, traumatized, and scared, those children — their predicament — shocked many Americans who insisted, along with former First Lady Laura Bush, that this was truly un-American. As she wrote in the Washington Post:

“Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation, on being the nation that sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by natural disasters or famine or war. We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.”

Her essay essentially asked one question: Who have we become? Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, tweeting out a picture of the Birkenau concentration camp over the words “Other governments have separated women and children,” suggested an answer: we were planting the seeds that could make us the new Nazi Germany.

Other governments have separated mothers and children pic.twitter.com/tvlBkGjT0h

— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) June 16, 2018

But let me assure you, much of what we saw in these last weeks with those children had its origins in policies and “laws” so much closer to home than Germany three-quarters of a century ago. If you wanted to see where their ravaging really began, you needed to look elsewhere (which, surprisingly enough, no one has) — specifically, to those who created the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. From its inception beyond the reach of American courts or, in any normal sense, justice, this prison camp set the stage structurally, institutionally, and legally for what we’ve just been witnessing at the border.

Kenneling Children

The fingerprints of those who created and sustained that offshore island prison for war-on-terror detainees were all over that policy. Not surprisingly, White House Chief of Staff and retired General John Kelly, former head of SOUTHCOM, the U.S. military combatant command that oversees Guantánamo, was the first official in the Trump administration to publicly float the idea of such a separation policy on the border. In March 2017, answering a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the separation of children from their mothers, he said,

“I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America” from making the journey here.

Just such separations, of course, became the well-publicized essence of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy at the border and, until the president’s executive order issued last week, the numbers of children affected were mounting exponentially — more than 2,000 of them in the previous six weeks, some still in diapers. (And keep in mind that there already were 11,000 migrant children in U.S. custody at that point.)

Apprehended at the border, the children were taken to processing facilities, separated from their parents thanks to a mix of Department of Homeland Security, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Justice policy directives, and then locked up. From the moment they arrived at those facilities, the echoes of Guantánamo were obvious (at least for those of us who had long followed developments there over the years). First, there were the most visible signs; above all, the children being placed in wire cages that, as journalists and others who saw them attested, looked more like holding cells for animals at a zoo or dogs at a kennel than for humans, no less children. This was, of course, exactly how the first Gitmo detainees were held back in 2002 as that prison was being built.

President Trump foreshadowed the treatment to come.

“These aren’t people,” he said in May, referring to undocumented migrants crossing the border, “these are animals.”

To make the children’s caged existence worse still, the lights were kept on around the clock and the children subjected to interruptions all night, recalling the sleep deprivation and constant light used as a matter of policy on detainees at Guantánamo Bay. In addition, caregivers were not allowed to touch the children. Even shelter workers were forbidden to do so, which meant adults were not able to console them either. And bad as any of this sounded, such conditions were but a prelude to a much deeper tale of abuse at government hands.

As at Guantánamo, those children were also being subjected to a regime of intentional abuse. The cruel and inhuman treatment began, of course, with the trauma of separation from their parents and often from their siblings as well, since children of different genders were sent to different facilities (or at least different parts of the same facility). Such policies, according to pediatrician and Columbia professor Dr. Irwin Redlener, a leading authority on public policy and children in harm’s way, amount to “child abuse by the government.” In other words, it all added up to a new form of torture, this time visited upon children.

Asking for Congress and the White House to end the policy of separation, members of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry weighed in on the harm that the trauma of forced separation can cause:

“Separating these children from their families in times of stress creates unnecessary and high-risk trauma, at the very time they need care and support the most.”

In addition,

the “children who experience sudden separation from one or both parents, especially under frightening, unpredictable, and chaotic circumstances, are at higher risk for developing illnesses such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other trauma-induced reactions.” (Ironically, one of the few characteristics Justice Department lawyers in George W. Bush’s administration acknowledged would constitute torture was “prolonged mental harm.” In their words, for severe pain or suffering to amount to torture would require that “the acts giving rise to the harm must cause some lasting, though not necessarily permanent, damage.”)

Name me the parent who doesn’t think that his or her child would suffer lasting harm if separated from his or her closest attachments. Yet, in a press briefing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen bluntly insisted that

“claiming these children and their parents are treated inhumanely is not true.”

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that the parents of the children were being tortured, too, not knowing where their children were being sent or held and when (or even if) they would ever see them again.

Perversely, administration spokespersons seemed to think that a trade-off had occurred: the loss of basic human rights for at least the pretense of pleasant cosmetic props. Some of the children at least were given toys and games. Nielsen even bragged that Trump administration officials had “high standards. We give them meals, we give them education, we give them medical care. There is videos, there is TVs.”

This, too, should have been a reminder of Guantánamo logic. The more the prisoners there were deprived of in terms of legal and human rights, the more the Bush administration boasted about the creature comforts offered to them, like movies, halal food, and even comfortable chairs (while they were being force-fed) — as if the presence of toys could counteract the wrenching separation from a parent (or a comfortable chair, force-feeding).

Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, caught the hypocrisy of it all, reporting that the children she saw were surrounded by “toys, books and crayons,” but banging the floor and crying out in pain.

Creating Gitmos

Beyond the physical and emotional deprivations, there were the legal ones. The stay of those children was indefinite, the defining characteristic of Gitmo. Before the Trump separation policy started, children, as minors whose parents were awaiting decisions on immigration status, could only be held by the government for 20 days. With “zero tolerance,” their saga suddenly became interminable.

Legally, like their parents, they were also reclassified. These were no longer the children of migrants or asylum seekers in immigration court, for whom there were strict policies and time limits on detention. They were now the children of alleged criminals, having essentially been rendered orphans. At Guantánamo, changing legal categories in a similar fashion — that is, defining the prisoners’ detentions as military, not criminal in nature — accomplished the same trick, avoiding the application of due process and rights for the detainees.

Which brings up yet another fundamental parallel between Gitmo’s prisoners and the children’s Gitmo at the border. Those being held were described in both places using the same crucial term: detainee. Guantánamo branded this word forever as beyond the bounds of normal legality because the Bush administration officials who set up that system wanted to ensure that the normal legal protections of both national and international law would not be extended to those captured and held there. Guantánamo, the government insisted, was not a prison. It was merely a “detention center.” So many years later, it still is, while those incarcerated there have often served “sentences” of a decade and more, even though only a handful of them were ever actually sentenced by a court of any sort. In 2018, that same label was taken from those accused of being battlefield enemies and slapped on the children of asylum seekers.

As with Guantánamo, lawyers who wanted to represent the parents, whose fates were to determine those of their separated children, found themselves impeded in their access to the detained adults. No one familiar with Gitmo could have missed the parallel. Lawyers seeking to provide assistance to war-on-terror detainees were kept out of Guantánamo for more than two years after it opened.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently filed suit claiming that, at two detention centers, authorities had limited the access of those undocumented immigrants to lawyers, violating due process. To make matters worse, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Department of Justice recently decided not to renew two programs that offered legal aid lawyers to undocumented immigrants facing deportation. Meanwhile, that department has instituted a new policy in which pro-bono lawyers (those from NGO groups seeking to represent the detainees) now have to go through a certification process before taking them on at their own expense.

The media has been similarly restricted. Photographs of the detention “camps” for those children were left to the government alone to provide. So, too, when Guantánamo opened, visiting journalists were ordered to leave their cameras behind. These restrictions stayed in place as official policy, intensified by none other than John Kelly. (Ironically, the Pentagon itself sent out the iconic early 2002 images of kneeling, shackled, orange-jump-suited detainees.)

For 16 years now, opponents of the U.S. detention center on the island of Cuba have understandably warned that its remarkable disregard for the rule of law would inevitably creep into America’s institutions. For the most part, their worries centered on the federal court system and the possibility that defendants there might someday lose basic rights. Now, we know that Guantánamo found a future in those detention camps on our southern border. Don’t think it will be the last place that the influence of that infamous prison will pop up.

While this moment of crisis may have passed, consider this piece, at best, a requiem for a tragedy that has barely ended (if it has) — and also a warning. The legacy of Guantánamo continues to haunt our laws, our imaginations, and our way of life. It’s time to do what we have failed to do for so long now: push back hard on the truly un-American policies spawned by that prison and apparent in so much else of Donald Trump’s America. We need to do so now, before the way of life we once knew is largely erased. It’s time to insist on the right to bring up our children in an America of compassion, law, and respect for the rights of all, not in one whose leaders are intent on robbing them — and so many other children — of their future.

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Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law (CNS) and the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State. She also wrote The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days. The summer interns at CNS contributed research for this article.

Israeli forces have killed 18 Palestinian children in 2018 alone – but after a complaint to the Corporation from a pro-Israel activist, the BBC have taken the extraordinary decision to reprimand their Senior Political Pundit Andrew Marr for exposing such horrific child executions by Israeli forces.

Following the beginning of the ‘March of Return’ on 30th March this year – an annual Palestinian protest which marks the commemoration of Land Day when Israeli forces killed 6 Palestinian children in 1976 for protesting the confiscation of their land – Israeli forces began firing live ammunition at protestors, ultimately resulting in the deaths of 123 Palestinians, including numerous children.

Subsequently, following reports emerging of the horrific killings by Israeli forces, the BBC’s Senior Political pundit Andrew Marr made brief comments on his self-titled Sunday morning show that compared the killing of innocent children by Israeli forces to the Syrian regime’s human rights abuses against innocent children.

During the newspaper review section of the show where guests were discussing the ongoing crisis in Syria and reports of an alleged chemical weapons attack, Andrew Marr said:

“And the Middle East is aflame again. I mean there’s lots of Palestinian kids being killed further south as well by the Israeli forces.“

You can watch the discussion and Andrew Marr’s comments below [beginning 09:55]:

However, following Marr’s comments, anti-Semitism campaigner Jonathan Sacerdoti made a complaint to the BBC claiming that the host was simply inventing false accusations against the Israeli forces, stating in his complaint that:

“When talking about a story on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Andrew Marr for some reason decided to talk about Israel (which was unrelated anyway). He stated there’s a lot of Palestinian kids being killed further south by Israeli forces.

This is completely incorrect and is made up. This was irrelevant to the conversation on Syria… and also actually completely false.”

However, between the start of the 2018 and the broadcasting of the show on April 8th, at least 5 Palestinian children had been gunned down by Israeli forces, including three child murders in quick succession between March 30th and April 6th.

However, despite the facts showing that Israeli forces had indeed killed numerous children as Marr had briefly mentioned, the BBC have decided to uphold Sacerdoti’s complaint, choosing instead to reprimand Andrew Marr.

The BBC’s Head of Executive Complaints, Fraser Steel, wrote to Mr Sacerdoti saying:

“The BBC’s guidelines require that output is “well sourced” and “based on sound evidence”.

In the absence of any evidence to support the reference to “lots” of children being killed at the time of transmission, it seems to us to have risked misleading audiences on a material point.

‘We therefore propose to uphold this part of your complaint.”

With their decision, the BBC has essentially declared that the murder of 5 innocent children by Israeli state forces is ‘not a lot’.

The unprecedented decision by the Corporation will also surely also act as a reminder to other BBC pundits that any criticism – however truthful it may be – of Israel’s policy of shooting dead unarmed protestors, is completely off-limits.

Call me old fashioned, but I’d argue that the killing of just one innocent child should be considered as too many.

More than 13,000 refugees and migrants, including pregnant women and children, have been force-marched into the Sahara desert by Algerian security forces over the past 14 months, where many of them have died from hunger and exposure.

The shocking revelation by the Associated Press was substantiated by videos showing hundreds of migrants stumbling through a sand storm and others being driven in massive convoys of overcrowded trucks to be dumped at Algeria’s southern border with Niger and forced into the desert at gunpoint.

As the AP itself makes clear, the murderous policy of the Algerian government is being carried out at the behest of the countries of the European Union, which have increasingly sought to induce North African regimes to act as their border guards, impeding the flow of migrants by means of intimidation, violence and death.

The refugees are being forced by Algerian security forces into the Sahara without food or water and, in many cases, after being robbed of their money and cellphones. They are pointed in the direction of the nearest settlement in Niger, over nine miles away, across empty sands where the temperature rises as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

The migrants told AP of

“being rounded up hundreds at a time, crammed into open trucks headed southward for six to eight hours to what is known as Point Zero, then dropped in the desert and pointed in the direction of Niger. They are told to walk, sometimes at gunpoint.”

Two dozen different migrants who survived the crossing told the news agency that in their groups a number were unable to go on and died in the desert.

“Women were lying dead, men … Other people got missing in the desert because they didn’t know the way,” said Janet Kamara of Liberia, who was pregnant when she was forced across the border. “Everybody was just on their own.”

Kamara’s baby died at birth and she was forced to bury him in a shallow grave in the desert.

“I lost my son, my child,” she said.

While the world’s media has focused on the dangerous crossing from northern Africa to southern Europe having turned the Mediterranean into a watery graveyard for countless thousands, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), for every refugee who drowns in the sea, two more succumb to the relentless heat and harsh conditions of the Sahara. It estimates that the death toll in the desert exceeds 30,000 just since 2014.

The migrants expelled by Algeria come from countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including Niger, Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Liberia and others.

“They come by the thousands … I’ve never seen anything like it,” Alhoussan Adouwal, an IOM official in Assamaka, Niger told AP. “It’s a catastrophe.”

A spokesperson for the European Union told AP that the EU is aware of what Algeria is doing with refugees and migrants, but that its view is that “sovereign countries” can carry out such expulsions so long as they comply with international law.

The revelations about the horrors inflicted upon refugees in the Sahara desert come on the eve of a summit meeting of EU member states on Thursday to discuss the issue of immigration.

On the eve of the summit, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini has been urging EU member states to put more money into an Africa trust fund with an eye toward financing the construction of “migrant screening” camps in North Africa. At the top of the EU summit agenda is expected to be a proposal for holding asylum seekers at such camps in countries that include Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Niger and Tunisia.

In the run-up to the summit, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Lega party and Italy’s new interior minister, flew to Tripoli on Monday to praise the regime for its “excellent work” in “rescuing” nearly 1,000 people on Sunday after the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted them. The purpose of the coast guard, which is financed, trained and to some degree directed by Italy and other European powers, is not to rescue refugees trying to reach Europe, but rather to drag them back to Libya. There they face imprisonment in camps where torture and executions are commonplace and even being sold into slavery.

Salvini said that Italy would work with the UN-recognized regime, which controls little outside of Tripoli, to stop a “full-on invasion” of Libyan waters by aid groups seeking to rescue refugees at sea. He also called for migrant detention centers to be placed at Libya’s southern border in the Sahara desert.

Salvini has become infamous for refusing to allow rescue ships carrying refugees to dock at Italian ports. He ordered the Aquarius carrying over 600 refugees, including pregnant women and children, turned back earlier this month, forcing it to make a dangerous voyage to Spain. Presently, there are two ships in limbo in the Mediterranean carrying hundreds of refugees, a boat operated by German aid group Mission Lifeline with 234 aboard, and the Danish-flagged Alexander Maersk cargo ship with 100. In a statement laying bare the depth of the racism and reaction of the new Italian government, Salvini referred to the refugees as “human meat.”

Meanwhile the new PSOE government in Spain, which allowed the Aquarius to dock and condemned the Italian response, dispatched its own interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, to Morocco with much the same mission as Salvini’s in Libya, securing cooperation for immigrant detention camps.

Spain’s new development minister, Jose Luis Abalos, told Cadena Ser radio that, while Spain is taking “a respectful humanitarian approach” toward the refugees’ plight, it had no intention of becoming “Europe’s maritime rescue organization.”

Human rights groups have warned that refugees will be subject to abuse and denied asylum rights if kept in camps in Libya, Egypt and other North African countries with records of massive human rights abuses. EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, who is playing a central role in plans for setting up these centers, responded to these concerns last week, declaring,

“I want to be very clear on that. I’m against a Guantanamo Bay for migrants.”

He was referring to the Guantanamo Bay Naval base prison camp where those rounded up in the US “war on terror” were subjected to systematic torture.

In Europe, as in the US—where President Donald Trump has expressed his own desire to throw Central American refugees back into the desert without any asylum proceedings—the number of refugees and migrants has actually fallen steadily, even as the political hysteria whipped up by right-wing governments and politicians has sharply escalated.

According to the UN refugee agency, the number of migrants arriving in Europe is on track to reach just half the number for last year, and less than a quarter the number in 2016.

The “immigration crisis,” both in Europe and America, is a noxious political invention, aimed at dividing the working class and scapegoating the most oppressed layers of the population and the victims of imperialist war and oppression for the continuously worsening conditions created by capitalism.

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Featured image is from Defend Democracy Press.

Like clockwork, every Sunday night I talk to my parents (by way of explanation, I live in New York, they reside in Rancho Mirage, California—a distance that makes in-person discussions somewhat difficult to manage). After catching up on family news, inevitably our conversation devolves into politics. I had (infamously, in my mom’s view) predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election shortly after the Democratic National Convention in July of that year, citing Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings as a candidate more than Trump’s positives. My mom, a Clinton supporter, was aghast that I could side with such a fundamentally flawed character as Trump. In the time Trump has held office, Mom has unfailingly sought to remind me of the president’s obvious (in her mind) failings as a leader and a human being. Our last conversation was pretty much along the same lines—wishing my dad a happy Father’s Day, talking about my niece’s graduation from high school and her future college prospects, the U.S. Open, and—inevitably—Trump.

Normally, I laugh my way through this part of the conversation. This time, however, we were discussing the ongoing policy of separating children from the parents of immigrants who illegally cross into U.S. territory. While I am far more liberal on immigration policy than President Trump, I respect the fact that he was elected as the chief executive and as such is responsible for setting policy. I was perturbed at Congress for failing to jump at the president’s offer to clear the way for more than a million immigrants to legalize their status in exchange for providing him with the funds needed to build a border wall, which was the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. However, like my mom, I was (and am) aghast at what is happening along the U.S.-Mexico border today—between mid-April and the end of May of this year, 1,995 children have been physically separated from their parents at the border. Hundreds more have been taken away since then.

Domestic politics is not my comfort zone—I’ll take weapons of mass destruction and arms control issues over health care and tax policy any day of the week. After I articulated my disdain for the current policy, however, my mom challenged me.

“You write about all these other issues,” she said. “Why don’t you write about this one?”

I threw out the standard excuse—not my area of expertise. Mom did not relent, pressing me harder. I finally came up with the weakest answer I could possibly give—it wouldn’t make any difference, and worse, it could lead to a backlash that might hurt my chances at getting picked up by conservative publishers in the age of Trump. The bottom line, I said, mattered. Mom relented.

After we hung up I reflected on my answer, and found it wanting. I tuned in to the Sunday news shows, listening to commentators from both sides of the political aisle address the issue. I looked at the imagery of children sitting in cages, put there by sworn American law enforcement officers. And I listened to the sounds of children crying as they were taken away from their parents, begging the officers involved to let them stay. I’m a rule-of-law kind of person, and I believe that all nations—not just the United States—have a sovereign duty and responsibility to their citizens when it comes to securing their borders. In my view, America’s immigration policy—which directly impacts the issue of border security—is fundamentally broken, and I support the efforts of those, Democrat and Republican alike, who are working to resolve this issue.

Children in immigration detention facilities are required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, according to the Washington Post. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol)

I’m also a parent, and someone who supports the right of all human beings to live a life free of oppression. In my opinion, what America was—and is—doing to the children of immigrants detained at the border represented the most vile, base form of oppression, if for no other reason than it targets the most innocent and defenseless for the sole purpose of making a political point (i.e., funding for Trump’s vaunted border wall.) Moreover, it awoke within me memories of an experience from my past involving incarcerated children, one in which I had been called upon to weigh the horrors of the images and sounds of their suffering with what I deemed to be a “larger purpose” of stopping a war. My mom’s insistence that I write something that addressed the human tragedy transpiring on America’s border with Mexico prompted me to reflect on that decision, and the larger question of whether the suffering of children can be condoned under any circumstance.

In March 2002, the on-line magazine Salon ran an interview with me conducted by Asla Aydintasbas. Midway through the interview, Aydintasbas asked about defining Iraq beyond simply Saddam Hussein, its former ruler. In my answer, I spoke about what I had seen during my seven years as a United Nations inspector—the institutions that made Iraq and the people who ran them. The point I tried to make was that Iraq was more than just one man, both in terms of the good, the bad, and the ugly. In underscoring the “ugly” aspect of what I had witnessed, I told Aydintasbas that

“I’ve been to the children’s prison at Amn al-Amm [the Directorate for General Security headquarters in downtown Baghdad]. It was horrific; these are kids in jail under horrific conditions, sweltering because of the political crimes of their parents. Dad speaks out about Saddam, Mom goes to the women’s prison, the kids go to the children’s prison. And do you know what they do to those kids? I don’t even want to get to that.”

To me, it was a throwaway moment in one of a long series of interviews I was giving at the time to draw attention to what I believed to be the real threat of an American invasion of Iraq. Aydintasbas pushed me several times to consider the horrific nature of Saddam’s rule as justification for regime change. I wouldn’t buy it:

“I just cannot accept the argument that we have to intervene to remove Saddam Hussein on moral grounds.”

I pointed out that an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis had died due to economic sanctions imposed on Iraq linked to its disarmament obligation.

“We have killed almost six times as many Iraqis trying to eliminate weapons of mass destruction programs than weapons of mass destruction have killed in the entire 20th century—that’s a moral issue to me.”

The issue at hand was an incident that occurred during an inspection I led in Iraq on Jan. 11, 1998, as a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM. We were investigating a sensitive piece of U.S.-sourced intelligence which claimed Iraq had conducted experiments using biological agents on live human subjects in the summer of 1995. The information was dated but contained enough specifics to investigate—the prisoners were taken from specific prisons by agents of the Amn al-Amm to remote locations in the desert where the experiments were conducted. UNSCOM was under a lot of pressure from the United States to come up with a smoking gun that proved Iraq was in violation of its obligation to disarm, and the American intelligence was infused with enough troubling data to make it appear credible and give inspectors something to search for during an inspection. After consulting with the White House, UNSCOM ordered me to carry out an inspection. I organized the inspection team into two elements—one would inspect the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the other would visit the Amn al-Amm.

Given the sensitivity of entering the Amn al-Amm, which served as the headquarters of Saddam’s secret police, I put myself in charge of the group inspecting that site. Our presence at the main gate created near panic on the part of the Iraqis—they had not expected us to attempt such a brazen inspection of one of their most sensitive facilities. Per existing inspection protocols, I was eventually allowed to enter along with a team of three inspectors. Our goal was the office of the director, where I would lead a detailed and focused search for any documents that might be related to the human experiments alleged to have been conducted in 1995. I split the team in half to facilitate our survey of the site. My element proceeded to inspect parking garages, residential complexes for the officers and families of the Amn al-Amm, armories and, in the basement of an office building, what could only be described as a children’s prison.

The inspector accompanying me had called me over to a series of ground-level windows looking in on the basement of the structure. Through the barred windows I could see dozens of children, boys and girls of varying ages. The stench was awful—it was obvious the rooms they were crammed into had open latrines and no access to water. When the children saw our faces, a cry went up inside the room, with the ones closest to the windows making gestures at their mouths as if they were hungry and wanted to eat. The Iraqi official accompanying me hurried up to my side. “This has nothing to do with your mandate, Mr. Ritter. Move on.”

My teammate and I headed back to our parked vehicle, but instead of getting inside and driving off, I opened the back of the white U.N. Nissan Patrol SUV and grabbed as many two-liter water bottles and Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) packets from our contingency supply as I could carry, instructing my teammate to do the same. I pushed past the Iraqi official, and made my way back to the windows, where we handed the water and food into the children inside. Within seconds there were armed Amn al-Amm agents standing next to us, pushing themselves between us and the children in the basement, whose arms extended through the window. “That’s enough, Mr. Ritter,” the Iraqi official said. “It’s time to go.”

The look in his eyes, and in those of the armed agents, left little doubt he was deadly serious. I threw the remaining bottles and packets at the window, hoping the kids inside would be able to catch them, but watched in frustration as the Amn al-Amm agents kicked them away. As we left, the agents made their way into the building, where there was no doubt in my mind that they would confiscate the water and food we had handed to the kids. There was nothing either my teammate or I could do except hope the kids would drink and eat as much as they could in the little time they had.

We eventually found the office we were searching for and, given the sensitivity of the location, agreed to meet with the senior Iraqi leadership, including the deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, later that evening to discuss how best to proceed with a document search. As soon as we exited the facility, the Iraqis ceased all cooperation with the team, labeling me a CIA spy and agent provocateur. UNSCOM found itself in a fight for its survival, and I was at the center of the storm. My every move was being tracked by foreign governments and the press, none of whom were looking out for either my or UNSCOM’s best interests. I was muzzled by my leadership, prohibited from saying anything to anybody while negotiations took place to get inspections back on track. Moreover, even if I had been allowed to speak, the children’s prison would have been the last thing I would have brought up. I had been accused by Iraq of being a spy. My only defense against such a charge was to adhere to the four corners of my mandate as an inspector and exclusively focus on the mandate of disarmament we had been given by the U.N. Security Council.

In August of 1998 I resigned from UNSCOM, protesting the failure of the U.S. to support the work of the inspectors. In September 1998 I testified before Congress about weapons inspections in Iraq, and in early 1999 I wrote a book, “Endgame,” which focused on the Iraq crisis from the perspective of its disarmament obligation. I made scores of public appearances, speaking on the topic of Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and wrote numerous articles and opinion pieces on the subject. I never once raised the topic of the Amn al-Amm children’s prison, as it simply was outside the scope of my primary focus, which was at the time trying to prevent a war with Iraq being fought over the false pretense of a retained Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capability. In fact, my interview with Aydintasbas was the first time I had publicly discussed the incident of the children’s prison.

In September 2002, to head off what I deemed to be a rush to war by the George W. Bush administration, I returned to Iraq, where I addressed the Iraqi Parliament and met with senior Iraqi government officials in an effort to convince them to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return to work and, in doing so, undercut the case America was making for an invasion. In the aftermath of this visit (which proved successful—shortly after I departed Iraq, Saddam announced that he would allow U.N. weapons inspections to resume), I was interviewed by several media outlets about what I was trying to accomplish. One of these interviews, conducted by Massimo Calabresi, appeared in Time magazine. In it, Calabresi asked me to describe what I had seen at the children’s prison in Iraq.

“The prison in question is at the General Security Services headquarters, which was inspected by my team in January 1998,” I replied. “It appeared to be a prison for children—toddlers up to pre-adolescents—whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene.”

I then reverted to inspector mode, trying to get the discussion back on topic, which for me was the issue of Iraq’s disarmament obligation.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.”

As I had explained early in the interview, “waging peace” was about facilitating “a debate here in the United States on America’s policy toward Iraq, a debate that’s been sadly lacking. We’re facing a critical moment in American history and I believe this is something that has to be more thoroughly looked at.” I argued that

“no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact.”

Moreover, as I pointed out to Calabresi, the U.S. had “tremendous capabilities to detect any effort by Iraq to obtain prohibited capability. The fact that no one has shown that he has acquired that capability doesn’t necessarily translate into incompetence on the part of the intelligence community. It may mean that he hasn’t done anything.” The Bush administration was arguing that Iraq had a WMD capability; I was challenging that assertion. Children’s prison’s, in my opinion, weren’t part of that debate.

Some people took umbrage at the notion. This included Bill Keller (image on the left), the former managing editor of The New York Times, who, on December 14, 2002, while serving as a senior writer and op-ed columnist for the Gray Lady, wrote an editorial titled “The Selective Conscience,” in which he called me out by name for my stance. He articulated it as representing the “apotheosis” of the “high-minded quandary” confronting human rights proponents when dealing with the issue of a possible war with Iraq.

To his credit, Keller fairly articulated my position:

“Officially, formally, Saddam’s depravity is not relevant to the question of whether America will lead a military effort to oust him. The question of invasion—officially, formally—is all about ridding Iraq of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them.”

However, according to Keller,

“the barbarity of the regime is subtext to everything,” noting that “Saddam’s cruelties also touch a little on two central questions about any exercise against Iraq: What’s the evidence that Saddam is a real threat? (Any leader who encourages the torture of children as a mechanism of control is probably never going to become a good neighbor.) How will Iraqis react to an invasion? (Many of them with an outpouring of relief, wouldn’t you think?)”

In the end Keller took a position on Iraq that supported the notion that the issue of weapons of mass destruction trumped the issue of human rights when it came to a decision on whether to go to war.

“The view I’ve expressed in this space,” he wrote,“is that Saddam’s appetite for a nuclear weapon makes him a grave danger, that containment is ultimately a sucker’s game, and that Mr. Bush is right to prepare for war—purposefully but patiently, hoping it will be unnecessary, and aiming to act as part of an aggrieved world rather than a posse of one. To my mind the sadistic practices of the Iraqi police state, and the more genocidal impulses—now successfully held in check by American and British air patrols—may be ample cause to indict Saddam as a war criminal, but they are not in themselves enough to launch an invasion.”

While inspectors did, in fact, return to Iraq, their work was not enough to forestall President Bush’s desire for war—in March 2003 a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power. America’s subsequent 15-year experiment in trying to fashion a stable replacement for Saddam’s regime has shown Keller’s morality-derived analysis to have been wrong—in terms of containing both Iran and the forces of Islamic fundamentalism, Saddam’s regime was not only not a threat, but a force of stability that no post-invasion Iraqi government has been able to replicate. Moreover, the incessant anti-American fighting that has shaken Iraq virtually nonstop since 2003 makes a mockery of Keller’s fanciful “outpouring of relief” the American invasion was supposed to presage.

Having been proved right by events, however, doesn’t resolve the “high-minded quandary” raised by Keller regarding troubling human rights issues such as the existence of the children’s prison in Baghdad, and my decision to suppress that horrific reality in favor of what I deemed a higher purpose—preventing an unnecessary war. On April 8, 2003, U.S. Marines moved into Baghdad and liberated a prison containing 100 to 150 children. I was unable to ascertain from the news article reporting this event whether the prison liberated was the one I had seen, or another—the children were said to have been imprisoned for the crime of refusing to join a pro-Saddam children’s militia, making their offense the kind of political “crime” the Amn al-Amm would be responsible for policing, so it’s possible it was.

The Marines’ action set off a firestorm among the chattering class that populates the comments section of web-based publications. Accuracy in Media (AIM) got the ball rolling, reporting on the liberation of a children’s prison on April 24, 2003, along with commentary that noted “the existence of children’s prisons in Iraq was reported last September by Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector.” Although factually incorrect (I had first mentioned the children’s prison in my March 2002 interview with Salon), the AIM article went on to speculate that “the liberal media” was following my lead when it came to its failure to widely report on the existence of the children’s prison. In the comments section, a reader posted what appeared to be an original poem commemorating the action of the Marines, commemorating the moment when the Marines “opened wide those prison gates and cast aside that tyrant’s hate.”

The AIM article was picked up by numerous conservative websites, including a Baptist-affiliated online community, Baptist Board, where one commenter noted that the story of the Marines liberating the children’s prison was “not widely reported by the media,” adding that “this alone would be enough for me to want to wage war on Iraq. Forget all the other reasons. A man who would do this had to be deposed.” This was followed by, “Scott Ritter has known about the prison since ’98 and kept it quiet. I wonder how many children were incarcerated, tortured or killed because Ritter decided not to tell the world.”

I take umbrage at the notion that I somehow opted out of telling the world about the Amn al-Amm children’s prison—the only reason Bill Keller, Time, AIM and the others could comment of the prison’s existence is because I opted to reveal what I saw during my interview with Salon. The notion that my somehow not highlighting the children’s prison prior to this interview led to additional Iraqi children being incarcerated, tortured or killed is on its face absurd. Given the context of the Iraq discussion at the time, any deviation away from my area of expertise would have detracted, not added, to the debate. I know this from personal experience—whenever I tried to shift the debate to include the issue of economic sanctions and the resultant suffering of the Iraqi people (including the deaths of some 500,000 children then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously dismissed as worth the price when it came to containing Saddam Hussein), I was unceremoniously reminded to stay in my lane.

What does resonate with me from this experience, however, is the legitimacy of outrage that existed regarding the existence of the children’s prison, and the callousness of a world, including myself, willing to turn a blind eye to such depravity in the cause of an erstwhile “greater good.” Today a variation of this argument is being used by the Trump administration, seeking as it does to justify the policy of separating children from parents at the border as a necessary evil in service of the greater good that comes from a strong immigration policy and strict border controls. I’m sure Saddam Hussein and his henchmen had similarly constructed arguments as to why they needed to separate children from their parents as well—national security can be used to conceal many sins.

There is a risk in conflating the Trump policy of child separation with whatever policies the Saddam regime used to justify their children’s prisons; most Americans will agree that there is simply no moral equivalency between the United States and Saddam’s Iraq. I, too, share this believe, which is why I raise the issue to begin with—if the U.S. is morally superior to Saddam’s Iraq, then why engage in a policy of forcibly removing children from their parents and imprisoning these children under conditions child psychologists and legal experts have deemed amount to child abuse that are akin to the past practices of that regime?

Of particular concern is the tendency on the part of many conservatives to defend this practice, including Robert Jeffress, a pastor of the First Dallas Baptist Church, who noted, “Any American who commits a crime is going to be separated from his or her child. You don’t send children to jail with their parents in America, so I’m not sure why the only criminals who would get a pass on that policy would be illegal immigrants.” The “crime” Jeffress alludes to is the act of illegal entry into the United States, which last month the Trump administration announced would be charged as a misdemeanor offense requiring the arrest of the perpetrators and the forcible separation of any accompanying children. “If you are smuggling a child,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared when announcing the policy, “then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” The problem is, there is no law that requires children to be separated from their parents—this is an invention of the Trump administration.

In the end, the forced imprisonment of children by the United States is not about national security, or any other “higher cause.” It is a purely political move designed to compel Congress to do President Trump’s bidding on the issue of border security. That this cynical mindset has led to the forcible separation and cruel imprisonment of children by the government of the United States is an affront to all Americans. These children are not “child actors”, as Anne Coulter has so callously suggested, any more so than the wretched kids locked up in the Amn al-Amm prison were. What is transpiring on the U.S.-Mexico border today is a testament to the soul of our nation, and how low we have collectively sunk in the name of partisan politics.

I’ll do my part to amend for these shortcomings—Mom was right, I did need to write about this issue. There is no ignoring evil when you see it, especially when that evil is being perpetrated by those who act in your name. But until a judge deems what is happening along the border to in fact constitute child abuse chargeable under the law, and properly mandated law enforcement officials move to cease this practice and arrest those responsible for perpetrating this abuse, or Congress acts and rewrites the laws in question and defunds Trump’s criminal border security enterprise, then my words will have little or no impact.

Unlike what happened in Iraq, there is no Marine invasion force coming to liberate these children from America’s prisons—that can only happen when the people who elected Donald Trump turn on him, something polls suggest has not yet happened. The conservative voices that once claimed that the existence of a children’s prison in Baghdad was justification alone for regime change in Iraq, and condemned Saddam Hussein as a dark force who tried to own the minds of the children he imprisoned, are largely silent on the issue of forcible separation and imprisonment of children by the Trump administration, their hypocrisy and moral cowardice on display for the entire world to see.

Fifteen years ago, these alleged pillars of American society took it upon themselves to call me out by name on my stance vis-a-vis children’s prisons in Iraq. There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t reflect on what I heard and saw in Baghdad that day and wrestled with what I could have done about it. Today I am returning the favor, calling out those who either actively support the president’s policies concerning the separation and imprisonment of immigrant children, or have turned a convenient blind eye to these policies, citing “national security.” Look at the pictures of the children crying as they are taken away from their parents, and the images of children locked in cages like animals. Listen to their cries for help. And then either change your position and join the chorus of Americans who are rising in opposition to these policies, or rot in hell, along with Saddam Hussein and all those whom you similarly condemned then for perpetrating the same acts you so callously condone today.

And thanks, Mom, for pushing me to write this.

*

Scott Ritter spent more than a dozen years in the intelligence field, beginning in 1985 as a ground intelligence officer with the US Marine Corps, where he served with the Marine Corps component of the Rapid Deployment Force at the Brigade and Battalion level.

• The current mass exodus of people from Central America to the United States, with the daily headline-grabbing stories of numerous children involuntarily separated from their parents, means it’s time to remind my readers once again of one of the primary causes of these periodic mass migrations.

Those in the US generally opposed to immigration make it a point to declare or imply that the United States does not have any legal or moral obligation to take in these Latinos. This is not true. The United States does indeed have the obligation because many of the immigrants, in addition to fleeing from drug violence, are escaping an economic situation in their homeland directly made hopeless by American interventionist policy.

It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed upon them by American police and other right-wingers. But whenever a progressive government comes to power in Latin America or threatens to do so, a government sincerely committed to fighting poverty, the United States helps to suppresses the movement and/or supports the country’s right-wing and military in staging a coup. This has been the case in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras.

The latest example is the June 2009 coup (championed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) ousting the moderately progressive Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. The particularly severe increase in recent years in Honduran migration to the US is a direct result of the overthrow of Zelaya, whose crime was things like raising the minimum wage, giving subsidies to small farmers, and instituting free education. It is a tale told many times in Latin America: The downtrodden masses finally put into power a leader committed to reversing the status quo, determined to try to put an end to two centuries of oppression … and before long the military overthrows the democratically-elected government, while the United States – if not the mastermind behind the coup – does nothing to prevent it or to punish the coup regime, as only the United States can punish; meanwhile Washington officials pretend to be very upset over this “affront to democracy” while giving major support to the coup regime. The resulting return to poverty is accompanied by government and right-wing violence against those who question the new status quo, giving further incentive to escape the country.

Talk delivered by William Blum at the Left Forum in New York, June 2, 2018

We can all agree I think that US foreign policy must be changed and that to achieve that the mind – not to mention the heart and soul – of the American public must be changed. But what do you think is the main barrier to achieving such a change in the American mind?

Each of you I’m sure has met many people who support American foreign policy, with whom you’ve argued and argued. You point out one horror after another, from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya; from bombings and invasions to torture. And nothing helps. Nothing moves these people.

Now why is that? Do these people have no social conscience? Are they just stupid? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions. Consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, and if you don’t deal with these basic beliefs you may as well be talking to a stone wall.

The most basic of these basic beliefs, I think, is a deeply-held conviction that no matter what the US does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the government of the United States means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on many occasions cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always honorable, even noble. Of that the great majority of Americans are certain.

Frances Fitzgerald, in her famous study of American school textbooks, summarized the message of these books:

“The United States has been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world: throughout history it had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant, and diseased countries. The U.S. always acted in a disinterested fashion, always from the highest of motives; it gave, never took.”

And Americans genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can’t see how benevolent and self-sacrificing America has been. Even many people who take part in the anti-war movement have a hard time shaking off some of this mindset; they march to spur America – the America they love and worship and trust – they march to spur this noble America back onto its path of goodness.

Many of the citizens fall for US government propaganda justifying its military actions as often and as naively as Charlie Brown falling for Lucy’s football.

The American people are very much like the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living, and don’t want to know, but then they wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living room window.

This basic belief in America’s good intentions is often linked to “American exceptionalism”. Let’s look at just how exceptional America has been. Since the end of World War 2, the United States has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
2. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
3. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
4. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
5. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
6. Led the world in torture; not only the torture performed directly by Americans upon foreigners, but providing torture equipment, torture manuals, lists of people to be tortured, and in-person guidance by American teachers, especially in Latin America.

This is indeed exceptional. No other country in all of history comes anywhere close to such a record. But it certainly makes it very difficult to believe that America means well.

So the next time you’re up against a stone wall … ask the person what the United States would have to do in its foreign policy to lose his or her support. What for this person would finally be TOO MUCH. Chances are the US has already done it.

Keep in mind that our precious homeland, above all, seeks to dominate the world. For economic reasons, nationalistic reasons, ideological, Christian, and for other reasons, world hegemony has long been America’s bottom line. And let’s not forget the powerful Executive Branch officials whose salaries, promotions, agency budgets and future well-paying private sector jobs depend upon perpetual war. These leaders are not especially concerned about the consequences for the world of their wars. They’re not necessarily bad people; but they’re amoral, like a sociopath is.

Take the Middle East and South Asia. The people in those areas have suffered horribly because of Islamic fundamentalism. What they desperately need are secular governments, which have respect for different religions. And such governments were actually instituted in the recent past. But what has been the fate of those governments?

Well, in the late 1970s through much of the 1980s, Afghanistan had a secular government that was relatively progressive, with full rights for women, which is hard to believe, isn’t it? But even a Pentagon report of the time testified to the actuality of women’s rights in Afghanistan. And what happened to that government? The United States overthrew it, allowing the Taliban to come to power. So keep that in mind the next time you hear an American official say that we have to remain in Afghanistan for the sake of the women.

After Afghanistan came Iraq, another secular society, under Saddam Hussein. And the United States overthrew that government as well, and now the country has its share of crazed and bloody jihadists and fundamentalists; and women who are not covered up properly are sometimes running a serious risk.

Next came Libya; again, a secular country, under Moammar Gaddafi, who, like Saddam Hussein, had a tyrant side to him but could in important ways be benevolent and do some marvelous things. Gaddafi, for example, founded the African Union and gave the Libyan people the highest standard of living in Africa. So, of course, the United States overthrew that government as well. In 2011, with the help of NATO, we bombed the people of Libya almost every day for more than six months.

Can anyone say that in all these interventions, or in any of them, the United States of America meant well?

When we attack Iran, will we mean well? Will we have the welfare of the Iranian people at heart? I suggest you keep such thoughts in mind the next time you’re having a discussion or argument with a flag-waving American.

In case you haven’t noticed

No evidence of “Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election” has yet been presented. And we still await even a believable explanation of how the supposedly advanced American nation of 138 million voters could be so crucially influenced by a bunch of simplistic, often-crude, postings on Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet.

In May, the House Intelligence Committee began releasing the text of numerous of these postings as evidence of Russian interference. The postings dealt with both sides of many issues, including football players who knelt during the national anthem to bring attention to issues of racism, and pro- and anti-Trump and Clinton messages. Most did not even mention Trump or Clinton; and many were sent out before Trump was even a candidate.

So what did any of this have to do with swaying the result of the election? The committee did not say. However, Cong. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the committee, stated:

“They sought to harness Americans’ very real frustrations and anger over sensitive political matters in order to influence American thinking, voting and behavior. The only way we can begin to inoculate ourselves against a future attack is to see first-hand the types of messages, themes and imagery the Russians used to divide us.”

Aha! So that’s it, dividing us! Imagine that – the American people, whom we all know are living in blissful harmony and fraternity without any noticeable anger or hatred toward each other, would become divided! Damn those Russkis!

Many of the Facebook postings were done well after the presidential election. That alone should have made the congressmen think that perhaps the ads had nothing to do with the US election, but that is not what they wanted to think.

This all lends credence to the suggestion that what actually lay behind the events was a so-called “click-bait” scheme wherein certain individuals earned money based on the number of times a particular website is accessed. The mastermind behind this scheme is reported to be a Russian named Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg, which is referred to by the House committee as “Kremlin-sponsored”, without explanation.

The organization has been named in an indictment issued by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigating committee, but as the Washington Post reported:

“The indictment does not accuse the Russian government of any involvement in the scheme, nor does it claim that it succeeded in swaying any votes.”

In the new Cold War, as in the old one, the powers-that-be in America seldom miss an opportunity to make Russia look bad, even to the point of farce. Evidence is no longer required. Accusation is sufficient.

Another charming example of American exceptionalism

The Washington Post coverage of the football World Cup in Russia couldn’t allow all the joy and good vibes to go unchallenged of course. So they found “a pipe worker named Alexander” who had a joke to tell: “An adviser comes to Putin and says, ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you were elected president. The bad news is that no one voted for you.’”

Now let’s imagine an American adviser coming to President Trump and saying: “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you were elected president. The bad news is that you didn’t get the most votes.”

This has now happened five times in the United States, five times that the “winner” received fewer popular votes than any of his opponents; this insult to democracy and common sense has now happened twice within the most recent five presidential elections.

And I find the worst news is that a year and a half after Trump’s election I haven’t heard or read a word of anyone in the US Congress or a state legislature who has taken the first step in the process of modifying the US Constitution to finally do away with the stupid, completely outmoded Electoral College system. If it’s such a good system, why doesn’t the United States use it for local and state elections? Why doesn’t it exist anywhere else in the world? Is it to be regarded as part of our beloved “American exceptionalism”?

The other “n” word is even more prohibited

The city of Seattle on June 12 voted to repeal a tax hike on large employers that it had instituted only weeks before. The new tax would have raised $48 million annually to combat Seattle’s homelessness and affordable-housing crisis. The Seattle area has the third-largest homeless population in the country.

The plan had passed the City Council unanimously but was fiercely opposed by Amazon.com and much of the city’s business community.

Many American cities are sincerely struggling to deal with this problem but are faced with similar insurmountable barriers. The leading causes of homelessness in the US are high rents and low salaries. A report released June 13 by the National Low Income Housing Coalition stated that there is nowhere in the country where someone working a full-time minimum-wage job could afford to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment. Not even in Arkansas, the state with the cheapest housing. More than 11.2 million families wind up spending more than half their paychecks on housing. How did America, “the glorious land of opportunity” wind up like this?

The cost of rent increases inexorably, year after year, regardless of tenants’ income. Any improvement in the system has to begin with a strong commitment to radically restraining, if not completely eliminating, the landlords’ profit motive. Otherwise nothing of any significance will change in society, and the capitalists who own the society – and their liberal apologists – can mouth one progressive-sounding platitude after another as their chauffeur drives them to the bank.

But to what extent can landlords be forced to accept significantly less in rents? Very little can be done. It’s the nature of the beast. Rent control in some American cities has slowed down the steady increases, but still leaving millions in constant danger of eviction or crippling deprivation. The only remaining solution is to “nationalize” real estate.

Eliminating the profit motive in various sectors, or all sectors, in American society would run into a lot less opposition than one might expect. Consciously or unconsciously it’s already looked down upon to a great extent by numerous individuals and institutions of influence. For example, judges frequently impose lighter sentences upon lawbreakers if they haven’t actually profited monetarily from their acts. And they forbid others from making a profit from their crimes by selling book or film rights, or interviews. It must further be kept in mind that the great majority of Americans, like people everywhere, do not labor for profit, but for a salary. The citizenry may have drifted even further away from the system than all this indicates, for American society seems to have more trust and respect for “non-profit” organizations than for the profit-seeking kind. Would the public be so generous with disaster relief if the Red Cross were a regular profit-making business? Would the Internal Revenue Service allow it to be tax-exempt? Why does the Post Office give cheaper rates to non-profits and lower rates for books and magazines which don’t contain advertising? For an AIDS test, do people feel more confident going to the Public Health Service or to a commercial laboratory? Why does “educational” or “public” television not have regular commercials? What would Americans think of peace-corps volunteers, elementary and high-school teachers, clergy, nurses, and social workers who demanded well in excess of $100 thousand per year? Would the public like to see churches competing with each other, complete with ad campaigns selling a New and Improved God? Why has American Airlines just declared “We have no desire to be associated with separating families, or worse, to profit from it.”

*

This article was originally published on The Anti-Empire Report. 

Notes

1. See Mark Weisbrot, “Top Ten Ways You Can Tell Which Side The United States Government is On With Regard to the Military Coup in Honduras.” Also see William Blum, Killing Hope, chapters on Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

2. Moon of Alabama, “Mueller Indictment – The ‘Russian Influence’ Is A Commercial Marketing Scheme”, February 17, 2018

3. Washington Post, June 23, 2018

4. Washington Post, June 9 and 16, 2018

Introduction

“Immigration” has become the dominant issue dividing Europe and the US, yet the most important matter which is driving millions to emigrate is overlooked – wars. 

In this paper we will discuss the reasons behind the massification of immigration, focusing on several issues, namely (1) imperial wars (2) multi-national corporate expansion (3) the decline of the anti-war movements in the US and Western Europe (4) the weakness of the trade union and solidarity movements.

We will proceed by identifying the major countries affected by US and EU wars leading to massive immigration, and then turn to the western powers forcing refugees to ‘follow’ the flows of profits.

Imperial Wars and Mass Immigration

The US invasions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq uprooted several million people, destroying their lives, families, livelihood, housing and communities and undermining there security.

As a result, most victims faced the choice of resistance or flight.  Millions chose to flee to the West since the NATO countries would not bomb their residence in the US or Europe.

Others who fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East or Latin America were persecuted, or resided in countries too poor to offer them employment or opportunities for a livelihood.

Some Afghans fled to Pakistan or the Middle East but discovered that these regions were also subject to armed attacks from the West.

Iraqis were devastated by the western sanctions, invasion and occupation and fled to Europe and to a lesser degree  the US , the Gulf states and Iran.

Libya prior to the US-EU invasion was a ‘receiver’ country accepting and employing millions of Africans, providing them with citizenship and a decent livelihood.  After the US-EU air and sea attack and arming and financing of terrorist gangs, hundreds of thousands of Sub-Sahara immigrants were forced to flee to Europe.  Most crossed the Mediterranean Sea to the west via Italy, Spain , and headed toward the affluent European countries which had savaged their lives in Libya.

The US-EU financed and armed client terrorist armies which assault the Syrian government and forced millions of Syrians to flee across the border to Lebanon,Turkey and beyond to Europe, causing the so-called ‘immigration crises’ and the rise of  rightwing anti-immigrant parties.  This led to divisions within the established social democratic and  conservative parties,as sectors of the working class turned anti-immigrant.

Europe is reaping the consequences of its alliance with US militarized imperialism whereby the US uproots millions of people and the EU spends billions of euros to cover the cost of immigrants fleeing the western wars.

Most of the immigrants’ welfare payments fall far short of the losses incurred in their homeland. Their jobs homes, schools, and civic associations in the EU and US are far less valuable and accommodating then what they possessed in their original communities.

Economic Imperialism and Immigration: Latin America

US wars, military intervention and economic exploitation has forced millions of Latin Americans to immigrate to the US.. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras engaged in popular struggle for  socio-economic justice and political democracy between 1960 – 2000.  On the verge of victory over the landed oligarchs and multinational corporations, Washington blocked popular insurgents by  spending billions of dollars, arming, training, advising the military and paramilitary forces.  Land reform was aborted; trade unionists were forced into exile and thousands of peasants fled the marauding terror campaigns.

The US-backed oligarchic regimes forced millions of displaced and uprooted pr unemployed and landless workers to flee to the US .

Image on the right: Protest in Honduras

US supported coups and dictators resulted in 50,000 in Nicaragua, 80,000 in El Salvador and 200,000 in Guatemala.  President Obama and Hillary Clinton  supported a  military coup in Honduras which overthrew  Liberal President Zelaya— which led to the killing and wounding of thousands of peasant activists and human rights workers, and the return of death squads, resulting in a new wave of immigrants to the US.

The US promoted free trade agreement (NAFTA) drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers into bankruptcy and into low wage maquiladoras; others were recruited by drug cartels; but the largest group was forced to immigrate across the Rio Grande.

The US ‘Plan Colombia’ launched by President Clinton established seven US military bases in Colombia and provided 1 billion dollars in military aid between 2001 – 2010.  Plan Colombia doubled the size of the military,

The US backed President Alvaro Uribe, resulting in the assassination of over 200,000 peasants, trade union activists and human rights workers by Uribe directed narco-death squad. Over two million farmers fled the countryside and  immigrated to the cities or across the border.

US business secured hundreds of thousands of Latin American low wages, agricultural and factory workers almost all without health insurance or benefits – though the paid taxes.

Immigration doubled profits, undermined collective bargains and lowered US wages.  Unscrupulous US ‘entrepreneurs’ recruited immigrants into drugs, prostitution, the arms trade and money laundering.

Politicians exploited the immigration issue for political gain – blaming the immigrants for the   decline of  working class living standards  distracting  attention from the real source:  wars, invasions, death squads and economic pillage.

Conclusion

Having destroyed the lives of working people overseas and overthrown progressive leaders like Libyan President Gadhafi and Honduran President Zelaya, millions were forced to become immigrants.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Colombia, Mexico witnessed  the flight  of millions of immigrants  — all victims of US and EU wars. Washington and Brussels blamed the victims and accused the immigrants of illegality and criminal conduct .

The West debates expulsion, arrest and jail instead of reparations for crimes against humanity and violations of international law.

To restrain immigration the first step is to end imperial wars, withdraw troops,and to cease financing paramilitary and client terrorists.

Secondly, the West should establish a long term multi-billion-dollar fund for reconstruction and recovery of the economies, markets and infrastructure they bombed

The demise of the peace movement allowed the US and EU to launch and prolong serial wars which led to massive immigration – the so-called refugee crises and the flight to Europe.  There is a direct connection between the conversion of the liberal and social democrats to war -parties and  the forced flight of immigrants to the EU.

The decline of the trade unions  and worse, their loss of militancy has led to the loss of solidarity with people living in the midst of imperial wars.  Many workers in the imperialist countries have directed their ire to those ‘below’ – the immigrants, – rather than to  the imperialists who directed the wars which created the immigration problem.

Immigration, war , the demise of the peace and workers movements,and left parties has led to the rise of the militarists,and neo-liberals who have taken power throughout the West.  Their , anti-immigrant politics, however, has provoked new contradictions within regimes,between business elites and among popular movements in the EU and the US.  The elite and popular struggles can go in at least two directions – toward fascism or radical social democracy.

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

• Dear Friends and Supporters,

You may recall that, in early May, CBC News reported that a senior lawyer at the Canadian Department of Justice urged the French authorities in 2009 to obtain new handwriting “evidence” against Hassan when the extradition case was about to collapse. In another effort to shore up the case, the DOJ lawyer requested fingerprint analysis as he believed that the evidence would be very powerful in getting Hassan extradited. When the fingerprint analysis excluded Hassan, the DOJ lawyer never disclosed this fact to the court in Canada or to the defense.

Last week, CBC News reported that another key fingerprint analysis exonerating Hassan was not disclosed to the court in Canada. The court in Canada was told that no such evidence existed, when in fact the fingerprint analysis that excluded Hassan was done many months before France requested Hassan’s extradition.

“France told Canada key evidence did not exist in Hassan Diab terrorism case”, CBC News, June 20, 2018

In a separate story, CBC news revealed that a senior official at the Department of Justice who is running the “internal review” regarding Hassan’s case had actually played a role in Hassan’s extradition, which is a clear conflict of interest.

“Internal review of Hassan Diab’s extradition tainted by conflict of interest, says lawyer”, CBC News, June 20, 2018

These revelations point to a long, troubling pattern of injustice in Hassan’s case and the role that government officials, especially within the Canadian Department of Justice, played in Hassan’s ordeal.

We urge you to join us and a growing list of organizations – such as Amnesty, British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Association of University Teachers, and Criminal Lawyers Association – in calling upon the Government of Canada to appoint an independent commissioner to conduct a thorough public inquiry into Hassan Diab’s extradition case, so no other Canadian would go through what Hassan and his family had to endure.

Please sign the petition here.

If you’ve already signed, THANK YOU. Please share the petition with family and friends, and distribute it on social media.

As a reminder, the Paris Court of Appeal will render a decision on July 6 regarding whether to uphold the investigating judges’ dismissal of the case against Hassan. The judges have declared Hassan innocent of the 1980 crime and ordered Hassan’s release. However, for political reasons and due to the climate in France, the French prosecutor has appealed. We remain hopeful that reason and justice will prevail and an innocent man’s ordeal will end soon.

Whilst the MOD and Parliament are both concerned at the rate of diminution and decline of Britain’s military capability on the world stage whereby we no longer have either a credible naval task /defence force or a 24/7 operative nuclear deterrent, the state of Israel has amassed an underground arsenal estimated by many authoritative sources to be in excess of that of the combined total of the nuclear WMD of Pakistan, India and North Korea.

There is no certainty of these figures, of course, because Israel is the only undeclared nuclear weapons state in the world and is not subject to inspection by the IAEA as are the vast majority of UN member states. But most important is the fact that it has also a Second Nuclear Strike capability courtesy of an apparently deranged German Chancellor who made a unilateral decision to supply the Israeli navy with a fleet of government subsidised, state-of-the-art, German-built submarines, now reliably reported to have been retro-fitted with nuclear cruise missiles and secretly patrolling the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Red Seas, and the Gulf.  And in so doing, irrevocably altered the balance of global power to the detriment of the European continent.

Of course, Israel is not a NATO member and is not in Europe.  But she is the last of the neo-colonial powers still in the process of subjugating an indigenous Arab population that has settled the land for over a thousand years and is now a demographic numbering in excess of 5 million.

Instead of sending a British royal representative to cavort about the Middle East, it would perhaps have been more productive to have implemented plans to defend our island in the future from any non-NATO, nuclear-armed, belligerent state with an expansionist government that treats the United Nations and international law with contempt.  Because the primary duty of any government – even that of Theresa May – is national security and the survival of the state.

*

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

On Sunday, Trump disgracefully tweeted: “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came,” adding:

“Our immigration (is) laughed at all over the world.”

US immigration policy is the shame of the nation under Republicans and undemocratic Dems, along with a whole lot more – mocking the notion of equity and justice for all, a nonstarter in America.

Due process is constitutionally guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment, stating:

“No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

It applies to all states by the 14th Amendment, a universally recognized principle – derived from the 1215 Magna Carta, stating:

“No free man (woman or child) shall be seized, or imprisoned, or stripped of his (or her) rights or possessions, or outlawed, or exiled, or deprived of his (or her) standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him (or her), or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his (or her) equals, or by the law of the land.”

“Due process of law” later substituted for “the law of the land.” It’s inviolable. Invoking executive authority otherwise is flagrantly unlawful.

Responding to Trump’s tweets, the ACLU tweeted its own, saying:

“What President Trump suggested here is both illegal and unconstitutional.”

“Any official who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws should disavow it unequivocally.”

In Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruled that “illegal aliens… may claim the benefit of the (14th Amendment’s) Equal Protection Clause, which provides that no State shall ‘deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ “

Equal protection applies to government at all levels, as required by the Fifth Amendment due process guarantee.

The protection applies to everyone within the borders of America. Presidents, Congress, state and local authorities cannot legally deny this right to anyone.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants

“the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”

Summarily deporting unwanted aliens denies them due process, equal protection, legal counsel, and other constitutional rights – along with what the Magna Carta affirmed for everyone – including in Trump’s America.

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled that separate is inherently unequal. Segregation based on race violates equal protection under the Fifth and 14th Amendments.

In Mapp v. Ohio (1961), the High Court ruled against evidence collected in violation of Fourth Amendment protection from an unlawful search, as well as Fifth and 14th Amendments’ due process clause protection.

In Gideon v Wainwright (1963), the Supreme Court affirmed the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel and 14th Amendment equal protection right in a criminal proceeding denied him by Florida and the state’s high court.

Constitutional law and High Court rulings affirm the inviolability of due process and equal protection rights.

If Trump’s tweets quoted above become regime policy, he’ll flagrantly violate these rights afforded everyone in America.

*

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

Dagli Stati uniti all’Europa, la «crisi dei migranti» suscita accese polemiche interne e internazionali sulle politiche da adottare riguardo ai flussi migratori. Ovunque però essi vengono rappresentati secondo un cliché che capovolge la realtà: quello dei «paesi ricchi» costretti a subire la crescente pressione migratoria dai «paesi poveri».

Si nasconde la causa di fondo: il sistema economico che nel mondo permette a una ristretta minoranza di accumulare ricchezza a spese della crescente maggioranza, impoverendola e provocando così l’emigrazione forzata.

Riguardo ai flussi migratori verso gli Stati uniti, è emblematico il caso del Messico. La sua produzione agricola è crollata quando, con il Nafta (l’accordo nordamericano di «libero» commercio), Usa e Canada hanno inondato il mercato messicano con prodotti agricoli a basso prezzo grazie alle proprie sovvenzioni statali. Milioni di contadini sono rimasti senza lavoro, ingrossando il bacino di manodopera reclutata nelle maquiladoras: migliaia di stabilimenti industriali lungo la linea di confine in territorio messicano, posseduti o controllati per lo più da società statunitensi, nei quali i salari sono molto bassi e i diritti sindacali inesistenti.

In un paese in cui circa la metà della popolazione vive in povertà, è aumentata la massa di coloro che cercano di entrare negli Stati uniti. Da qui il Muro lungo il confine col Messico, iniziato dal presidente democratico Clinton quando nel 1994 è entrato in vigore il Nafta, proseguito dal repubblicano Bush, rafforzato dal democratico Obama, lo stesso che il repubblicano Trump vorrebbe ora completare su tutti i 3000 km di confine.

Riguardo ai flussi migratori verso l’Europa, è emblematico il caso dell’Africa. Essa è ricchissima di materie prime: oro, platino, diamanti, uranio, coltan, rame, petrolio, gas naturale, legname pregiato, cacao, caffè e molte altre.

Queste risorse, sfruttate dal vecchio colonialismo europeo con metodi di tipo schiavistico, vengono oggi sfruttate dal neocolonialismo europeo facendo leva su élite africane al potere, manodopera locale a basso costo e controllo dei mercati interni e internazionali.

Oltre cento compagnie quotate alla Borsa di Londra, britanniche e altre, sfruttano in 37 paesi dell’Africa subsahariana risorse minerarie del valore di oltre 1000 miliardi di dollari.

La Francia controlla il sistema monetario di 14 ex colonie africane attraverso il Franco CFA (in origine acronimo di «Colonie Francesi d’Africa», riciclato in «Comunità Finanziaria Africana»): per mantenere la parità con l’euro, i 14 paesi africani devono versare al Tesoro francese metà delle loro riserve valutarie.

Lo Stato libico, che voleva creare una moneta africana autonoma, è stato demolito con la guerra nel 2011. In Costa d’Avorio (area CFA), società francesi controllano il grosso della commercializzazione del cacao, di cui il paese è primo produttore mondiale: ai piccoli coltivatori resta appena il 5% del valore del prodotto finale, tanto che la maggior parte vive in povertà. Questi sono solo alcuni esempi dello sfruttamento neocoloniale del continente.

L’Africa, presentata come dipendente dall’aiuto estero, fornisce all’estero un pagamento netto annuo di circa 58 miliardi di dollari. Le conseguenze sociali sono devastanti. Nell’Africa subsahariana, la cui popolazione supera il miliardo ed è composta per il 60% da bambini e giovani di età compresa tra 0 e 24 anni, circa i due terzi degli abitanti vivono in povertà e, tra questi, circa il 40% – cioè 400 milioni – in condizioni di povertà estrema. La «crisi dei migranti» è in realtà la crisi di un sistema economico e sociale insostenibile.

Die politisch-medialen Projektoren konzentrieren sich auf den Migrationsstrom über das Mittelmeer von Süden nach Norden und lassen die anderen Mittelmeerströme im Dunkeln – jene von Norden nach Süden, die Streitkräfte und Waffen beinhalten.

Vielleicht sollten wir besser vom “Großen Mittelmeer” sprechen, einem Gebiet im Rahmen der USA/NATO-Strategie, das sich vom Atlantik zum Schwarzen Meer und im Süden vom Persischen Golf bis zum Indischen Ozean erstreckt.

Während seinem Treffen mit NATO-Generalsekretär Jens Stoltenberg in Rom, betonte Premierminister Giuseppe Conte die „zentrale Bedeutung des großräumigen Mittelmeeres für die europäische Sicherheit“, die jetzt durch den „Bogen der Instabilität vom Mittelmeer bis zum Nahen Osten“ bedroht ist. Deshalb ist ein Bündnis unter US-Kommando wichtig für die NATO, welches Conte als „Pfeiler der nationalen und internationalen Sicherheit“ bezeichnet. Das ist eine vollständige Verdrehung der Realität.

Es ist die Grundlage der US/NATO-Strategie, die in Wahrheit den „Bogen der Instabilität“ hervorgerufen hat, durch zwei Kriege gegen den Irak, den beiden weiteren Kriegen, die Jugoslawien und Lybien zerstört haben und den Krieg, der die Zerstörung Syriens zum Ziel hat. Laut Conte spielt Italien, das an all diesen Kriegen teilnahm, “eine Schlüsselrolle für die Sicherheit und die Stabilität der Südflanke des Bündnisses”.

Inwiefern? Wir können die Wahrheit durch das, was die Medien verbergen, herausfinden. Das US-Marineschiff Trenton, das 42 Flüchtlinge aufnahm (die im Gegensatz zu denen der Aquarius in Sizilien an Land gehen durften), ist nicht in Sizilien stationiert, um humanitäre Zwecke im Mittelmeer zu erfüllen – es ist in Wahrheit eine schnelle Eingreiftruppe (bis zu 80 km/h), die innerhalb weniger Stunden die nordafrikanische Küste erreichen kann, eine Expeditionstruppe mit 400 Soldaten und ihren Fahrzeugen. US-Spezialeinheiten operieren in Lybien, um alliierte Armeeformationen auszubilden und zu  führen, während bewaffnete US-Drohnen, die von Sigonella (Sizilien) aus starten, ihre Ziele in Lybien treffen. In Kürze, gab Stoltenberg an, werden auch NATO-Drohnen von Sigonella aus operieren.

Sie werden das “Hub” oder “NATO Strategic Direction South” (NSDS), das Geheimdienstzentrum für Militäroperationen im Nahen Osten, Nordafrika, der Sahelzone und dem subsaharischen Afrika, integrieren.

Das Zentrum, das im Juli in Betrieb geht, hat seinen Hauptsitz in Lago Patria, neben dem Joint Force Command of NATO (JFC Napels), unter dem Befehl eines US-Admirals – derzeit James Foggo – der auch die US-Marinesteitkräfte in Europa (mit ihrem Hauptsitz in Neapel-Capodichino und der sechsten Flotte, in Geata stationiert) und auch die US-Marinesteitkräfte für Afrika befehligen wird.

Diese Streitkräfte wurden durch den Flugzeugträger Harry Truman eingebunden, der das Mittelmeer vor zwei Monaten mit seiner Angriffsgruppe erreichte.

Am 10. Juni, als die Aufmerksamkeit der Medien auf die Aquarius gerichtet war, wurde die US-Flotte mit 8.000 Soldaten und bewaffnet mit 90 Kampfflugzeugen sowie über 1.000 Raketen, im östlichen Mittelmeer stationiert, bereit, Syrien und den Irak anzugreifen. Zur gleichen Zeit, am 12./13. Juni, machte die Liberty Pride in Livorno fest – ein militarisiertes US-Schiff, und beförderte auf ihren 12 Brücken weitere Fracht und Waffen, die, von der US-Basis Camp Darby (Pisa), jeden Monat nach Jordanien und Saudi Arabien geschickt werden, um die Kriege in Syrien und dem Jemen aufrecht zu erhalten.

Auf diese Weise nähren wir diese Kriege, die, durch neo-koloniale Methoden der Ausbeutung, die Verarmung und Entwurzelung der Bevölkerungen verursachen. Infolgedessen nimmt der Migrationsstrom weiterhin dramatisch zu und erschafft Opfer und neue Formen der Sklaverei. “Es scheint, dass es sich jetzt auszahlt, hart gegen Immigration vorzugehen”, kommentierte Präsident Trump in Bezug auf die Maßnahmen, die nicht nur von Mattea Salvini sondern von der ganzen italienischen Regierung beschlossen wurden, deren Premierminister als „fantastisch“ bezeichnet wird.

Dies ist eine angemessene Anerkennung seitens der Vereinigten Staaten, die im Programm der Regierung als „priveligierter Verbündeter“ Italiens benannt sind.

(il manifesto, 19. Juni 2018)

Übersetzung: K.R.

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U.S. to Continue to Use White Helmets As Long As the Western Public Accepts “Media War Lies”

By Mark Taliano and The Syria Times, June 26, 2018

U.S. policymakers will go ahead with using not only the White Helmets but also the false flag chemical weapons events in Syria for as long as broad-based domestic populations accept the war lies and the engineered deceptions, the Canadian political analyst and Research Associate at Global Research Mark Taliano told the Syriatimes e-newspaper.

Moscow-Riyadh: Balancing Out Washington

By Andrew Korybko, June 26, 2018

The state-owned Russian Railways is already planning to participate in the construction of the Trans-Arabian Railroad (also known as the GCC Railroad) for connecting the Gulf Kingdoms, so it’s already clearly developed the connections within Saudi Arabia for clinching relevant deals. The company could therefore leverage these contacts to explore the options available for participating in the Israeli-Saudi Railway too, and considering Moscow’s excellent relations with Riyadh and Tel Aviv as a result of Russia’s fast-moving rapprochements with both of them over the past couple of years, it’s unlikely that these two increasingly independent actors would object to its proposed role even if their American ally was unhappy with it.

Are al-Qaeda Affiliates Fighting Alongside U.S. Rebels in Syria’s South?

By Sharmine Narwani, June 26, 2018

Whether there will now be a full-on battle for the south or not, visits last week to Syria’s three southern governorates, Daraa, Quneitra, and Suweida, reveal a startling possibility: al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise—the Nusra Front—appears to be deeply entrenched alongside these U.S.-backed militants in key, strategic towns and villages scattered throughout the south.

US Senate Bans Sale of F-35s to Turkey: Dealing with an Unreliable Partner

By Peter Korzun, June 26, 2018

On June 19, the Senate passed a draft defense bill for FY 2019 that would halt the transfer of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft to Turkey, until the secretary of state certifies that Turkey will not accept deliveries of Russian S-400 Triumf air-defense systems. It paves the way for Ankara’s expulsion from the program if it does not bow to this pressure. The support for the measure (85-10) is too strong to be overridden.

US-NATO Led Wars Have Created a Global Migrant Crisis. Solutions?

By J. Michael Springmann, June 26, 2018

At one time or another, the United States has invaded, attacked, subverted, or regime-changed nearly every country south of its border with Mexico, as well as most of those in the Caribbean. Because of wrecked governments, devastated economies, and consequent loss of freedom, waves of migrants have moved north to the “Land of Opportunity”, now called by some on National Public Radio here as the “Land of Humanity”.

U.S. Forces Failed Attempts to Seize Territory in Southern Syria. U.S. Backed Al Qaeda Fighter Fleeing from SAA Forces

By Eric Zuesse, June 26, 2018

On June 25th, U.S.-aided fighters in southern Syria were fleeing from the Syrian Government’s Army, southward toward U.S.-allied Israeli-controlled areas in the Golan Heights and toward America’s ally Jordan.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the Tiger Forces and their allies have reportedly established full control of the district of Lajat in the province of Daraa. According to pro-government sources, militants in the area have mostly surrendered to government troops.

Additionally, the SAA and its allies liberated the village of Mleha al-‘Atsh and captured the center of Busr al-Harir.

If all these reports are confirmed, government forces have liberated about 400km2 since the start of clashes in northeastern Daraa last week.

On June 25, the Russian Defense Ministry released a statement saying that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) had carried out a large attack on government positions in the province. The attack was repelled and 70 militants were killed.

This attack likely was an attempt to sabotage the SAA progress in Lajat.

On June 26, Israel reportedly carried out a new missile strike on Syria targeting the Damascus International Airport.

According to pro-government sources, at least two missiles fell in near the airport. Pro-Israeli sources claim that the strike hit an Iranian cargo plane inside the airport.

Local sources say that Syrian air defense systems were employed. However, it is unclear if some missiles were intercepted.

An alleged pro-government partisan group, the Popular Resistance in Manbij, has announced the start of preparations for an uprising against foreign occupiers – i.e. forces of the US, France and Turkey – aiming to divide Syria.

In April, a similar group, entitled “the Popular Resistance in al-Hasakah”, appeared in eastern Syria. This group also threatened the US-led coalition and its proxies with attacks. However, no notable attacks have been carried out so far.

In any case, appearance of such groups show that far from everyone in northeastern Syria like the US-led coalition.

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The defeat of the Egyptian national football team by their Saudi Arabian counterparts in the 2018 World Cup can be viewed as a metaphor for the triumph of the Saudis over Egypt after an intense and sometimes deadly political rivalry played out during the rule of the charismatic and secular-orientated Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Egypt has a rich tradition of football at both domestic and international levels. Along with the ‘Black Stars’ of Ghana, the ‘Pharaohs’ of Egypt were the glamour team of African football back in the 1960s and despite several significant lows have over the course of time established as seven-times winners of the African Cup of Nations tournament. The derby matches held between the Cairo club sides Al Ahly and Zamalek represent an enduring rivalry which is arguably as passionately intense as any other in the world including Istanbul’s Kitalarasi Derbi and the Spanish El Clasico.

Saudi Arabia, which established its football federation 35 years after Egypt’s, did not enter a tournament until 1984. And although it has gone on to become one of Asia’s most successful national football teams, the rankings tabulated respectively by FIFA and the Soccer Power Index, demonstrate that Asian football continues to trail that of the African continent.

Going into yesterday’s match held in Volgograd, Egypt could boast of having defeated Saudi Arabia in 4 out of 6 meetings. The first meeting between both countries in September 1961 during the Pan Arab Games ended in a 13-0 rout of the Saudis. Although the phenomenal gap in quality had closed over the years, Egypt emerged as 2-1 winners the last time they met in 2007.

For these reasons, it would appear rather perplexing to think of a footballing rivalry as existing between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. However, the nature of the football World Cup tournament in its straightforward evocation of nationalist pride and rivalry has been apt at bringing into sharp focus the relations of nations who have been scheduled to play each other.

This was clearly the case when England played Argentina in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, four years after the military conflict between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, or, to Argentineans, Las Islas Malvinas.

And the imagination of the global public was stirred by the drawing of the United States and Iran in the same group during the 1998 tournament.

While the same cannot be said about the drawing together of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Arab Republic of Egypt into Group A of the present World Cup, the Saudi defeat of an Egyptian side which included English Premier League Golden Boot winner Mo Salah, may have brought to the minds of some the previously intense and sometimes deadly political rivalry which existed between both countries.

The struggle for the heart and soul of the Arab masses between the secular Egyptian republic led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Wahabbist monarchy of Saudi Arabia was at its peak during the 1960s. The eight-year-long civil war in North Yemen between republican and royalist factions was one manifestation of a struggle, which also placed both countries on opposite sides in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Where the pro-Western Saudis were tradition-bound and seemingly resistant to change, the government of Nasser, which had been formed by members of the Free Officer Movement, appeared to be progressive. Nasserism not only embodied Arab nationalism, it also embraced the spirit of Bandung-era anti-imperialist sentiment and Afro-Arab solidarity.

At the apex of its appeal in the years following the Suez War of 1956, Nasser-led Egypt appeared to represent the aspirations of the Arab people -not the rulers of Saudi Arabia, who felt threatened and sought to check the spread of Egyptian influence.

That rivalry has, for all intents and purposes, been defunct for several generations.

How and why did Egyptian prestige and influence in the Arab world fall to its present state? Perhaps a starting point can be made by referencing the humiliating defeat inflicted on the Egyptian armed forces by the State of Israel in 1967 when the Israelis routed the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

This defeat so traumatised the Arab psyche that it provided an avenue through which the fundamentalist brand of Islamism espoused by ideologues such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb could begin to gain greater appeal.

Nasser may have executed Qutb, but a succession of failures: militarily against Israel, economically in relation to the implementation of his brand of socialism, and politically the fracture of the United Arab Republic project with Syria alongside the quagmire in Yemen, began to convince some intellectuals and the man-in-the-street that secular nationalism was no longer the preferred course through which Arabs could develop their societies.

Egyptian prestige dwindled when it began to be perceived that Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, had become a tool of the West, and Egypt, with its ever expanding population but meagre resource, could not compete economically with the oil-rich Saudis.

While Sadat had garnered a modicum of esteem for Egypt after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, the oil embargo and the ensuing fuel crisis strengthened the hand of the Saudis whose deal with the United States to sell oil solely in US dollars in return for guaranteeing the security of the House of Saud, offered the Saudi monarchy an extra layer of protection.

Although less concerned now about the possibility of Nasserite-inspired conspiracies aimed at overthrowing the royal house as had occurred during Nasser’s heyday, the Saudis still felt threatened by the possibility of a revival of the Nasserite ideology in Egypt, or by the machinations of his ideological heir, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had overthrown the Libyan monarchy in 1969.

An indication of the change in the balance of Saudi-Egyptian relations was apparent with the more or less wholesale abrogation by Sadat of Nasser’s policies, in return for subsidies and low-interest loans from the Saudis. Also, while the Arab League has for much of its history been characterised as a ‘do-nothing’ organisation, it was clear that as Egyptian influence waned, that of the Saudis grew.

The hand of the Saudis was also strengthend by the jolt caused in 1979 by the Siege of Mecca, which had the effect of intensifying the policy of exporting the Wahhabist ideology to foreign Muslim lands as a form of atonement to the senior clerics of the realm who warned Saudi Arabia’s rulers that the siege, which was staged by the followers of Juhayman al-Otaibi had been caused by Saudi Arabia’s steady drift towards an ‘infidel culture’, that is, what they considered to be the adapting of Western practices in Saudi society.

By now, the days when Egypt had actively provided a counter-weight ideology of secularism to the Muslim world were long gone.

For decades, Egypt’s rulers, beginning with Sadat and continuing with Hosni Mubarak, have largely played second fiddle to the Saudis. And under General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, this state of affairs has arguably become more pronounced. It is an open secret that el-Sisi was brought to power in 2013 by a coup which was financed by Saudi Arabia.

Furthermore, the ceding by Egypt to the Saudis of the Red Sea Islands of Tiran and Sanafir in June 2017, provoked widespread outrage in Egypt. Although both Islands are largely uninhabited, the transfer of sovereignty was interpreted by many Egyptians as an abject surrender to Saudi suzerainty. It was a pact that many believe was reached because of Egyptian need for Saudi aid.

There are likely to be many Egyptians whose pride will be sorely dented by a sporting loss to the sparsely-populated desert kingdom to whom their leaders have increasingly become beholden.

A football match, it appears, has come to mirror the loss of Egyptian geopolitical power and influence relative to that gained and wielded by the Saudis.

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Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Featured image is from the author.

As we write, troops commanded by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), backed by Saudi Arabian warplanes, are fighting to take control of the port city of Al Hudaydah on Yemen’s western coast, now held by Yemen’s Houthi movement. Aid flowing through Al Hudaydah is the only thing standing between 22 million Yemenis and starvation. And now it’s being threatened by a reactionary offensive armed, trained, guided, and backed by the USA.

After a week of fierce fighting, UAE forces have reportedly taken over the airport south of Al Hudaydah, as Saudi warplanes bomb the city. Hundreds have been killed, and 30,000 have reportedly fled the city along with 76,000 from the surrounding region. The assault has disrupted supplies of electricity and clean water, and aid workers warn of a cholera outbreak that could spread “with lightning speed” and infect hundreds of thousands. Many aid workers have been forced to leave Al Hudaydah, and others can’t access areas where the fighting has been heaviest.

America: A Force for Barbarity, Not Good in the World

If you want to understand what a truly barbaric, monstrous system America is, look at what it’s done—and is doing—to the 28 million people of this impoverished Middle Eastern country. After creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, it’s now threatening Yemen’s meager flow of humanitarian aid and deliberately flirting with mass slaughter through famine and disease. Closing Al Hudaydah’s port “means that you’re cutting the last artery to Yemen,” said one aid worker. For over three years, behind the scenes and a veil of lies, the U.S. has been deliberately murdering hundreds of thousands of children and starving millions of oppressed Yemeni people. They’ve done so by providing the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with weapons and planes, fuel and training, hands-on direction and intelligence, Green Berets on the front lines, and the political and propaganda support to wage war on the people of Yemen.

This is a war of mass slaughter, mass starvation, and mass disease—waged by blockading food and medicine, destroying the country’s health, water, and power systems—war crimes that have targeted the country’s means for sustaining life.

A war waged so the U.S. imperialists can maintain their stranglehold on the Middle East and the world, and so their murderous Saudi and UAE “allies” can maintain their death grip on the Arabian Peninsula. These predators view isolating and overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as crucial to this overall agenda, and see the war in Yemen as one front in that struggle. Iran has attempted to advance its own reactionary regional interests through this war, although its involvement in the conflict and backing of the Houthis has been vastly overstated by the U.S. rulers, when in reality Iran isn’t directly involved in the fighting and whatever backing it’s provided the Houthis doesn’t begin to compare to the massive assaults and crimes being carried out by the Saudis, the UAE, and the U.S.

Source: revcom.us

Between 15,000 and 44,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, have been slaughtered by U.S. and British bombs and missiles. More than 22 million Yemenis have been driven to the brink of hunger, over eight million to the brink of starvation. In two years (2016-2017), 113,000 children died of hunger or preventable disease. The U.S.-Saudi-UAE coalition’s destruction of Yemen’s water and sewer system led to the largest outbreak of cholera, a bacterial disease spread by drinking contaminated water, in history. Over the last year, a million people have been infected; 2,300 have died, mainly children. During the epidemic, the U.S.-Saudi coalition, which regularly issues statements of their supposed “concern” for the suffering in Yemen, blocked imports of the chlorine tablets needed to make water safe to drink.

Doubling Down on Mass Murder and Starvation

America claims it’s not involved, and its clients Saudi Arabia and the UAE claim their hands are clean. They say they want to take Al Hudaydah to insure the flow of humanitarian aid. But if that were true, if the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and the UAE gave a rat’s ass about the welfare of Yemen’s people, then:

• Why have the Saudis and the UAE—with a green light from the U.S.—continued their assault (and demand for unconditional surrender) when they have already threatened humanitarian relief and when every humanitarian agency in the world demanded they stop?
• Why, according to a new report by Amnesty International (AI), has Saudi Arabia deliberately delayed aid from arriving in Al Hudaydah for weeks at a time, an action AI said constituted the war crime of collective punishment? And why are they holding back a ship with 25,000 tons of wheat now!?
• Why have Saudi planes targeted Al Hudaydah’s port during the war, and are on track to do even more damage now?
• Why, in the areas Saudi- and UAE-backed forces have controlled for years, do Yemenis still lack basic necessities—food, clean water, healthcare—even though the Saudis and the UAE control the flow of goods into the country?
• Why would the UAE be running at least 18 secret prisons across Yemen where the most depraved, unspeakable sexual tortures are rampant according to an Associated Press report, which cites examples where prisoners were lined up, ordered to strip, and then sodomized by guards claiming to be looking for contraband, while being threatened by dogs? One top prison official told the AP, “Americans use Emiratis as gloves to do their dirty work.”

No wonder the International Rescue Committee denounced Saudi and UAE claims as “a publicity stunt meant to draw attention away from the undue suffering the attack is causing,” and that their “so-called relief plan … must be seen for exactly what it is; a justification to launch an attack that will have catastrophic consequences.”

The U.S. is the godfather behind all this savagery.

“When [the Saudis] have the backing of the United States, they’ve been able to wage this war of extreme proportions that they would have never been able to wage on their own,” said Yemeni-American researcher Shireen Al-Adeimi in a June 22 interview on The Michael Slate Show. “[The Saudis] don’t manufacture their own weapons, they don’t train their own soldiers, they don’t refuel their own jets. They rely on the U.S. for all these things, and that’s why they’ve been able to wage this incredibly destructive war.”

U.S. and British officers have even staffed Saudi command rooms for airstrikes.

After the U.S. publicly rejected their request for minesweepers for the Al Hudaydah attack, a UAE official said:

“Not giving us military assistance is not the same as telling us not to do it.” (See revcom.us article “America Targets Yemen’s Children for Death by Starvation.”)

Yemeni Lives Are Hanging in the Balance… What Are YOU Going to Do?

Right now, the U.S.-backed Saudi-UAE attack on Al Hudaydah is continuing. They’re attempting to seize Yemen’s lifeline—in order to threaten, terrorize, and if necessary starve the Yemeni people into submission. The lives of millions of Yemenis—men, women, and yes children—now hang in the balance.

American lives are NOT more important than Yemeni lives, and we in this country have a responsibility to loudly and visibly denounce and oppose this offensive, and call for an end to this mass murder before it becomes horribly genocidal! And people need to confront the real nature of an empire based on starving children, HERE, and the real solution to ending it, and all the horrors it inflicts on humanity, HERE.

U.S. policymakers will go ahead with using not only the White Helmets but also the false flag chemical weapons events in Syria for as long as broad-based domestic populations accept the war lies and the engineered deceptions, the Canadian political analyst and Research Associate at Global Research Mark Taliano told the Syriatimes e-newspaper.

The analyst asserted that U.S. policymakers support al Qaeda in Syria, and the White Helmets are al Qaeda auxiliaries, so it makes sense that the U.S. which seeks global control, would continue to support them.

But he pointed out that the US aspirations are being frustrated on Syrian soil.

“As Syria and its allies continue to win this war, the world is shifting, geopolitically, to a multipolar orientation. Yes, I expect Syria will win this war and regain its sovereignty and territorial integrity, as per international law,” Taliano said, adding that Syria and its allies have almost completely destroyed the international brigades of terrorists within Syrian territory.

“The remaining terrorists in Syria – ISIS, al Qaeda, FSA etc. — are all in U.S occupied areas of Syria, and the U.S is protecting them as per usual. But Syria and its allies are defeating the terrorists, so we can expect another false flag incident anytime now, which will be used as a pretext for increased Western support of their terrorist proxies,” stressed the Canadian analyst, who visited Syria twice in 2016 and 2018.

He expects no change in the policy of western countries towards Syria, affirming that Israel and the west have been intervening directly since the war began in Syria and they commit war crimes as policy.

Suffocating mantle of lies

“Western policymakers are committing an overseas holocaust right now, in the Middle East and beyond. These elite, largely unaccountable policymakers, and an increasingly transnational oligarch class, are the short- term beneficiaries of these policies, to the detriment of domestic and global populations.  We need to break through the suffocating mantle of lies that is destroying us all,” said Taliano.

He, in addition, commented on MSM’s attacks against European delegations and reporters that come to Syria to see the reality of events by saying:

“MSM is an ignorant appendage of the mindless war machine, hence MSM fake journalists feel threatened by real reporting that contradicts their criminal war propaganda.”

“Voices from Syria”

The Canadian political analyst, who was in Syria in in April, 2018, at the same time that the U.S, France, and U.K bombed Syria with their cruise missiles following the Ghouta false flag, published one year ago a book entitled ‘Voices from Syria’ after he came to Syria in September 2016 as he sensed that the official narrative being fed to North Americans across TV screens, in newsprint and on internet were false.

“Voices from Syria is a very short book, but it is full of primary source documentation and evidence that refutes the incessant Western war propaganda. It also explains what we as Westerners can do to amplify the Truth for Peace and Justice,” the author clarified.

He went on to say:

“I hope to visit Syria again.  All of humanity is connected to Syria’s ancient civilization in one way or another, and Syria’s rich roots are spiritually uplifting. I see Syria as a bastion of civilization that is confronting and defeating international terrorism for the benefit of humanity.”

Taliano described the achievements of Syria and its allies against terrorism as ‘extraordinary’ and a ‘remarkable feat’, given the fact that all of NATO and its allies support the terrorists.

*

Interviewed by Basma Qaddour  

This article was originally published on The Syria Times.

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.

---

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)

List Price: $17.95

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The US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment affirms the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…”

Warrants based on probable cause must be obtained to conduct them legally.

On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5 – 4 majority in Carpenter v. United States that Fourth Amendment protections apply to cell phone location information.

Prior to the ruling, government at the federal, state and local levels could obtain cell location records from companies on request by claiming they’re required as part of an investigation.

Supporting the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said location information collected by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and other cell providers creates a “detailed chronicle of a person’s physical presence compiled every day, every moment over years…400 million devices in the United States” tracked.

Authorities must now get warrant approval before obtaining this data, an important privacy protection.

According to the Court, cell phone tracking lets government achieve “near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

Cell providers collect it for every device so “police need not even know in advance whether they want to follow a particular individual, or when.”

The FBI, CIA, NSA, and other Big Brother US spy agencies have other ways of monitoring everyone, trampling on Bill of Rights protections virtually unrestrained.

Federal mass surveillance is pervasive, circumventing rule of law principles, metadata collected unrelated to national security without court authorized warrants.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and major telecommunications companies are complicit in spying on customers.

Phone conversations are recorded, emails collected and stored, computers and television sets turned into monitoring devices in ways Orwell never imagined, today’s technology way ahead of his time.

Capabilities enable spying on virtually everything we do, turning America and other so-called Western democracies into totalitarian states.

What’s going on happens extrajudicially without congressional oversight or knowledge.

Big Brother is real, no longer fiction, reflecting unchecked police state power. Fundamental freedoms are vanishing, most people unaware of or indifferent about what’s happening.

Friday’s Supreme Court ruling was an important step in the right direction, prohibiting cell phone information exchanged between individuals from being shared with third parties without warrant authorization.

Yet it’s not enough to counter the power and ability of the state to monitor and control our lives in countless ways – capabilities increasing as technology advances.

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

The Times of Israel published an article titled “Israel to begin promoting railway linking Haifa seaport with Saudi Arabia”, which self-explanatorily describes Israeli Transportation Minister Israel Katz’s unprecedented proposal for pioneering an overland rail route from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf as part of his signature “Tracks for Regional Peace” initiative. First unveiled just a few months ago, this plan envisions Israel replacing Syria as the mainland gateway for facilitating EU-Gulf trade through rail connections with Palestine, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which has yet to formally sign a peace deal with Israel but is widely regarded as one of its most solid regional allies in the larger Mideast proxy war against Iran. 

The timing of the article comes right after reports that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) held secret talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Jordanian capital of Amman, supposedly over the US’ forthcoming peace plan but which possibly also included discussions about this prospective connectivity route. In fact, the Haifa-to-Dammam rail corridor might even become a fundamental component of the so-called “New Middle East” that the Trump Administration is trying to build, given that it would represent the undeniable betterment of Israeli-Saudi relations and could even come to precede a formal peace treaty between the two de-facto anti-Iranian allies after they openly join forces in pushing the US’ soon-to-be-unveiled peace plan on the Palestinians.

Symbolism aside, there are very real economic reasons for building this railway. MBS’ ambitious Vision 2030 comprehensive reform program aims to assist the Kingdom’s phased transition to its inevitable post-oil economy, to which end Riyadh is seeking billions in investment in real-sector development projects. China is slated to play a key role in this process by building up the heavily populated eastern part of the country’s southern Persian Gulf shoreline into an industrial powerhouse as part of its plans to turn Saudi Arabia into a tri-continental pivot node along its New Silk Road, which if successful could see Beijing making use of the Haifa-to-Dammam rail corridor to export products to the EU.

In other words, the irony of this US-assisted plan is that it might inadvertently help China because of the very real potential that Beijing has for “piggybacking” off of it in pursuing its own self-interests, which interestingly overlap with all the relevant parties’, including Washington’s own. From the American perspective, it makes sense to invest in this project in order to exert influence over what might become one of its rival’s Silk Road branch lines, thus keeping Chinese-EU trade under the watchful eye of the US no matter which geographic domain it’s conducted across. So as not to be left out of this exciting confluence of strategic interests, Russia should endeavor to play a role in this project.

The state-owned Russian Railways is already planning to participate in the construction of the Trans-Arabian Railroad (also known as the GCC Railroad) for connecting the Gulf Kingdoms, so it’s already clearly developed the connections within Saudi Arabia for clinching relevant deals. The company could therefore leverage these contacts to explore the options available for participating in the Israeli-Saudi Railway too, and considering Moscow’s excellent relations with Riyadh and Tel Aviv as a result of Russia’s fast-moving rapprochements with both of them over the past couple of years, it’s unlikely that these two increasingly independent actors would object to its proposed role even if their American ally was unhappy with it.

It’s always to Russia’s benefit to participate in mutually (or in this case, multilaterally) beneficial projects with its partners, especially its newfound and non-traditional ones such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, both of whom have the available funding to reciprocally invest within the country itself as a quid-pro-quo for the successful outcome of this or any other initiative. Speaking of which, the proposed railway isn’t the only potential platform for trilateral cooperation between these three players, as MBS’ plans for constructing the so-called “NEOM future city” close to the Gulf of Aqaba could naturally involve Israel and also Russia as well.

Tel Aviv has an interest in funding this nearby project and incorporating it into the so-called “Red-Med Railway” that could even potentially be expanded across part of the former Hejaz Railway route for streamlining a connectivity corridor along Saudi Arabia’s western coast to complement the GCC Railway down its eastern one. Moscow, meanwhile, could also provide financing to the NEOM future city but might additionally seek to involve its Skolkovo Innovation Center in this initiative too, thereby giving it a “big-ticket project” to attach its name to and gain further global renown. Altogether, Russia can play a crucial role in tightening the Israeli-Saudi alliance and reaping strategic dividends as a result.

Economic rewards are of course the driving factor incentivizing Russian participation in these aforementioned projects, but even important though much longer-term is the role that Moscow would be playing in “balancing” out Washington’s hitherto monopolization of this partnership, which has thus far been advanced without any multipolar influence. Taking advantage of its rapid rapprochements with Israel and Saudi Arabia, Russia should market its prospective role in these initiatives as strengthening both parties’ strategic independence by proactively mitigating any possible overreliance on the US. Seeing as how China stands to gain immensely from these projects, it’s inevitable that the US will exert disproportionate influence over them with time, which is why it’s so important for Russia to apply a positive counterbalancing force when this moment finally arrives.

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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 InfoRos.

I thought that perhaps I had tuned into John Oliver or to Saturday Night Live in error, but no doubt about it, there was an unmistakable President Donald Trump speaking before an audience at the National Space Council. He was saying that on his own presidential authority “I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. … We are going to have the Air Force, and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”

Before signing Space Policy Directive 3 mandating the change and abruptly departing, Trump went on to explain that

“My administration is reclaiming America’s heritage as the world’s greatest space-faring nation. The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers. But our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security. It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.”

The Air Force, which already has a Space Command, will no doubt object to the new arrangement, preferring instead to roll the expanded responsibilities and money into its already existing framework. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is also reported to be against the expansion, explaining in a speech last year that

“The creation of an independent Space Corps, with the corresponding institutional growth and budget implications, does not address…our nation’s fiscal problems in a responsive manner.”

And Donald Trump will have to get over a couple of bureaucratic hurdles to get his nifty new interstellar command up and running. First of all, it will require an Act of Congress to create a new branch of the military. That might not be difficult to do as the expansion is being packaged as “national security,” which Republicans will support reflexively and Democrats will also get behind not wanting to appear weak before the elections in November. And both parties will also be willing to line up to benefit from the political contributions coming from defense contractors as well as the creation of new military support facilities providing jobs in congressional districts.

And then there is the money, alluded to by Mattis. Start-up funding a new, coequal military branch would mean a huge increase in the defense budget. As long as the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency and the treasury can print money without any real backing it is possible to ride the wave, but there are currently significant challenges to the dollars survival in that role. If its supremacy ends, there goes the economy taking the unrestrained government spending with it and sinking the Space Command together with much, much more.

Major defense contractors, all of whom were present to hear Trump’s speech, were immediately seen to be drooling over the prospect of a new cash cow. And at the Pentagon champagne corks were popping at the thought of a couple of hundred new flag officer positions that will have to be invented and filled as well as the full complement of civilians to staff the bureaucracy. And think of the uniforms that will have to be distinct from those used by the other branches of the service, maybe copying those formerly in vogue on the Starship Enterprise or as seen in the movie Starship Troopers.

The reality is that the United States does indeed have a major national security interest in protecting its network of satellites in orbit as well as related infrastructure, but there is still quite a lot in the Trump remarks that is disturbing. Trump is basically saying two things. The first is that he will be weaponizing outer space and the second is that he is doing so because he intends for the United States to become dominant in that domain. It is a complete ass-backwards approach to the problem of potential development of threats coming from beyond the atmosphere. Instead of arming outer space, Washington should be working with other countries that have capabilities in that region to demilitarize exploration and both commercial and government exploitation. Everyone has an interest in not allowing outer space to become the next site for an arms race, though admittedly working with other countries does not appear to be something that the Trump Administration enters into lightly. Or at all.

And Trump should also abandon his insistence that the United States develop “dominance” in space. The use of such language is a red flag that will make any agreement with countries like Russia and China impossible to achieve. It virtually guarantees that there will be a competition among a number of nations to develop and deploy killer satellites employing lasers and other advanced electronic jamming technologies to protect their own outer space infrastructure.

Trump appears to have internalized a viewpoint that sees the United States as surrounded by threats but able to emerge victorious by being hyper-aggressive on all fronts. It is a posture that might unnerve opponents and bring some success in the short term but which ultimately will create a genuine threat as the rest of the world lines up against Washington. That day might be coming if one goes by the reaction to recent U.S. votes in the United Nations and Trump’s behavior at G-7 are anything to go by.

No one in his right mind would allow Trump to dominate outer space based on Washington’s track record of irresponsible leadership since 9/11. It has wrecked the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, killing possibly as many as 4 million Muslims in so doing. It has bullied allies into joining its projects in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria while also disparaging foreign governments and entering into trade wars. It has bankrupted itself in all but name, systematically dismantled the rights of its own citizens, and has become a rogue nation by virtually every measure.

And when you have firmly established the principle that might makes right and all the universe is at the disposal of Washington, what comes next? Antarctica and the arctic region are by some accounts rich in natural resources. Will we Americans be seeing an Antarctic Command with a mandate to dominate the polar regions to enhance national security? Stay tuned.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

Dr. Giraldi is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

When are America’s global corporations and Wall Street going to sit down with President Trump and explain to him that his trade war is not with China but with them.  The biggest chunk of America’s trade deficit with China is the offshored production of America’s global corporations. When the corporations bring the products that they produce in China to the US consumer market, the products are classified as imports from China.  

Six years ago when I was writing The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, I concluded on the evidence that half of US imports from China consist of the offshored production of US corporations.  Offshoring is a substantial benefit to US corporations because of much lower labor and compliance costs. Profits, executive bonuses, and shareholders’ capital gains receive a large boost from offshoring.  The costs of these benefits for a few fall on the many—the former American employees who formerly had a middle class income and expectations for their children.

In my book, I cited evidence that during the first decade of the 21st century “the US lost 54,621 factories, and manufacturing employment fell by 5 million employees.  Over the decade, the number of larger factories (those employing 1,000 or more employees) declined by 40 percent. US factories employing 500-1,000 workers declined by 44 percent; those employing between 250-500 workers declined by 37 percent, and those employing between 100-250 workers shrunk by 30 percent. These losses are net of new start-ups.  Not all the losses are due to offshoring.  Some are the result of business failures” (p. 100).

In other words, to put it in the most simple and clear terms, millions of Americans lost their middle class jobs not because China played unfairly, but because American corporations betrayed the American people and exported their jobs.  “Making America great again” means dealing with these corporations, not with China.  When Trump learns this, assuming anyone will tell him, will he back off China and take on the American global corporations?

The loss of middle class jobs has had a dire effect on the hopes and expectations of Americans, on the American economy, on the finances of cities and states and, thereby, on their ability to meet pension obligations and provide public services, and on the tax base for Social Security and Medicare, thus threatening these important elements of the American consensus.  In short, the greedy corporate elite have benefitted themselves at enormous cost to the American people and to the economic and social stability of the United States.

The job loss from offshoring also has had a huge and dire impact on Federal Reserve policy.  With the decline in income growth, the US economy stalled. The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan substituted an expansion in consumer credit for the missing growth in consumer income in order to maintain aggregate consumer demand. Instead of wage increases, Greenspan relied on an increase in consumer debt to fuel the economy.

The credit expansion and consequent rise in real estate prices, together with the deregulation of the banking system, especially the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, produced the real estate bubble and the fraud and mortgage-backed derivatives that gave us the 2007-08 financial crash.

The Federal Reserve responded to the crash not by bailing out consumer debt but by bailing out the debt of its only constituency—the big banks.  The Federal Reserve let little banks fail and be bought up by the big ones, thus further increasing financial concentration. The multi-trillion dollar increase in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet was entirely for the benefit of a handful of large banks.  Never before in history had an agency of the US government acted so decisively in behalf only of the ownership class.

The way the Federal Reserve saved the irresponsible large banks, which should have failed and have been broken up, was to raise the prices of troubled assets on the banks’ books by lowering interest rates.  To be clear, interest rates and bond prices move in opposite directions. When interest rates are lowered by the Federal Reserve, which it achieves by purchasing debt instruments, the prices of bonds rise. As the various debt risks move together, lower interest rates raise the prices of all debt instruments, even troubled ones. Raising the prices of debt instruments produced solvent balance sheets for the big banks.

To achieve its aim, the Federal Reserve had to lower the interest rates to zero, which even the low reported inflation reduced to negative interest rates.  These low rates had disastrous consequences.  On the one hand low interest rates caused all sorts of speculations.  On the other low interest rates deprived retires of interest income on their retirement savings, forcing them to draw down capital, thus reducing accumulated wealth among the 90 percent.  The under-reported inflation rate also denied retirees Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, forcing them to spend retirement capital.  

The low interest rates also encouraged corporate boards to borrow money in order to buy back the corporation’s stock, thus raising its price and, thereby, the bonuses and stock options of executives and board members and the capital gains of shareholders.  In other words, corporations indebted themselves for the short-term benefit of executives and owners. Companies that refused to participate in this scam were threatened by Wall Street with takeovers.

Consequently today the combination of offshoring and Federal Reserve policy has left us a situation in which every aspect of the economy is indebted—consumers, government at all levels, and businesses.  A recent Federal Reserve study concluded that Americans are so indebted and so poor that 41 percent of the American population cannot raise $400 without borrowing from family and friends or selling personal possessions.

A country whose population is this indebted has no consumer market. Without a consumer market there is no economic growth, other than the false orchestrated figures produced by the US government by under counting the inflation rate.

Without economic growth, consumers, businesses, state, local, and federal governments cannot service their debts and meet their obligations. 

The Federal Reserve has learned that it can keep afloat the Ponzi scheme that is the US economy by printing money with which to support financial asset prices.  The alleged rise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve are not real interest rates rises.  Even the under-reported inflation rate is higher than the interest rate increases, with the result that the real interest rate falls.  If the stock market tries to sell off, before much damage can be done the Federal Reserve steps in and purchases S&P futures, thus driving up stock prices.  

Normally so much money creation by the Federal Reserve, especially in conjunction with such a high debt level of the US government and also state and local governments, consumers, and businesses, would cause a falling US dollar exchange rate.  Why hasn’t this happened?

For three reasons.  One is that the central banks of the other three reserve currencies—the Japanese central bank, the European central bank, and the Bank of England—also print money.  Their Quantitative Easing, which still continues, offsets the dollars created by the Federal Reserve and keeps the US dollar from depreciating.

A second reason is that when suspicion of the dollar’s worth sends up the gold price, the Federal Reserve or its bullion banks short gold futures with naked contracts. This drives down the gold price.  There are numerous columns on my website by myself and Dave Kranzler proving this to be the case.  There is no doubt about it.

The third reason is that money managers, individuals, pension funds, everyone and all the rest had rather make money than not.  Therefore, they go along with the Ponzi scheme.  The people who did not benefit from the Ponzi scheme of the past decade are those who understood it was a Ponzi scheme but did not realize the corruption that has beset the Federal Reserve and the central bank’s ability and willingness to continue to feed the Ponzi scheme. 

As I have explained previously, the Ponzi scheme falls apart when it becomes impossible to continue to support the dollar as burdened as the dollar is by debt levels and abundance of dollars that could be dumped on the exchange markets.  

This is why Washington is determined to retain its hegemony.  It is Washington’s hegemony over Japan, Europe, and the UK that protects the American Ponzi scheme.  The moment one of these central banks ceases to support the dollar, the others would follow, and the Ponzi scheme would unravel.  If the prices of US debt and stocks were reduced to their real values, the United States would no longer have a place in the ranks of world powers.

The implication is that war, and not economic reform, is America’s most likely future.

In a subsequent column I hope to explain why neither US political party has the awareness and capability to deal with real problems.

*

This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

At first glance, all appears calm in this southern Syrian city where protests first broke out seven years ago. Residents mill around shops in preparation for the evening Iftar meal when they break their daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

But the tension is nonetheless palpable in this now government-controlled city. A few weeks ago, Russian-brokered reconciliation talks in southern Syria fell apart when Western-backed militants rejected a negotiated peace.

Whether there will now be a full-on battle for the south or not, visits last week to Syria’s three southern governorates, Daraa, Quneitra, and Suweida, reveal a startling possibility: al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise—the Nusra Front—appears to be deeply entrenched alongside these U.S.-backed militants in key, strategic towns and villages scattered throughout the south.

U.S. media and think tanks obfuscate this fact by referring to all opposition fighters as “rebels” or “moderates.” Take a look at their maps and you only see three colors: red for the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies, green for opposition forces, black for ISIS.

So then, where is the Nusra Front, long considered by Western pundits to be one of the most potent fighting forces against the SAA? Have they simply—and conveniently—been erased from the Syrian battle map?

Discussions with Syrian military experts, analysts, and opposition fighters during my trip revealed that Nusra is alive and kicking in the southern battlefields. The map below specifically identifies areas in the south controlled by Nusra, but there are many more locations that do not appear where Nusra is present and shares power with other militants.

Despite its U.S. and UN designation as a terrorist organization, Nusra has been openly fighting alongside the “Southern Front,” a group of 54 opposition militias funded and commanded by a U.S.-led war room based in Amman, Jordan called the Military Operations Center (MOC).

Specifics about the MOC aren’t easy to come by, but sources inside Syria—both opposition fighters and Syrian military brass (past and present)—suggest the command center consists of the U.S., UK, France, Jordan, Israel, and some Persian Gulf states.

They say the MOC supplies funds, weapons, salaries, intel, and training to the 54 militias, many of which consist of a mere 200 or so fighters that are further broken down into smaller groups, some only a few dozen strong.

SAA General Ahmad al-Issa, a commander for the frontline in Daraa, says the MOC is a U.S.-led operation that controls the movements of Southern Front “terrorists” and is highly influenced by Israel’s strategic goals in the south of Syria—one of which is to seize control of its bordering areas to create a “buffer” inside Syrian territories.

How does he know this? Issa says his information comes from a cross-section of sources, including reconciled/captured militants and intel from the MOC itself. The general cites MOC’s own rulebook for militants as an example of its Israel-centricity:

“One, never threaten or approach any Israeli border in any way. Two, protect the borders with (Israeli-occupied) Golan so no one can enter Israel.”

To illustrate the MOC’s control over southern militants, Issa cites further regulations:

“three, never take any military action before clearing with MOC first. Four, if the MOC asks groups to attack or stop, they must do so.”

What happens if these rules are not upheld?

“They will get their salaries cut,” says Issa.

The armed opposition groups supported by the MOC are mostly affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), itself an ill-defined, highly fungible group of militants who have changed names and affiliations with frequency during the Syrian conflict.

Over the course of the war, the FSA has fought alongside the Nusra Front and ISIS—some have even joined them. Today, despite efforts to whitewash the FSA and Southern Front as “non-sectarian” and non-extremist, factions like the Yarmouk Army, Mu’tazz Billah Brigade, Salah al-Din Division, Fajr al-Islam Brigade, Fallujah al-Houran Brigade, the Bunyan al-Marsous grouping, Saifollah al-Masloul Brigade, and others are currently occupying keys areas in Daraa in cooperation with the Nusra Front.

None of this is news to American policymakers. Even before the MOC was established in February 2014, Nusra militants were fronting vital military maneuvers for the FSA. As one Daraa opposition activist explains:

“The FSA and al-Nusra join together for operations but they have an agreement to let the FSA lead for public reasons, because they don’t want to frighten Jordan or the West…. Operations that were really carried out by al-Nusra are publicly presented by the FSA as their own.”

Efforts to conceal the depth of cooperation between Nusra and the FSA go right to the top. Says one FSA commander in Daraa:

“In many battles, al-Nusra takes part, but we don’t tell the (MOC) operations room about it.”

It’s highly doubtful that the U.S. military remains unaware of this. The Americans operate on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis with regard to FSA-Nusra cooperation. In a 2015 interview with this reporter, CENTCOM spokesman Lieutenant Commander Kyle Raines was quizzed about why Pentagon-vetted fighters’ weapons were showing up in Nusra hands. Raines responded:

“We don’t ‘command and control’ these forces—we only ‘train and enable’ them. Who they say they’re allying with, that’s their business.”

In practice, the U.S. doesn’t appear to mind the Nusra affiliation—regardless of the fact that the group is a terror organization—as long as the job gets done.

U.S. arms have been seen in Nusra’s possession for many years now, including highly valued TOW missiles, which were game-changing weapons in the Syrian military theater. When American weapons end up in al-Qaeda hands during the first or second year of a conflict, one assumes simple errors in judgment. When the problem persists after seven years, however, it starts to look like there’s a policy in place to look the other way.

It’s also not difficult to grasp why U.S. maps patently ignore evidence of Nusra embedded among U.S.-supported militias. The group, after all, is exempt from ceasefires, viewed as a fair target for military strikes at all times.

In December 2015, UN Security Council Resolution 2254 called for “Member States to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as Da’esh), Al-Nusra Front (ANF), and all other individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities associated with Al Qaeda or ISIL, and other terrorist groups, as designated by the Security Council” (emphasis added). Furthermore, the resolution makes clear that ceasefires “will not apply to offensive or defensive actions against these individuals, groups, undertakings and entities.”

This essentially means that the Syrian army and its allies can tear apart any areas in the south of Syria where Nusra fighters—and “entities associated” with it—are based. In effect, international law provides a free hand for a Syrian military assault against U.S.-backed militias co-located with Nusra, and undermines the ability of their foreign sponsors to take retaliatory measures.

That’s why the Nusra Front doesn’t show up on U.S. maps.

In an interview last week, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad blamed the sudden breakdown of southern reconciliation efforts on

“Israeli and American interference,” which he says “put pressure on the terrorists in that area in order to prevent reaching any compromise or peaceful resolution.”

Today, the Israeli border area with Syria is dotted with Nusra and ISIS encampments, which Israel clearly prefers over the Syrian army and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies. The Wall Street Journal even reported last year that Israel was secretly providing funding for salaries, food, fuel, and munitions to militants across its border.

In early June, two former Islamist FSA members (one of them also a former Nusra fighter) in Beit Jinn—a strategic area bordering Syria, Lebanon, and Israel—told me that Israel had been paying their militia’s salaries for a year before a reconciliation deal was struck with the Syrian government.

“Every month Israel would send us $200,000 to keep fighting,” one revealed. “Our leaders were following the outside countries. We were supported by MOC, they kept supporting us till the last minute,” he said.

Earlier that day, in the village of Hadar in the Syrian Golan, members of the Druze community described a bloody Nusra attack last November that killed 17:

“All the people here saw how Israel helped Nusra terrorists that day. They covered them with live fire from the hilltops to help Nusra take over Hadar. And at the end of the fights, Israel takes in the injured Nusra fighters and provides them with medical services,” says Marwan Tawil, a local English teacher.

“The ceasefire line (Syrian-Israeli border) is 65 kilometers between here to Jordan, and only this area is under the control of the SAA,” explains Hadar’s mayor. “Sixty kilometers is with Nusra and Israel and only the other five are under the SAA.”

Israel is so heavily vested in keeping Syria and its allies away from its borders, it has actively bolstered al-Qaeda and other extremists in Syria’s southern theater. As Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon famously explained in 2016,

“In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.”

To justify their interventions in the battle ahead, the U.S. and Israel claim that Iranian and Hezbollah forces are present in the south, yet on the ground in Daraa and Quneitra, there is no visible sight of either.

Multiple sources confirm this in Daraa, and insist that that there are only a handful of Hezbollah advisors—not fighters—in the entire governorate.

So why the spin? “This is a public diplomacy effort to make the West look like they’ve forced Iran and Hezbollah out of the south,” explains General Issa.

The U.S., Israel, and their allies cannot win this southern fight. They can only prolong the insecurity for a while before the SAA decides to launch a military campaign against the 54-plus-militias-Nusra occupying the south of Syria. The end result is likely to be a negotiated settlement peppered with a few “soft battles” to eject the more hardline militants.

As one SAA soldier on the scene in Daraa tells me: “Fifty-four factions in a small area shows weakness more than it shows strength.” And their cooperation with the Nusra Front just makes the targets on their backs even larger.

*

On April 19th, university students in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, exploded onto the streets. Their initial demand? A more effective government response to wildfires burning out of control in the country’s most precious repository of biodiversity.

Soon, a social wildfire took hold in Managua and then spread across the country. Thousands of Nicaraguans added a second demand to the first: for President Daniel Ortega to revoke his recent changes to the country’s social security law, which had simultaneously raised social security taxes (upsetting private enterprise) and cut benefits to seniors (angering many ordinary people). In the ensuing clashes, close to 200 Nicaraguans have died, hundreds have been arrested, and thousands have been injured, almost all at the hands of anti-riot police, unidentified snipers, or gangs of pro-government thugs on motorcycles. Today, this movement of auto-convocados (self-conveners) articulates two key demands: justice and democracy — justice for those who have died at the government’s hand and a return to democratic governance for Nicaragua.

Why should we care? In a world where the U.S. president proclaims his desire to see his people “sit up and pay attention” to him the way North Koreans do for Kim Jong-Un; where his attorney general tore children from their parents’ arms; where the United States plans to initiate the militarization of space (despite our endorsement of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws exactly that) — in such a world, why should people care what happens in an impoverished Central American nation thousands of miles from the centers of power?

Because there was a time when Nicaragua’s imaginative, idiosyncratic revolution offered the world an example of how a people might shuck off the bonds of U.S. dominance and try to build a democratic country devoted to human well-being. I know, because I saw a little of that example during the six months I spent in Nicaragua’s war zones in 1984, working with an organization called Witness for Peace. My job there was to report on the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary (Contra) military campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government, which had replaced a vicious dictator in 1979.  The Contras employed an intentional terrorist strategy of torture, kidnapping, and murder, targeting civilians in their homes and fields and workers in rural schools and clinics.

Some (Abbreviated) History

Nicaragua sits dead center on any map of the Americas and, in the 1980s, small as it was, it also occupied the center of the political imaginations of many people. In that country lay the hopes of millions living beyond its borders, hopes that a people really could become the protagonists of their own nation’s story or, in the words of the Sandinista anthem, “dueño de su historia, arquitecto de su liberación” — directors of their own history, architects of their own liberation.

Before the fall of its Washington-supported dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle (image on the right), in 1979, very few people outside Central America had given a thought to Nicaragua. It was the poorest, most illiterate nation in the region. Indeed, Somoza is reported to have said, “I don’t need educated people. I need oxen!” (Or, as our own president put it during his 2016 campaign, “I love the poorly educated!”) In the years following the dictator’s ouster, Nicaragua became a symbol of hope for people on the left globally.

Somoza had treated Nicaragua like his own private hacienda, leasing out its hillsides for clear-cutting to U.S. and Canadian lumber companies and, along with an oligarchic class of landowners and businessmen, squeezing every dollar out of the people he ruled. He maintained his power thanks to a regime of intimidation, torture, and assassination. His National Guard functioned like a private army (and would eventually form the nucleus of the Contras after many of its members fled to neighboring Honduras when the Sandinistas came to power).

In 1979, however, after a year-long insurrection fought in the mountainous areas of the country by a guerrilla force armed with AK-47s and in the cities by ordinary citizens wielding homemade bombs thrown from behind barricades, the Somoza regime collapsed. By the time he fled, after a brutal final round of aerial bombardment, no sector of the country backed him. Erstwhile allies like the big landowners, private industry, and the Catholic Church, along with the press of all stripes, had all turned on him. So had the majority of Nicaraguans, the rural campesinos (a word inadequately translated as “peasants”), and the country’s tiny urban working class. In the end, even his patrons in Washington abandoned Somoza as a hopeless cause.

A group called the Frente Sandinista (the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN) stepped into the vacuum he left. Founded in 1961, it took its name from Augusto César Sandino (image on the left), a guerrilla leader who had fought against a U.S. occupation of Nicaragua decades earlier. In 1978, despite internal disagreements, the group united around four basic principles of governance: political pluralism; the formation of a mixed economy, including private ownership, state-owned enterprises, and collectives; popular mobilization through a variety of mass organizations; and a foreign policy of nonalignment.

In July 1979, when Somoza resigned and fled the country, the FSLN assumed power with long-established plans to improve the lives of the rural and urban poor. The party established health clinics, promoted free public education, and offered a “canasta básica” (basic food basket) of affordable staple foods, quickly reducing the endemic malnutrition in the country. Through a national vaccination campaign, it eliminated polio in 1981. It also brought in laws that protected poor farmers from losing their land to banks and instituted agrarian reform, transferring land titles to thousands of previously landless campesinos.

In 1980, 90,000 people, two-thirds of them middle-class high school students from the cities, took part in a national literacy campaign. In the process, those young students spent five months living with campesino families, learning about the hardships (and joys) of subsistence farming. In return for such hospitality, those students taught their host families to read. Today, my partner sits on the board of a Nicaraguan development NGO, several of whose organizers began their lives of community engagement as teenage participants in that literacy campaign.

Of course, the Sandinista government was not perfect. Some of its worst policies reflected the country’s endemic racism against indigenous groups and English-speaking Nicaraguans of African descent. Existing conflict between the Sandinistas and Miskito Indians was further exacerbated by the government’s imposition of a military draft in response to the Contra war. Many Miskitos were members of the pacifist Moravian church, but the Sandinistas interpreted their resistance to the draft as complicity with the enemy, and so opened the way for successful CIA infiltration of the group.

The military draft became deeply unpopular throughout the country and its enforcement was sometimes heavy-handed. More than once, I sat on a bus stopped at a Sandinista roadblock, waiting for soldiers to check the papers of all the young men on board to be sure none of them were draft dodgers.

The Sandinistas also created and consolidated government structures, including a presidency and national assembly. When the party swept the 1984 elections with 67% of the vote, and Daniel Ortega became president, no one doubted that the result represented the will of the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans.

In 1986, the National Constitutional Assembly approved a new constitution, which granted abundant rights to Nicaraguans, including women and LGBT people. One of its articles even called for absolute equality between men and women and the full sharing of housework and childcare. (Let’s pause here to remember that the U.S. Constitution has yet to include any kind of Equal Rights Amendment, let alone an article requiring men to share equally in domestic labor!)

Among the new constitution’s provisions was a six-year fixed term for the presidency.

However, Nicaraguans were not stupid. They knew that, as long as the Sandinistas ran the government, the U.S. would continue its Contra war. So, in 1990, Nicaraguans replaced the FSLN with the UNO party run by Violeta Chamorro in a result that shocked many people outside Nicaragua, including the Sandistas’ U.S. polling firm. The people had spoken, and the Sandinistas accepted their verdict.

And that was momentous in itself. For the first time in history, a victorious revolutionary party allowed itself to be voted out of office, relinquishing many of its hopes, but preserving the democratic structures so many Nicaraguans had died to create and maintain.

Nicaragua in U.S. Hearts and Minds

While Nicaragua was having its revolution, back in the United States we were enduring our own: the Reagan Revolution. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s successful attack on the New Deal structures still embedded in American life. The Reagan administration undermined unions, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated vital industries from banking to health care (with disastrous results still felt today), attacked social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medicaid, and turned perfectly respectable words like “welfare” and “entitlement” into code for African American moral turpitude. AIDS was ravaging gay communities, but the president refused to even say the word in public until the first year of his second term. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration escalated Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs” into a full-scale assault on poor communities. In 1986, the president signed a drug law requiring guaranteed — and long — prison sentences even for minor, non-violent drug offenses.

In other words, things in the U.S. were pretty grim. That made it tempting indeed to adopt someone else’s ready-made revolution, especially one that had already achieved so much and had such a great soundtrack: the music of the brothers Luis and Carlos Mejía Godoy, including the Sandinista anthem mentioned above and the beloved “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita,” with its final line,

“Pero ahora que ya sos libre, Nicaragüita, yo te quiero mucho más.”(“But now that you are free, little Nicaragua, I love you so much more.”)

And Nicaragua was indeed free, although also under attack. The United States had always been its biggest trading partner. In 1985, however, President Reagan embargoed all trade with the country and cut off air and sea transport to and from the U.S. Other nations, including Soviet bloc countries, Cuba, and the European Union, along with many thousands of American individuals and organizations, stepped in to offer material aid, technical assistance, and in the case of Witness for Peace, accompaniment in the war zones. Such volunteers risked their lives — young engineer Ben Linder actually lost his — for the privilege of being part of this experiment in liberation.

In my six months there, I met Nicaraguans who had never been more than 50 kilometers from the tiny villages in which they were born, but had a vision of change that would spread across Central America, Latin America, and — as in my case — even reach the United States. Over and over, people told me,

“Americans can stop Congress from voting for aid to the Contras this year; you can stop it next year, but until you make a revolution in your own country, nothing will really change. We will always be confronted by U.S. power.”

Heady stuff. And it turned a lot of heads, not always in the most helpful ways. Some visiting Americans became ever more convinced that their own left-wing party back home was destined to become the vanguard that would bring revolution to North America. Some became more rojinegro (red and black, the colors of the FSLN’s flag) than the Sandinistas themselves and would hear no criticism of the party or its leaders. Others simply lived for the day when they could abandon the United States, with its hopeless, politically backward population, and make the permanent move to Nicaragua, and its highly conscious (or in today’s language, “woke”) people.

And some of us reluctantly acknowledged that, much as we loved Nicaragua’s brilliant green mountains, our real work lay in our own country. We came home believing that if we could not find a way to love the United States, despite its maddening intransigence, we would never find a way to change it.

Trouble in Paradise

Like everything in Nicaragua, its post-1990 history has proven complicated indeed. As a start, some of the elements in the FSLN most committed to popular democracy left to form smaller Sandinista-style parties, but without significant success at the ballot box. Meanwhile, in the months between the election and the transfer of power, many Sandinistas took part in the Piñata — a wholesale appropriation of state-owned property, companies, vehicles, and cash. In the process, Daniel Ortega, his wife Rosario Murillo, and other high-ranking party members began amassing personal fortunes and rebuilding their political power. The couple even underwent a well-publicized conversion to a charismatic form of Roman Catholicism (which helps explain why Nicaragua today has one of the world’s harshest anti-abortion laws).

By 1999, Ortega had made a pact with the notorious right-wing politician and then-president, Arnoldo Alemán. He and his PLC party, which drew its support from the oligarchic class that once supported Samoza, had beaten Violeta Chamorro in the 1996 election. Alemán was later convicted of corruption on a grand scale and sentenced to years of house arrest.

In 2006, Daniel Ortega was again elected president. Having himself weathered a number of personal scandals, including his stepdaughter Zoilamerica’s credible accusations of years of sexual abuse, he would gradually grant Alemán complete clemency.

In the 12 years since his second election, Ortega has consolidated his own power, placed family members in important (and lucrative) positions, and achieved full control of the FSLN party apparatus. He engineered constitutional changes that now permit him to serve an unlimited number of terms; that is, he granted himself a potential presidency for life.

In spite of the increasingly autocratic nature of his rule, Nicaragua has seen substantial economic development in the last decade, from which many have benefitted. Ortega’s is an authoritarian government that has nonetheless provided real material benefits to Nicaraguans. Furthermore, whether because of a lingering esprit de corps in the police and army or thanks to Ortega’s mano dura (harsh hand), or a combination of the two, the country is not suffering the plague of drugs and government-by-cartel that has terrorized the peoples of much of the rest of Central America and Mexico.

Today, the United States is once again Nicaragua’s largest trading partner and the Ortega government is on good terms with international lending agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

At the Crossroads

In towns and urban neighborhoods across the country, people have once again built barricades, as Sandinista supporters did in the 1979 insurrection against Somoza. Once again, they are pulling up the concrete paving blocks once produced in Somoza’s own factory — this time to prevent the Sandinista police from entering their towns and neighborhoods.

Envío, a digital magazine put out by the University of Central America in Managua, calls this uprising an unarmed revolution. “Unarmed” is a modest exaggeration, since defenders at many of the barricades have used homemade mortars (steel tubes which hold hemp fuses attached to bags of gunpowder), but the demonstrators are massively outgunned by the government’s regular army and the police, as well as the turbas — organized gangs of thugs.

For longtime Nicaragua-watchers, it has been strange to see COSEP, the country’s private industry council and inveterate Sandinista opponent, joining with university students and campesinos to create a Civil Alliance for Justice and Democracy. In late May, leaders of the Alliance agreed to a dialogue with the government, mediated by the country’s council of Catholic bishops. The talks have been on-again, off-again ever since.

Although leftists around the world hailed Ortega’s return to power, his is not the revolutionary government of the 1980s. Perhaps because they wish it were, some Ortega supporters here and elsewhere are treating the present uprisings as if they were a reprise of the Contra war, a right-wing coup attempt orchestrated in Washington. I don’t think that’s true, although I have Nicaraguan friends who disagree with me.

To blame everything that happens in the country on puppet masters in Washington denies Nicaraguans their own agency. As student leader Madelaine Caracas told the German news network Deutsche Welle:

“It’s us Nicaraguans who are in the streets. Not a political party, not liberals, not conservatives, not the CIA. It’s an awakening, an exhaustion with seeing our brothers murdered.”

Y Ahora, Qué? (Now What?)

When Somoza left power, the FSLN was waiting, ready to govern. As far as I can tell, today there is no such organized force on the left that could fill the vacuum left by Ortega, for example, by successfully campaigning in any new elections. If, however, Ortega refuses to leave office, the alternatives are at least as painful to consider: his successful repression of a genuine uprising of popular anger through yet more killings, beatings, and jailings (with the continuation of an autocratic government into the unknown future), or a turn from a largely unarmed and, when armed, defensive, resistance to a full-scale civil war, with all the horrors that entails.

The only thing I am sure of is that Nicaragua always does better when the United States is looking elsewhere. So let’s hope Trump keeps his focus on infuriating his allies and courting his enemies in other parts of the world.

Many years ago, I sat in a hotel room — really more of a cot in a shed — in the tiny town of San Juan de Bocay, talking with my Witness for Peace travelling companion and a young Sandinista soldier. The soldier’s pet chipmunk sat on the windowsill chewing sunflower seeds. We discussed what the revolution meant to him and his country, and his hopes as well as ours that Nicaragua’s seeds of liberation would spread through the Americas. In that warm, dim light, revolution almost seemed possible.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to the chipmunk’s name. It was Napoleon.

*

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

The troops live under
The cannon’s thunder
From Sind to Cooch Behar
Moving from place to place
When they come face to face
With a different breed of fellow
Whose skins are black or yellow
They quick as winking chop him into
Beefsteak tartar
—“The Cannon Song” from “The Threepenny Opera”

The soldier’s tale is as old as war. It is told and then forgotten. There are always young men and women ardent for glory, seduced by the power to inflict violence and naive enough to die for the merchants of death. The soldier’s tale is the same, war after war, generation after generation. It is Spenser Rapone’s turn now. The second lieutenant was given an “other than honorable” discharge June 18 after an Army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers” and thereby had engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Rapone laid bare the lie, although the lie often seems unassailable. We must honor those like him who have the moral courage to speak the truth about war, even if the tidal waves of patriotic propaganda that flood the culture overwhelm the voices of the just.

Rapone enlisted in the Army in 2010. He attended basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. He graduated from airborne school in February 2011 and became an Army Ranger. He watched as those around him swiftly fetishized their weapons.

“The rifle is the reification of what it means to be infantrymen,” he said when I reached him by phone in Watertown, N.Y. “You’re taught that the rifle is an extension of you. It is your life. You have to carry it at all times. The rifle made us warriors dedicated to destroying the enemy in close personal combat. At first, it was almost gleeful. We were a bunch of 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds. We had this instrument of death in our hands. We had power. We could do what 99 percent of our countrymen could not. The weapon changes you. You want to prove yourself. You want to be tested in combat. You want to deliver death. It draws you in, as much as life in the Army sucks. You start executing tactical maneuvers and battle drills. You get a certain high. It’s seductive. The military beats empathy out of you. It makes you callous.”

He was disturbed by what was happening around him and to him.

“When you get to RASP [the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program], you’re told you not only have to understand Ranger culture and history, you have to adopt what’s called an airborne Ranger in the sky,” he said. “They make you go online and look at Rangers who were killed in action. You have to learn about this person and print out a copy of their obituary. It’s really unsettling, the whole process. This was a class leader acting on behalf of the cadre, he said something to the effect of ‘I’ll give you a hint, don’t pick Pat Tillman.’ ”

Rapone began to read about Pat Tillman, the professional football player who joined the Rangers and was killed in 2004 in Afghanistan by friendly fire, a fact that senior military officials, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who at the time was the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, covered up and replaced with a fictitious Hollywood version of death in combat with the enemy. Rapone watched the 2010 documentary “The Tillman Story” and would later read the 2006 Truthdig essay “After Pat’s Birthday,” written by Pat’s brother Kevin, who was in the Rangers with Pat. Pat Tillman, who had been in contact with Noam Chomsky, had become a critic of the war. In addition to lying to the Tillman family about Pat’s death, the Army did not return, and probably destroyed, Pat’s papers and diary.

“Pat Tillman showed me I could resist the indoctrination,” he said. “I did not have to let the military dehumanize me and turn me into something monstrous. When I learned how his death was covered up to sell the war, it was shocking. The military wasn’t interested in preserving freedom or democracy. It was only interested in protecting the profits of those in power and expanding the U.S. hegemony. I was not a Hollywood freedom fighter. I was a cog in the imperialist machine. I preyed on the poorest, most exploited people on the planet.”

“We were told to ‘shoot, move, and communicate,’ ” he said of his Ranger training. “This became our entire existence. We did not need to understand why or the larger implications. These things did not concern us.”

By July 2011 he was in Khost province in Afghanistan. He was 19 years old. He was an assistant machine gunner on an Mk-48, an 18-pound weapon that is mounted on a tripod and has a fire rate of 500 to 625 rounds per minute. He carried the spare barrel, along with the ammunition, which he fed into the gun. When his fellow Rangers cleared dwellings at night he set up a blocking position. He watched as the Rangers separated terrified men, women and children, treating them “as if they were animals.” The Rangers spoke of the Afghans as subhumans, dismissing them as “hajjis” and “ragheads.”

“A lot of the guys would say, ‘I want to go out every night and kill people,’ ” he told me. “The Rangers are about hyper-masculinity, misogyny, racism, and a hatred of other cultures.”

His platoon sergeant had the hammer of Thor, a popular symbol among white supremacists, tattooed on his arm. The sergeant told new Rangers that if they saw something that upset them and wanted to speak out about it they were “in the wrong fucking place.”

Rapone left the Rangers to attend West Point in 2012. Maybe, as an officer, he could make a difference, infuse some humanity into his squads of killers. But he had his doubts.

“When I started West Point in July 2012 I encountered a lot of similar themes I noticed in the Ranger regiment,” he said. “Officers and NCOs relished the idea of being able to kill people with impunity. It’s Rudyard Kipling. It’s the young British soldier mentality we’ve seen for hundreds of years. Its hyper-masculine. Even female cadets have to assimilate themselves. Any display of femininity is considered weakness. This is combined with the structural racism. They still honor [Confederate Gen.] Robert E. Lee at West Point. There’s a barracks named after him. There’s a portrait of him in the library in his Confederate uniform. In the bottom right of the portrait, in the background, is a slave.”

Rapone watched with growing anger as black cadets were kicked out for infractions that did not lead to the expulsion of white cadets.

He majored in history. But he read outside of the curriculum, including authors such as Howard Zinn and Stan Goff, a former Special Forces master sergeant who had been in Vietnam, Haiti, Panama, Colombia and Somalia and who wrote “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti.”

“I realized we are the muscle for those with wealth and status,” Rapone said. “I also realized I was a socialist. It was jarring.”

His outspokenness and criticism saw him reprimanded.

“I almost got kicked out my senior year at West Point,” he said. “At that point, I was a socialist. When you study political economy, when you study critical theory, it informs your analysis and your work. It started off as an academic position. But I thought there has to be more to this. There has to be some kind of an action to back up my theories.”

He was derided as the “communist cadet.” He sought out those at the military academy who suffered from discrimination there, including people of color, women and Muslims. He joined the Muslim Cadet Association, although he is not Muslim.

“I wanted to help Muslim cadets find a platform,” he said. “I wanted them to know they were not forgotten. At West Point, there weren’t too many people who understood or appreciated Islam or how the U.S. has ripped Islamic countries to shreds.”

He helped organize an effort to provide Muslims at the academy with a proper prayer space, something that led him into heated arguments with senior administrative officials.

One professor confronted him:

“I’ve been watching you for the past three, four years—you think you can do whatever you want.”

“Yes, sir,” Rapone answered, a response that resulted in his being written up for speaking back to an officer.

The professor examined his social media accounts and found Rapone was posting articles from socialist publications and criticizing U.S. policy on Syrian refugees. The teacher sent a file on Rapone to the Criminal Investigations Division and G2, or military intelligence. Rapone was interrogated by senior officers. He was issued a “punishment tour” lasting 100 hours. He was forced to walk back and forth in the central square at West Point in his full dress uniform each week until the required hours were fulfilled.

“It looked like something out of a Monty Python sketch,” he said.

He was stripped of his privileges for 60 days. His spring break was canceled. He spent spring break doing landscaping and other menial tasks to “pay off” his punishment debt. He was required to train cadets who had not passed a required event.

“At West Point, they’ll maintain that hazing doesn’t exist,” he said, “at least the kind that was around in the ’50s or ’60s. But it’s still hazing. You’re considered a plebe when you first get to West Point. You take out upper classmen’s trash every night. You’re not allowed to talk when you’re outside as a plebe. You have to keep your hands balled up and walk in position of attention. If you’re caught talking to a classmate, you’ll get in trouble. The worst part is that those who move on from their plebe year enforce the same dehumanizing behavior, which they despised, on the new plebes.”

He had experienced hazing in the Rangers, too. New Rangers were forced to fight each other and do numerous push-ups or were hogtied and their stomachs were smacked repeatedly.

“The hazing weeds out people who won’t embrace it,” he said. “To resist total assimilation, a lot of people create an ironic detachment. But this ironic detachment is really another form of assimilation. It runs pretty deep. There was a guy in a leadership position who tried to kill himself when I was overseas. There were cadets who committed suicide when I was at West Point and others who tried to commit suicide. I spent eight years in the Army. Suicide was a very tangible reality. A lot of suicides were the result of the combination of hazing and military culture, which in a sense is a form of hazing. Your drill instructor can’t beat the shit out of you the way he used to, but the military still has methods to torture you emotionally.”

When he graduated from West Point he was sent back to Fort Benning, where he had been a young recruit six years earlier.

“Every other Friday a basic training class graduates,” he said. “I would see these buzzed-cut teenaged boys, who had barely progressed out of puberty, being sent into the meat grinder. It was unsettling. I was being trained to lead these guys, to tell them the mission we were doing was just and right. I could not in good conscience do that. I searched for an opening. I looked for ways to leave or speak out. When the whole national anthem thing was starting up with Colin Kaepernick (image on the right), putting his skin in the game, risking himself to fight against systemic racism, I thought I could at least do my part.”

He posted a picture of himself in uniform with the hashtag #VeteransForKaepernick.

“Everything snowballed from there,” he said. “Colin Kaepernick, for me, was linked to Pat Tillman. He too was willing to risk himself and his status to speak truth to power.”

His public support of Kaepernick—along with his social media posts of photos of himself at his 2016 graduation at West Point wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt under his uniform and holding up his fist as he showed the words “Communism will win” on the inside of his cap—led to an investigation. Afterward, the Army’s 10th Mountain Division accept his resignation.

“The United States is almost religious about its patriotism,” he said. “Military personnel are seen as infallible. You have someone like [Secretary of Defense] James Mattis, who is a bona fide war criminal. He dropped bombs on a wedding ceremony in Iraq. He’s responsible for overseeing many different massacres in Iraq. Or [general and former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster. These people can’t do any wrong because they’ve served. This reverence for the military is priming the population to accept military rule and a form of fascism or protofascism. That’s why I felt even more compelled to get out.”

“The public doesn’t understand how regressive and toxic military culture is,” he went on. “The military’s inherent function is the abuse and degradation of other people. It is designed to be a vehicle of destruction. It’s fundamental to the system. Without that, it would collapse. You can’t convert the military into a humanitarian force even when you use the military in humanitarian ways, such as in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The military trains soldiers to see other human beings, particularly brown and black human beings, as an imminent threat.”

“Of course, the military prides itself on being apolitical, which is oxymoronic,” he said. “The military is the political muscle of the state. There are few things more dangerous than a soldier who thinks he or she doesn’t have a political function.”

“I want to implore other soldiers and military personnel, there’s more to being a soldier than knowing how to fire a weapon,” Rapone said. “You can take a lot of what you’ve learned into society and actually help. At West Point, they say they teach you to be a leader of character. They talk to you about moral fortitude. But what do we see in the military? I was blindly following orders. I was inflicting violence on the poorest people on earth. How is there any morality in that?”

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco.

Featured image is by Mr. Fish/Truthdig.

The U.S. Navy has proposed training and testing exercises in the Pacific Ocean that could injure or kill thousands of marine mammals, including endangered whales and seals. The proposal would allow the Navy to harm marine mammals approximately 15 million times over five years.

That take, which the Navy today asked the National Marine Fisheries Service to authorize, could include seriously injuring 83 California long-beaked dolphins, three endangered blue whales and three Hawaiian monk seals, an endangered monk-seal population that has only recently begun to recover after heading toward extinction.

“The Navy doesn’t need to blow up dolphins or blast whales with sonar to keep us safe. Sonar can injure and deafen whales who depend on hearing for their survival,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Hawaiian monk seals will pay a big price for the Navy’s war games in its habitat.”

The latest analysis shows the Navy exercises would cause approximately 15 million  harmful incidents. Long-beaked common dolphins could be harmed more than 1.1 million times and blue whales 9,245 times over five years. Hawaiian monk seals could be harmed 916 times. The exercises could also seriously injure 18 humpback whales, 444 short-beaked common dolphins and 478 California sea lions.

Ocean mammals depend on hearing for navigation, feeding and reproduction. Scientists have linked military sonar and live-fire activities to mass whale beaching, exploded eardrums and even death. In 2004, during war games near Hawaii, the Navy’s sonar was implicated in a mass stranding of up to 200 melon-headed whales in Hanalei Bay, Kauai.

The Navy and Fisheries Service estimate that, over the current plan’s five-year period, training and testing activities will result in thousands of animals suffering permanent hearing loss, lung injuries or death. Millions of animals will be exposed to temporary injuries and disturbances, with many subjected to multiple harmful exposures.

Featured image: Children in immigration detention facilities are required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, according to the Washington Post. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol)

While tearing children away from parents under a policy designed to keep asylum seekers from entering U.S. society, the Trump administration is forcing those same children to pledge their allegiance to the country that is actively trying to expel them.

We make the children recite a pledge of allegiance to the country that took them from their parents. This is calculated sadism.https://t.co/pYHl4VBxRt

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) June 25, 2018

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week stating that families would be detained together under his “zero tolerance” immigration policy, but thousands of children remain separated from their parents.

The Washington Post on Monday detailed the conditions in which many of those children are living, in detention centers like Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas, describing “a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.”

A facility employee told the Post, “We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect.'”

Hey, kids-you don't speak English, we ripped you from your parents, we've put you in cages and you'll never be Americans-so now recite the Pledge of Allegiance. https://t.co/HRGz0uszsp

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) June 25, 2018

Abducted little refugee kids forced to recite the pledge of allegiance to the country abusing them as a sign of respect. Because nothing says respect like abducting kids.
https://t.co/TgKS7lNCpa via @Splinter_news

— PEZ (@Seriously_usa_) June 25, 2018

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, Casa Padre also features a prominently displayed mural of President Donald Trump.

As details about the treatment of children in detention facilities have emerged, many have drawn comparisons to internment camps for Japanese-Americans that were established during World War II. Actor and activist George Takei‘s memories of the camp he lived in as a child mirror the descriptions of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Every morning at the shelter for separated immigrant children begins the same way. The kids are asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. @washingtonpost

(https://t.co/HbxIezl1xz)

We have been here before. @GeorgeTakei on his experience during WWII.https://t.co/aj0qyH5nKT pic.twitter.com/qvxgFWyacG

— Meghna Chakrabarti (@MeghnaWBUR) June 25, 2018

As the Post‘s report coincided with much discussion of the Virginia restaurant whose owner refused to serve White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders over the weekend—and other public protests against administration officials—many critics strongly pushed back against the notion that Americans should be concerned with “civility” toward the Trump administration—while children are being forced to show “respect” for the government holding them hostage.

And they want us to believe that the big moral outrage here is that the people behind this aren't welcome at nice restaurants.

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) June 25, 2018

Let me make sure I have this straight: babies and children who have done nothing wrong are being ripped away from their parents, locked in cages, and being forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in front of murals of Donald Trump, but the biggest crisis of today is "civility"?

— Evan Greer (@evan_greer) June 25, 2018

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

On June 19, the Senate passed a draft defense bill for FY 2019 that would halt the transfer of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft to Turkey, until the secretary of state certifies that Turkey will not accept deliveries of Russian S-400 Triumf air-defense systems. It paves the way for Ankara’s expulsion from the program if it does not bow to this pressure. The support for the measure (85-10) is too strong to be overridden.

Turkey has been one of six major partner nations in the JSF project since 2002. It is responsible for the production of certain components and for providing maintenance services in Europe to other operators of the aircraft. About a dozen Turkish companies are involved in the manufacturing, in accordance with the deal that was reached 16 years ago (2002). Ankara has placed an order to buy more than 100 F-35A Lightning IIs. It has already paid $800 million, so any restrictions that are imposed now will be an illegal breach of obligations by the US.

On June 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee added an amendment to the foreign-aid bill that would put a stop to future deliveries, if Ankara does not cancel the S-400 deal already concluded with Moscow. One of the arguments for blocking the F-35 transfer is the fear that Russia would get access to the JSF, enabling Moscow to detect and exploit its vulnerabilities. It would learn how the S-400 could take out an F-35.

Screenshot from the Reuters

The House version contains even more limits on arms transfers to Turkey. In May, the bill passed the House with a provision mandating a temporary hold on all major defense sales to Turkey, including F-35s, due in part to its impending purchase of the S-400. Almaz-Antey, the company that manufactures the Triumf, is on a State Department list of banned entities. Any deal with that firm could result in sanctions. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) has introduced an amendment to the FY 2019 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 6157) that would bar the planned transfer of the aircraft to Turkey. So, there may be some changes to the wording but that won’t significantly alter the final result — the F-35 transfer will remain blocked after the reconciliation process.

The bill is expected to become law this summer. The administration will have no choice but to exclude Turkey from the F-35 program, to remove any parts of the plane produced in that country, and to ban the Turkish F-35s from leaving the territory of the United States.

Despite the proceedings on Capitol Hill, officials from the government and Lockheed Martin held a ceremony on June 21 in Fort Worth, Texas, to mark the “roll out” of the first F-35A Lightning II jet under its Turkish program. It was an imposing ceremony, but it disguised some sleight of hand. The US government will retain custody of the aircraft while the Turkish pilots and service technicians are undergoing training at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. This is a long process that will take several years, but the bill will become law soon. Turkey may be denied access to the cloud-based Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) computer network, depriving it of software updates and other data. The US could insert some malicious code to disable the aircraft even if they are transferred and based in Turkey in 2020 as planned.

US officials don’t shy away from open statements about their intentions to exert pressure and prevent other countries from buying Russian weapons.

“I would work with our allies to dissuade them, or encourage them, to avoid military purchases that would be potentially sanctionable,” said David Schenker, the nominee for assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, at his Senate confirmation hearing on June 14. “In other words, I would tell Saudi Arabia not to do it,” he explained.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are in talks with Moscow to buy the S-400.

According to UAWire, The US State Department’s Office of Cooperative Threat Reduction has announced a tender for the monitoring of open-source information about arms deals involving the Russian Federation and the CIS countries. That data will be collected in Russian, English, Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Urdu, and several other languages. The information will be used for decision-making and planning sanctions against foreign states.

So far, the policy of twisting arms has failed. Demand for Russian arms is booming in the Middle East and Africa. Just a few days ago, one of Iraq’s armored brigades swapped out its American-made M1 Abrams tanks for new Russian T-90s. Last year, Russia and Iraq signed a huge arms deal.

Unfazed by the US lawmakers’ stance, Ankara remains all set to go ahead with the purchase of the S-400 from Moscow. If the deal is blocked it will find an alternative, such as Russia’s Su-57 jet, or Turkey could produce an aircraft of its own, as part of its indigenous TFX stealth fighter program.

India has recently been warned against buying the Russian S-400. If it does, a ban will be put in place on sharing sensitive American military technology with Delhi, which is refusing to back down under pressure.

A deal is not always what one may think it is. A deal signed with the US is a special case because there are strings attached, which cannot be found in the text and are not mentioned during the negotiations. All of a sudden a partner finds out that there is a caveat that goes without saying. One may sign a deal and be naive enough to take it at face value, only to find out later that it will not be valid if certain unwritten conditions are not met. If you cooperate with another country without US approval, like Turkey does, you don’t get what you are entitled to under the terms of that agreement. Buy American, they say, but if you make a deal with Russia, like India wants to do, the access to the best technology the US has is going to be cut off.

Congress has offered a lesson to those who cooperate with America. They should remember that whatever they may sign with Washington cannot be taken for granted. US lawmakers can change everything to their heart’s content at any time they wish. There is nothing worse than an unreliable partner. And that’s what America is.

*

Peter Korzun is an expert on wars and conflicts.

Featured image is from the author.

Featured image: The ‘high risk’ Sizewell nuclear power plant, seen from Southwold, Suffolk. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

In the Guardian recently, Paul Brown reminded us that in 2012 a document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed that the Environment Agency was warning that 12 out of the UK’s 19 nuclear sites were in danger of coastal flooding and erosion because of climate change. Among them was Hinkley Point in Somerset, one of the eight proposed sites for new nuclear power stations around the coasts.

The analysis was conducted by officials from the floods and coastal erosion team (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Defra) as part of a major investigation into the impact of climate change on the UK. But when the results were published in January 2012 only summary numbers for the 2080s were mentioned and no individual sites were named.

That was before the increasing volume of melting of the Greenland ice cap was properly understood and when most experts thought there was no net melting in the Antarctic.

Now we read that melting ice sheets are hastening sea level rise and satellite measurements and that warmer seas are eroding ice shelves and glaciers. Estimates of sea level rise in the next 50 years have gone up from less than 30cm to more than a metre, well within the lifespan of the nuclear stations the UK government has planned.

Defra has now released its full analysis in response to a request under freedom of information legislation. As a result, the department’s assessments of the risks for individual sites can be disclosed for the first time. Seven of those sites containing radioactive waste stores are judged to be at some risk of flooding now, with a further three at risk of erosion by the 2080s.

Experts suggested the main concern was of inundation causing nuclear waste leaks.

“Sea level rise, especially in the south-east of England, will mean some of these sites will be under water within 100 years,” said David Crichton, a flood specialist and honorary professor at the hazard research centre at University College London. “This will make decommissioning expensive and difficult, not to mention the recovery and movement of nuclear waste to higher ground.”

The extra coastal erosion and threat of storm surges that this increase in sea level will bring to our shores might make sensible people think twice about siting any buildings in vulnerable places, let alone nuclear power stations.

So far, however, the government has yet to respond and is pressing ahead with its plans.

The Moseley reader who drew attention to this issue sends a useful link to a government report on rising sea levels (cover above right) with reference to nuclear issues on Page 15 and comments:

“Worrying, as it demonstrates yet more short term thinking by government, the members of which will be long gone when the problems are evident.

“Perhaps they should be forced to make all decisions based on the lives of their grandchildren; which would be forfeit should things go wrong!”

Featured image: Israeli occupation forces [Source: Salih Zeki Fazlıoğlu/Anadolu Agency]

The Israeli military has prepared plans for a full-scale invasion of the occupied Gaza Strip, in the event of a serious escalation in the south, according to a report by Israeli news site Ynet.

Veteran correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai, citing unnamed Israeli military officials, wrote that the army “is already considering alternatives to the Hamas government”, should the latter not cooperate in efforts to establish an economic-security “arrangement” in Gaza agreeable to the Israelis.

“There is a feeling in the [Israeli army’s] Southern Command that, this time, the IDF will be able to create a considerable change in the situation if it is required to launch a major campaign in Gaza,” wrote Ben-Yishai.

“The offensive missions inside the Strip will be carried out from now on by the IDF’s tip of the spear storming divisions, which—according to the plan—will enter Gaza and dissect it in two, and even occupy significant parts of it,” Ben-Yishai continued.

“The plan is based on three things: A strong protection of the western Negev and the Israeli home front, a systemic blow of fire in full force from the very first moment, and a quick broad manoeuvre into the Strip to dissect it and conquer parts of it.”

According to the defence expert, the Israeli army’s goal “will be to prevent Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad from gaining psychological achievements and getting them to request a ceasefire as soon as possible following the beginning of the fighting.”

Israel will also reportedly seek to prevent the involvement of a third-party mediator by “reach[ing] a military victory in the next war that will be so decisive and unequivocal that it will allow Israel to dictate the terms for the end of the fighting to Hamas and to the Palestinian factions.”

There’s no one more interesting and important in the JFK story–and indeed the history of the CIA–who is more important than the late James Angleton. Lisa Pease has studied the man and had a few things to say at the AARC’s conference on the Warren Commission on September 27, 2014.

This version of Ms. Pease’s lecture is somewhat edited and shortened.

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First published by Global Research on May 27, 2018

When the Saudi Crown Prince gave an interview to the Washington Post, declaring that it was actually the West that encouraged his country to spread Wahhabism to all corners of the world, there was a long silence in almost all the mass media outlets in the West, but also in countries such as Egypt and Indonesia.

Those who read the statement, expected a determined rebuke from Riyadh. It did not come. The sky did not fall. Lightning did not strike the Prince or the Post.

Clearly, not all that the Crown Prince declared appeared on the pages of the Washington Post, but what actually did, would be enough to bring down entire regimes in such places like Indonesia, Malaysia or Brunei.Or at least it would be enough under ‘normal circumstances’. That is, if the population there was not already hopelessly and thoroughly indoctrinated and programed, and if the rulers in those countries did not subscribe to, or tolerate, the most aggressive, chauvinistic and ritualistic (as opposed to the intellectual or spiritual) form of the religion.

Reading between the lines, the Saudi Prince suggested that it was actually the West which, while fighting an ‘ideological war’ against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, handpicked Islam and its ultra-orthodox and radical wing – Wahhabism – as an ally in destroying almost all the progressive, anti-imperialist and egalitarian aspirations in the countries with a Muslim majority.

As reported by RT on 28 March 2018:

“The Saudi-funded spread of Wahhabism began as a result of Western countries asking Riyadh to help counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told the Washington Post.

Speaking to the paper, bin Salman said that Saudi Arabia’s Western allies urged the country to invest in mosques and madrassas overseas during the Cold War, in an effort to prevent encroachment in Muslim countries by the Soviet Union…

The interview with the crown prince was initially held ‘off the record’. However, the Saudi embassy later agreed to let the Washington Post publish specific portions of the meeting.”

Since the beginning of the spread of Wahhabism, one country after another had been falling; ruined by ignorance, fanatical zeal and fear, which have been preventing the people of countries such as post-1965 Indonesia or the post-Western-invasion Iraq, to move back (to the era before Western intervention) and at the same time forward,towards something that used to be so natural to their culture in not such a distant past – towards socialism or at least tolerant secularism.

*

In reality, Wahhabism does not have much to do with Islam. Or more precisely, it intercepts and derails the natural development of Islam, of its strife for an egalitarian arrangement of the world, and for socialism.

The Brits were behind the birth of the movement; the Brits and one of the most radical, fundamentalist and regressive preachers of all times – Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

The essence of the Wahabi/British alliance and dogma was and still is, extremely simple: “Religious leaders would force the people into terrible, irrational fear and consequent submission. No criticism of the religion is allowed;no questioning of its essence and particularly of the conservative and archaic interpretation of the Book. Once conditioned this way, people stopped questioning and criticizing first the feudalist, and later capitalist oppression; they also accepted without blinking the plunder of their natural resources by local and foreign masters. All attempts to build a socialist and egalitarian society got deterred, brutally, ‘in the name of Islam’ and ‘in the name of God’”.

Of course,as a result, the Western imperialists and the local servile ‘elites’ are laughing all the way to the bank, at the expense of those impoverished and duped millions in the countries that are controlled by the Wahhabi and Western dogmas.

Only a few in the devastated, colonized countries actually realize that Wahhabism does not serve God or the people; it is helping Western interests and greed.

Precisely this is what is right now happening in Indonesia, but also in several other countries that have been conquered by the West, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Destroyed Aleppo

Were Syria to fall, this historically secular and socially-oriented nation would be forced into the same horrid direction. People there are well aware of this, as they are educated. They also see what has happened to Libya and Iraq and they definitely do not want to end up like them. It is the Wahhabi terrorist fighters that both the West and its lackeys like Saudi Arabia unleashed against the Syrian state and its people.

*

Despite its hypocritical secular rhetoric, manufactured mainly for local consumption but not for the colonies, the West is glorifying or at least refusing to openly criticize its own brutal and ‘anti-people’ offspring – a concept which has already consumed and ruined both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. In fact, it is trying to convince the world that these two countries are ‘normal’, and in the case of Indonesia, both ‘democratic’ and ‘tolerant’. At the same time,it has consistently been antagonizing almost all the secular or relatively secular nations with substantial Muslim majorities, such as Syria (until now), but also Afghanistan, Iran (prior to the coup of 1953), Iraq and Libya before they were thoroughly and brutally smashed.

Extremist attacks against Indonesian churches 

It is because the state, in which the KSA, Indonesia and the present-day Afghanistan can be found, is the direct result of both Western interventions and indoctrination. The injected Wahhabi dogma is giving this Western ‘project’ a Muslim flavor, while justifying trillions of dollars on ‘defense spending’ for the so-called ‘War on Terror’ (a concept resembling an Asian fishing pond where fish are brought in and then fished out for a fee).

Obedience, even submissiveness – is where, for many reasons, the West wants its ‘client’ states and neo-colonies to be. The KSA is an important trophy because of its oil, and strategic position in the region. Saudi rulers are often going out of their way to please their masters in London and Washington, implementing the most aggressive pro-Western foreign policy. Afghanistan is ‘valued’ for its geographical location, which could potentially allow the West to intimidate and even eventually invade both Iran and Pakistan, while inserting extremist Muslim movements into China, Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian republics. Between 1 and 3 million Indonesian people ‘had to be’ massacred in 1965-66, in order to bring to power a corrupt turbo-capitalist clique which could guarantee that the initially bottomless (although now rapidly thinning) natural resources could flow, uninterrupted and often untaxed, into places such as North America, Europe, Japan and Australia.

Frankly, there is absolutely nothing ‘normal’ about countries such as Indonesia and the KSA. In fact, it would take decades, but most likely entire generations, in order to return them to at least some sort of nominal ‘normalcy’. Even if the process were to begin soon, the West hopes that by the time it ends, almost all of the natural resources of these countries would be gone.

But the process is not yet even beginning. The main reason for the intellectual stagnation and lack or resistance is obvious: people in countries such as Indonesia and KSA are conditioned so they are not able to see the brutal reality that surrounds them. They are indoctrinated and ‘pacified’. They have been told that socialism equals atheism and that atheism is evil, illegal and ‘sinful’.

Hence, Islam was modified by the Western and Saudi demagogues, and has been ‘sent to a battle’, against progress and a just, egalitarian arrangement of the world.

This version of religion is unapologetically defending Western imperialism, savage capitalism as well as the intellectual and creative collapse of the countries into which it was injected, including Indonesia. There, in turn, the West tolerates the thorough corruption, grotesque lack of social services, and even genocides and holocausts committed first against the Indonesians themselves, then against the people of East Timor, and to this day against the defenseless Papuan men, women and children. And it is not only a ‘tolerance’ – the West participates directly in these massacres and extermination campaigns, as it also takes part in spreading the vilest forms of Wahabi terrorism and dogmas to all corners of the world. . All this, while tens of millions of the followers of Wahhabism are filling the mosques daily, performing mechanical rituals without any deeper thought or soul searching.

Wahhabism works – it works for the mining companies and banks with their headquarters in London and New York. It also works extremely well for the rulers and the local ‘elites’ inside the ‘client’ states.

*

Ziauddin Sardar, a leading Muslim scholar from Pakistan, who is based in London, has no doubts that ‘Muslim fundamentalism’ is, to a great extent, the result of the Western imperialism and colonialism.

In a conversation which we had several years ago, he explained:

“Trust between Islam and the West has indeed been broken… We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. The colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both from Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting history as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.”

“As a consequence, Muslim cultures were de-linked from their own history with many serious consequences. For example, the colonial suppression of Islamic science led to the displacement of scientific culture from Muslim society. It did this by introducing new systems of administration, law, education and economy all of which were designed to impart dependence, compliance and subservience to the colonial powers. The decline of Islamic science and learning is one aspect of the general economic and political decay and deterioration of Muslim societies. Islam has thus been transformed from a dynamic culture and a holistic way of life to mere rhetoric. Islamic education has become a cul-de-sac, a one-way ticket to marginality. It also led to the conceptual reduction of Muslim civilization. By which I mean concepts that shaped and gave direction to Muslim societies became divorced from the actual daily lives of Muslims – leading to the kind of intellectual impasse that we find in Muslim societies today.  Western neo-colonialism perpetuates that system.”

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In Indonesia, after the Western-sponsored military coup of 1965, which destroyed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and brought to power an extreme pro-market and pro-Western regime, things are deteriorating with a frightening predictability, consistency and speed.

While the fascist dictator Suharto, a Western implant after 1965, was said to be ‘suspicious of Islam’, he actually used all major religions on his archipelago with great precision and fatal impact. During his pro-market despotism, all left-wing movements and ‘-isms’ were banned, and so were most of the progressive forms of arts and thought.The Chinese language was made illegal. Atheism was also banned. Indonesia rapidly became one of the most religious countries on Earth.

At least one million people, including members of the PKI, were brutally massacred in one of the most monstrous genocides of the 20^th century.

The fascist dictatorship of General Suharto often played the Islamic card for its political ends. As described by John Pilger in his book,“The New Rulers of The World”:

“In the pogroms of 1965-66, Suharto’s generals often used Islamicist groups to attack communists and anybody who got in the way. A pattern emerged; whenever the army wanted to assert its political authority, it would use Islamicists in acts of violence and sabotage, so that sectarianism could be blamed and justify the inevitable ‘crackdown’ – by the army…”

‘A fine example’ of cooperation between the murderous right-wing dictatorship and radical Islam.

After Suharto stepped down, the trend towards a grotesque and fundamentalist interpretation of the monotheist religions continued. Saudi Arabia and the Western-favored and sponsored Wahhabism has been playing an increasingly significant role. And so has Christianity, often preached by radical right-wing former exiles from Communist China and their offspring; mainly in the city of Surabaya but also elsewhere.

From a secular and progressive nation under the leadership of President Sukarno, Indonesia has gradually descended into an increasingly radically backward-looking and bigoted Wahhabi-style/Christian Pentecostal state.

After being forced to resign as the President of Indonesia during what many considered a constitutional coup, a progressive Muslim cleric and undoubtedly a closet socialist, Abdurrahman Wahid (known in Indonesia by his nickname Gus Dur), shared with me his thoughts, on the record:

“These days, most of Indonesian people do not care or think about God. They only follow rituals. If God would descend and tell them that their interpretation of Islam is wrong, they’d continue following this form of Islam and ignore the God.”

‘Gus Dur’ also clearly saw through all the tricks of the military and pro-Western elites. He told me, among other things, that the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta was organized by the Indonesian security forces, and later blamed on the Islamists, who were actually only executing the orders given to them by their political bosses from the pro-Western military regime, which until nowis being disguised as a, ‘multi-party democracy’.

In Indonesia, an extreme and unquestioning obedience to the religions has led to a blind acceptance of a fascist capitalist system, and of Western imperialism and its propaganda. Creativity and intellectual pluralism have been thoroughly liquidated.

The 4^th most populous nation on the planet, Indonesia, has presently no scientists, architects, philosophers or artists of any international standing. Its economy is fueled exclusively by the unbridled plunder of the natural resources of the vast, and in the past, pristine parts of the country, such as Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), as well as on the brutally-occupied Western part of Papua. The scale of the environmental destruction is monumental; something that I am presently trying to capture in two documentary films and a book.

Awareness of the state of things, even among the victims, is minimal or out rightly nonexistent.

In a country that has been robbed of its riches; identity, culture and future, religions now playthe most important role. There is simply nothing else left for the majority. Nihilism, cynicism, corruption and thuggery are ruling unopposed. In the cities with no theatres, galleries, art cinemas, but also no public transportation or even sidewalks, in the monstrous urban centers abandoned to the ‘markets’ with hardly any greenery or public parks, religions are readily filling the emptiness. Being themselves regressive, pro-market oriented and greedy, the results are easily predictable.

In the city of Surabaya, during the capturing of footage for my documentary film produced for a South American television network TeleSur (Surabaya – Eaten Alive by Capitalism), I stumbled over an enormous Protestant Christian gathering at a mall, where thousands of people were in an absolute trance, yelling and lifting their eyes towards the ceiling. A female preacher was shouting into a microphone:

“God loves the rich, and that is why they are rich! God hates the poor, and that’s why they are poor!”

Von Hayek, Friedmann, Rockefeller, Wahab and Lloyd George combined could hardly define their ‘ideals’in more precise way.

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What exactly did the Saudi Prince say, during his memorable and ground-breaking interview with The Washington Post? And why is it so relevant to places like Indonesia?

In essence, he said that the West asked the Saudis to make the ‘client’ states more and more religious, by building madrassahs and mosques. He also added:

“I believe Islam is sensible, Islam is simple, and people are trying to hijack it.”

People? The Saudi themselves? Clerics in such places like Indonesia? The Western rulers?

In Teheran, Iran, while discussing the problem with numerous religious leaders, I was told, repeatedly:

“The West managed to create a totally new and strange religion, and then it injected it into various countries. It calls it Islam, but we can’t recognize it… It is not Islam, not Islam at all.”

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In May 2018, in Indonesia, members of outlawed terrorist groups rioted in jail, took hostages, then brutally murdered prison guards. After the rebellion was crushed, several explosions shook East Java. Churches and police stations went up in flames. People died.

The killers used their family members, even children, to perpetrate the attacks. The men in charge were actually inspired by the Indonesian fighters who were implanted into in Syria –the terrorists and murderers who were apprehended and deported by Damascus back to their large and confused country.

Many Indonesian terrorists who fought in Syria are now on their home turf, igniting and ‘inspiring’ their fellow citizens. The same situation as in the past – the Indonesian jihadi cadres who fought against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan later returned and killed hundreds and thousands in Poso, Ambon and other parts of Indonesia.

Indonesian extremists are becoming world-famous, fighting the battles of the West as legionnaires, in Afghanistan, Syria, Philippines and elsewhere.

Their influence at home is also growing. It is now impossible to even mention any social or god forbid, socialist reforms in public. Meetings are broken up, participants beaten, and even people’s representatives (MP’s)intimidated, accused of being “communists”, in a country where Communism is still banned by the regime.

The progressive and extremely popular Jakarta governor, Ahok, first lost elections and was then put on trial and thrown into jail for “insulting Islam”, clearly fabricated charges. His main sin – cleaning Jakarta’s polluted rivers, constructing a public transportation network, and improving the lives of ordinary people. That was clearly ‘un-Islamic’, at least from the point of view of Wahhabism and the Western global regime.

Radical Indonesian Islam is now feared. It goes unchallenged. It is gaining ground, as almost no one would dare to openly criticize it. It will soon overwhelm and suppress the entire society.

And in the West ‘political correctness’ is used. It is lately simply ‘impolite’ to criticize Indonesian or even the Saudi form of ‘Islam’, out of ‘respect’ for the people and their ‘culture’. In reality, it is not the Saudi or Indonesian people who get ‘protected’ – it is the West and its imperialist policies; policies and manipulations that are used against both the people and the essence of Muslim religion.

*

While the Wahhabi/Western dogma is getting stronger and stronger, what is left of the Indonesian forests is burning. The country is literally being plundered by the Western multi-national companies and by its local corrupt elites.

Religions, the Indonesian fascist regime and Western imperialism are marching forward, hand in hand. But forward – where? Most likely towards the total collapse of the Indonesian state. Towards the misery that will come soon, when everything is logged out and mined out.

It is the same, as when Wahhabism used to march hand in hand with the British imperialists and plunderers. Except that the Saudis found their huge oil fields, plenty of oil to sustain themselves (or at least their elites and the middle class, as the poor still live in misery there) and their bizarre, British-inspired and sponsored interpretation of Islam.

Indonesia and other countries that have fallen victims to this dogma are not and will not be so ‘lucky’.

It is lovely that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke publicly and clarified the situation. But who will listen?

For the Indonesian people, his statements came too late. They did not open many eyes, caused no uprising, no revolution. To understand what he said would require at least some basic knowledge of both the local, and world history, and at least some ability to think logically. All this is lacking, desperately, in the countries that have found themselves squashed by the destructive imperialist embrace.

The former President of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, was correct: “If God would come and say… people would not follow God…”

Indonesia will continue following Mr. Wahab, and the capitalist dogma and the Western imperialists who ‘arranged it all’. They will do it for years to come, feeling righteous, blasting old North American tunes in order to fill the silence, in order not to think and not to question what is happening around them. There will be no doubts. There will be no change, no awakening and no revolution.

Until the last tree falls,until the last river and stream gets poisoned, until there is nothing left for the people. Until there is total, absolute submission:until everything is burned down, black and grey. Maybe then, few tiny, humble roots of awakening and resistance would begin to grow.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

All images in this article are from the author.

Ron Ridenour’s book, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert, a true historical page-turner, is destined to endure and inform future readers, writers and researchers about both what has been reported—mainly malicious propaganda—and what truly took place in the one hundred years from the 1917 Russian Revolution until the eruption of the distinct harbingers of the collapse of the US empire in the early twenty-first century.

Events often just seem to happen, caught up in the swirl of history. But still, we try to interpret them and to understand. And then, in many cases, take a stand for or against. Understanding is like discovering a new world, like converting to a new faith. Revolt invades your life and everything is different from what it once was. Ridenour’s book helps us along the way to first remembering the historical facts so that we can then understand. His new work documents clearly facts about the early years of the Soviet Union’s relations with the West, its difficult steps toward socio-political maturity and Communism, and its enormous sacrifices along the way: its defeat of Western intervention during the revolutionary and civil war period; its regulation of state economic planning and the reforms required for the industrialization of the nation; its defeat of the German Nazi military juggernaut at the gates of Russia’s major cities and the coup de grace in the ferocious battle in Stalingrad, defeating German invaders and crushing Nazi Germany before the USA even entered the war; and finally the arduous salvation of Russia after the collapse of the USSR under US post-WWII economic firepower and the most treacherous anti-Russian policies since the early 1900s.

Those Western policies continue to determine US-Russian relations today. Throughout this long work Ridenour recalls and clarifies diverse significant historical details, obscured by time and by Western propaganda, facts that are so easily forgotten or that were never learned: such ignored truths as the importance of the USSR in the defeat of Japan in WWII and the timing of the US use of the atomic bomb in Japan. Not many people are aware of the extent of the destruction of many Japanese cities which the author details here. He points out that the Soviet Union kept its word to help the United States by its intervention against Japan, the decisive reason why Japan was defeated even before the atomic bombs fell. A stunning but little known fact is that in response to the Russians’ sacrifice the Anglo-American leaders—first Churchill and later Truman— were hatching Operation Unthinkable and Operation Pincher to launch a surprise war against Soviet forces in Europe. These military plots included the potential use of nuclear bombs. This is a book that no well-informed Western reader should be without, especially those inhabiting the homeland of the new empire, the dangerously brainwashed United States.

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Title: The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert

Author: Ron Ridenour

Publisher: Punto Press, LLC; 1 edition (June 22, 2018)

ISBN-10: 0996487069

ISBN-13: 978-0996487061

Click here to order.

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Here’s the Law on Migrants. U.S. immigration law essentially tracks the wording of the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol to it.

In the United States and elsewhere, there are refugees and asylees. Refugees are people who meet the appropriate legal status and are of special humanitarian concern. Standing as such is granted, in general, on the basis of a person being unable or unwilling to return to their country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Additionally, an asylee is someone who meets the definition of refugee and is already in the United States or is seeking admission at a port of entry. [101(a)(42) and 208(a) et seq. of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, INA]. There is no provision for migrants, i.e., no provision for economic refugees, no provision for opportunistic refugees, no provision for unstable-country refugees, no provision for criminal refugees. And refugee status is not permanent, while asylum is.

Europe’s refugee crisis is modeled on that of the United States. And both derive from American foreign and domestic policy.

Differing Views on Migrants. Europeans, even knowledgeable ones, generally take the view of one individual known to the author that “I am wary of the ‘migrant timebomb’ messaging as it feeds far right Islamophobia. I believe in migration especially as [the]West has destroyed/destabilized/ financially raped so many of the ‘migrants’ countries… my family and I live in an increasing atmosphere of heightened alert because of hatred of Muslims across Europe. It’s always really important to keep our empathy alive and avoid ‘othering’.”

The real link to the migrant crisis, whether it be the United States or Europe, is right there in plain English: essentially, “don’t put an end to the destruction of the migrants’ countries; just let them in, be empathetic, and avoid ‘othering’ “.

Origin and Nature of the Problem. At one time or another, the United States has invaded, attacked, subverted, or regime-changed nearly every country south of its border with Mexico, as well as most of those in the Caribbean. Because of wrecked governments, devastated economies, and consequent loss of freedom, waves of migrants have moved north to the “Land of Opportunity”, now called by some on National Public Radio here as the “Land of Humanity”. Why “Humanity”? Because the migrants are using children, accompanied or unaccompanied, as “protection” to guarantee their admission to the United States. It is an emotional counter to President Donald J. Trump‘s ill-thought out policy of “Zero Tolerance” for illegal aliens. This is the pattern governing the current situation in Europe.

The concept of migration, whether it be in America or the Continent, boils down to permitting the free flow of immigrants. The idea is that everyone has the right to move to another country and live a better life. Laws, regulations, language, customs, society, housing, available jobs have no role in the matter. And this view is gaining traction. In October 2017, at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, the author spoke about his books, Visas for Al Qaeda, CIA Handouts That Rocked The World and Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? Merkel’s Migrant Bomb. The evening went well until one member of the audience asked if this writer supported unrestricted emigration. The reply was “No”. Citing the laws of the United States and those of other countries, the author told the listener that no country on earth permitted people to pack up and move into the state without meeting existing legal requirements. The man persisted in what became his demands for unlimited colonization, to the point where the moderator had to shut him down as disrupting the meeting.

Migrants and Merkel. In Europe, to a great extent, the migrant issue is closely connected to Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, i.e., Prime Minister, and the country’s history. Those who back Merkel’s stance on welcoming incoming aliens with candy and flowers and who oppose any effort to restrict their entrance or send them home generally have a specific background. They are people who had either personal knowledge of the Second World War or the 10 years immediately afterwards. As one 75-year old German journalist recently told this writer, Germany, because of its sordid past in the 1930s and 1940s, has a special requirement to take in anyone who needs a better life. And Angela Merkel, perhaps because of her 35 years in Communist East Germany, is well placed to understand the migrants’ plight and provide relief, she said. The correspondent also repeated the German government line that opposition to unrestricted relocation was the purview of extreme right-wing groups filled with neo-Nazis like the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany). Our interlocutor did note that Merkel, perhaps, has stayed too long in office and that she is increasingly less effective in her position. Continuing, our contact feared a migration-sparked breakup of the shaky governing coalition and felt that new elections would increase the AfD’s representation in parliament, the Bundestag.

What the West Hath Wrought. To focus on what U.S. policy has done to Europe by creating a migrant crisis, let’s look again at our well-connected, extremely knowledgeable contact’s statement: “[the]West has destroyed/destabilized/ financially raped so many of the ‘migrants’ countries…”

Without covering the entire world, see what “the American Way” has done in:

• Afghanistan. War–1978 to the present. By 1982, 2.8 million Afghans had fled to Pakistan and 1.5 million to Iran. By 1989, 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed, along with about 2 million Afghans. At the end of 2015, the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] estimated there are approximately 1.2 million internally displaced persons in Afghanistan. An additional 2.7 million Afghans are refugees abroad, primarily in Pakistan and Iran. A quarter of refugees worldwide are Afghan.
• Yugoslavia. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia once was comprised of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and two autonomous provinces. As the result of Germany encouraging secession and a series of wars (1991-1995; 1998-1999) in which the U.S. and NATO participated, the country became seven statelets, i.e., the foregoing plus Kosovo. Two hundred thousand people were killed; 2.7 million made homeless.
• Iraq. As the result of American sanctions and warfare against Iraq, as of 2017, according to the UNHCR, 2.6 million were still internally displaced, and about 1.5 million refugees have returned from abroad. Nearly 1 million people have died as the result of combat, about a million adults through sanctions, and 500,000 children through sanctions.
• Libya. In 2017, 200,000 people remain internally displaced as the result of the 2011 war against Moammar Gaddafi. More than 200,000 migrants, out of a total of about 472,000, went to Europe in 2017. In the fighting, 30,000 died, with another 50,000 wounded.
• Syria. Since 2011, over 250,000 have died in the war, and half the country’s population has been displaced — including four million Syrian refugees abroad in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Europe.

The Migrants Are Still Marching But Change May Be Coming. Naturally, the migrants keep marching. Allegedly democratic governments have, until recently, ignored their citizens’ protests. (The United States’ news media plays up only the opposition to illegal aliens, emphasizing the wrongs done to people violating the Immigration and Nationality Act. They say not a word about unlawful voting, illegal entry, or the benefits of cheap, easily exploited labor.) But change seems to be coming, at least in Europe.

• As noted earlier, Germany‘s ruling coalition supports the continued entry of migrants (with increasing restrictions). However, it fears the growing clout of increasingly vocal opposition groups such as the AfD, now the third-strongest party in the Bundestag.
• Austria, because of the migrant wave, has a new, right-wing government now placing restrictions on illegal aliens. According to a contact just returned from Italy, Austrian border guards are now checking bus riders traveling through the Brenner Pass into the old Archduchy.
• Italy is another country that has elected a government opposed to the unending migrant stream. It is refusing entry into Italian ports of “rescue” ships that pick up migrants at sea and carry them to Europe.
• Slovenia‘s newly-elected government is now anti-migrant.
• Sweden has a party, the anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, which, according to the polls, is almost even with the ruling Social Democrats ahead of September 2018’s elections.

Victims? Who are the victims? Really?

It’s the migrants first of all. The United States and NATO, either in concert or with the help of the alliance’s member states individually, have destroyed most of South and Southwest Asia and North Africa. Their reasons were supposedly noble–they had a “responsibility to protect” people in those regions! However, houses, factories, shops, schools, waterworks, and sewage treatment plants disappeared under a hail of bombs, drone strikes, and artillery shells. And the jobless, penniless people were herded, by shadowy individuals and organizations, into Europe. Mirabile dictu, interpreters were found, wifi networks set up, SmartPhones provided, and smugglers located.

For the most part, Europe has little connection to the migrants’ home countries. There’s no pool of Dari speakers or Arabic linguists or Pushtun talkers. The Continent lacks any cross-cultural contacts with the migrants’ lands, other than, perhaps, through restaurants. So, ultimately, the aliens must adapt to Europe, rather than the other way round. In a way, it’s cultural imperialism. The newcomer must adapt to the new life he’s been forced into and give up his old language and culture. Simultaneously, he must deal with a native population that resents his being pushed upon them and given support and benefits out of their tax money–without any agreement to do so.

Muslims in particular are disadvantaged. First, they are seen as practitioners of a disfavored religion (even though, like Christianity and Judaism, it acknowledges one God and has a long-established code of righteous conduct). Second, as Muslim friends here in the United States have told this writer, it’s difficult belonging to a minority religion that imposes a strict fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Americans, and, increasingly, Europeans eat a lot between meals. In Southwest Germany, there is the long-established Second Breakfast, and in Austria, the late afternoon snack. Third, there are jobs closed to devout Muslims: work in bars and nightclubs, serving meals of forbidden pork in restaurants, brewing beer and distilling spirits. Fourth, Muslim friends have told the author that celebrating major religious feasts is much more enjoyable when there is a large gathering of family and friends.

And the natives in Europe and America are also victims. Under the pain of being denounced as insensitive, right-wing, neo-Nazis, they are required to welcome and work with the aliens. Questioning their ability to speak the local language, adapt to well-established customs, or absorb the mores of the region is strictly forbidden. They are taxed to support the alien, they are fined or jailed if they are too critical of them, and they lose housing to them. They’ve had their societies turned upside down and, in Germany, women are told to change their style of dress and go out only with a male escort. They (and some of the migrants) are victims of crime that appears to show no abatement, recent examples coming from Germany in 2018: 200 migrants smashed police cars transporting an illegal alien to deportation; a man from Niger, whose asylee status had been denied, fatally stabbed his wife and decapitated one of their children in a subway station; a Tunisian man, a migrant, was arrested for trying to produce the deadly poison ricin.

Solutions. If Any? How do we solve this? How do we change things? 1. Stop the wars generating migrants. 2. End the herding from their home countries to the United States, Canada, and Europe. 3. Rebuild their destroyed nations. 4. Help them go home.

But that costs money!!! Yes, it does. And the logical source for the funds to do all of this is the military budgets for NATO’s member states. In 2016, European NATO countries spent US$254 billion on their armed forces. The United States spent US$611 billion, the highest expenditure of any country in the world.

Which is cheaper? Continued social disorder and uproar or a reduction in the Western War Machine’s funding? Do we look to the future or do we look to the past? As one German friend noted, failure to deal with the migrant issue demonstrates Albert Einstein’s belief that stupidity is as endless as the universe.

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J. Michael Springmann is an attorney, author, political commentator, and former diplomat. He has written Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World and a second book, Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? Merkel’s Migrant Bomb. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The modern detainee in a political sense has to be understood in the abstract.  Those who take to feats of hacking, publishing and articulating positions on the issue of institutional secrets have become something of a species, not as rare as they once more, but no less remarkable for that fact.  And what a hounded species at that. 

Across the globe prisons are now peopled by traditional, and in some instances unconventional journalists, who have found themselves in the possession of classified material.  In one specific instance, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stands tall, albeit in limited space, within the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Unlawful imprisonment and arbitrary detention are treated by black letter lawyers with a crystal clarity that would disturb novelists and lay people; lawyers, in turn, are sometimes disturbed by the inventive ways a novelist, or litterateur type, might interpret detention.  The case of Assange, shacked and hemmed in a small space at the mercy of his hosts who did grant him asylum, then citizenship, has never been an easy one to explain to either.  Ever murky, and ever nebulous, his background and circumstances inspires polarity rather than accord.

What matters on the record is that Assange has been deemed by the United Nations Working Group in Arbitrary Detention to be living under conditions that amount to arbitrary detention.  He is not, as the then foreign secretary of the UK, Philip Hammond claimed in 2016, “a fugitive from justice, voluntarily hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy.”  To claim such volition is tantamount to telling a person overlooking the precipice that he has a choice on whether to step out and encounter it.

The whole issue with his existence revolves, with no small amount of precariousness, on his political publishing activity.  He is no mere ordinary fugitive, but a muckracker extraordinaire who must tolerate the hospitality of another state even as he breathes air into a moribund fourth estate.  He is the helmsman of a publishing outfit that has blended the nature of journalism with the biting effect of politics, and duly condemned for doing so.

Given such behaviour, it was bound to irk those who have been good enough to accept his tenancy. The tenancy of the political asylum seeker is ever finite, vulnerable to mutability and abridgment.  Assange’s Ecuadorean hosts have made no secret that they would rather wish him to keep quiet in his not so gilded cage, restraining himself from what they consider undue meddling.  To do so entails targeting his lifeblood: communications through the Internet itself, and those treasured discussions he shares with visitors of various standings in the order of celebrity.

On March 27, his hosts decided to cut off internet access to the WikiLeaks publisher-in-chief. Jamming devices were also put in place in case Assange got any other ideas.  Till that point, Assange had been busy defending Catalan separatist politician Carles Puigdemont against Germany’s detention of him, in the process decrying the European Arrest Warrant, while also questioning the decisions made by several European states to expel Russian diplomats in the wake of the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.  It was just that sort of business that irked the new guard in Ecuador, keen on reining in such enthusiastic interventions.

What seems to be at play here is a breaking of spirit, a battle of attrition that may well push Assange into the arms of the British authorities who insist that he will be prosecuted for violating his bail conditions the moment he steps out of the embassy.  This, notwithstanding that the original violation touched upon extradition matters to Sweden that have run their course.

Former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa had denounced his country’s recent treatment of Assange.  In May, Correa told The Intercept how preventing Assange from receiving visitors at the embassy constituted a form of torture. Ecuador was no longer maintaining “normal sovereign relations with the American government – just submission.”

Times, and the fashion, has certainly changed at the London embassy.  Current President Lenín Moreno announced in May that his country had “recently signed an agreement focused on security cooperation [with the US] which implies sharing information, intelligence topics and experiences in the fight against illegal drug trafficking and fighting transnational organized crime.” Tectonic plates, and alliances, are shifting, and activist publishers are not de rigueur.

The recent round of lamentations reflect upon the complicity and collusion not just amongst the authorities but within a defanged media establishment keen to make Assange disappear. “This quest to silence free speech and neuter a free press,” suggests Teodrose Fikre, “is a bipartisan campaign and a bilateral initiative.”

There has been little or no uproar in media circles over the 6-year period of Assange’s Ecuadorean stay, surmises Paul Craig Roberts, because the media itself has changed.  The doddering Gray Lady (The New York Times for others), had greyed so significantly under the Bush administration it had lost its teeth, “allowing Bush to be re-elected without controversy and allowing the government time to legalize the spying on an ex post facto basis.”

Both President Donald J. Trump and Russia provide the current twin pillars of journalistic escapism and paranoia.  Be it Democrat or Republican in the US, the WikiLeaks figure remains very wanted personifying the bridge that links current political behemoths.  For the veteran Australian journalist John Pilger,

“The fakery of Russia-gate, the collusion of a corrupt media and the shame of a legal system that pursues truth-tellers have not been able to hold back the raw truth of WikiLeaks revelations.”

Such rawness persists, as does the near fanatical attempt to break the will of a man who has every entitlement to feel that he is losing his mind.

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

Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire called on UK government to free Julian Assange and end their cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment which amounts to torture, as defined by international law. She said,

“I know of no other country where an asylee  is held with no sunlight, no exercise, no visitors, no computer, no phone calls, yet all this is happening in the heart of London at the Ecuadorian Embassy to an innocent man, Julian Assange, now in his 8th year of illegal and  arbitrary detention by the United Kingdom government. “

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We are here this evening to stand in solidarity with our friend Julian Assange, Editor in Chief, of WikiLeaks. Because of WikiLeaks reporting of acts during US/NATO’s illegal wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., and its highlighting of corruption by USA/CIA and corporate power, and continuing his fight in disclosing the links between the great private corporations and government agencies, Julian Assange has been threatened by high profile USA citizens, and a Grand Jury has been set up in American to try Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, for their publications.

For this, he is being persecuted and deprived of his right to liberty, human rights, etc. Six years ago Julian Assange, aware of these extradition plans of America,  sought asylum in the  Ecuadorian Embassy,  in London, where he remains today. (He is now in his 8th year of Arbitrary Detention in the U.K.) Although Mr. Assange’s conditions were already harsh, having no sunlight or outdoor exercise since June 2012, his situation has gotten worse since March 2018 when the Ecuadorian Government (after a visit by UK/USA officials to Ecuador) imposed conditions that are like indefinite confinement.

He is prevented from having visitors, receiving telephone calls, no internet, emails, or other electronic communications. He is unable to speak to his lawyers except in person and his   physical health, according to doctors, continues to deteriorate. Julian Assange is unable to walk outside the Ecuadorian embassy, as he has been told by UK government, he will be arrested by the British Metropolitan Police. He has asked UK Gov. to give assurances he will not be   handed over to American Security for extradition to America, to face a grand Jury, where he could be tortured and face life imprisonment, but UK government, refuse to give him assurance of this. A UN working group on Arbitrary detention has deemed this an arbitrary deprivation of his liberty and a grave human rights abuse which should be ended immediately, and for which, according to this UN Group on Arbitrary detention, he ought to be compensated by Britain and Sweden.

We should all be  deeply concerned at attacks by Governments, on ’truth’ tellers and ‚’whistle-blowers’ as this is a  danger posed to our democracy, security and good Governance when ‚whistle-blowers’ are thus persecuted. These matters of removal of basic rights of speech, information, liberty, persecution and silencing of journalists, etc., are of fundamental importance to all of us who believe in a free and democratic society.

We have a duty to ensure Mr. Assange, an Australian citizen, is treated no less favourably than UK citizens detained for similar ofences. British citizens enjoy the protection of the UK Human Rights Act l998 and the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantee their right to freedom of expression. This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, received and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’ and to do so, without interference by public authority’; He also has a right to be presumed innocent; and a right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

We have all a responsibility as Governments and as concerned Citizens to ensure that Mr. Assange’s treatment by UK Authorities accords to these standards. As Julian Assange is an Australian Citizen and they have a responsibility to see their Citizens are protected and Rights upheld, we call upon the Australian Government to work for Julian’s Freedom and safe return to Australia.   Also we call upon the UK Government to do the utmost to restore Julian Assange’s human rights and the free and lawful operation of WikiLeaks.  Specifically, we ask UK government to:

1. Ensure Julian Assange is guaranteed full and timely access to all necessary medical and dental care;
2. Request and defend his right to receive information and impart information freely without interference by any public authority;
3. Defend Mr. Assange at home and abroad and object to threats levelled against Mr. Assange by high-profile US citizens and others;
4. Strongly oppose and refuse, any application to have Mr. Assange extradited to the United States where it is unlikely he would receive a fair trial;
5. Facilitate the exercise of his right to freedom of movement in an expedient manner;
6. Compensate him for his arbitrary detention (also the Swedish government should compensate him for his arbitrary detention).

I would like to make a special appeal to the American President Donald Trump and his Government, to close down this Grand Jury which has been established to try Julian Assange and WikiLeaks based on their publications, and confirm the US Government will not extradite him to America, but recognize that he too, (as any American Citizen, ) has a right to have his rights protected under law.

This impasse could be resolved through Mediation between Ecuadorian Embassy and the UK Government. A text which includes a confirmation that Julian Assange will not be extradited to America and his Civil and Political Rights will be upheld by all Parties, would mean Freedom for Julian Assange. The case of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is deeply important to not only journalists, media, etc., but is of fundamental importance to a free and democratic society for us all.

We owe Julian Assange our deepest thanks for his courage and being prepared to tell the truth even at risk of his own liberty and life. We can all, especially the media, and Governments, refuse to  be silent in face of such injustice and persecution of a man whose only crime was telling the truth to stop the wars and save lives. We can refuse to be silent and thus complicit in the face of injustice and work together until Julian Assange can return in safety and freedom to be with his family in Australia, or whatever country he chooses as a free citizen of the world.

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

On June 25th, U.S.-aided fighters in southern Syria were fleeing from the Syrian Government’s Army, southward toward U.S.-allied Israeli-controlled areas in the Golan Heights and toward America’s ally Jordan; and, according to the AP’s news-report, “The majority of these rebels in southern Syria were U.S- and Jordan backed, although some local al-Qaida-linked militants still operate there.” The U.S. has relied heavily upon Al Qaeda in southern Syria, to lead the jihadist groups against Syria’s Government, ever since 2012.

The expectation when Donald Trump came into the U.S. White House had been that his predecessor’s war to conquer Syria or at least to seize territory there, would end. But Trump instead continues that invasion and occupation of Syria, and he even does so under the very same excuse that Obama had used, which is the ‘humanitarian’ one, of protecting people against Syria’s Government and against ISIS, which is one of the dozens of fundamentalist-Sunni ‘rebel’ groups of jihadists (ISIS and Al Qaeda being only the most famous ones) who have been brought in from all over the world and financed mainly by the Sauds, and armed and advised mainly by the Americans. They’ve been fighting to overthrow Syria’s Government. The rulers of the U.S., who bombed Iraq and Libya to hell and have done the same to Syria and now also to Yemen, say that their motivation is ‘humanitarian’. Even George W. Bush did, when he invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 (but he mainly gave the reason, “Saddam’s WMD,” which didn’t any longer even exist). Somehow, most Americans think that this Government in Washington represents them; but I am an American and I don’t think that the U.S. Government represents the American people. It certainly doesn’t represent us in Syria.

However, perhaps now, the actual end of the invasion of Syria is, at last, in sight. The commentator “bernhard,” who blogs on geostrategy at his “Moon of Alabama” site, headlined on June 22nd, “Syria – Damascus And Its Allies Prepare To Remove U.S. Forces From Al-Tanf”, and he (or she) explained the reasons why the U.S. invaders are now clearly in an untenable military-strategic position in the Syrian war. Basically, it’s because, as he(she) states at the end, “The al-Tanf position [U.S. military base in Syria] is indefensible against any larger force. The U.S. forces there can still move out without a fight. If they do not leave voluntarily, force will be used to remove them.” On the other hand, a year ago, on 29 June 2017, he/she had headlined “U.S. Retreats From Al-Tanf – Gives Up on Occupying South East Syria”, and that turned out to have been at least a year premature.

The knowledgeable Middle-Eastern commentator, Abdel Bari Atwan, headlined, also on June 22nd, “Syria’s Southern Front: The army is determined to retake the area. Israel is determined to prevent it.” Atwan stated:

“More than 40,000 soldiers have been deployed [by Syria’s Government] in preparation for the southern offensive [by the U.S. and its allies], according to reliable sources, suggesting that a decisive showdown is imminent. It is doubtful that the Syrian army, feeling confident after the battle for Ghouta, would launch such an operation without a green light from its Russian ally, as has been the case in similar instances. This follows the dead-end reached in negotiations between Russia and the US aimed at achieving an acceptable settlement, due to the intransigence of the armed groups, their insistence on all their conditions being met and the support some receive from Israel. It is not in Israel’s interest for these groups to evacuate as their counterparts did in Eastern Ghouta and Aleppo and for the Syrian army to retake control.”

He seems to view Israel as leading the U.S. operation there. This is conceivably true, because everything that Trump has thus far done in the Middle East has served both Israel’s Government and Saudi Arabia’s Government, and both of those Governments have almost identical objectives there. Conceivably, those two Governments together determine what the U.S. Government’s policies in the Middle East will be. And Israel has taken the initiative in Syria, just as the Sauds have taken the initiative in Yemen. But both Israel and the Sauds as well as the U.S. regime want the Saud family to control Syria; in fact, at the U.N.’s peace-talks, in which the “High Negotiations Committee” negotiates against the Syrian Government, to replace Syria’s Government, the Saud family itself selects who will and who won’t be members of the High Negotiations Committee: the ‘Syrian opposition’ there represents actually the Saud family. (See more on that here.) So, actually, both Israel’s rulers and America’s rulers are the Saud family’s agents in Syria; they front for the Sauds, regarding Syria-policy.

Atwan concludes:

“Syria continues to defy those who have spent the past seven years conspiring against it. This time, eyes should be turned to its south, where new and shocking surprises may be in store for the Israelis and their allies.”

The U.S. military base at al-Tanf, in Syria on Jordan’s border, is America’s main training-base for the Saudi-allied ‘rebels’, and has been key to the fundamentalist-Sunni Arabic, outright jihadist, south-Syrian half, of America’s boots-on-the-ground effort, to seize Syria, or at least to seize territory (especially oil-producing territory, around Deir Ezzor) in Syria. For decades, the jihadists (supporters of the Sauds’ fundamentalist Sunni form of Islam) have been hoping to oust Syria’s ideologically non-sectarian, decidedly secular, Government, and replace it with a Sunni Sharia-law regime. Trump’s troops even have been secretly arming ISIS to overthrow the Government. That plan will be crashing down if these ‘rebels’ in Syria’s south fail.

Without this jihadist operation in Syria’s south, all that will remain of the U.S.-led invasion-occupation operation will be the northern part, which relies instead upon anti-(Syrian)-Government Kurds as the U.S. regime’s boots-on-the-ground proxy forces to seize the northern portion of Syrian territory. So, it’s the Sauds’ jihadists in the south, and the Americans’ Kurdish-independence fighters in the north — a pincer between the two, for the U.S. alliance to take all of Syria. But there is increasing doubt that the U.S. coalition will be able to seize and hold either portion, or, ultimately, any part, of Syria. 

In other words: if the southern invaders fail, then Syria’s oil-producing region, around the city of Deir Ezzor, now contested between these jihadists and Syria’s Government, will no longer be in play, and the only function which land-seizure by the U.S. would even possibly serve for the U.S. and its allies, would be for pipeline-construction, in order for oil and gas from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and possibly other fundamentalist-Sunni-owned countries, to become pipelined through Syria into Europe, so as to replace Russia as the EU’s main energy-source. But Turkey’s Government won’t permit a Syrian Kurdistan, any more than Iraq had permitted success of the U.S. regime’s plan for an Iraqi Kurdistan (around Mosul). The big policy-difference between the Turkish Government and the American Government has long been over the U.S. aristocracy’s (along with Israel’s aristocracy’s) desire to use a Kurdistan so as to break up the non-Saudi Arabic countries (such as Syria) in order for Saudi oil and maybe Qatar’s (the Thani family’s) gas to increase market-share in Europe, so as to decrease Russia’s market-share there. 

Consequently, (unless ‘bernhard’ turns out to be wrong about al-Tanf, that “Damascus And Its Allies Prepare To Remove U.S. Forces From Al-Tanf”), Donald Trump finally will have to do what he had always been promising to do: exit from Syria — let the Syrians control Syria. The long effort by the aristocracies of U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel — to supplant Russia and its allies, as suppliers of energy and of energy-related services (such as pipeline-construction) to and in the world’s largest energy-market, the EU — will have to be abandoned, at least until the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. aristocracy can come up with a different way to squeeze Russia out of the European market. (The U.S. already has been successful at reducing the effectiveness of Russia’s gas-pipelines into the EU through Ukraine.) It’s not necessarily the end for the American plan, however: a new opportunity (perhaps yet another ‘Arab Spring’) could emerge — they’ve been at this ever since the CIA’s second coup, which occurred in Syria in 1949, when they took over Syria but their barbarism caused Syria’s generals to restore in 1955 the democratically elected Syrian President, whom President Truman’s people had assisted some of Syria’s generals to overthrow in 1949. 

As soon as FDR died in 1945, the imperialist faction in the United States — which has controlled the Republican Party ever since 1865 — quickly came to control also the Democratic Party; so, now, both of America’s political Parties are determined that the U.S. aristocracy will control the entire world. World peace is the last thing they want, and if they win it, that would be only ‘peace’ by force — not democracy.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

On June 23, militants in 11 settlements in southern Syria surrendered to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and declared their readiness to fight ISIS and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on June 24.

According to pro-government sources, about 900 members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) joined the SAA.

On June 24, the  SAA and the Tiger Forces liberated the villages of Hawsh Hammad and Jaddel and entered the village of Busra al-Harir northeast of the city of Daraa. According to pro-militant sources, this advance was supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces.

On June 25, clashes in the area continued.

It is interesting to note that on June 23 the US Embassy in Amman released a statement saying that militants in southern Syria should not count on a US military intervention in the situation in the area when they make decisions influencing their future.

The statement comes amid reports that some FSA groups in the province of Daraa have resumed negotiations with the Syrian government and Russia on a reconciliation agreement that would allow Damascus to restore its control of the area by a peaceful solution.

On June 24, the SAA repelled an attack of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham near the village of Zlin in northern Hama. However, after the attack the situation in the area remained relatively calm.

Tensions between the Thuwar al-Raqqa Brigade and the rest of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have erupted in the city of Raqqah. The Thuwar al-Raqqa Brigade says that the SDF’s security forces, Asayish, have surrendered its HQs and have attacked some of its members.

The current situation in Raqqah is another result of the tensions growing between the Kurdish-dominated SDF and local Arab factions formally operating within the same group.

At the same time, the SDF has captured a large chunk of area near the border with Iraq reaching the Tell Safouk border crossing. Thus, the group achieved a key goal of its operation in southern al-Hasakah.

According to pro-Kurdish sources, now the group is going to focus on combating ISIS in the Euphrates Valley and in the area north of al-Bukamal.

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Make no mistake. Trump is a rogue actor serving his privileged class exclusively at the expense of most others, the nation’s least advantaged harmed most by his hostile agenda, besides unspeakable horrors inflicted on countless millions abroad.

Every popular promise he made was breached straightaway in office. Instead of draining the swamp, he filled it with a rogue’s gallery of warmongering neocons (including John Bolton), Wall Street predators, hawkish generals, and billionaires.

His rage for endless wars of aggression is insatiable, terror-bombing one nation after another – at a pace far exceeding the Clintons, Bush/Cheney and Obama in munitions used, civilians in harm’s way massacred in cold blood by the thousands.

The media reporting nothing, suppressing his high crimes while bashing him in other ways.

He’s part of the dirty system in private and public life, as president presiding over fantasy democracy in America.

Things are far worse than ever since the neoliberal 90s, notably post-9/11. The mother of all false flags changed everything. The Trump regime exceeds the wickedness of his predecessors.

Criticizing his disgraceful mistreatment of unwanted alien children is one among a long list of policies showing indifference to equity and justice for all, along with the highest of high crimes against humanity at home and abroad.

Last week, Ralph Nader tweeted:

“Would be nice if Laura Bush and Michelle Obama had expressed similar heartfelt concern for the tens of thousands of children killed or seriously maimed by the wars of their husbands in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere” as they do for mistreated alien children unwanted in America.

Just societies and leadership would never tolerate outrageously separating children from parents, traumatizing kids, in some cases doing irreparable damage.

Yet it doesn’t rise to the level of naked aggression, mass slaughter and destruction, smashing nations to own them, wanting planet earth colonized, seeking New World Order societies comprised of rulers and serfs, no middle class, no democratic rights, no justice, perpetual wars and chaos instead, US-dominated NATO operating as a global killing machine – Orwell’s “vision of the future (with) a boot stamping on a human face forever,” a world unsafe and unfit to live in anywhere.

Trump’s “zero tolerance” extends far beyond his deplorable immigration policy. Far worse is his intolerance of democratic values, rule of law principles, peace and stability, along with fundamental human and civil rights – an agenda only a despot could love.

He’s indifferent to poverty, hunger, homelessness,  unemployment, underemployment.

He’s commander-in-chief of the nation’s military with his finger on the nuclear trigger he may be itching to squeeze – mindless of the horror of nuclear immolation.

He supports virtually every global tinpot despot allied with Washington’s imperial agenda, serving its interests, sovereign independent nations targeted for regime change by naked aggression, color revolutions or coup d’etats.

Instead of improved relations with Russia, they’re more dismal than ever.

Irreconcilable differences separate the geopolitical agendas of both countries, resolving them unattainable because bipartisan US hardliners want regime change, not mutual cooperation.

US policy toward Israel was always one-sided. Throughout its deplorable history, nothing was ever done by Washington to support and insure fundamental Palestinian rights, always treating them unfairly and unjustly – never holding the Jewish state accountable for its high crimes.

Trump elevated their mistreatment to a higher level, supporting apartheid ruthlessness, tacitly endorsing occupation harshness and unlimited settlement construction on stolen Palestinian land, opposing diaspora Palestinians’ legal right of return, wrongfully moving Washington’s embassy to Jerusalem, an international city not recognized as Israel’s capital by the UN and most nations.

At the same time, his regime endorses Israeli human rights abuses too egregious to ignore, wrongfully blaming Palestinians for Israeli crimes committed against them.

Trump’s great GOP tax cut heist benefitted corporate predators and high-net-worth households exclusively at the expense of social justice erosion to help pay for it.

His inaugural address promise “to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people” was a bald-faced lie, serving rich and powerful ones alone from day one in office.

He’s hostile to ecosanity, serving Big Oil and other cororate polluters, turning a blind eye to their worst offenses.

Straightaway in office, he proved he’s just another dirty politician, waging war OF terror, not on it, supporting ISIS and likeminded jihadists, not combatting them.

His America first agenda is all about bullying, pressuring and bribing other nations to bend to Washington’s will economically, politically, militarily and in trade relations.

It’s about enriching corporate predators and high-net-worth Americans more than already. It’s about serving privileged interests at the expense of others.

It’s about neocon extremists running things, federal courts stacked with hard-right ideologues serving their interests.

It’s about exploiting ordinary people over government serving everyone everywhere equitably. It’s about punishing anyone unwilling to go along with an agenda no one should accept.

Trump’s National Security Strategy is a modern-day version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a manifesto for endless wars of aggression, his regime heading America closer to full-blown tyranny than already.

He disgraces the office he holds, doing it in record time compared to his predecessors. With two-and-half years before another presidential election, he’s free to rape, ravage, plunder and destroy much more than already.

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

For much of the year, independent media [including Global Research] has felt the sting of increased social media censorship, as the “revolving door” between U.S. intelligence agencies and social-media companies has manifested in a crackdown on news that challenges official government narratives.

With many notable independent news websites having shut down since then as a result, those that remain afloat are being censored like never before, with social media traffic from Facebook and Twitter completely cut off in some cases. Among such websites, social media censorship by the most popular social networks is now widely regarded to be the worst it has ever been – a chilling reality for any who seek fact-based perspectives on major world events that differ from those to be found on well-known corporate-media outlets that consistently toe the government line.

Last August, MintPress reported that a new Google algorithm targeting “fake news” had quashed traffic to many independent news and advocacy sites, with sites such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Democracy Now, and WikiLeaks, seeing their returns from Google searches experience massive drops. The World Socialist Website, one of the affected pages, reported a 67 percent decrease in Google returns while MintPress experienced an even larger decrease of 76 percent in Google search returns. The new algorithm targeted online publications on both sides of the political spectrum critical of U.S. imperialism, foreign wars, and other long-standing government policies.

Now, less than a year later, the situation has become even more dire. Several independent media pages have reported that their social media traffic has sharply declined since March and – in some cases – stopped almost entirely since June began. For instance, independent media website Antimedia – a page with over 2 million likes and follows – saw its traffic drop from around 150,000 page views per day earlier this month to around 12,000 as of this week. As a reference, this time last year Antimedia’s traffic stood at nearly 300,000 a day.

Other pages, particularly those that promote natural-health news along with political news, have seen their pages deleted without warning by Facebook as recently as earlier this week. One such page, Collectively Conscious, saw its Facebook page with over 900,000 likes and follows deleted without warning after Facebook said the page “violated its terms of use agreement” but did not state which terms had been violated. Other similar pages, such as Nikola Tesla and Earth We Are One, were likewise suddenly deleted without explanation.

Other pages, such as the Free Thought Project, have been flagged as “fake news” by Facebook “fact checking” partner organizations, like the Associated Press and Snopes. In one recent case, a story published by the Free Thought Project was flagged as “false” by the Associated Press. That story, which detailed the documented case of Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) being forcibly removed from a DHS migrant detention center that had once been a Walmart, was marked false because the Associated Press asserted that the article made the claim that Walmart was housing immigrants for DHS. However, the article does not make the claim, instead accurately noting that the facility used to be a Walmart.

In a troubling turn of events, pages that shared that very story are now being punished by Facebook for helping disseminate “false news.” The Mind Unleashed, which has 8.8 million likes and follows, was warned that it would have its reach reduced for this “offense,” and that the reduction in the page’s reach would only increase with the number of offenses after it shared the Free Thought Project story on the detention center.

At MintPress News, the story is similar. While the MintPress Facebook and Twitter pages remain up and no notices warning of their imminent deletion have yet been received, traffic from social media has reached an all-time low, as the site’s average traffic of around 70,000 unique visitors last January has now dropped to around 4,000 – a decrease of around 94 percent. On Tuesday, social media traffic to MintPress stopped entirely, as it did for several other independent media sites like Antimedia.

Broad-brush censorship: an overreaction on steroids

Given what has been experienced by several independent media sites in recent months, it seems that several known initiatives aimed at censoring content on social media have now taken full effect after being announced earlier this year.

Those initiatives — particularly those being implemented by Facebook, Twitter and Google — first came to light during a Senate hearing held earlier this year in January. During their testimony, representatives from Facebook detailed that it would employ a team of 20,000 new employees by the end of the year who would “assess potentially violating content” and “fake news” uploaded by the platform’s users. Monika Bickert, head of Global Policy Management at Facebook, told lawmakers at the time that “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials and prosecutors who worked in the area of counterterrorism” are among the members of that new “team” at Facebook.

In the months since, Facebook’s censorship of independent content has continued to spin out of control, with the site prioritizing “trustworthy” sites even though Facebook has not stated how a site’s “trustworthiness” is determined. The site’s censorship efforts, however, reached a crescendo when it was announced last month that the social media giant would team up with the war-loving, Washington-based think tank, The Atlantic Council, in order to “combat election-related propaganda and misinformation from proliferating” on the social media site.

The Atlantic Council is funded by the country’s top weapons manufacturers – Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing – as well as by NATO and the United Arab Emirates, currently responsible for an offensive on a port in Yemen, slammed by the UN and human rights groups, that threatens to lead to the death of some 18.5 million civilians in the war-torn country. The Atlantic Council’s conflicts of interest with companies, organizations, and countries that benefit from war have raised concern among anti-war news sites that the think tank’s partnership with Facebook will negatively affect their own presence on social media.

While many thought that social media censorship on the most commonly used platforms could not get much worse after Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council, the upcoming vote by the European Union on the controversial measure known as Article 13 could soon change that. The proposed law, if approved, would require platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others to scan user-uploaded content before it is shown online and take down material that “could be stolen” or infringe on existing copyrights.

Several prominent figures, including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, warned the EU Parliament that the measure would be “an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.”

The current censorship of social media is undeniably the worst it has ever been. However, it is unlikely that this troubling trend will get better anytime soon. Instead, it likely to get much worse. If you value fact-based news content that challenges the powerful and scrutinizes official narratives, now is the time to sign up for mailing lists, Steemit and other alternatives that will allow you to continue to receive the content you enjoy amid the increasingly bleak future of news shared via social media.

*

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.

In general, the question of immigration is the most misunderstood social issue in the Western world. Ironically, the 1% and powerful elite are the only section of society that has a clear understanding of this social phenomenon.

Historically the wealthy 1% of “advanced” countries want both legal and undocumented immigrants in their countries. They look at immigrants not as human beings but as a cheap money making machine. This is not new and it is not unique to any particular country.

Like all powerful countries, the 1% in the U.S. gladly permits an engineer or a skilled medical doctor from any country to work in the U.S. legally and at the same time would allow- to a certain degree- migrant or undocumented workers to work hard in the shadow, for pennies. This creates a work force that has no rights or identity and is forced to endure a harsh working environment for long hours in the industrial or agricultural field. For peace and justice activists this understanding is crucial.

All U.S. Presidents have propagated the campaign against immigrants to a different degree. President Trump and his administration with their “zero tolerance” policy have only exposed the decades of cruelty and inhumane treatment that immigrants have had to endure in the custody of the U.S. government. A fascistic minded President and his shameless racist Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, want to intimidate not only immigrants and asylum seekers’ families but also those conscious people who are outraged and standing up to this barbaric and undemocratic behavior.

Unfortunately, despite mountains of evidence and images of how immigrant children were placed in cages during Mr. Obama presidency, a considerable number of activists are still  unconsciously distracted by the cunning Democratic Party leadership.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties are blaming each other for the tragedy of the isolated immigrants. It is repulsive to see that the well known representatives of the Democratic Party after 8 years of Mr. Obama’s anti-immigrant policies now acting like they are surprised of what is going on with ICE or other privately run detention centers. Republicans, in return, have made a mockery of being “compassioned” and toss another bizarre distraction into the mix by sending the First Lady to the South carrying a bold message from the White House that reads: “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” to visit the detained immigrant “children”!

It is needless to say that this obvious message became a feeding frenzy for the clueless political pundits from all sides on the gossip commercial media. However, a minority of conscious and democratic minded people are organizing demonstrations in different cities and chanting “Set the Children Free” and “We Are Not Giving Up”.

The hysteria over border security and building a wall is just an exaggerated and baseless notion that is propagated by politicians to keep the American population in a constant state of fear and confusion. Despite the 1% unfounded claims that the Immigration issues are very complicated and unsolvable, there are many practical solutions to the immigration question. Mr. Trump says: “The US will not be a migrant camp” meanwhile the U.S. Navy has developed a plan to construct internment camps to hold tens of thousands of immigration detainees on remote bases in California, Alabama and Arizona. Certainty these camps are also built for dissents who dare to question and expose the authorities. Mr. Sessions is already warning activista and immigrant rights advocates that “Free speech … will be protected, but obstructing law enforcement …will not be tolerated “.  Of course the vague word like “obstruction” is only defined by law enforcement! The Associated Press points out that

“President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration.”

The Independent reports that:

“Teenage immigrants detained in a Virginia juvenile detention centre allege that they were beaten and subjected to long periods of confinement, including some instances where teens were left nude in a cold concrete cell.”

Source: Massoud Nayeri

What needs to be done? Is there any solution to the question of Immigration? The answer is YES. But first we have to understand the root causes of the recent migration. Those families who are seeking asylum mainly are from the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras which today are facing unparalleled levels of violent crime. One of the best informative sources is the WOLA a leading research and advocacy organization advancing human rights in the Americas. Maureen Meyer and Elyssa Pachico in their Commentary: “Fact Sheet: U.S. Immigration and Central American Asylum Seekers”, layout the root cause of migration in details.

Second we have to act independent of influential politicians and ignore their friendly or provocative distractions. Congress has already shown it is incompetent. What we need is transparency – a task that only independent democratic minded people are able to carry on. In time of emergency, one must act swiftly. An Independent Fact Finding Commission by working people is in order. A People’s Commission that consists of conscious Religious Leaders, Professional Medical Caretakers, Civil Rights Lawyers, Working Mothers and Fathers, Teachers and Progressive Journalists as a group should have access to all detention Centers and immigrants’ official records with full authority to publish their uncensored findings and their recommendations for immediate implementation.

*

Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Humanity’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’: Starving, Enslaving, Torturing and Killing Our Children

By Robert J. Burrowes, June 25, 2018

Every day, according to some estimates, human adults kill 50,000 of our children. The true figure is probably significantly higher. We kill children in wars. See, for example, ‘Scourging Yemen’. We kill them with drones. We kill them in our homes and on the street. We shoot them at school.

The Global Refugee Crisis: Humanity’s Last Call for a Culture of Sharing and Cooperation

By Rajesh Makwana, June 25, 2018

Instead of providing ‘safe and legal routes’ to refugees, a growing number of countries on the migration path from Greece to Western Europe are adopting the Donald Trump solution of building walls, militarising boarders and constructing barbed wire barriers to stop people entering their country. Undocumented refugees (a majority of them women and children) who are trying to pass through Europe’s no-longer borderless Schengen area are at times subjected to humiliation and violence or are detained in rudimentary camps with minimal access to the essentials they need to survive.

How the US, Under Obama, Created Europe’s Refugee Crisis

By Eric Zuesse, June 25, 2018

The US Government itself caused this crisis that Europeans are struggling to deal with. Would the crisis even exist, at all, if the US had not invaded and tried to overthrow (and in some instances actually overthrown) the governments in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere — the places from which these refugees are escaping?

US Court Documents Reveal Immigrant Children Tied Down, Hooded, Beaten, Stripped and Drugged

By Patrick Martin, June 24, 2018

Court documents made public in Virginia and Texas give a glimpse of the systematic brutality being meted out to immigrant children in both public and private jails. Children are strapped down, hooded and beaten, or drugged by force, as part of the everyday procedure in what can only be called the American Gulag.

Refugee Crisis: Manufactured Migrants Are Tools in U.S. Empire’s ‘Grand Chessboard’

By Barrie Zwicker, June 24, 2018

The misery of asylees, Springmann writes, is one of the planned outcomes of horrendous and unlawful military attacks on Syria and other countries. These are carried out in proxy wars by “the West,” including Israel. Springmann writes that Israel “is a terrorist entity” and “an ever helpful architect of chaos.”

War and the Refugee Crisis: The Western Powers Which Bomb Enemy Nations Are Rejecting Their Refugees

By Masud Wadan, June 24, 2018

No external interventionist holds the right to cause the peaceful inhabitants of a jurisdiction to displace, unless it comes forward with legitimate reasons. Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq’s Diaspora worldwide are struggling with the skepticism of the migrant host states over whether they “deserve admission into their societies or not”. By comparison, some European countries as well as Canada, which have no direct involvement in these wars, have welcomed by a far great proportion of the refugees than the US, the UK and France.

At a meeting of the newly-revived National Space Council, President Donald Trump announced the  Space Policy Directive:  National Space Traffic Management (STM) Policy and ordered the Department of Defense to establish a Space Force as a sixth branch of the US military – although creating a ‘separate but equal’ Space Corps would need Congressional authorization.   

Under the guise of a ‘space junk directive’ to clean up a “congested and contested” cosmos that promises to keep the MIC fat and happy; at the same time make space safe for the up-and-coming commercial space industry (CSI), the Directive suggests an overly-ambitious mission of broad, wide-ranging goals with no time schedule or funding.

Specifically, the Directive provides a role for the DOD “to protect and defend US space assets and interests’ and I am still trying to wrap my mind around how the Director of National Intelligence will provide a Space Situational Awareness (SSA) of ‘knowledge and characterization of space objects.”  Further expounding on the US role in outer space, Trump added 

“..our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security.  We must have American dominance in space.”     

As the US presumes to act on behalf of other countries on the planet and commercial space endeavors which might someday launch a satellite up into the wild, blue yonder, the Directive proposes to establish operational criteria with the assumption that all players will accept the Empire’s dominance and happily follow their every command.  

Opposition within the Trump Administration has not been reticent with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson suggesting that

“The Pentagon is complicated enough.  This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart, and cost more money.”

In an October, 2017 letter on the NDAA 2018, Defense Secretary James Mattis commented:  

“I oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions.”   

And in a later letter to Congress, Mattis reiterated

“I do not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations,”

Despite Pentagon opposition, an administration witness told a recent House Armed Services subcommittee that 

“the President has prioritized space. He recognized the threats that have evolved and the pace at which they evolve.” 

In March, the president endorsed a Space Force during a White House ceremony with “we’re getting very big in space, both militarily and for other reasons” suggesting that the true purpose of a Space Force may be more than the equivalent of a celestial traffic cop. 

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, there are 1,738 operational satellites with 803 US satellites in orbit (476 commercial, 150 government, 159 military and 18 civil).  Russia has 142 operational satellites and China has 204.   There are also 2,600 non-functional human-made satellites, most of which weigh less than 5 tons and fly in a low orbit specifically programmed to burn out and fall to earth after 25 years. 

It is difficult to conjure up the effects of a ‘growing threat’ from ‘human-made’ orbital clutter and debris floating the infinite vastness of outer space as cosmically significant enough to qualify as a national security risk or that US global dominance is required to sweep the cosmos clean of said debris.  Perhaps, however, the President is referring to something other than debris and clutter. 

While outer space is a wide-open, limitless expanse full of life that remains as clandestine as any black ops project. global citizens no longer members of the Flat Earth Club are familiar with the noteworthy increase of reported extra terrestrial activity across the planet. While UFO’s are part of the lexicon, having evolved from folklore to real time events, government secrecy abounds. 

Especially intriguing are former astronauts who have commented on their experiences as well as members of the US military  who have described sightings that move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion or that hover with no apparent means of lift and can change direction or speed on a dime.  

A black ops until it was revealed in December, 2017, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) which prepared a 500 page document of worldwide UFO sightings, was Congressionally funded by former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), home state of Area 51.   In a CNN interview, retired AATIP director Luis Elizondo who resigned in protest over ‘excessive secrecy’ said

“my personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”  

Two events that dared challenge the government’s decades of secrecy with open disclosure were two press conferences at the National Press Club featuring retired military personnel providing public comment on their direct experiences with an extra terrestrial world in their official capacity.  The first press conference occurred on September, 10, 2001, one day before the 911 attacks and another on September 27, 2010.    Both press conferences were organized by Dr. Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project who also produced the videos Sirius and Unacknowledged.   

In responding to the Directive, Greer said he has been

“talking about this for years and has spoken to multiple witnesses who said that at least since the 1960s the US has had military assets in space. They (Trump administration) are acknowledging something that is already there. However, what is not being talked about, even now, is that those military assets are tracking and targeting ET craft.”

On the edge of human consciousness lies a more subtle, less obvious presence than the usual political adversaries as the US continues to lay specious claim to ownership of Outer Space.   Since the Roswell crash in 1947, the US has maintained a committed disinformation campaign to withhold truth from a disempowered citizenry – a truth that would empower those who have been blind to the government’s deception and a truth that would challenge the carefully crafted, familiar world we call reality. 

*

Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31.

“We do not have a civil war, since a civil war is based on inter-confessional, ethnic, religious or other conflicts,” Assad explained, adding:

“We do not have this in Syria. You can go anywhere, particularly in government-controlled areas, and can see all the layers of Syrian society living peacefully alongside one another.”

“The war has taught us a very important lesson. Our diverse society has become much more united than it was before the war. We learned this lesson.”

Time and again throughout the war, I explained the same thing. Syria is Obama’s war, now Trump’s – naked aggression launched for regime change, continuing with no prospect in sight for resolution.

Washington wants another imperial trophy, a sovereign independent state replaced by pro-Western puppet rule, an Israeli rival eliminated, Iran isolated ahead of a similar scheme to topple its government.

That’s what imperialism is all about, diabolical viciousness for dominance by brute force, no nation more ruthless about it over a longer duration than America.

“Land of the free and home of the brave,” “America the beautiful,” its self-styled exceptionalism and indispensable state rubbish are cover for permanent wars of aggression, barbarous rampaging, rage for global dominance, indifference to virtually everything just societies hold dear.

America’s self-proclaimed “manifest destiny” was all about settlers from abroad alone enjoying the nation’s “spacious skies…amber waves of grain…and purple mountain majesties…from sea to shining sea.”

Indigenous people had to go, mass slaughter the way, winning the west accomplished by eliminating them.

Hitler modeled his “final solution” on the American holocaust, genocide defined as destroying a nation or ethnic group by “tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc.” – including its culture and heritage.

It’s the American way. Wherever US forces show up, mass slaughter, vast destruction and human misery follow.

NATO was established to serve its interests first and foremost. Today it’s a killing machine, a force for pure evil, not good.

Its existence threatens humanity’s survival, notably because of Washington’s aim to make it global force for colonizing planet earth, an agenda for endless wars and chaos, aiming for ruler-serf societies worldwide, wealth and powerful interests dominating all others.

General Smedley Butler famously explained it, saying

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers” – a “gangster” for monied interests.

“…I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

His book titled “War is a Racket” is a powerful anti-war classic, far more relevant now than when he wrote it in 1935 during the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal era – polar opposite the scourge of neoliberal harshness, supported by both right wings of US duopoly governance.

In his interview with NTV, Assad covered much more ground, his remarks always candid straightforward, an antidote to duplicitous Western politicians, notably US ones.

He called alleged Syrian use of CWs “fairy tales…(fabricated) stories…used when…terrorists under their control, are defeated in some part of Syria.”

US-supported terrorists are down but not out, he stressed. ISIS, al-Nusra, and likeminded jihadists aren’t going away. Washington, NATO, Israel, and their allies will “use them again and again, but under different names.”

He blasted the West, saying it’s “distant from the concept of integrity. They do not give. They only take.” They rape and destroy for their own self-interest.

Asked if he’ll run for another term in 2021, he said what he explained many times before. He’ll serve if Syrians want him. He’s overwhelmingly popular. Without strong support, he’ll step aside for new leadership.

He stressed the following:

The “problem (with) West is that they do not have statesmen…only fake politicians. Fake politics needs fake news.”

“Tales about chemical weapons are part of this fake. Western politicians, and I’m not talking about the people, only the politicians, there is absolutely no sense of morality or moral principles.”

“When you encounter unprincipled people, they do not touch your heart nor your mind.”

They ravage nations for their own self-interest. They rape and destroy because who’ll stop them.

Their ruthlessness and recklessness to own planet earth may end up destroying it.

*

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

In another twist from one of the most bizarre stories of recent times comes the news that the already beleaguered British taxpayer will now be footing the bill for buying Sergei Skripal’s house.

According to officials cited by The Sunday Times, taxpayers will be footing the bill for Skripal’s home, which is expected to be bought by the UK government for around £350,000. The Sunday Times also reported, that the taxpayer will pay for the home of Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who fell ill after coming into contact with the so-called nerve agent Novichok. That house is expected to cost taxpayers around £430,000. All in all, the purchase of both homes, cars, and other possessions, will amount to a hefty £1 million.

Asked why the state is buying both these properties and belongings, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it would be inappropriate to comment on the personal matters of anyone involved in the attack.

“Mr Skripal’s home is still the scene of an ongoing police investigation and has not yet been released for clean-up work,” a spokesman added.

Wiltshire Police told the Sunday Times it was a “personal matter”.

So, it’s all hush-hush then.

Earlier this month it was revealed the force’s overall cost, prior to house buying, will be in the order of £7.5million and the area’s police and crime commissioner Angus Macpherson has asked the Home Office to cover the bill.

In another report by the DailyStar – “A source said Sergei was in an MI5 safehouse and will be “under armed guard 24-hours a day for the foreseeable future”.

And yet The Times reported on April 8th that:

“Sergei and Yulia Skripal will be offered new identities and a new life in America in an attempt to protect them from further murder attempts. Intelligence officials at MI6 have had discussions with their counterparts in the CIA about resettling the victims of the Salisbury poisoning. “They will be offered new identities,” a senior Whitehall figure said.”

One wonders why the state is buying these two properties. One assumes they must be completely cleaned and safe by now even if they had been contaminated. And why not just board them up and leave them? There are plenty of empty homes across the UK. If not, how can the state declare that Salisbury itself is safe and ask members of the Royal family to visit the town if the authorities cannot contain a very confined space such as a house?

Source: TruePublica

There are many confusing aspects to this story that continues to this day and the buying of Skripal’s house with no explanation or valid reason only adds to it.

As OffGuardian put it with regard to the event as it was unravelling back in March:

“Even the numbers of casualties still can’t be agreed upon. The claim of “nearly 40” needing treatment that were made by Neil Basu, the national head of counterterrorism, and repeated in the Times and other outlets, were subsequently debunked by a senior physician at Salisbury hospital, who, in a letter to the Times, said unambiguously that only three people (presumably the two Skripals and Bailey) had ever needed treatment. A correction the Times itself published the same day.”

The government totally messed up their story – thanks to the continued ineptitude of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. As John Pilger put it – “this was a carefully constructed drama” – perhaps not as carefully constructed as it could have been though.

By April 20th, senior civil servants were distancing themselves from this story. Craig Murray, with connections in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said:

“FCO sources tell me it remains the case that senior civil servants in both the FCO and Home Office remain very sceptical of Russian guilt in the Skripal case.”

Nothing actually really changed from that position even though mainstream media were having a festival of propaganda that was then to be subsequently silenced by the government as the story got more muddled and confusing and suspicions rose.

On April 22nd TruePublica was the only news outlet in Britain to report that a Novichok delivery system had been patented in the USA in April 2013. Why would anyone need to protect a patent design to deliver a deadly nerve agent that was supposedly illegal in the country that patented it – or any other country for that matter?

By April 30th the connection had been made about Pablo Millar. He was a colleague in both MI6 and then Orbis Intelligence with Christopher Steele, author of the fabrications of the Trump/Russia golden shower dossier, paid for by the Democrats in an attempt to tarnish Trump with a revelation that involved the Russians and prostitutes. In this case, British spooks were found to be making it up and the story was debunked within weeks.

As this news was about to become public the government sent out D-Notices banning all media mention of Pablo Miller making it more than probable that the government had something to hide and that the whole incident related to the Trump dossier puts Skripal in the frame for working on it.

By May 10th TruePublica reported that

“a D-notice (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) used by the British state to censor the publication of potentially damaging news stories had been formally issued to the mainstream media to withhold publication of the British ex-spy deeply involved in the Skripal/Novichok affair.”

TruePublica then published the D-Notice.

The involvement of Skripal, a double agent himself, with MI5 and MI6 officers, who had in fact, been suspected more recently of being a triple-agent, with the connection of major political parties in the USA along with the hundreds of Russian agents exposed (many of whom were reported as being captured and murdered) by Skripal’s disclosures to foreign government’s for cash – made him a target of many actors. Skripal could well have a been a victim of an assassination attempt by an aggrieved Russian family but the story of the Russian state itself being involved simply does not stack up. This is especially so given that if the Russian state was involved – it would have succeeded in its mission and not bungled it quite so badly as it turned out.

We will probably never learn of the truth in this case. Skripal has gone. No-one can speak to him, his daughter or their families.

The entire affair is an embarrassing mess for the government, which stinks of collusion and cover-up, most of the damage being done by Boris Johnson’s ridiculous lies.

The New Yorker staff writer Adam Entous revealed on June 18 that four sitting U.S. presidents beginning with Bill Clinton signed secret letters agreeing never to publicly discuss Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. According to Entous, President Trump’s aides felt “blindsided” by Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer’s urgent demand to sign a fourth letter. Only a small number of “senior American officials” in the previous three administrations even knew about the existence of such letters. Though said not to specifically mention Israel’s arsenal, Israeli leaders interpret the letters as binding American pledges not to publicly mention Israel’s nuclear weapons or press Israel to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The letters add to growing evidence of a longstanding multifaceted executive and federal agency conspiracy to violate the US Arms Export Control Act on Israel’s behalf.

US Foreign Assistance to Israel Since the Clinton Administration (US Billion)

Source: 2018 GAO report “US Foreign Aid to Israel,” MOU commitments, inflation-adjusted, excludes black budgets.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who has FBI-documented personal connections to Israel’s nuclear weapons program smuggling operations – was particularly concerned about newly-elected president Barack Obama. On February 9, 2009, veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas asked if Obama knew “of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons.” Obama dodged answering the question before finally replying that he didn’t “want to speculate.” Speaking in Prague in April, 2009 Obama called for strengthening the NPT. However, by May 2009, Obama yielded to Israeli pressure and signed an updated version of the secret Israeli gag letter, according to Entous. On September 6, 2012 Obama’s Department of Energy, in consultation with the Department of State, issued a secret directive called “Guidance on Release of Information Relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability,” or WNP-136 making it a crime for any US government employee or contractor to publicly communicate any information – even from the public domain – about Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

The Israelis, empowered by their $6.3 billion per year US affinity network, are ever eager to curtail informed public discussion and policymaking about Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Entous notes that Israel already had three nuclear devices by 1967 but does not examine how a country with no infrastructure to produce highly-enriched uranium managed to assemble such weapons. According to CIA and FBI files, Israel colluded with Pennsylvania nuclear processing plant administrators, two connected to Israeli intelligence and three with strong connections to the Zionist Organization of America, to divert enough US government-owned highly-enriched uranium to build several devices in the 1960s. The pillage of NUMEC, a privately-held thinly capitalized Atomic Energy Agency contractor, left behind a toxic mess and hundreds of poisoned, uncompensated victims.

More important than avoiding public knowledge about how Israel built its nuclear program, Israel and its lobby wish to preempt overdue enforcement of the 1976 Symington and Glenn Amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act now embedded in the US Arms Export Control Act. US presidents, upon learning that a non-NPT member is trafficking in nuclear weapons technology and testing nuclear weapons, are supposed to publicly notify Congress and cut off US foreign aid to said country. Israel has not signed the NPT and also continually smuggles nuclear weapons-making technology from the US. The President can comply with the AECA by publicly justifying to Congress why continuing foreign aid to non-NPT signatory proliferators serves the US national interest, as was done in the case of waivers for Pakistan. No president has ever complied with any of provisions of the AECA regarding Israel, including waivers. (PDF)

In May of 2018, the US District Court of Appeals of DC upheld a lower court’s ruling that US citizens have no standing to sue the president and executive agencies complicit in failing to enforce the AECA over the many administrations inflict by improperly withholding information sought through the Freedom of Information Act about Israel’s nuclear weapons program and US policy. In a brief, the US Department of Justice argued that the President has sole authority whether or not to recognize Israel’s nuclear weapons program as fact, stating “The legislative history of the [AECA] statute, moreover, makes clear that Congress intended that ‘the determinations under this section. . . be made by the President…the president’s decision whether or not to make a determination…is the epitome of a discretionary judgment…’” (PDF, page 5 and 6).

Most Americans believe Israel has nuclear weapons and that Congress should factor Israel’s nuclear arsenal into congressional discussions about US foreign aid given to Israel to allegedly maintain its “qualitative military edge.” In polls, Americans consistently say the US gives too much aid to Israel.

Excluding clandestine US aid funneled through black budgets, US presidents and Congress have given an inflation-adjusted sum of $222.8 billion to Israel since the Symington & Glenn Amendments became law in 1976. Since Bill Clinton became the first known US president to sign a secret letter to Israel, inflation-adjusted aid to Israel has grown to $99.9 billion.

*

Grant F. Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington and the author of the 2016 book, Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby moves America now available as an audiobook.

Noted consumer advocate and author Ralph Nader on Friday offered a sharp retort to Laura Bush and Michelle Obama in response to the former first ladies levied criticism at the Trump administration’s cruel immigration policy that separated immigrant children from their families.

“Would be nice if Laura Bush and Michelle Obama had expressed similar heartfelt concern for the tens of thousands of children killed or seriously maimed by the wars of their husbands in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere,” he tweeted.

Would be nice if Laura Bush and Michelle Obama had expressed similar heartfelt concern for the tens of thousands of children killed or seriously maimed by the wars of their husbands in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. -R

— Ralph Nader (@RalphNader) June 22, 2018

As it’s signed “-R,” it was written by Nader himself, rather than his staff who often tweet on his behalf.

The tweet follows an op-ed published Sunday at the Washington Post in which Bush took aim at Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, writing that she “was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents.”

“I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” she wrote, tweeting out the same section of text.

Michelle Obama retweeted that, adding,

“Sometimes truth transcends party.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), it should also be noted, was created under the George w. Bush administration and the Obama administration also came under fire for his deportation policy, treatment of child migrants, and the detention of immigrant families.

The other living first ladies have also weighed in on the Trump administration’s widely condemned policy of ripping families apart at the Southern border, with all expressing at least some measure of criticism.

The current First Lady’s reaction to the separations and detention of chidlren was quite mild, with a spokesperson for Melania Trump saying she “hates to see children separated from their families.” It also rang particularly hollow, as, on her way to visit a detention center at the border, she wore a jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do U?”

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Featured image is from AlterNet.

Amid the ongoing killing of defenceless Palestinian demonstrators, the Israeli leadership is engaged in a fierce and multifaceted war on photographers, either by shooting at them or criminalising them. Israel’s occupation authorities fear that photographs and video images will expose their brutality on the ground, which may lead to the provision of evidence to help prosecute officers and soldiers in accordance with international criminal justice procedures.

In the past, professional journalists rarely managed to reach the sites and locations where Israel was committing its crimes and human rights violations in time to record them for posterity, because the army would declare the sites to be closed military zones. Images weren’t as much of a concern for the Israelis as they are today. Most of the killings, assaults and abuse that Israeli soldiers and settlers committed in the past took place away from the scrutiny of the lens; only a few incidents were documented on camera, and they usually caused an uproar by moving the world’s conscience.

This happened during the First Intifada that broke out in late 1987 and lasted for several years. A photographer captured shocking images of soldiers breaking the bones of young Palestinians. Soldiers were shown surrounding groups of handcuffed and blindfolded men before hitting them with stones repeatedly until their arms were broken.

There were also images of Palestinian children being used as human shields; Israeli soldiers tied them to the bumpers of their vehicles to protect themselves against stone-throwers. At the end of September 2000, Mohammad Al-Durra’s name was known around the world after he was shot and killed in his father’s arms, despite his father repeatedly calling on the soldiers to stop firing. The scene ended with Abu Mohammad collapsing over his son’s body.

In 2003, photographers documented the crushing to death of human rights activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli bulldozer. The US citizen was protesting against the razing of Palestinian homes to the ground in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip. In 2006, media lenses also captured the shock on the face of young Huda Ghalia on the beach in Gaza after an Israeli gunboat killed most of her family members in one murderous fusillade.

These events and others preceded the Palestinians’ use of smart phones linked to social media sites. This is the technological development that has raised concerns amongst the Israelis. While the soldiers are armed with their deadly weapons, the Palestinians and activists supporting them are armed with their smartphones, which can expose the actions of the soldiers in real time and may be enough to convict them in international courts one day.

Palestinian victims of Israeli brutality were once merely statistics reported in news reports, but the new generation of citizen journalists takes their lives and their deaths into the public domain around the world within seconds. Anyone can thus get close to them, get to know them, feel their pain and anguish, and sympathise in their tragedy. Modern high-resolution photography is being used to document Israeli war crimes, which Israel fears due to the potential consequences. This has been expressed officially by warnings about “harming the morale of the soldiers.”

The mass killings committed by Israeli snipers on the fringe of the Gaza Strip a few short weeks ago marked a turning point in this issue. The massacre of peaceful protesters and the extensive injuries they sustained provoked global outrage, so much so that even the pro-Israel lobby has been unable to justify Israel’s actions in the US and European media.

The so-called Israel Defence Forces fears that damning video footage documenting soldiers’ crimes will be used to prosecute them. Footage has emerged of soldiers standing on one of the hills near the border Gaza, shooting Palestinian protestors and then cheering at the injuries they inflicted. Such footage is rare, even though Israeli soldiers have regularly behaved in such a manner as they shoot at Palestinians and their homes.

This is why the government has introduced a bill in parliament — the Knesset — which would make it illegal to photograph soldiers in the act of carrying out their duties, no matter that such duties often contravene international law. The initial reading of the bill was passed on 20 June.

This is how the Israeli government is declaring war on photographers and their images. Israel and its army have things they want to hide from the world which they understand that most people will find repulsive.

Rushdi Sarraj [r], co-founder of Ain Media and Yaser Murtaja who was killed by an Israeli sniper in April (Source: MEMO)

It was also noticeable during the Great March of Return protests in Gaza that the Israeli snipers were targeting professional journalists wearing very clear “PRESS” insignia on their vests. Those carrying cameras were particular targets. The killing of photojournalist Yasser Murtaja has become a symbol of the sacrifices made by journalists while doing their job in the besieged territory.

If images from the front line are no longer available from independent eyewitnesses to Israel’s crimes, we can be certain that the government’s propaganda machine will swing into action to “prove” that the soldiers acted in “self-defence”. The Israelis will do anything to cover up their war crimes, hide their rights violations and continue to try to justify what most reasonable people believe is unjustifiable. Photographers and journalists must be allowed to go about their work free from violence and threats to their lives.

If there was a pill which could boost your health, increase testosterone, sharpen your mind and supercharge your athletic abilities … you’d take it, right?

Especially if there were no negative side effects … and the pill was cheap?

Well, there is something like that.

But instead of a pill you pop in your mouth, it’s a special type of light. Scientists call treatment with this special type of light “photobiomodulation” (or “PBM”), and they used to call it “low level light therapy” (or “LLLT”). Or some people simply call it “red light therapy”.

If this sounds crazy, remember that our bodies evolved to make Vitamin D from a specific type of light (specifically, the ultraviolet light coming from the sun). And scientists say that the blue light from your devices can damage your eyes and may cause severe health problems. So it is clear that light has an effect on us.

Thousands of Scientific Studies from All Over the World Demonstrate the Power of This Approach

Let’s jump right into the scientific proof that this approach is incredibly powerful for a vast range of conditions. We will link to the scientific studies, and note the academic institutions with which the researchers are affiliated.

Improves Athletic and Sports Performance

Top U.S. Olympic athletes state that PBM helps their performance. See this video, and then watch this one.
Many studies show that PBM can assist in athletic performance:

• Provides an advantage in sports performance (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Universidade do Sagrado Coração)

• The effectiveness in improving muscle performance and recovery suggest applicability for high performance sports and in training programs (Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology, Federal University of Sao Carlos, University of São Paulo)

• Improves performance and accelerates recovery of high-level rugby players (Universidade Nove de Julho, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Universidade Cidade de São Paulo)

• Significantly reduced return-to-play in injured university athletes (Lehigh University)

• Twin exposed to PBM performed better than twin not exposed in terms of reduced muscle damage, pain, and atrophy, increased muscle mass, recovery, and athletic performance (Harvard Medical School, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Federal University of São Carlos, University of São Paulo)

• Accelerates post-exercise recovery (University of Bergen,, University of Caxias do Sul, University of São Paulo)

• Improves muscular performance and accelerates recovery if applied before exercise (University of Bergen, Universidade Nove de Julho)

• Improves muscle performance, reduces muscle fatigue during exercises and benefits muscle repair(Massachusetts General Hospital, Federal University of São Carlos)

• Enhances physical performance, stamina, and provides prophylactic benefits to skeletal muscle(University of Florida)

• Decreases muscle injury (Tel-Aviv University)

• Helps all phases of muscle recovery process, including anti-inflammatory, antioxidative properties and bio-stimulation (University Paulista, Methodist University of São Paulo)

• Aids in muscle repair (Universidade Nove de Julho, University of São Paulo)

• Reduces loss of strength after resistance exercise, may be beneficial for improving muscle function during rehabilitation after musculoskeletal injury (University of Calgary, University of Florida, Troy University)

• Promotes mucle regeneration (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Federal University of São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo)

• Promotes skeletal muscle regeneration and accelerates tissue repair (Soochow University, Fudan University, South China Normal University)

• May modulate metabolic and renal function to achieve better performance (Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology, Federal University of Sao Carlos, University of São Paulo)

• Significantly increases performance, decreases muscle soreness, and reduces to skeletal muscle damage (Universidade Nove de Julho)

• Aids muscle recovery (Federal University of São Carlos, University of São Paulo)

• Decreases muscle fatigue (Nove de Julho University)

• Reduces muscle inflammation (Universidade Luterana do Brasil)

• Helps with Achilles heel (University of Bergen)

• Strenghtens knee muscles and quickens recovery from exercise (Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre, Brazil)

• Assists with muscle fatigue and muscle injury (Harvard University, Federal University of São Carlos)

Good for the Brain

• Researchers at the Department of Psychology and Institute for Neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin found:

“LLLT improves prefrontal cortex-related cognitive functions, such as sustained attention, extinction memory, working memory, and affective state. Transcranial infrared stimulation may be used efficaciously to support neuronal mitochondrial respiration as a new non-invasive, cognition-improving intervention in animals and humans. This fascinating new approach should also be able to influence other brain functions …”

They note:

“LLLT supplies the brain with metabolic energy in a way analogous to the conversion of nutrients into metabolic energy, but with light instead of nutrients providing the source for ATP-based metabolic energy.”

• Improves memory and attention (University of Texas at Austin)

• Improves reaction times, and improves performance on memory test in healthy test subjects(Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, U.S. Army Medical Research)

• Improves cognition, reduces costs in traumatic brain injury treatment (VA Boston Healthcare System)

• Helps with dementia (Harvard Medical School, Boston University School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital)

• Promising therapy for Alzheimer’s and brain injury (Boston University Medical Center, St Michael’s Hospital)

• Promising treatment for Gulf War syndrome (U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs)

• Helps with Parkinson’s (Lausanne University Hospital, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with funding from Swiss National Science Foundation)

Increases Testosterone

Studies from North Carolina State University, U.S. National Cancer Institute, College of Medical Sciences in Nepal, NRS Medical College and Dankook University, and the Wallace Memorial Baptist Hospital show that PBM may significantly increase testosterone levels in males.

Helps Prevent Macular Degeneration

• Studies from the State University of New York, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Austalian National University show that PBM can help reduce macular degeneration and other causes of blindness

Good for the Skin

• It’s good for the skin (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Defence Institute of Physiology & Allied Sciences, India, Aripam Medical Center, Israel):

“In dermatology, LLLT has beneficial effects on wrinkles, acne scars, hypertrophic scars, and healing of burns. LLLT can reduce UV damage both as a treatment and as a prophylaxis. In pigmentary disorders such as vitiligo, LLLT can increase pigmentation by stimulating melanocyte proliferation and reduce depigmentation by inhibiting autoimmunity. Inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis and acne can also benefit.”

• Stimulates, heals and restores skin (Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital)

• Protects skin against wrinkles (Dankook University, Yonsei Wonju College of Medicine)

• Reduces wrinkles (Medical Light Consulting, Heidelberg, Germany, International GmbH, Windhagen, Germany)

• Helps in healing wound from Staph infection (Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences)

• Speeds healing of diabetic wounds (King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre)

• Hastens wound healing by promoting fibrous tissue, epidermal and endothelial cell proliferation(Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Peking Union Medicine College)

Mood and Depression

• Helps with major depression (Massachusetts General Hospital, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)
• Assists with seasonal and non-seasonal depression (New York State Psychiatric Institute)
• Less experience of day-to-day anxieties and stressors in healthy test subjects (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, U.S. Army Medical Research)
• Improves mood (University of Texas at Austin)
• Improves behavioral recovery from neurodegeneration (University of Texas at Austin)

Protects the Heart

• Helps protect the heart after a heart attack (Sydney University, Australian Catholic University, University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, Maitland Hospital, Blacktown Hospital)

Reduces Pain

• Reduces pain after spinal cord injury (Australian National University)

• Reduce pain in cancer patients (University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital)

Helps Teeth and Gums

• May improve healing, reduce inflammation and control pain (University of Birmingham)

• Improves blood flow and neovascularization, non-healing wounds can be healed, ‘normal’ wounds heal faster and better, pain and many types of inflammation can be significantly reduced (Kangbuk Samsung Hospital)

• May help to regenerate damaged bone (Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences)

• Helps heal bone defects after grafts (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul)

• Promotes bone healing after socket extraction surgery (University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Târgu Mures)

• Helps promote healing after periodontal surgery (Tokyo Medical and Dental University)

• May help form dentin on damaged, immature teeth (AJA University of Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, University of Tehran)

• Reduces harmful bacteria in mouth (Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Qom University of Medical Sciences)

• May help reduce harmful bacteria in the mouth (University of Campinas)

• Reduces pain in mouth (Urmia University of Medical Sciences)

• Reduces tooth sensitivity (Atatürk University)

• Reduces tooth sensitivity (University of Ankara, Near East University)

Assists with Weight Loss

• Studies from Massachusetts General Hospital, Louisiana State University, Louisiana State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the San Antonio Medical Spa show that PBM can help with those trying to lose weight

Thyroid

• The University of Sao Paulo Medical School has shown that PBM can help with thyroid conditions.

Joint Pain and Arthritis

• Reduces osteoarthritis pain (University of Ottawa)

• Reduces pain and improves health status in chronic joint disorders (University of Bergen)

• Reduces osteoarthritis pain in knee (São Paulo University)

• Reduces pain and improves quality of life in patients with knee osteoarthritis (University of Dundee)

Nerve Damage

• Studies from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania, Medical College of Wisconsin, and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee show that PBM is helpful in addressing nerve damage

Other Healing Effects

Studies have shown many other beneficial effects from PBM, including:

• Increases peripheral blood flow (Brigham Young University)

• Helps with tumors (Institute of Research and Development, Brazil)

• Reduces pain from chemotherapy (University of Alabama, Children’s Hospital Wisconsin NASA)

• Helps with burns (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden)

• Promotes wound healing, tissue repair, and the prevention of tissue death, to relieve inflammation and edema because of injuries or chronic diseases, and as an analgesic and a treatment for other neurological problems (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Guangxi Medical University, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology; funding from U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research)

• Reduces tinnitus (University of Manchester, Weill Cornell Medical College, Rumaillah Hospital and Hamad General Hospital)

• Fights certain types of bacterial infection (Friedrich Schiller University)

• Reduces baldness in men and women (various)

Indeed, an FDA scientists said at a recent conference that PBM showed positive effects on virtually every health condition studied so far.

(And the articles listed above are just a sample … I have collected hundreds of other links to scientific articles on the health benefits of PBM. But spamming you with links would be boring. And scientists such as Hamblin have written definitive summaries of the topic.)

How Was This Discovered?

The discovery of PBM – like many great scientific discoveries – was largely an accident …

Emeritus Professor, Radiation Oncology (Radiation Biology) Stanford University School of Medicine, Kendric C. Smith, notes:

“The father of phototherapy is Niels Ryberg Finsen, who first used sunlight, and then red light, to treat patients with smallpox in the 1800’s. He received a Nobel Prize in 1903.”

In 1967, professor of surgery at Pazmany Peter University in Budapest named Endre Mester experimented on rats and mice to try to induce cancer with lasers. He shaved the mice, and then shot a red laser at them. To his surprise, the red laser didn’t induce cancer … instead hair grew back faster on the animals.

In the 1990’s, NASA ran experiments to see if LED lights could help plants grow onboard the space shuttle. But the astronauts soon noticed that the lights helped their wounds heal more quickly.

NASA notes:

“Tiny light-emitting diode (LED) chips used to grow plants in space are lighting the way for cancer treatment, wound healing, and chronic pain alleviation on Earth.”

Evolutionary Basis for the Health Benefits of Red Light

What possible mechanism could explain the incredibly diverse positive effects from PBM? What possible evolutionary explanation is there for this treatment?

Our bodies evolved to consume certain materials to stay healthy. For example, we evolved to eat protein and drink water … so we need both to maintain health. Scientists have recently learned that our bodies also evolved to consume omega 3 fatty acids, and as mentioned above, to make Vitamin D from UV light.

The sunlight shining on our ancestors’ and our bodies is comprised mainly of red and near infrared light between around and nanometers:

Source: Nick84, CC BY-SA 3.0

As NASA discovered with its red light experiments, red light helps plants to grow. And a new study from researchers from the U.S. and Finland show that virtually all life-forms respond favorably to light. They note:

“Veterinarians routinely use PBM to treat non-mammalian patients. The conclusion is that red or NIR light does indeed have significant biological effects conserved over many different kingdoms, and perhaps it is true that “all life-forms respond to light”.

Our ancestors were outside a lot. Many of them woke up shortly before dawn, and went to sleep shortly after dusk. So they got exposed to a lot of natural light … not only bright overhead white sunlight, but also the red wavelengths in the sunrise and sunset.

So maybe we evolved to get a lot of exposure to red light. The fact that plants and other organisms seem to be positively effected by red light would support that argument.

But that still doesn’t explain why red light applied to the inside of the body has beneficial effects. Specifically, red light shined inside the nose or – according to Chinese and Russian tests – directly into the bloodstream, have positive effects.

How could this be?

Scientists have proven that red light boosts the production of ATP by mitochondria, which are the powerhouses in our cells. Every cell in our body (other than red blood cells) contain mitochondria.

Now here’s my personal theory …

Mitochondria may originally have been photosynthetic bacteria. For example, a top evolutionary biologist – Oxford professor of evolutionary biology Thomas Cavalier-Smith – argues:

[T]he first enslavement step [of the bacteria which would become mitochondria by larger organisms which would eventually evolve into humans] was uptake of a host carrier protein through the outer membrane (OM) and its insertion into the inner, cytoplasmic membrane (IM) of a photosynthetic purple bacterium that escaped into the host cell’s cytoplasm from the food vacuole into which it was initially phagocytosed.

Studies show that photosynthetic purple bacteria utilize similar wavelengths to those used in PBM.

So while I obviously don’t know why PBM does so many helpful things, my hypothesis is that PBM taps into latent abilities of our mitochondria … that may have lain untapped for millions of years.

While this may sound whacky, the Harvard Medical School professor who wrote the book (actually severalof them) on PBM, Dr. Michael Hamblin, told me “I think there is something in your theory”.

Postscript: In a separate article, I will discuss various ways to use PBM and get exposure to red light therapy.

Dublin mayor calls for Irish boycott of 2019 Eurovision in Israel

14 May 2018

Dublin’s mayor on Monday called for Ireland to boycott next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which is to be held in Israel, in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Micheal Mac Donncha told Dublin Live news site that he would support a boycott of the Israeli-hosted event.

“I would support that, I don’t think we should send a representative,” he said.

Read more at www.timesofisrael.com

French director Jean-Luc Godard among dozens of film professionals to boycott Israel cinema event

May 8, 2018

The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard joined dozens of other film-industry professionals from France who vowed to boycott an event celebrating Israeli cinema.

Godard, a pioneer of the 1960s New Wave cinema and an avowed Marxist who has fought accusations of anti-Semitism, added his name to a May 4 petition calling for a boycott of the France-Israel Season event by the Institut Francais. The state-run organization for furthering French culture abroad scheduled next month’s event in cooperation with Israeli government officials.

Read more at www.jta.org

5 June 2018

The Palestinian ambassador to Argentina said to play in Jerusalem would be to disregard the plight of their Palestinian communities.

After an intense campaign by the pro-Palestinian activists and groups calling for a peaceful boycott against Israel, Argentine Football Association (AFA) have canceled their friendly match with Israel, AFA official Hugo Moyano confirmed Tuesday.

Read more at www.telesurtv.net

Shakira abandons plan to play in Tel Aviv

29 May 2018

Palestinians are welcoming the news that Shakira won’t be playing in Tel Aviv this summer.

PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, said that Shakira’s decision dashes Israel’s hopes “to use her name to art-wash its latest massacre in Gaza.”

Read more at electronicintifada.net

Gilberto Gil cancels Tel Aviv gig

22 May 2018

Palestinians are hailing the decision by Brazilian music legend Gilberto Gil to pull the plug on a performance in Israel this summer.

Meanwhile, dozens of artists are declaring their support for the cultural boycott of Israel following the latest Israeli mass killings of civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip.

Read more at electronicintifada.net

U.S. and U.K. bands boycott Berlin event due to Israeli embassy donation

June 11, 2018

US singer John Maus announced his withdrawal from the Berlin Pop-Kultur music festival due to pressure from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

He is the fourth musical act to boycott the event because the Israeli Embassy is a small sponsor of the August international festival.

Read more at www.jpost.com

After Monday’s Massacre, Boycotting Israel is the Best Way the World Can Fight Back

15 May 2018

May 15, 2018 marks the convergence of three events in Palestine, each with the potential of sparking unrest and violence. The combination of the three portended grave consequences and what happened on Monday with 55 Palestinian civilians gunned down by Israeli soldiers at the Gaza border is confirmation of how dire the situation is. Here, we examine each of these events in their present and historic contexts.

Read more at thewire.in

Pressure grows to cancel “France-Israel Season”

23 May 2018

Demands are growing to cancel the Saison France-Israël 2018 – or France-Israel Season – a series of hundreds of “cultural” events backed by both governments that is set to start next month.

In the first major sign that the pressure is being felt, the French government announced on Wednesday that Prime Minister Édouard Philippe was canceling a trip to open the France-Israel Season.

Already, more than 10,000 people have signed a petition launched this week urging President Emmanuel Macron to cancel the France-Israel Season altogether.

Read more at electronicintifada.net

Featured image: Doug Ford with a female supporter, May 4, 2018. (Source: Doug Ford / Wikimedia)

While U.S. socialists have always challenged the myth of American exceptionalism – that the U.S. is immune to class struggle and a politics linked to it – they tend to have the opposite view of Canadian politics: that the latter is somehow exceptional, rooted in a classic social-democratic and even socialist political culture that makes it immune to reactionary trends like Trumpism and the right-wing populist wave around the world.

But Canada, and its industrial heartland and largest province of Ontario, is far from immune from these forces. Case in point: the June 7 election of a right-wing populist government of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario (PC), led by politician and businessman Doug Ford.

Canada has gone through a number of less reactionary but austerity-driven Conservative governments, most recently that of Stephen Harper from 2006–2015, and Ontario was ruled by a more moderate PC for forty years before hard-line, Thatcher-like neoliberal PC governments ruled from 1995–2003. That draconian regime drove the Ontario economy into the low-wage, low-tax, “anything-goes” development model that dominates today. The Liberal government that succeeded it over the past fifteen years did little to challenge that model.

The election of the PCs in Ontario should have been expected. The PCs were far out in front in the opinion polls for over a year. The party suffered from internecine leadership struggles in the past few months but still maintained a huge lead until the last part of the election campaign. The PC’s popularity was based especially on the anger of people across the province with the long-standing incumbent governing Liberals.

Exhaustion With the Liberals

Ontario Liberals fancy themselves as a “centrist,” business-friendly party that seeks to integrate the needs of capital with workers, combining competitiveness-oriented policies with forms of positive social reforms, vacillating over time between the two policy poles. In reality, it has continued the low-wage economic model it inherited from the previous PC government, driving down spending on social programs slowly – ultimately leaving Ontario with the lowest program spending per capita in the country.

Over its mandate, the Liberals accumulated several scandals and policy boondoggles, along with some moderate reforms. By the time this election was called, there was a general weariness and disgust with them that was captured by Ford and his party.

Some of that weariness came from a more traditional conservative aversion to government spending and taxation and being insufficiently business-friendly. Some reflected opposition or uneasiness with the progressive changes to the labour code made by the Liberals in their final months, in response to mass pressure and protests and an eye for capturing progressive voters, including increasing the minimum wage to $14 with plans to move to $15 per hour.

Kathleen Wynne’s government kept a lid on social-service spending, squeezing education and in particular healthcare, then partially reversing itself in the buildup to the election to take votes from the NDP. People objected to the scandals, the selling off of 53 per cent of the Hydro One electrical utility, and the swift move of the latter to pay its now-private executives shockingly high salaries. Those on both the Right and Left opposed the government for different reasons, while drawing opposite conclusions of what to replace it with.

As in all the right-wing populist movements in the Global North, issues such as job insecurity, workplace closures, relatively high personal tax levels (in a province where government spending per capita remains abysmally low), fed fear and anger amongst key sections of the electorate, and the working class in particular. According to figures cited by Peter Graefe of McMaster University, even with relatively low general unemployment levels (5.5 per cent), the lowest in fifteen years, there remains an exceptionally low labour participation rate, as the percentage of Ontarians aged 15–64 participating in the labour market declined from 79 per cent in 2003 to 72.3 per cent in 2017.

A Social-Democratic Opening

Frustration with the government and opposition to the possibility of a right-wing populist PC victory fueled a response on the Left, as well. While the PCs initially led in the opinion polls, their lead was steadily eroded by the social-democratic Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP). The predicted popular vote for the NDP and PC were virtually tied by the week before the election. But the first-past-the-post electoral system favored the PC, and the popular vote was skewed in a way that gave them enough seats to form a comfortable majority.

June 16, Toronto: Rally for Decent Work. More pics at flickr.com.

As such, much of the frustration with the Liberal government was divided between the PCs, who ended up with 40 per cent of the popular vote, translating into seventy-six parliamentary seats and a clear majority (sixty-three needed), and the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), who took 34 per cent of the vote, translating into forty seats. The governing Liberals took 19 per cent of the popular vote, translating into seven seats. (The Greens won one seat with 4.6 per cent of the vote.)

The NDP is a party of moderate social reform, the successor to the more radical Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which was founded during the Great Depression and transformed after the 1930s into a moderate Keynesian party. In 1961, a further effort to become more “mainstream,” working with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), led to the creation of the NDP.

In its earlier days, the NDP championed some of Canada’s key social-welfare reforms. In the neoliberal period, the party reflected the Third Way orientation of sister parties in the Global North. Its one time in power in Ontario was in 1990–1995. The party’s current leader, Andrea Horwath, ran two previous middle-of-the-road electoral campaigns that proposed very limited reforms, couched in a discourse of financial orthodoxy. They were outflanked on the left by the Liberals in the 2014 election. This time, they had a more ambitious set of moderate social-democratic proposals, including a form of dental care, day care, Pharmacare, transit, measures to facilitate unionization, and a commitment to fighting privatization.

The NDP also fielded several activist- and left-oriented candidates in some ridings. As the campaign progressed and the precipitous drop in Liberal support became apparent, the NDP became the only electoral challenge to the prospects of a Ford victory. Because of this, much of the Left (and Liberals) rallied behind them.

In purely electoral terms, more voters chose moderate or progressive options than those who chose the PCs. The Liberals couched themselves as “responsible” social reformers, opposing both the draconian right-wing platform of the PCs and attacking the NDP for somehow being too negative toward the private sector or even “socialist.” Yet, the Liberal defense of the flurry of reforms they introduced in the waning months of their mandate made them appear to be progressive in some ways.

Looked at this way, the majority of voters actually voted for more progressive policies than Ford’s PCs. It’s hard to portray the electoral outcome as a wholesale endorsement of right-wing populism. Yet Ford has a majority government at his command.

Clearly, the Ontario electorate is divided in this province. Ford got most of his seats from the rural, exurban, and suburban areas, and traditionally conservative spaces. The NDP elected people in larger urban centers and places where organized labour remains strong or has an historical resonance. But even there, the story isn’t that simple; class, demographic, and ideological differences and contradictions helped shape the outcome.

Doug Ford, the PCs, and Right-Wing Populism à la Ontario

Doug Ford is a multimillionaire co-owner of Deco Labels, a labeling and packaging business based in Chicago and Toronto. He and his brothers inherited it from their father, who was a member of the hard-line, neoliberal PC government of Mike Harris. Doug was a city councillor in Toronto, while his infamous brother, the late Rob Ford, was the mayor who was seen on video smoking crack not long before he died in 2016.

Both Ford brothers wore the mantle of “standing up for the little guy,” using the standard right-wing populist arsenal of opposition to taxes and government spending (referring to the “gravy train” of government waste and “privilege”), public housing, and services; opposing above-ground public transit, defending car dominance of the roads and championing privatization.

But populism of the Right has different inflections in different places. Ford is not openly racist, as is President Donald Trump. Ford courted fiscal and social conservatives within different immigrant communities and communities of color and carefully balanced not-so-concealed appeals to racism and xenophobia with base-building across ethnic and other social divides.

In running for the leadership of the PC party – just a few months before the election – Ford brought his persona and politics with him, much of it as simplistic and obnoxious as Trump. He spoke about “The People,” about bringing “relief” to the “hard-pressed” taxpayers of Ontario, “putting more money in your pocket and letting YOU decide how to spend your hard-earned money,” about cutting taxes and making the province open for business investment in order to create jobs.

While the party gave no costed platform, explaining what exactly the party’s policy intentions were and how they were going to pay for them (and Ford made sure of keeping the media at arms length throughout the entire campaign), their promises were a mix between usual right-wing populist issues and promises peculiar to the Ontario context: cutting the already low corporate tax rate; scrapping the cap-and-trade agreement with California and New York and opposing any carbon tax; reducing gas taxes by 10 cents per liter (the source of much public-transit funding); cutting income tax by 20 per cent for “middle” and upper level earners; freezing the minimum wage and introducing a low-wage tax credit; introducing a meager increase in healthcare spending for long-term care; scrapping a revised (and socially progressive) sex-education curriculum; bringing in provincial ownership of subways and increasing spending on subways (to the detriment of other forms of mass transit), and promising “a buck a beer.”

Instead of renationalizing Hydro One, they promised to fire the company’s high-earning officers and to lower electricity bills. (Previous PC governments began the process of privatizing electricity markets.) And, Ford, unlike his luckless PC predecessor in the 2014 election who boasted of 100,000 public sector layoffs, guaranteed that there would be no job losses as a result of “efficiencies.”

The rough edges of this are clear: severe cuts to state revenues, subsidies for the wealthy, spending promises that can’t be fulfilled without radical cuts to services, an end to environmental initiatives with renewable energy, downward pressure on public sector and other workers’ wages and benefits, and an appeal to social-conservative opposition to updated and progressive sex education in schools. He also opposes safe injection sites for drug users and maintains a “law and order” stance in favor of unfettered police powers.

So, who does he appeal to? Aside from more conservative workers, the wealthier voters favor Ford’s promotion of their interests. Entrepreneurial types who look to replace public-service delivery with low-wage private services see openings.

The business community has supported Ford wholeheartedly. He is committed to further deepening the low-wage model and undoing even moderate reforms introduced by the Liberals. Key members of the business class have grumbled about Canada’s failure to match the Trump tax cuts. Ford offers an unmistakable move in this direction.

On the other hand, key sections of the capitalist class also look to increased investment in infrastructure, transit, and education. It’s unclear how Ford’s promises to dramatically cut revenues would allow the expenditures necessary to make that happen.

The Making of a Right-Wing, Working-Class Voter

There were many working-class Ford supporters, and their support reflects several of the contradictions in working-class life in neoliberal capitalism. In the face of ongoing concerns about job insecurity, stagnant incomes, and deindustrialization, especially in smaller communities, workers are conflicted about how to respond. Unions are limited and weak. Few workers have experience with collective resistance or demanding government limitations on the power of capital.

On the contrary, many blame governments for high taxes and too much “regulation,” for the most part believing that only the private sector can provide “real” jobs and see regulation as an impediment to job creation. Many are so frustrated that they are open to racist, xenophobic, and sexist appeals by the Right. There are no mass political movements or organizations that challenge those beliefs, and right-wing populists like Ford have ready-made – if bogus – responses.

Many workers have difficulties paying their bills and identify taxes as a leading cause of their problems rather than stagnant wages and low-wage jobs. There are also huge imbalances between rural and urban life which shape the way workers in the latter look at the world. Even as the effects of climate change become clearer, reliance on cars in suburban areas increases, keeping many workers sensitive to the cost of gasoline. Carbon taxes and the like are seen as a burden, rather than part of a solution to environmental degradation.

In response to the many challenges of working-class life, people are encouraged to move up the ladder of class and income, seeing successful capitalists as role models to emulate rather than a class which runs and benefits from exploiting them. People living in cities, on the other hand, are portrayed as somehow being part of a despised “elite,” benefiting from new private business and service investments, and somehow enjoying lifestyles denied to people in smaller, rural areas.

Collective resistance and class solidarity don’t automatically occur: they need to be built. In their absence, people are open to the solutions posed by Ford and his allies. But, even with these appeals, half of the electorate responded negatively to Ford’s message.

Still, noticeably weak in the campaign was the labour movement. Three different unions waged competing anti-privatization campaigns in the year leading up to the election and were in no position to wage a sustained anti-Ford campaign with its own agenda. They did little or no education in most unions with their members, let alone in their communities, about the underlying issues, other than official appeals to vote for the NDP. Without any socialist political party or movement with roots in working-class communities or institutions, this is not surprising.

During the final weeks of the campaign, the PCs aired an effective series of ads which targeted the NDP. Attacks on NDP candidates aimed at “radical activists” and “lawbreakers” (who were indeed the more progressive and activist people in the party), went relatively unanswered, as did ads saying that the NDP would chase business out of the province. The NDP had few answers for the latter attacks.

Ford’s brand of right-wing populism fits into the context of Canadian and Ontario political culture, much as Trump has his roots in the peculiarities of U.S. populism. Both are odious. The PCs don’t openly call for privatizing Medicare or education, or even public transit. Public and working-class support for these services play a greater role in the political culture of Ontarians than Americans. But that doesn’t mean that the new government won’t build on people’s frustrations with these public goods and look to undermine their non-commodified elements or undermine public ownership and control over time.

The same is partially true for avoiding the open embrace of nativist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, racist, and homophobic elements of U.S. right-wing populist culture. They are present in the PC caucus, party, and in Ford’s politics. Social-conservative elements within different Canadian demographic segments including immigrants and native-born whites were clearly courted by Ford, and his bloc of supporters includes large numbers of people with economically and socially conservative ideas from different communities (some of whom are elected MPPs).

Ford mobilized voters over the sex-education issue both outside and within some immigrant communities, but also the planned legalization of marijuana by the Federal Liberal government. The PC’s tapping of social-conservative views within certain communities, in the context of Canada’s multicultural ethos, has the potential to create an identitarian mobilization on the Right, even as it opens space for white supremacist groups.

Along with this were dog-whistle appeals to those open to the worst of these positions, such as when he said that Northern Ontario should provide jobs to all the jobless in the province before inviting immigrant workers to fill openings in these communities. He also reinforced homophobic and misogynistic attitudes toward the current premier, Kathleen Wynne, who is a lesbian (particularly in his opposition to the updated sex-education curriculum which includes thoughtful introductions to LGBTQ issues). His campaign showed a disdain for “political correctness” similar to Trump’s.

Most disturbing is the crew of unsavory hard-right activists who used print and social media to put forward a more unadulterated form of hatred – groups such as Ontario Proud and the Toronto Sun tabloid. The latter developed a campaign against the NDP’s proposals to provide rights and services to immigrants and refugees, claiming that it would waste resources necessary to provide services to “deserving” Ontarians. Ford has refused to dissociate himself from these groups.

As a sidelight, a few days before the election, the widow of Doug’s brother Rob announced a lawsuit, accusing the future premier of cheating her and her family out of Rob’s inheritance and running the family business into the ground. Like the accusations of Trump’s philandering and sexual assaults on women, it had no effect on the election’s outcome.

Resisting Ford and His Agenda

Within progressive spaces, social activist groups, left organizations, trade unions, and communities, there are feverish discussions about how to resist Ford. This will not be easy.

Many are looking at the last time the hard right was elected in this province. In the mid-1990s, after small but determined groups of anti-poverty and community groups organized various protests against the first attacks of the Harris government (a 21 per cent cut in welfare rates and elimination of an anti-scab law), the trade union movement organized.

The Days of Action were a series of one-day, rotating general strikes and mass demonstrations, co-organized by the Ontario Federation of Labour (in the name of a bitterly divided union movement), in partnership with local coalitions of social and community activist movements and groups. Hundreds of thousands of workers struck their employers, joining with community members and marching together in mass rallies.

The key to the success of this tactic were the mass, intensive education campaigns with workers in each city, many of whom had voted for the PC. The education campaigns succeeded in convincing a number of workers not only to change their minds, but to engage in illegal strikes against their employers, forcing the latter to pressure the government to change its policies.

The government was forced to moderate its offensive, though it was ultimately reelected four years later. But the change in attitudes by many workers and the experience of organizing extra-parliamentary struggle marked a major step forward for province’s working class and helped to transform some unions’ culture. That later set the stage for further movements like the anti-globalization mobilizations within unions.

There are several lessons that one can quickly draw from the experience of the Days of Action and the fightback against right-wing populist regimes elsewhere. Clearly, without engaging the working class as a whole, in unions as well as communities, you can’t build a movement that can confront both employers and the government. Simply taking verbal pot shots at the obvious buffoonery of Ford (or Trump for that matter) doesn’t change anything. It simply emboldens their base.

There has be a series of alternative policies and approaches popularized across the working class that can address many of the workers who supported Ford and his party. Mass democratic movements of workers, women, indigenous, LGBTQ people, tenants, and more need to be ready to disrupt the workings of the system that Ford looks to impose. This won’t be easy.

The NDP (like the Democrats in the USA) will include elements that can be part of any resistance movement. Some of the newly elected MPPs have excellent activist histories that have placed them decidedly to the left of the party’s leadership. They should be welcomed as allies.

On the other hand, the NDP has a history of limiting the space for left critiques and activism within its caucus. Leader Horwath has already made moves to limit the party’s role to being an official parliamentary opposition and a government-in-waiting. This doesn’t bode well for the NDP’s potential role in any movement.

But it is critical not to subordinate any movement’s autonomy or leadership to that of a moderate, electoral political party like the NDP. It is important to keep in mind that the latter only became the center of electoral opposition to Ford because of the collapse of the Liberals and the lack of any real left alternative.

Most important is to build what was completely lacking in the last major popular push against the Harris years: socialists have to work with allies to change the opinions and understanding of working people who look to the false solutions of Ford. This can’t be done in isolation, but as part of building an alternative resistance in unions, communities, and other working-class spaces and institutions.

It means combining socialist principles with deeper education about the causes and solutions to challenges posed by neoliberalism, along with learning about right-wing populism and its agenda. Socialists need to argue that a clear analysis of the conjuncture and of the nature of our forces and those on the other side is essential in building solid resistance. This has to be done inside and alongside unions and working-class institutions and spaces and social movements, around all kinds of issues that have a class component: housing, transportation, education, workplace issues, jobs, social programs, racism, sexism, homophobia, and more.

Upcoming municipal elections across Ontario in October provide a potential space to mobilize resistance across the province if the Left can build sectoral networks around the above issues, in alliance with elected officials, candidates, and community and labour activists.

Socialist organizations and individuals are small and isolated. We can’t control the larger course of events, but we can contribute toward building a countermovement against Ford and the broader right-wing populist push he represents – a movement that can ultimately move from playing defense against these forces to offense.

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Herman Rosenfeld is a Toronto-based socialist activist, educator, organizer and writer. He is a retired national staffperson with the Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor), and worked in their Education Department.

Since 2002, Guantanamo Bay has held a total of 780 prisoners. In this time it has become a global symbol of injustice: a place which stands for torture, abuse, and indefinite detention.Since 2002, Guantanamo Bay has held a total of 780 prisoners. In this time it has become a global symbol of injustice: a place which stands for torture, abuse, and indefinite detention.

Over the last 15 years, the Government has attempted to suppress the truth about Guantanamo. In response, we have been working to bring the facts to the public. As it turns out, Guantanamo is not a prison full of the “worst of the worst,” but a prison full of mistakes.

Here, we bring you 7 facts that you may not know about America’s infamous illegal prison:

1. Most detainees were sold to the US for enormous bounties

The vast majority of detainees in Guantanamo (86%) were not captured by US forces. Instead the Government filled the prison with people they bought for bounties. The US flew planes over parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan offering $5,000 for any “suspicious person.” This amounted to approximately seven years’ average salary for most people in the area, encouraging them to turn over innocent men in exchange for a life-changing amount of money.

Since then, it has turned out they got it wrong most of the time. It didn’t even take long for those in charge to see their mistake– as early as 2002, Guantanamo’s operational commander complained that he was being sent too many “mickey mouse” detainees.

2. The Bush administration decided that the prisoners had no rights, and Reprieve was a big part of changing that

After the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo in 2002, the Bush administration claimed that the Geneva Convention – the rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war – did not apply. As a result, the detainees were denied access to lawyers, and the right to challenge their detention.  This was until Reprieve’s founder Clive Stafford Smith and two other lawyers successfully challenged President Bush in the Supreme Court. They won access to Guantanamo, opened it up and began representing the prisoners held there. Since then, we have gone on to secure the release of over 80 detainees – more than any other organization.

3. All the prisoners initially faced the death penalty

All the detainees in Guantanamo faced a death sentence. Clive Stafford Smith had spent 25 years defending people on death rows in America’s Deep South before turning to Guantanamo.

4. At least 15 children have been held in Guantanamo

One of the youngest detainees in Guantanamo was Mohammed El Gharani, who was just 14 years old when he was taken there. Despite being a child, Mohammed was tortured, including having his head slammed against the floor, and cigarettes stubbed out on his arm. Mohammed was held for a total of seven years without charge or trial, until Reprieve lawyers won a court order for his release in 2009.

5. More men have died in Guantanamo than have been convicted of a crime

In total, only 8 men held in Guantanamo have ever been convicted, and 4 of these convictions have since been reversed. But in total, 9 men have died in the prison without ever being charged with a crime.

6. Over 90% of Guantanamo detainees have been released without charge

730 men have been released without charge from Guantanamo, often after having endured years of suffering and abuse.
Now, 41 prisoners remained detained, including many who have not be charged or given a fair trial, and some who have been cleared for release. Many of these detainees have been subjected to horrifying torture and abuse.

7. Guantanamo is possibly the world’s most expensive prison

It costs the US tax payer $445 million a year to keep the remaining 41 detainees held in Guantanamo. This means that it costs $29,000 per prisoner per night to keep Guantanamo open – far more than any federal prison.

Featured image is from Reprieve US.

In this month’s prestigious British Medical Journal, The Lancet, has given considerable coverage in its June issue to the fact of the dangerous upsurge for both young and old of the variety of Diabetes which is becoming one of the largest global health crises of the 21st century.

The Lancet is the oldest medical journal in the world, founded in 1823.

In short, the etymology of the name of the journal was intended to convey excellence in medical research and to provide the “light of wisdom”.

Once thought of as a disease that only affected older people, diabetes is now being diagnosed increasingly in people under the age of 20, the vast implications of which have yet to be fully understood nor appreciated.

Alarming rising rates have been recorded in the first decade of the 21st century, not only in America and Europe, but particularly the Middle East and Africa, of diabetes which has been shocking to say the least. Asian countries, India and China show similar trends.

The most influential factor in the increase in diabetes, in the 5 to 15 age group, is junk food.

More and more young people are developing the early stages of diabetes and those that are diagnosed and some even hospitalised due to further complications of the disease, such as kidney disease and teenagers incredibly having heart attacks, costs a country’s health system considerably and in addition  in terms of lost wages and productivity where adults are concerned.

A main goal is to reduce the rates of hospitalisation, and help those diagnosed to better manage their care, with simpler smaller insulin delivery systems that take some of the inevitable embarrassment and stigma away from the disease, so improving children and the publics knowledge of diabetes is a priority.

The bottom line, especially for our children and grandchildren, is to limit or eradicate eating junk foods. Such so called food is calorie-dense and nutrient poor. In recent decades, junk food, essentially fast food and convenience food consumption in America alone increased dramatically, with more than 25 percent of all people now consuming predominantly junk food diets. This trend has occurred concurrently with rising epidemics of numerous chronic diseases and accounts for a long list of reasons why eating junk food is bad. It directly contributes to the on set of diabetes; full stop!

Also, junk food plays a major role in the obesity epidemic. By the year 2050, the rate of obesity in America is expected to reach 45 percent, according to researchers at Harvard University.

Children who eat fast food as a regular part of their diets consume more fat, carbohydrates and processed sugar, with less fibre, than those who do not eat fast food regularly. Junk food in these children’s diets accounts for 187 extra calories per day, leading to 6 additional pounds of weight gain per year. Obesity increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and many other chronic health conditions.

Such fast foods may be connected to depression and therefore the increase in Doctors over prescribing opioids, the dangers of which are now only too well known. In contrast, diets that had vegetables, whole grains and lactose, a sugar that comes from milk and other dairy products, had protective effects against developing depression.

There are increased risks of becoming diabetic for adolescents and young adults due a lack of consideration by us parents in the overall lifestyle plan we should, as responsible adults, impose on our children. The easy fix of allowing one’s child to spend way too much time on their iPhones, on video games and bingeing on McDonalds et al. By our accepting that our children live what is in effect a sedentary lifestyle is also a major contributor to the onset of diabetes. In a sense advances in technology and new gadgets make children less physically active, less sportive than bygone generations and thus nature’s balance is ‘thrown off’ because of the easy and quick nature of life, our acceptance that our child ‘keeps quiet’ makes our life as parents easier. So we must share the bulk of the blame for the onset of diabetes in children. We consciously allow their addiction to their ‘hand helds’ whilst also acquiescing to their requests for junk foods from pizzas to burgers usually accompanied by a variety of sugary drinks that come almost free with such so called meals.

And, finally, we are helping increase the insistence of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in our children, which was very recently reiterated in an exhaustive study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry on May 23, 2018.

The fact is the prevalence of a variety of different types of diabetes is increasing worldwide. We must take corrective action for future generations before its too late by reintroducing in our family value rules the concept of discipline, rationing our children’s use of their electronic gadgetry whilst encouraging outside or inside sporting activities particularly team sports.

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Richard Galustian is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out four conflict configurations that are paid little attention by conflict theorists.

In this article, I would like to discuss a fifth conflict configuration that is effectively ignored by conflict theorists (and virtually everyone else). This conflict is undoubtedly the most fundamental conflict in human society, because it generates all of the violence humans perpetrate and experience, and yet it is utterly invisible to almost everyone.

I have previously described this conflict as ‘the adult war on children’. It is indeed humanity’s ‘dirty little secret’.

Let me illustrate and explain the nature and extent of this secret war. And what we can do about it.

Every day, according to some estimates, human adults kill 50,000 of our children. The true figure is probably significantly higher. We kill children in wars. See, for example, ‘Scourging Yemen’. We kill them with drones. We kill them in our homes and on the street. We shoot them at school.

We also kill children in vast numbers by starving them to death, depriving them of clean drinking water, denying them medicines – see, for example, ‘Malaria is alive and well and killing more than 3000 African children every day’ – or forcing them to live in a polluted environment, particularly in parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America. Why? Because we use military violence to maintain an ‘economic’ system that allocates resources for military weapons, as well as corporate profits for the wealthy, instead of resources for living.

We also execute children in sacrificial killings after kidnapping them. We even breed children to sell as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and the filming of ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming), torture and satanic sacrifice. And these are just some of the manifestations of the violence against children that have been happening for centuries or, in some cases, millennia. On these points, see the video evidence presented at the recent Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse organized by the International Tribunal for Natural Justice.

The compelling testimony at the Commission of Inquiry of survivor/perpetrator Ronald Bernard will give you a clear sense of the deep elite engagement (that is, the 8,000-8,500 ‘elite’ individuals running central banks, governments, secret service agencies, multinational corporations, terrorist organizations and churches) in the extraordinary violence inflicted on children, with children illegally trafficked internationally along with women, weapons, drugs, currencies, gold and wildlife.

In a particularly poignant series of moments during the interview, after he has revealed some of the staggering violence he suffered as a child at the hands of his father and the Church, Bernard specifically refers to the fact that the people engaged in these practices are terrified (and ‘serving the monster of greed’) and that, during his time as a financial entrepreneur, he was working with people who understood him as he understood them: individuals who were suffering enormously from the violence they had suffered as children themselves and who are now so full of hatred that they want to destroy life, human and otherwise. In short: they enjoy and celebrate killing people and destroying the Earth as a direct response to the violence they each suffered as a child.

There are more video testimonies by survivors, expert witnesses, research scholars in the field and others on the International Tribunal for Natural Justice website and if you want to read scholarly books documenting aspects of this staggering violence against children then see, for example, ‘Childhunters: Requiem of a Child-killer’ and ‘Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape’.

For further accounts of the systematic exploitation, rape, torture and murder of children over a lengthy period, which focuses on Canada’s indigenous peoples, Rev. Kevin Annett’s evocative report ‘Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust – The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada’, and his books ‘Unrelenting’ and ‘Murder by Decree: The Crime of Genocide in Canada’ use eyewitness testimonies and archival documentation to provide ‘an uncensored record of the planned extermination of indigenous children in Canada’s murderous “Indian residential schools”’ from 1889 to 1996.

Apart from what happened in the Indian Residential Schools during this period, however, the books also offer extensive evidence documenting the ongoing perpetration of genocide, including child rape, torture and killing, against Canada’s indigenous peoples by its government, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches since the 19^th century. Sadly, there is plenty more in Kevin’s various books and on the website of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State which also explain the long-standing involvement of the Vatican in these genocidal crimes against children.

Of course, Canada is not alone in its unrelenting violence against indigenous children (and indigenous peoples generally). The United States and Australia, among many others, also have long records of savagery in destroying the lives of indigenous children, fundamentally by taking their land and destroying their culture, traditional livelihoods and spirituality. And when indigenous people do not simply abandon their traditional way of being and adopt the dominant model, they are blamed and persecuted even more savagely, as the record clearly demonstrates.

Moreover, institutional violence against children is not limited to the contexts and settings mentioned above. In the recently conducted Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse undertaken in Australia, childcare services, schools, health and allied services, youth detention, residential care and contemporary out-of-home services, religious activities, family and youth support services, supported accommodation, sporting, recreational and club activities, youth employment, and the military forces were all identified as providing contexts for perpetrating violence against children.

Over half of the survivors suffered sexual violation in an institution managed by a religious organization such as places of worship and for religious instruction, missions, religious schools, orphanages, residential homes, recreational clubs, youth groups, and welfare services. Another one-third of survivors suffered the violence in an institution under government management such as a school, an out-of-home care service, a youth detention centre or at a health service centre. The remaining 10%  suffered violence in a private organization such as a child care centre, a medical practice or clinic, a music or dance school, an independent school, a yoga ashram or a sports club, a non-government or not-for-profit organization.

Needless to say, the failure to respond to any of this violence for the past century by any of the institutions ‘responsible’ for monitoring, oversight and criminal justice, such as the police, law enforcement and agencies responsible for public prosecution, clearly demonstrates that mechanisms theoretically designed to protect children (and adults) do not function when those same institutions are complicit in the violence and are, in any case, designed to defend elite interests (not ‘ordinary’ people and children). Hence, of course, this issue was not even investigated by the Commission because it was excluded from the terms of reference!

Separately from those children we kill or violate every day in the ways briefly described above, we traffic many others into sexual slavery – such as those trafficked (sometimes by their parents) into prostitution to service the sex tourism industry in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and India – we kidnap others to terrorize them into becoming child soldiers with 46 countries using them according to Child Soldiers International, we force others to work as slave laborers, in horrific conditions, in fields, factories and mines (and buy the cheap products of their exploited labor as our latest ‘bargain’) with Human Rights Watch reporting over 70,000,000 children, including many who aren’t even, technically-speaking, slaves, working in ‘hazardous conditions’ – see ‘Child Labor’ – and we condemn millions to live in poverty, homelessness and misery because national governments, despite rhetoric to the contrary, place either negligible or no value on children apart from, in some cases, as future wage slaves in the workforce.

We also condemn millions of children, such as those in Palestine, Tibet, Western Sahara and West Papua, to live under military occupation, where many are routinely imprisoned, shot or killed.

In addition, while fighting wars we cause many children to be born with grotesque genetic deformities because we use horrific weapons, like those with depleted uranium, on their parents. See ‘“Falluja Babies” and Depleted Uranium: America’s Toxic Legacy in Iraq’ and ‘Depleted uranium used by US forces blamed for birth defects and cancer in Iraq’.

In other cases, we cause children shockingly debilitating injuries, if they are not killed outright, by using conventional, biological and chemical weapons on them directly. See ‘Summary of historical attacks using chemical or biological weapons’.

But war also destroys housing and other infrastructure forcing millions of children to become internally displaced or refugees in another country (often without a living parent), causing ongoing trauma. Worldwide, one child out of every 200 is a refugee, whether through war or poverty, environmental or climate disruption. See ‘50mn children displaced by war & poverty worldwide’.

We also inflict violence on children in many other forms, ranging from ‘ordinary’ domestic violence to genital mutilation, with UNICEF calculating that 200 million girls and young women in 30 countries on three continents have been mutilated. See ‘Female genital mutilation/cutting’.

And we deny children a free choice (even those who supposedly live in a ‘democracy’) and imprison vast numbers of them in school in the delusional belief that this is good for them. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ Whatever other damage that school does, it certainly helps to create the next generation of child-destroyers. And, in many countries, we just imprison children in our jails. After all, the legal system is no more than an elite tool to control ‘ordinary’ people while shielding the elite from accountability for their grotesque violence against us all. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

While almost trivial by comparison with the violence identified above, the perversity of many multinational corporations in destroying our children’s health is graphically illustrated in the film ‘Global Junk Food’. In Europe, food manufacturers have signed up to ‘responsibility pledges’, promising not to add sugar, preservatives, artificial colours or flavours to their products and to not target children.

However, the developing world is not in Europe so these ‘responsibility pledges’ obviously do not apply and corporations such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino’s Pizza sell their junk food in developing countries (with the video above showcasing Brazil and India) loaded with excess oil, salt and sugar and even using fake cheese.

The well-documented report reveals corporations like these to be nothing more than drug dealers, selling toxic food to ill-informed victims that deliver a lifetime of diabetes and obesity to huge numbers of children. So, just as weapons corporations derive their profits from killing children (and adults), junk food corporations derive their profits from destroying the health of children (and adults). Of course, the medical industry, rather than campaigning vigorously against this outrage, prefers to profit from it too by offering ‘treatments’, including the surgical removal of fat, which offer nothing more than temporary but very profitable ‘relief’.

But this is far from representing the only active involvement of the medical industry in the extraordinary violence we inflict on children. For example, western children and many others are rarely spared a plethora of vaccinations which systematically destroy a child’s immune system, thus making their health ongoingly vulnerable to later assaults on their well-being. For a taste of the vast literature on this subject, see ‘Clinical features in patients with long-lasting macrophagic myofasciitis’, ‘Vaccines: Who’s Allergic To Thimerosal (Mercury), Raise Your Hand’ and ‘Vaccine Free Health’.

And before we leave the subject of food too far behind, it should be noted that just because the junk food sold in Europe and some other western countries has less fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it, this does not mean that it is healthy. It still has various combinations of added fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it.

Separately from this: don’t forget that virtually all parents are systematically poisoning their children by feeding them food grown by the corporate agribusiness giants which is heavily depleted of nutrients and laced with poisons such as glyphosate. For a taste of the vast literature, see ‘The hidden truth about glyphosate EXPOSED, according to undeniable scientific evidence’. Of course, in many countries we are also forcing our children to drink fluoridated water to the detriment of their health too. See ‘Research Exposes How our Water is Making us Depressed, Sick: Fluoridated water is much to blame’.

Obviously, organically/biodynamically grown food, healthily prepared, and unfluoridated water are not health priorities for their children, according to most parents.

As our ultimate act of violence against all children, we are destroying their future. See ‘Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction’.

So how do we do all of this?

Very easily, actually. It works like this.

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, they learn to inflict violence on others. The child rapist and ritual child killer suffered violence as a child. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The political leader who wages war suffered violence as a child. The man who inflicts violence on women suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people and/or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The racist and religious bigot suffered violence as a child. The soldier who kills in war suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child. The parent who inflicts violence on their own children suffered violence as a child.

So if we want to end violence, exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must finally admit our ‘dirty little secret’ and end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here is an incentive: if we do not tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behavior is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to ‘socialize’ children to fit into society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviors in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than these trivialities suggest and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behavior in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioral change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? We do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen. In other words: a slave.

Of course, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themself, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of thinking critically or even learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new (or even important) information. This is one explanation why many people are ‘climate deniers’ and most others do nothing in response to the climate catastrophe.

Of course, each person’s experience of violence during childhood is unique and this is why each perpetrator becomes violent in their own particular combination of ways.

But if you want to understand the core psychology of all perpetrators of violence, it is important to understand that, as a result of the extraordinary violence they each suffered during childhood, they are now (unconsciously) utterly terrified, full of self-hatred and personally powerless, among another 20 psychological characteristics. You can read a brief outline of these characteristics and how they are acquired on pages 12-16 of ‘Why Violence?’

As should now be clear, the central point in understanding violence is that it is psychological in origin and hence any effective response must enable both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s suppressed feelings (which will include enormous fear about, and rage at, the violence they have suffered) to be safely expressed. As mentioned above, for an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Unfortunately, this nisteling cannot be provided by a psychiatrist or psychologist whose training is based on a delusionary understanding of how the human mind functions. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ and ‘Psychiatry: Science or Fraud? The professor’s trick that exposed the ongoing Psychiatry racket…’ Nisteling will enable those who have suffered from psychological trauma to heal fully and completely, but it will take time.

So if we want to end violence (including the starvation, trafficking, rape, torture and killing of children), exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must tackle the fundamental cause. Primarily, this means giving everyone, child and adult alike, all of the space they need to feel, deeply, what they want to do, and to then let them do it (or to have the feelings they naturally have if they are prevented from doing so). See ‘Putting Feelings First’. In the short term, this will have some dysfunctional outcomes. But it will lead to an infinitely better overall outcome than the system of emotional suppression, control and punishment which has generated the incredibly violent world in which we now find ourselves.

This all sounds pretty unpalatable doesn’t it? So each of us has a choice. We can suppress our awareness of what is unpalatable, as we have been terrorized into doing as a child, or we can feel the various feelings that we have in response to this information and then ponder (personal and collective) ways forward.

If feelings are felt and expressed then our responses can be shaped by the conscious and integrated functioning of thoughts and feelings, as evolution intended, and we can plan intelligently. The alternative is to have our unconscious fear controlling our thinking and deluding us that we are acting rationally.

It is time to end the most fundamental conflict that is destroying human society from within – the adult war on children – so that we can more effectively tackle all of the other violence that emerges from this cause too.

So what do we do?

Let me briefly reiterate.

If you are willing, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’. If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.

In addition, you are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that all children (and everyone else) has an ecologically viable planet on which to live.

You might also consider supporting or even working with organizations like Destiny Rescue, which works to rescue children trafficked into prostitution, or any of the many advocacy organizations associated with the network of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking.

But for the plethora of other manifestations of violence against children identified above, you might consider using Gandhian nonviolent strategy in any context of particular concern to you. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. And, if you like, you can join the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary: Each one of us has an important choice. We can acknowledge the painful truth that we inflict enormous violence on our children (which then manifests in a myriad complex ways) and respond powerfully to that truth. Or we can keep deluding ourselves and continue to observe, powerlessly, as the violence in our world proliferates until human beings are extinct.

If you want a child who is nonviolent, truthful, compassionate, considerate, patient, thoughtful, respectful, generous, loving of themself and others, trustworthy, honest, dignified, determined, courageous, powerful and who lives out their own unique destiny, then the child must be treated with – and experience – nonviolence, truth, compassion, consideration, patience, thoughtfulness, respect, generosity, love, trust, honesty, dignity, determination, courage, power and, ideally, live in a world that prioritizes nurturing the unique destiny of each child.

Alternatively, if you want a child to turn out like the perpetrators of violence described above, to be powerless to respond effectively to the crises in our world, or to even just turn out to be an appalling parent, then inflict violence – visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – on them during their childhood.

Tragically, with only the rarest of exceptions, human adults are too terrified to truly love, nurture and defend our children from the avalanche of violence that is unleashed on them at the moment of birth.

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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?’ He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. His email address is [email protected] and his website is here.

This article was originally published on March 15, 2016.

Razor-wire fences, detention centres, xenophobic rhetoric and political disarray; nothing illustrates the tendency of governments to aggressively pursue nationalistic interests more starkly than their inhumane response to refugees fleeing conflict and war. With record numbers of asylum seekers predicted to reach Europe this year and a morally acceptable humanitarian response nowhere in sight, the immediate problem is more apparent than ever: the abject failure of the international community to share the responsibility, burden and resources needed to safeguard the basic rights of asylum seekers in accordance with international law.  

Of immediate concern across the European Union, however, is the mounting pressure that policymakers are under from the far-right and anti-immigration groups, whose influence is skewing the public debate on the divisive issue of how governments should deal with refugees and immigrants. With racial intolerance steadily growing among citizens, the traditionally liberal attitude of European states is fast diminishing and governments are increasingly adopting a cynical interpretation of international refugee law that lacks any sense of justice or compassion.

The 1951 Refugee Convention, which was implemented in response to Europe’s last major refugee crisis during World War II, states that governments need only safeguard the human rights of asylum seekers when they are inside their territory. In violation of the spirit of this landmark human rights legislation, the response from most European governments has been to prevent rather than facilitate the arrival of refugees in order to minimise their legal responsibility towards them. In order to achieve their aim, the EU has even gone so far as making a flawed and legally questionable deal with President Erdogan to intercept migrant families crossing the Aegean Sea and return them to Turkey against their will.

Instead of providing ‘safe and legal routes’ to refugees, a growing number of countries on the migration path from Greece to Western Europe are adopting the Donald Trump solution of building walls, militarising boarders and constructing barbed wire barriers to stop people entering their country. Undocumented refugees (a majority of them women and children) who are trying to pass through Europe’s no-longer borderless Schengen area are at times subjected to humiliation and violence or are detained in rudimentary camps with minimal access to the essentials they need to survive. Unable to travel to their desired destination, tens of thousands of refugees have been bottlenecked in Greece which has become a warehouse for abandoned souls in a country on the brink of its own humanitarian crisis.

Ostensibly, the extreme reaction of many EU member states to those risking their lives to escape armed conflict is tantamount to officially sanctioned racial discrimination. Unsurprisingly, this unwarranted government response has been welcomed by nationalist parties who are now polling favourably among voters in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Poland. The same is true in Hungary, where the government has even agreed Nazi-era demands to confiscate cash and jewellery from refugees to fund their anti-humanitarian efforts.

There can be little doubt that the European response to refugees has been discriminatory, morally objectionable and politically dangerous. It’s also self-defeating since curtailing civil liberties and discarding long-held social values has the potential to destabilise Europe far more than simply providing the assistance guaranteed to refugees under the UN convention. Albeit unwittingly, the reactionary attitude of governments also plays directly into the hands of Islamic State and other jihadi groups whose broader intentions include inciting Islamophobia, provoking instability and conflict within western countries, and recruiting support for terrorism in the Middle East and across Europe.

Dispelling nationalist myths of the far-right

With the public increasingly divided about how governments should respond to the influx of people escaping violent conflict, it’s crucial that the pervasive myths peddled by right-wing extremists are exposed for what they are: bigotry, hyperbole and outright lies designed to exacerbate fear and discord within society.

Forced migration is a global phenomenon and, compared with other continents, Europe is not being subjected to the ‘invasion of refugees’ widely portrayed in the mainstream media. Of the world’s 60 million refugees, nine out of ten are not seeking asylum in the EU, and the vast majority remain displaced within their own countries. Most of those that do settle in Europe will return to their country of origin when they are no longer at risk (as happened at the end of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s when 70% of refugees who had fled to Germany returned to Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Albania and Slovenia).

The real emergency is taking place outside of Europe, where there is a desperate need for more assistance from the international community. For example, Turkey is now home to over 3 million refugees; Jordan hosts 2.7 million refugees – a staggering 41 percent of its population; and Lebanon has 1.5 million Syrian refugees who make up a third of its population. Unsurprisingly, social and economic systems are under severe strain in these and the other countries that host the majority of global refugees – especially since they are mainly based in developing countries with soaring unemployment rates, inadequate welfare systems and high levels of social unrest. In stark comparison (and with the notable exception of Germany), the 28 relatively prosperous EU member states have collectively pledged to resettle a mere 160,000 of the one million refugees that entered Europe in 2015. Not only does this amount to less than 0.25% of their combined population, governments have only relocated a few hundred have so far.

The spurious claim that there are insufficient resources available to share with those seeking asylum in the EU or that asylum seekers will ‘take our homes, our jobs and our welfare services’ is little more than a justification for racial discrimination. Aside from the overriding moral and legal obligation for states to provide emergency assistance to anyone fleeing war or persecution, the economic rationale for resettling asylum seekers throughout Europe (and globally) is sound: in countries experiencing declining birth rates and ageing populations – as is the case across the EU as a whole – migration levels need to be significantly increased in order to continue financing systems of state welfare.

The facts are incontrovertible: evidence from OECD countries demonstrates that immigrant households contribute $2,800 more to the economy in taxes alone than they receive in public provision. In the UK, non-European immigrants contributed £5 billion ($7.15 billion) in taxes between 2000 and 2011. They are also less likely to receive state benefits than the rest of the population, more likely to start businesses, and less likely to commit serious crimes than natives. Overall, economists at the European Commission calculate that the influx of people from conflict zones will have a positive effect on employment rates and long-term public finances in the most affected countries.

A common agenda to end austerity

If migrant families contribute significantly to society and many European countries with low birth rates actually need them in greater numbers, why are governments and a growing sector of the population so reluctant to honour international commitments and assist refugees in need? The widely held belief that public resources are too scarce to share with asylum seekers is most likely born of fear and insecurity in an age of economic austerity, when many European citizens are struggling to make ends meet.

Just as the number of people forcibly displaced from developing countries begins to surge, economic conditions in most European countries have made it politically unfeasible to provide incoming refugees with shelter and basic welfare. Voluntary and compulsory austerity measures adopted by governments after spending trillions of dollars bailing out the banks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have resulted in deep spending cuts to essential public services such as healthcare, education and pensions schemes. The resulting economic crisis has led to rising unemployment, social discontent, growing levels of inequality and public services that are being stretched to breaking point.

The same neoliberal ideology that underpins austerity in Europe is also responsible for creating widespread economic insecurity across the Global South and facilitating an exodus of so-called ‘economic migrants’, many of who are also making their way to Europe. Economic austerity has been central to the ‘development’ policies foisted onto low-income countries for decades by the IMF and World Bank in exchange for loans and international aid. They constitute a modern form of economic colonialism that in many cases has decimated essential public services, thwarted poverty reduction programmes and increased the likelihood of social unrest, sectarian violence and civil war. By prioritising international loan repayments over the basic welfare of citizens, these neoliberal policies are directly responsible for creating a steady flow of ‘refugees from globalisation’ who are in search of basic economic security in an increasingly unequal world.

Instead of pointing the finger of blame at governments for mismanaging the economy, public anger across Europe is being wrongly directed at a far easier target: refugees from foreign lands who have become society’s collective scapegoats at a time of grinding austerity. It’s high time that people in both ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries recognise that their hardship stems from a parallel set of neoliberal policies that have prioritised market forces above social needs. By emphasising this mutual cause and promoting solidarity between people and nations, citizens can begin overturning prejudiced attitudes and supporting progressive agendas geared towards safeguarding the common good of all humanity.

From a culture of war to conflict resolution

It’s also clear that any significant change in the substance and direction of economic policy must go hand-in-hand with a dramatic shift away from aggressive foreign policy agendas that are overtly based on securing national interests at all costs – such as appropriating the planet’s increasingly scarce natural resources. Indeed, it will remain impossible to address the root causes of the refugee crisis until the UK, US, France and other NATO countries fully accept that their misguided foreign policies are largely responsible for the current predicament.

Not only are many western powers responsible for selling arms to abusive regimes in the Middle East, their wider foreign policy objectives and military ambitions have displaced large swathes of the world’s population, particularly as a consequence of the illegal occupation of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the ill-conceived invasion of Libya. The connection between the military interventions of recent years, the perpetuation of terrorism and the plight of refugees across the Middle East and North Africa has been succinctly explained by Professor Noam Chomsky:

“the US-UK invasion of Iraq … dealt a nearly lethal blow to a country that had already been devastated by a massive military attack twenty years earlier followed by virtually genocidal US-UK sanctions. The invasion displaced millions of people, many of whom fled and were absorbed in the neighboring countries, poor countries that are left to deal somehow with the detritus of our crimes. One outgrowth of the invasion is the ISIS/Daesh monstrosity, which is contributing to the horrifying Syrian catastrophe. Again, the neighboring countries have been absorbing the flow of refugees. The second sledgehammer blow destroyed Libya, now a chaos of warring groups, an ISIS base, a rich source of jihadis and weapons from West Africa to the Middle East, and a funnel for flow of refugees from Africa.”

After this series of blundered invasions by the US and NATO forces, which continue to destabilise an entire region, one might think that militarily powerful nations would finally accept the need for a very different foreign policy framework. No longer can governments ignore the imperative to engender trust between nations and replace the prevailing culture of war with one of peace and nonviolent means of conflict resolution. In the immediate future, the priority for states must be to deescalate emerging cold war tensions and diffuse what is essentially a proxy war in the Middle East being played out in Syria. Yet this remains a huge challenge at a time when military intervention is still favoured over compromise and diplomacy, even when common sense and experience tells us that this outdated approach only exacerbates violent conflict and causes further geopolitical instability.

Sharing the burden, responsibility and resources

Given the deplorably inadequate response from most EU governments to the global exodus of refugees thus far, the stage is set for a rapid escalation of the crisis in 2016 and beyond. Some ten million refugees are expected to make their way to Europe in 2016 alone, and this figure is likely to rise substantially with population growth in developing countries over the coming decades. But it’s climate change that will bring the real emergency, with far higher migration levels accompanied by floods, droughts and sudden hikes in global food prices.

Although largely overlooked by politicians and the mainstream media, the number of people fleeing conflict is already dwarfed by ‘environmental refugees’ displaced by severe ecological conditions – whose numbers could rise to 200 million by 2050. It’s clear that unless nations collectively pursue a radically different approach to managing forced displacement, international discord and social tensions will continue to mount and millions of additional refugees will be condemned to oversized and inhumane camps on the outer edges of civilisation.

The fundamentals of an effective and morally acceptable response to the crisis are already articulated in the Refugee Convention, which sets out the core responsibilities that states have towards those seeking asylum – even though governments have interpreted the treaty erroneously and failed to implement it effectively. In the short term, it’s evident that governments must mobilise the resources needed to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to those escaping war, regardless of where in the world they have been displaced. Like the Marshall Plan that was initiated after the Second World War, a globally coordinated emergency response to the refugee crisis will require a significant redistribution of finance from the world’s richest countries to those most in need – which should be provided on the basis of ‘enlightened self-interest’ if not from a genuine sense of compassion and altruism.

Immediate humanitarian interventions would have to be accompanied by a new and more effective system for administrating the protection of refugees in a way that is commensurate with international refugee law. In simple terms, such a mechanism could be coordinated by a reformed and revitalised UN Refugee Agency (the UNHCR) which would ensure that both the responsibility and resources needed to protect refugees is shared fairly among nations. A mechanism for sharing global responsibility would also mean that states only provide assistance in accordance with their individual capacity and circumstances, which would prevent less developed nations from shouldering the greatest burden of refugees as is currently the case.

Even though the UN’s refugee convention has already been agreed by 145 nations, policymakers in the EU seem incapable and unwilling to demonstrate any real leadership in tackling this or indeed any other pressing transnational issue. Not only does the resulting refugee fiasco demonstrate the extent to which self-interest dominates the political status quo across the European Union, it confirms the suspicion that the union as a whole is increasingly devoid of social conscience and in urgent need of reform.

Thankfully, ordinary citizens are leading the way on this critical issue and putting elected representatives to shame by providing urgent support to refugee families in immediate need of help. In their thousands, volunteers stationed along Europe’s boarders have been welcoming asylum seekers by providing much needed food, shelter and clothing, and have even provided search and rescue services for those who have risked their lives being trafficked into Europe in rubber dinghies. Nowhere is this spirit of compassion and generosity more apparent than on Lesbos and other Geek islands, where residents have been collectively nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for their humanitarian efforts.

The selfless actions of these dedicated volunteers should remind the world that people have a responsibility and a natural inclination to serve one another in times of need – regardless of differences in race, religion and nationality. Instead of building militarised borders and ignoring popular calls for a just and humanitarian response to the refugee crisis, governments should take the lead from these people of goodwill and prioritise the needs of the world’s most vulnerable above all other concerns. For European leaders and policymakers in all countries, it’s this instinctively humane response to the refugee crisis – which is based firmly on the principle of sharing – that holds the key to addressing the whole spectrum of interconnected social, economic and environmental challenges in the critical period ahead.

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Featured image is from TruePublica.