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A neutral bystander might question why Iran is not permitted to explore nuclear capabilities, especially as the country has long been under the shadow of possible attack. One need only examine the fate of past American victims like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, none of whom possessed nuclear weapons as a deterrent against aggression.

Such is the lesson invoked by US foreign policy. This has been heeded by North Korean leaders who, looking on at one American intervention after another, fearfully armed themselves to the teeth. On the other side, the United States and Israel possess a vast array of nuclear weapons – while the superpower and its right-hand man, unlike Iran, have decades of bloodshed and destruction under their belt.

Yet it is Iran that remains according to New York Times the key “destabilizing force” in the world with the Islamic republic, in reality, representing a threat to US and Israeli power in the Middle East. US president Donald Trump insisted that Iran is stoking the “fires of sectarian conflict and terror” while being “responsible for so much instability”. No such accusations are directed at America’s major ally and oil dictator country Saudi Arabia who, among other crimes, fund a range of terrorist groups.

Yet the Saudis have long constituted a “stabilizing regional presence” (according to MSM) , despite being among the world’s worst human rights abusers, far more severe than Iran. The US itself has been the greatest driver of “sectarian conflict and terror” in the Middle East, with repeated interventions dating to the early 1990s Gulf War. A rational observer would again be tempted to query why Israel and its sponsor America are not being pressurized into reviewing their own nuclear arsenals.

Unlike Iran, Israel refuses to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), nor does it allow any inspections of its nuclear capabilities. Also with American assurance, Israel has thwarted calls for a nuclear weapons free zone in one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has remained under significant outside pressure, in violation of the United Nations Charter. In recent days, this was publicly reiterated with Trump saying “If Iran threatens us in any way, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid”.

The West have a long history of intervention in Iranian affairs – dating in living memory to the early 1950s, when the US and Britain overthrew the country’s conservative parliamentary government, led by prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. He had been taking steps to nationalize Iran’s enormous oil reserves, placing it out of foreign reach, an unacceptable prospect. He was unceremoniously toppled in August 1953 and the pro-Western Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, replaced him.

During his quarter century of dictatorship, the Shah would compile one of the worst human rights records on earth (as noted by Amnesty International). None of that mattered so long as America and the new junior partner, Britain, had control over Iran’s oil supplies.

In August 1962, president John F. Kennedy bluntly outlined in a letter to the Shah that,

“The United States greatly appreciates the highly important strategic location of Iran”, while warning that the dictator should remain “vigilant against the pressures of international communism”.

Two years later Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, insisted that the Shah was “carrying out great programs aimed at the welfare of his people… His leadership has been a vital factor in keeping Iran free and in modernizing this ancient land”, while describing the tyrant as “a reformist twentieth century monarch”.

Despite the Shah’s grisly record, he received numerous requests to visit the West. The Shah toured the White House while meeting, at different times, presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Returning the favor with trips to the Iranian capital Tehran were Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon and Carter – while the Shah was also summoned to America to attend the funerals of both Kennedy and Eisenhower (in 1963 and 1969 respectively).

The Iranian despot further enjoyed invites to London, gracing the halls of Buckingham Palace where he met Queen Elizabeth II (still reigning today), also seeing Winston Churchill – Churchill was himself one of the instigators behind the 1953 coup. In March 1961, the Queen accepted the Shah’s invitation with a “royal tour to Iran”, joined by husband Prince Philip.

In April 1978, the Shah also saw Britain’s incoming prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Tehran. Later, following his ousting, Thatcher said she was “deeply unhappy” in being unable to offer the Shah refuge, whom she described as a “firm and helpful friend to the UK”.

Perhaps such meetings are not terribly surprising. For example the Indonesian dictator General Haji Suharto, who oversaw one of the biggest mass murders of the twentieth century (as the CIA reported), was also invited to Buckingham Palace in November 1979, where he greeted the Queen and Prince Philip. Previously, in March 1974, the British monarch had become acquainted with Suharto in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.

In April 1985, prime minister Thatcher saw Suharto during a state visit to Indonesia, saying that she and the dictator “have a close identity of view on so many things”, and elsewhere describing him as “one of our very best and most valuable friends” (Thatcher’s government was supporting the Suharto regime with weapons sales). Suharto also made repeated trips to the White House, being warmly hosted by a number of US presidents, from Nixon to Bill Clinton.

Mohammad Reza speaks with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office (Source: White House Photo Office)

Elsewhere, in mainstream dialogue, the Shah was known as “a protector of Middle East stability” by allowing American companies and banks to access Iran’s vast riches. In the background, the Shah’s notorious secret police SAVAK killed many thousands of people, maiming and torturing countless others. SAVAK’s formation in 1957 was made possible because of CIA assistance, along with backing from Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. In operation for 22 years, SAVAK is today known as “the most feared and hated institution” in Iranian history.

In early 1979, the Shah was at last overthrown by popular resistance – despite president Carter saying just months before that his was “a progressive administration”. Following the Shah’s expulsion, invitations from Washington and London to Iran’s new leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, were mysteriously not forthcoming. This despite the fact that Khomeini, in comparison to his predecessor, was something of a saintly figure. In fact, no Iranian leader since 1979 can match the blood spilled during the Shah’s rule.

One can assume that American and British elites are concerned solely with gaining control over major resources, while immune to the enormous human suffering that supporting dictatorships entails. Indeed, Iran has never been forgiven for liberating itself from Western-backed tyranny, since enduring a US-sponsored invasion, sanctions and endless threats.

In recent years, Tony Blair has gone so far as to blame Iran for the many problems in Iraq (and the entire region), following the murderous 2003 US/UK invasion. Blair, a key figure behind the illegal attack on Iraq, singled out “the continuing intervention of Iran”, while openly calling for “regime change in Tehran”.

Blair’s tone towards post-revolutionary Iran is standard fare across the West. Once Iran slipped from American influence it became “evil”, like North Korea and Iraq, as president George W. Bush outlined. Previously, in 1982, president Reagan took Saddam Hussein off the list of states sponsoring terrorism, so he could supply the Iraqi dictator with extensive military aid in his war against Iran (1980-88). The conflict’s longevity, which killed hundreds of thousands on either side, would not have been possible without US backing for Saddam.

From an imperial viewpoint, Iran is an even greater prize than its neighbor Iraq. In land area Iran is almost four times larger, with a population of 80 million compared to Iraq’s 37 million. Iran possesses far greater strength and international clout, containing more oil reserves along with other resources such as iron ore and magnesium.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

No leader, no matter how talented and visionary, effectively defies power without a disciplined organizational foundation. The civil rights movement was no more embodied in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. than the socialist movement was embodied in Eugene V. Debs. As the civil rights leader Ella Baker understood, the civil rights movement made King; King did not make the civil rights movement. We must focus on building new, radical movements that do not depend on foundation grants, a media platform or the Democratic Party or revolve around the cult of leadership. Otherwise, we will remain powerless. No leader, no matter how charismatic or courageous, will save us. We must save ourselves.

“You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me,” said Baker, who died in 1986. “The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

All of our radical and populist organizations, including unions and the press, are decimated or destroyed. If we are to successfully pit power against power we must reject the cult of the self, the deadly I-consciousness that seduces many, including those on the left, to construct little monuments to themselves. We must understand that it is not about us. It is about our neighbor. We must not be crippled by despair. Our job is to name and confront evil. All great crusades for justice outlast us. We are measured not by what we achieve but by how passionately and honestly we fight. Only then do we have a chance to thwart corporate power and protect a rapidly degrading ecosystem.

What does this mean?

It means receding into the landscape to build community organizations and relationships that for months, maybe years, will be unseen by mass culture. It means beginning where people are. It means listening. It means establishing credentials as a member of a community willing to make personal sacrifices for the well-being of others. It means being unassuming, humble and often unnamed and unrecognized. It means, as Cornel West said, not becoming “ontologically addicted to the camera.” It means, West went on, rejecting the “obsession with self as some kind of grand messianic gift to the world.”

One of the most important aspects of organizing is grass-roots educational programs that teach people, by engaging them in dialogue, about the structures of corporate power and the nature of oppression. One cannot fight what one does not understand. Effective political change, as Baker knew, is not primarily politically motivated. It is grounded in human solidarity, mutual trust and consciousness. As Harriet Tubman said:

“I rescued many slaves, but I could have saved a thousand more if the slaves knew they were slaves.”

The corporate state’s assault on education, and on journalism, is part of a concerted effort to keep us from examining corporate power and the ideologies, such as globalization and neoliberalism, that promote it. We are entranced by the tawdry, the salacious and the trivial.

The building of consciousness and mass organizations will not be quick. But these mass movements cannot become public until they are strong enough to carry out sustained actions, including civil disobedience and campaigns of noncooperation. The response by the state will be vicious. Without a dedicated and organized base we will not succeed.

Bob Moses (image on the right) was the director of the Mississippi Project of the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) in the early 1960s when that group organized to register black voters. Most blacks had been effectively barred from voting in Mississippi through poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements and other barriers. Moses, like many organizers, was beaten and arrested. Blacks who attempted to register to vote were threatened, harassed, fired from their jobs, physically attacked and even murdered.

“In essence, it was low-grade guerrilla warfare,” Moses said recently at an event at Princeton University, in New Jersey. “In guerrilla warfare, you have a community you can disappear into and emerge from. That’s what we had. We had a group of local activists who had been a part of the NAACP local organizations and who had a different sense after World War II. They were our base. I can go any place, any time of the night, knock on a door. Somebody was going to open it up, give me a bed to sleep in, feed me. They were going to watch my back.”

“We had a guerrilla community that we could disappear into and then emerge to take some people down to the battleground, the courthouse in some local town with people trying to register to vote,” he said. “At that point, you were exposed and possibly open to some danger. The danger came in different ways. There were the highway patrols, which the state organized. Then there were the local sheriffs. Then there’s the Klan citizens. Different levels of danger. The challenge is to understand that you are not always in danger. Those who couldn’t figure that out didn’t last. They didn’t join.”

“In guerrilla warfare, you have to have an end,” he said. “You learn that from people in the guerrilla base who had been fighting and figuring out how to survive and thrive in a guerrilla struggle. The only way to learn that is to immerse yourself. There’s no training. In Mississippi, most of the people who did that were young, 17, 18, 19. And they lived there.”

Organizing, Moses said, begins around a particular issue that is important to the community—raising the minimum wage, protecting undocumented workers, restoring voting rights to former prisoners, blocking a fracking site, halting evictions, ending police violence or stopping the dumping of toxic waste in neighborhoods. Movements rise organically. Dissidents are empowered and educated one person at a time. Any insurgency, he said, has to be earned.

“If you get knocked down enough times and stand up enough times then people think you’re serious,” he said. “It’s not you talking. They’ve heard everyone talk about this forever. We earned their trust. We earned the respect of young people across the country to get them to come down and risk their lives. This is your country. Look what’s going on in your country. What do you want to do about it? We established our authenticity.”

Moses warned movements, such as Black Lives Matter, about establishing a huge media profile without a strong organizational base. Too often protests are little more than spectacles, credentialing protesters as radicals or dissidents while doing little to confront the power of the state. The state, in fact, often collaborates with protesters, carrying out symbolic arrests choreographed in advance. This boutique activism is largely useless. Protests must take the state by surprise and, as with the water protectors at Standing Rock, cause serious disruption. When that happens, the state will drop all pretense of civility, as it did at Standing Rock, and react with excessive force.

“You can’t be a media person [the subject of media reports] and an organizer,” Moses said. “If you’re leading an organization, it’s what you do and who you are that impacts the people who you are trying to get to do the organizing work. If what they see is your media presence, then that’s what they also want to have. It’s overwhelming to be a media person in this country. To attend to the duties of being a media person, the obligations that follow a media person, really means that you can’t attend to the obligations of actually doing organizing work. Once SNCC decided it needed a media person, it lost its organizing base. It disintegrated and disappeared. You can’t do both.”

The mass mobilizations, such as the Women’s March, have little impact unless they are part of a campaign centered around a specific goal. The goal—in the case of SNCC, voter registration—becomes the organizing tool for greater political consciousness and eventually a broader challenge to established power. People need to be organized around issues they care about, Moses said. They need to formulate their own strategy. If strategy is dictated to them, then the movement will fail.

“People need to figure out for themselves what they want to do about a problem,” Moses said. They need “agency.” They do not get agency, he said, “by listening to somebody tell them things.”

“They can develop agency by going out and trying things,” he said. “It works, or it doesn’t work. They come back. They think about it. They reformulate it. Staff people are keeping track of what it is, who it is, what they’re working on. They are documenting it. This is the difference between a mobilizing effort, where you’re getting people to turn out for an event, and trying to get people self-engaged and thinking through a problem.”

“When you do civil disobedience, the question is not about the power structure but the people you’re trying to reach,” he said. “How do they view what you’re doing? Do you alienate them? It’s a balance between, in some sense, leading and organizing. When you do your civil disobedience, it may or may not help with expanding your organizing base.”

Moses, who believes that only nonviolent resistance will be effective, said the Vietnam anti-war movement hurt itself by not accepting, as the civil rights movement did, prison and jail time as part of its resistance. Many in the anti-war movement, he said, lacked the vital capacity for self-sacrifice. This willingness to engage in self-sacrifice, he said, is fundamental to success.

“The anti-war movement would have had a huge impact if it had been able to agree that what we’re going to do is go to prison,” he said. “We are going to pay a certain price. We’re going to earn our insurgency against the foreign policy establishment of the country. We’re going to say no and go to prison. That way, they could have emerged when the war was over as the insurgents who had paid, in their own way, the price of the war.”

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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 from Mr. Fish/Truthdig.

The White Helmets are al Qaeda auxiliaries.  They are misogynist, sectarian, anti-Christian terrorists.

Canada supports them and all of the sectarian, anti-Christian, misogynist terrorists invading, destroying, and occupying parts of secular, pro-Christian, pluralist, pro-equal rights, civilized Syria.

Pictured below we see Canada’s NDP foreign affairs critic, Helene Laverdiere, posing with White Helmets personnel inside the Canadian parliament.  (Ken Stone, of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, offers his comments below the picture.)

Canada, NATO, and their allies, including the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Apartheid Israel, have been supporting (all of) the terrorists with a view to destroying Syria and implementing “Regime Change” (God forbid), for the last seven years now.

Syrians, for the most part, are staunch supporters of their democratically-elected, secular, pro-Christian, pro-equal rights, government.

The video below was taken shortly after France, the UK, and the US criminally bombed Syria with their cruise missiles on April 14, 2018. Syrians in the video are rallying in support of their government.

(Video by Maickel Wijnhoven, Damascus, Syria)

Sarah Abdallah, for her part, notes that Christians in liberated Aleppo now have the freedom to attend church and celebrate First Communion, freedoms that the church-destroying, anti-Christian terrorists denied them.

From Aleppo, free of ISIS and Al-Qaeda jihadists, Syrian Christians observed the First Communion at the Saint Dimitrios Church.

This is the kind of peace that would reign all over Syria if Saudi Arabia & its NATO buddies stop backing terrorists masquerading as “moderate rebels”. pic.twitter.com/7MG2eHh3Vp

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) May 5, 2018

In stark contrast to Syrian government-secured areas, are (Western-supported) terrorist-occupied areas.  In the video below, investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley interviews a former captive of Eastern Ghouta, now liberated by Syria and its allies.

The woman tells a harrowing tale of child abductions, organ harvesting, starvation, and myriad privations and humiliations.

(Video by Vanessa Beeley)

Canadians who cherish Truth for Freedom and Justice, who cherish religious freedoms and freedom from terrorism, must surely denounce Canada’s barbaric foreign policy, concealed as it is, beneath lies and fake progressive fronts.

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

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

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

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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Beyond Pesticides and The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) today responded to a federal judge’s ruling against Monsanto Co.’s motion to dismiss the groups’ lawsuit, filed in April, 2017. The lawsuit challenged Monsanto’s safety claim on its Roundup (glyphosate) products as misleading and fraudulent. Monsanto displays a claim on its Roundup product label that states that the chemicals in the product “targets an enzyme bound in plants but not in people or pets,” when, in fact, the chemical adversely affects beneficial bacteria essential to the gut biome and normal body functions.

Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, the lead plaintiff in the case, said:

“In the face of EPA’s poor regulation of pesticides, misleading pesticide product labeling cannot be left unchecked. The court’s decision to allow our case to move forward, in denying Monsanto’s motion to dismiss, is critical to showing that the company is deceiving the public with a safety claim on its Roundup (glyphosate) label. Its advertising and labeling claim that Roundup ‘targets an enzyme found in plants but not in people or pets’ is false, given the devastating harm that glyphosate has on beneficial bacteria in the gut biome. The disruption of the gut biome is associated with a host of 21st century diseases, including asthma, autism, bacterial vaginosis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, Crohn’s disease, depression, inflammatory bowel disease, leaky gut syndrome, multiple sclerosis, obesity, Type 1 and 2 diabetes, and Parkinson’s.

The science on the hazards of Roundup (glyphosate) are clear and Monsanto officials know it. With this case, we seek to ensure that the public is not misled by false advertising and product labeling in the marketplace. It is a critical step toward ensuring that people are fully informed before purchasing toxic products that can poison them, their families, and the communities where they live.”

OCA International Director, Ronnie Cummins said:

“Monsanto aggressively markets Roundup as ‘safe’ for humans and animals, despite newer studies indicating that glyphosate may be carcinogenic and its use may affect human and animal cardiovascular, endocrine, nervous and reproductive systems. No reasonable consumer seeing the claim on this product that glyphosate targets an enzyme not found ‘in people or pets’ would expect that Roundup actually targets an important bacterial enzyme found in humans and animals, affecting the health of their immune system.

Survey after survey shows that consumers rely on labels to guide their purchases and keep them and their families safe. When corporations mislead on the issue of a product’s effect on consumers and their families, they put everyone, but especially young children—in this case, playing in yards and parks—at risk, leaving the public no other recourse than to use the legal system to seek the removal of this misleading information.”

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled that Beyond Pesticides and OCA presented enough evidence to support that Monsanto’s labeling of its flagship weedkiller, Roundup, misleads consumers.

Through their attorneys, Richman Law Group, Beyond Pesticides and OCA sued Monsanto on behalf of the general public, in Washington D.C., under the District of Columbia’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act, for misleading the public by labeling its popular weedkiller Roundup as “target[ing] an enzyme found in plants but not in people or pets.” The nonprofits allege that this statement is false, deceptive and misleading, because the enzyme targeted by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is, in fact, found in people and pets.

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Featured image is from Beyond Pesticides.

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Rachel Maddow‘s May 2 MSNBC show, highlighted Andrew Kramer‘s same day New York Times (NYT) article, saying the Kiev regime has decided to limit its cooperation with the Robert Mueller led FBI investigation on an alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign and the Russian government. The Kiev regime is presented as feeling pressured to not cooperate with Mueller, for the purpose of maintaining the military aid it has received from the Trump administration.

Maddow’s May 2 show included an appearance by The NYT’s Kenneth Vogel. To conform with her overly subjective and inaccurate spin, Maddow was quite selective in what she wanted out of Vogel. Specifically, Vogel’s August 18, 2016 Politico article about Konstantin Kilimnik, who has had ties to Trump’s former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort. As claimed, Kilimnik might’ve been working with Russian Intel during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. Manafort served for a time as a consultant to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych before the latter’s ouster in 2014.

Screenshot from Politico

On Maddow’s show, Vogel acknowledged some reason to question the extent (if any) of Kilimnik having a Russian Intel relationship for the period at issue. That’s the most objective part of her May 2 anti-Russian propaganda. With the coming months and years in mind, it’ll be interesting to see if anything conclusive comes up to support the notion of an anti-Hillary Clinton operation, involving Kilimnik, the Kremlin, Manafort and Trump, during the 2016 US presidential election.

Maddow started her May 2 show on this subject, with the image of civic minded, freedom loving Ukrainian people, toppling a corrupt pro-Russian leader Yanukovych, followed by his lavish living conditions being exposed to the public. Missing from Maddow’s presentation are these realities:

• Manafort saying that he favored Yanukovych taking a European Union route, over the Russian involved Eurasian Customs Union
• contrary to the pro-Russian stereotype, Yanukovych didn’t always do what the Kremlin preferred – his not advocating for Ukraine to be in the Eurasian Customs Union serving as an example
• the violent nationalists, who committed murderous action during the Kiev street protests against Yanukovych
• the overthrow of the democratically elected Yanukovych, who had just signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main political opposition
• post-Yanukovych Kiev regime controlled Ukraine, includes a highly corrupt kleptocracy (whose lavishness hasn’t been featured in the manner of Yanukovych’s), meshed with an enhanced ultra-nationalist element, that has led to numerous deaths
• the considerable unpopularity of that regime.

These are obviously inconvenient points for Maddow, who takes the easy way out by not mentioning them. In line with this tact, she omits mention of another article which Vogel had written.

Screenshot from Politico

He coauthored with David Stern a January 11, 2017 Politico article, about the Kiev regime’s 2016 clandestine effort to find damaging information on Trump and Manafort. At the time, the Kiev regime was particularly uneasy with Trump’s position on Russia. CNN later followed up on this issue with Stern. He acknowledged not having as detailed a conversation as Vogel with the Ukrainian-American activist Alexandra Chalupa, who was involved with the Kiev regime’s effort against Trump and Manafort. In the aforementioned CNN segment, Stern was hesitant to equate that activity with what the Russian government has been accused of doing with Trump.

The neocons are pleased with Trump’s decision to increase military support to the Kiev regime. Neolibs have been generally more apprehensive on that move. For its part, Russia is understandably concerned about the Kiev regime, perhaps at some point launching a Croatian scenario into the rebel held Donbass territory. That move could very well lead to an increased exodus to Russia and pressure from within Russia to militarily strike back.

Contrary to what some say, the Russian government isn’t seeking unnecessary armed conflicts – something well worth debating if there’s any doubt. At the same time, the Kremlin can only (within reason) take so much. (Srdja Trifkovic’s May 2 Chronicles Magazine article, argues that the Kremlin has been passive on the domestic and foreign policy fronts.)

In the meantime, the likes of Maddow recklessly use Russia as a political football on a major US cable TV news network, offering little if any diversity in its coverage of that country.

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Michael Averko is a New York based independent foreign policy analyst and media critic.

Featured image: Mike Pompeo meets with Israeli Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, April 2018. (Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv/ flickr)

Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo has recently completed his first trip to the Middle East as U.S. Secretary of State. Perhaps not surprisingly as President Donald Trump appears prepared to decertify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) limiting Iran’s nuclear program creating a possible casus belli, much of what Pompeo said was focused on what was alleged to be the growing regional threat posed by Iran both in conventional terms and due to its claimed desire to develop a nuclear weapon.

The Secretary of State met with heads of state or government as well as foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan during his trip. He did not meet with the Palestinians, who have cut off contact with the Trump Administration because they have “nothing to discuss” with it in the wake of the decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

During his first stop in Riyadh, Pompeo told a beaming Foreign Minister Adel Jubeir that Iran has been supporting the “murderous” Bashar al-Assad government in Damascus while also arming Houthi rebels in Yemen. He noted that

“Iran destabilizes the entire region. It is indeed the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world…”

In Israel, Pompeo stood side by side with an smiling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said

“We remain deeply concerned about Iran’s dangerous escalation of threats to Israel and the region, and Iran’s ambition to dominate the Middle East remains. The United States is with Israel in this fight. And we strongly support Israel’s sovereign right to defend itself.”

At the last stop in Jordan, Pompeo returned to the “defend itself” theme, saying regarding Gaza that

“We do believe the Israelis have a right to defend themselves and we are fully supportive of that.”

One hopes that discussions between Pompeo and his foreign interlocutors were more substantive than his somewhat laconic published comments. But given the comments themselves, it is depressing to consider that he was until recently Director of the CIA and was considered an intellectually brilliant congressman who graduated first in his class at West Point. One would hope to find him better informed.

Very little that surfaced in the admittedly whirlwind tour of the Middle East is fact-based. Starting with depicting Iran as a regional and even global threat, one can challenge the view that its moves in Yemen and Syria constitute any fundamental change in the balance of power in the region. Iranian support of Syria actually restores the balance by returning to the status quo ante where Syria had a united and stable government before the United States and others decided to intervene.

Israeli claims repeated by Washington that Iran is somehow building a “land bridge” to link it to the Mediterranean Sea are wildly overstated as they imply that somehow Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are willing to cede their sovereignty to an ally, an unlikely prospect to put it mildly. Likewise, the claim that Iran is seeking to “dominate the region” rings hollow as it does not have the wherewithal to do so either financially or militarily and many of its government’s actions are largely defensive in nature. The reality is that Israel and Saudi Arabia are the ones seeking regional dominance and are threatened because a locally powerful Iran is in their way.

Israel and Saudi Arabia are the ones seeking regional dominance and are threatened because a locally powerful Iran is in their way.

Support by Tehran for Yemen’s Houthis is more fantasized than real with little actual evidence that Iran has been able to provide anything substantial in the way of arms. The Saudi massacre of 10,000 mostly Yemeni civilians and displacement of 3 million more being carried out from the air has been universally condemned with the sole exceptions of the U.S. and Israel, which seem to share with Riyadh a unique interpretation of developments in that long-suffering land. The U.S. has supplied the Saudis with weapons and intelligence to make their bombing attacks more effective, i.e. lethal.

Pompeo did not exactly endorse the ludicrous Israeli claim made by Benjamin Netanyahu last week that Iran has a secret weapons of mass destruction program currently in place, but he did come down against the JCPOA, echoing Trump in calling it a terrible agreement that will guarantee an Iranian nuclear weapon. The reality is quite different, with the pact basically eliminating a possible Iranian nuke for the foreseeable future through degradation of the country’s nuclear research, reduction of its existing nuclear stocks and repeated intrusive inspections. Israel meanwhile has a secret nuclear arsenal and is a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty without any demur from the White House.

The Israeli-Pompeo construct assumes that Iran is singularly untrustworthy, an odd assertion coming from either Washington, Riyadh or Tel Aviv. It also basically rejects any kind of agreement with the Mullahs and is a path to war. It is interesting to note that the Pentagon together with all of America’s closest allies believe that the JCPOA should stay in place.

And then there is the claim that Iran is the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism. In reality that honor belongs to the United States and Israel with Iran often being the victim, most notably with the assassination of its scientists and technicians by Mossad agents. Israel has also been targeting and bombing Iranians in Syria, as has the United States, even though neither is at war with Iran and the Iranian militias in the country are cooperating with the Syrians and Russians to fight terrorist groups including ISIS as well as those affiliated with al-Qaeda. The U.S. is actually empowering terrorists in Syria and along the Iraqi border while killing hundreds of thousands in its never-ending war on terror. Israel meanwhile has agreements with several extremist groups so they will not attack its occupied Golan Heights and also seeks to continue to destabilize the Syrians.

There is the claim that Iran is the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism. In reality that honor belongs to the United States and Israel with Iran often being the victim, most notably with the assassination of its scientists and technicians by Mossad agents.

Pompeo also endorsed Israel’s “fight” against the Gazan demonstrators and pledged that America would stand beside its best friend. As of this point, Israel has used trained army snipers to kill forty-three unarmed protesting Palestinians. Another 5,000 have been injured, mostly by gunfire. No “threatened” Israelis have suffered so much as a broken fingernail and the border fence is both intact and has never been breached. Israel is committing what is very clearly a war crime and the United States Secretary of State is endorsing the slaughter of a defenseless people who are imprisoned in the world’s largest open-air concentration camp.

Donald Trump entered into office with great expectations, but if Mike Pompeo is truly outlining American foreign policy, then I and many other citizens don’t get it and we most definitely don’t want it.

*

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.

Killing the Truth: In this article, first published by the Duran and GR in October 2016, the journalist who exposed the truth regarding the State sponsors of ISIS-Daesh is killed. Who are the state sponsors of ISIS-Daesh.

Although all signs point to foul play, indeed murder, by Turkish intelligence, until now the US government has neither conducted nor demanded an inquiry into the events of the alleged car accident which Turkish officials say was the cause of Shim’s death, let alone offer condolences to the family.

Serena Shim was at the time reporting on Ayn al-Arab (Kobani), from the Turkish side. She was, in her own words, one of the first, if not the first, on the ground to report on ,“Takfiri militants going in through the Turkish border”. These include not only ISIS but also terrorists from the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA).

As Shim’s sister Fatmeh Shim stated in 2015, “She caught them bringing in ISIS high-ranked members into Syria from Turkey into camps, which are supposed to be Syrian refugee camps.”

Serena Shim’s January 2013 expose, “Turkey’s Pivotal Role in Syria’s Insurgency: PressTV Report from Inside Turkey,” showed footage of what she estimated to be 300 semi-trucks “awaiting militants to empty them out”; included testimony explaining how Turkey enables the crossing of foreign terrorists “freely” into Syria; spoke of the funneling of arms via the Incirlik US Air Base in Turkey to terrorists in refugee camps or on through to Syria; and highlighted the issue of terrorist training camps portrayed as refugee camps, guarded by the Turkish military.

Shim named the World Food Organization as one of the NGOs whose trucks were being used to funnel terrorists’ arms into Syria, and stated this in her last interview, just one day before being killed. Notably, in that interview she also explicitly stated that she feared for her life because Turkish intelligence had accused her of being a spy. She told Press TV:

“Turkey has been labeled by Reporters Without Borders as the largest prison for journalists, so I am a bit frightened about what they might use against me… I’m hoping that nothing is going to happen, that it’s going to blow over. I would assume that they are going to take me in for questioning, and the next hope is that my lawyer is good enough to get me out as soon as possible.”

Two days later, Press TV announced her death, stating:

“Serena was killed in a reported car accident when she was returning from a report scene in the city of Suruch in Turkey’s Urfa province. She was going back to her hotel in Urfa when their car collided with a heavy vehicle.”

“There’s so many different stories. The first was that Serena’s car was hit by a heavy vehicle, who proceeded to keep on driving. They could not find the vehicle nor could they find the driver. Two days later, surprisingly, they had found the vehicle and the driver, and had pictures of the heavy vehicle hitting my sister’s car. Every day coming out with new pictures of different degrees of damages that have happened to the car.”

“Serena and my cousin who was the driver of the car were taken to two different hospitals. She was reported first dead at the scene. Then coming out with later reports that she passed away at the hospital 30 minutes later from heart failure?! ”

POLITICAL BLACKOUT, MEDIA BLACKOUT

When on November 20, 2014, at a Daily Press Briefing, RT journalist Gayane Chichakyan twice pressed Director of Press Office, Jeff Rathke, for updates on Shim’s death, he unsurprisingly gave none:

Chichakyan: “It’s about the journalist Serena Shim, who died in Turkey under very suspicious circumstances. Did her death raise suspicions here at the State Department?”

Rathke: “Well, I think we’ve spoken to this in the briefing room several weeks ago, after it happened. I don’t have anything to add to what the spokesperson said at the time, though.”

Chichakyan: “But then she died several days after she claimed she had been threatened by the Turkish intelligence. Have you inquired about this? Have you asked questions? Is there really nothing new about this?”

Rathke: “Well, I just don’t have any update to share with you. Again, this was raised shortly after her death. The spokesperson addressed it. I don’t have an update to share with you at this time.”

Chichakyan: “I just want to go back to Serena Shim. You rightly said the State Department commented on her death several weeks ago, and you say there is no update. Why is there no update? A U.S. citizen dies days after she said she’d been threatened by the Turkish intelligence.”

Rathke: “Well, I simply don’t have any information to share at this time. I’m happy to check and see if there’s anything additional. We spoke out about it, as I said, at the very start several weeks ago after her death, so I – but I don’t have anything with me right now to offer. I’m happy to check and see if there’s more that we can share.”

Of course, neither he nor any US government official has followed up. Last year, Shim’s mother, Judy Poe, replied to me in a message:

“There is no doubt in my mind that my daughter did not die in a car accident. There was not one single scratch on her there was no blood absolutely anywhere. I have tried to contact the American Embassy in Turkey with the cell phone numbers they gave me originally when I was going to get my daughter. Absolutely no response from the American Embassy in Turkey, including via personal cell phones.”

Shim’s sister in her RT interview stated, “We’ve got no support whatsoever, nor have we got condolences.”

None of the major journalist organizations have pursued a just investigation into Shim’s murder, much less lamented it. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) turns up zero results when Shim’s name is searched on their website. Yet, the CPJ does have a list of journalists killed in Turkey since 1992, and as recent as Feb 2016, obviously minus Shim’s name.

Likewise, a search on the Reporters Without Borders website turns up zero results. A December 19, 2014 article at the Greanville Post does have a CPJ spokesperson stating:

“The Committee to Protect Journalists has investigated the events surrounding Serena Shim’s death in Turkey and at this time has found no evidence to indicate that her death was anything other than a tragic accident. Unless her death is confirmed to be in direct relation to her work as a journalist, it will not appear on our database. In the event that new evidence comes to light, CPJ would review her case.”

The article Greanville Post notes, “As of February 2016, the CPJ has not changed its position.”

The International Federation of Journalists does have a short entry on Shim:

“Serena Shim, the female correspondent for Press TV in Turkey was killed in a car accident on the Turkish-Syrian border. She was returning from an assignment in Suruç, a rural district of Şanlıurfa Province of Turkey when her car collided with a truck.”

But no call for inquiry and no questioning of official narrative. In a November 21, 2014 article at Shim’s death, RT noted that, “the office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media at the OSCE told RT that Turkey is carrying out an investigation.” It cited OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Gunnar Vrang, as saying:

“The representative has been following the case since the first reports appeared about the car accident that claimed the life of journalist Serena Shim. According to information available to her office, the Turkish authorities have started investigation into the details of the car accident.”

Searching the OSCE for Serena Shim’s name also results in zero hits. On February 5, 2016, Judy Poe tweeted:

Clearly the representative went with the Turkish rendition of events. Few in corporate media have looked into Shim’s suspicious death. In one surprising exception, Fox News reported on Shim’s death, citing a US State Department spokesperson as saying the State Department “does not conduct investigations into deaths overseas.”

Given that Turkish intelligence threatened Shim, according to her testimony, and that Turkey is notorious world-wide for its imprisonment and murder of journalists, the US State Department’s lack of concern is incriminating in itself.

In stark contrast to the silence around Shim’s death, John Kerry at least twice publicly mourned the death of James Foley, lauding as a hero the journalist who snuck into Syria via Turkey to report embedded with al-Qaeda and other terrorists, and giving sincere condolences to his family.

Without a trace of irony, in August 2014, Kerry said of Foley, and never of Shim, “We honor the courage and pray for the safety of all those who risk their lives to discover the truth where it is needed most.”

In September, 2014, Kerry directly contradicted the above-mentioned words of the State Department spokesperson, saying: “When terrorists anywhere around the world have murdered our citizens, the United States held them accountable, no matter how long it took.

And those who have murdered James Foley and Steven Sotloff in Syria should know that the United States will hold them accountable too, no matter how long it takes.” On the media and political blackout around Serena Shim’s suspicious death, Shim’s former colleague, Afshin Rattansi, host of RT’s “Going Underground” posited:

“There were a few press reports, but nothing like the kind of reporting about a brave young journalist that one would expect. Was this because the story she was covering was so dangerous that a NATO ally like Turkey should be cooperating with ISIS… was that the reason that this story has not been more widely broadcast? We don’t know.”

Indeed, this would not be the first time the US administration has not pursued justice for the murder of one of its citizens by an ally. Rachie Corrie’s March 16, 2013 murder by an Israeli soldier driving a bulldozer was not only witnessed by numerous rights activists with Corrie in Rafah, occupied Palestine, but was filmed. There is no denial that the Israeli soldier saw Corrie, drove his dozer over her and then reversed back, crushing her twice.

Yet, in spite of the efforts of her family and supporters, the US has never pursued justice for this American citizen either. Judy Poe said that Serena’s favourite motto was: “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” Shim lived the motto. She was 29, with two children, when killed.

The Trump administration announced a policy of unprecedented cruelty in its persecution of immigrant families Monday. Family groups caught crossing the U.S. border without authorization will be immediately broken up, with the parents detained and prosecuted for illegal entry while their children are taken away from them.

Enforcement of the new policy was triggered by a memorandum sent out last Friday by the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, directing both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol to refer all suspected border crossers to the Justice Department for prosecution under a federal statute that prohibits illegal entry.

“Those apprehended will be sent directly to federal court under the custody of the US Marshals Service, and their children will be transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement,” a DHS official said in elaborating the policy.

Publicly announcing the policy in a speech to a police conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared,

“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”

By “smuggling,” Sessions was referring to parents bringing their children with them as they flee the violence-torn, poverty-stricken countries of Central America, seeking refuge in the United States. The vast majority of family groups detained at the US border come from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, where right-wing, military-backed regimes and gangs involved in the US-fueled drug trade hold sway, with the approval and assistance of Washington.

By the standard of Sessions, Trump, and the other bigots and maniacs who direct U.S. immigration policy, the Jewish parents fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s were also engaged in “smuggling” because they brought their children with them. So too, the millions who have fled US-devastated war zones in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East.

The Trump administration has been actively preparing a policy of family separation since Trump entered the White House, although officials denied they were doing so when initial reports appeared in the press last year. But according to press reports today, officials in the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have long believed that jailing everyone caught crossing the border illegally was the best means to intimidate and discourage prospective immigrants.

Trump and Sessions would be quite willing to jail the children too, but this was barred by prior court decisions that overturned a similar (though undeclared) practice of the Obama administration. As a result, adopting a policy of universal jailing of adults requires the separation of children from their parents.

However, from the standpoint of the Trump administration, the sheer cruelty of such measures, with infants only a few months old torn away from their mothers, was a positive feature, since it would serve as an additional “deterrent” to crossing the border illegally.

According to the Wall Street Journal, once the Border Patrol separates the parents, the children will be classified as “unaccompanied minors” and sent to shelters, unless family members can be found living legally in the United States who are able to take care of them.

Sessions said that additional resources, including dozens of prosecutors and immigration judges, were being mobilized to the four borders states in the Southwest: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. He cited a doubling of detentions for illegal entry along that border in April 2018, compared to the same month last year.

Criminal prosecutions at the border have skyrocketed over the past 25 years, from 10,000 a year in the mid-1990s to a peak of more than 90,000 in 2013 under the Obama administration, which also deported more immigrants than any other administration in history. The number of such prosecutions declined to 60,000 in the last fiscal year, which ended September 30, 2017, but it is expected to increase dramatically and perhaps break the Obama record this year.

First-time “offenders,” convicted of “improper entry by an alien,” have usually been prosecuted for a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison. A second conviction for illegal border crossing would likely be a felony “illegal reentry,” with a prison term of up to two years. A third conviction can mean a prison term as long as 20 years. There are similarly savage penalties for aiding immigrants, making false statements to an immigration official, or acts classified as fraud, such as working under a false Social Security number.

Sessions pointed to the broad range of potential charges in his speech in Arizona.

“If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you,” he declared. “If you make false statements to an immigration officer or commit fraud in our system to obtain an immigration benefit, that’s a felony. We will put you in jail. If you help others to do so, that’s a felony, too.”

The entire speech of the attorney general was devoted to “law-and-order” demagogy, portraying the United States as a country under assault.

“We are not going to let this country be invaded,” he said. “We will not be stampeded. We will not capitulate to lawlessness.”

The truth is that the United States has invaded more countries than anyone since Hitler. The vast majority of the world’s refugees and displaced persons have lost their homes and been forced to flee for their lives because of American bombs, missiles and other armaments, whether employed directly by American troops, by US-backed puppet regimes (Afghanistan and Iraq) or by their US allies like Saudi Arabia (in Yemen), or France (across North Africa).

Leave it to Donald Trump, besieged by denunciations of his torturous behavior toward women, to have nominated a female torturer to head the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a move clearly designed to prove that a woman can be as crudely barbaric as this deeply misogynistic president. When it comes to bullying, Gina Haspel, whose confirmation hearing begins Wednesday, is the real deal, and The Donald is a pussycat by comparison. Whom has he ever waterboarded? Haspel has done that and a lot worse. Haspel is Trump’s ideal feminist, a point tweeted by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel. Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) May 5, 2018

They call her “Bloody Gina,” and for some of her buddies in the torture wing of the CIA and their supporters in Congress, that is meant as a compliment. For a decade after the 9/11 attacks, Haspel served as chief of staff, running the vast network of secret rendition torture prisons around the globe. As a definitive Senate Intelligence Committee report established, torture is not legal, according to U.S. law and international covenants signed by President Ronald Reagan, nor does it produce any actionable information in preventing acts of terror.

After the public revelation of the vast extent of the torture program horrified the world, Haspel deliberately destroyed 92 videotapes depicting the barbaric practice, violating a Justice Department order that the tapes be preserved, and thus clearly obstructing a criminal investigation. Yet in March, Trump chose to nominate Bloody Gina to be the new head of our super-spy agency.

Give Trump credit for consistency: He did campaign on the theme that torture—or “enhanced interrogation,” as his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, justified it—is only wrong when nations other than our own do it. And by nominating Haspel to head the CIA, Trump is clearly seeking to take torture out of the covert dark side, as former Vice President Dick Cheney termed his revival of the medieval dungeon art; Trump has branded it as a legitimate, made-in-America weapon, wielded by a woman, no less. Trump seemed to be saying,

“Label me a bully; I’ll show you what a woman can do!”

When it comes to authorizing the near-drowning of shackled prisoners and smashing their heads against prison walls, this lady is the equal of any macho man.

The best witness to the crimes of Bloody Gina is offered by a true hero of the real war against terrorism, former FBI agent Ali Soufan, who is credited with having done the most significant interrogation of captured terrorist suspects. Soufan shunned torture and skillfully gained the confidence of prisoners who went on to provide reliable information.

“It is a matter of public record,” Soufan wrote in The Atlantic magazine, “that Gina Haspel … played a key role in the agency’s now-defunct program of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ an Orwellian euphemism for a system of violence most Americans would recognize as torture. … I know firsthand how brutal those techniques were—and how counterproductive. … Unsurprisingly, the CIA’s own inspector general concluded that the torture program failed to produce any significant actionable intelligence; and I testified to the same effect under oath in the Senate.”

While there is no evidence that this indelible stain on America’s legacy produced any reliable information, the nomination of Bloody Gina sent a message to the world from this president that torture is to be rewarded. There are many, including Republican Sen. John McCain, who has his own story of being tortured as a prisoner in Vietnam and who raised questions about Haspel’s support of the torture program.

“The use of torture compromised our values, stained our national honor, and threatened our historical reputation,” McCain said.

But even some Democrats may support Haspel’s nomination given that members of their party have been complicit in excusing the heinous practice of torture. After all, it was Democratic President Barack Obama who decided not to prosecute anyone for ordering or committing the torture that is one of the great stains on American history. In fact, Obama prosecuted former CIA agent John Kiriakou after he revealed the torture program’s existence to a journalist. He did so after President Bush’s memorable statement that the United States “does not torture people!” Ironically, the Bush Justice Department cleared Kiriakou of any charges, while Obama revived them two years later and sent the former agent to prison for 30 months.

Whether or not the Senate confirms Haspel, the very fact of her nomination defines Trump as a fatally callous leader totally contemptuous of basic human rights and the rule of law. Trump did not indelibly link America to torture; that disgrace is owned by George W. Bush, a “moderate” Republican, but it remained for this American president to brand torture as a favored American sport.

*

Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures.

Five NATO members continue to possess colonies. These NATO states have no intention of granting their territories independence any time soon. Not only does France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United States insist on maintaining vestiges of their colonial pasts, but their colonies have been interwoven into NATO’s military infrastructure.

The continued presence of French, British, Dutch, Danish, and American colonies around the world extends what is officially called the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” to the South Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. If there was ever an organization guilty of blatantly deceptive advertising practices, it is NATO.

Recent attempts to secure more political autonomy in the French Caribbean territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, the latter the home of a French space launch facility having strategic importance, have been met with everything from indifference in Paris or extreme hostility. A January 26, 1968 SECRET Central Intelligence Agency report warned against Soviet attempts to establish space tracking facilities in French Guiana. That same year, the Guiana Space Center was established at Korou in the French colony. NATO ordered the suppression of independence moves by the people of Guiana to keep the center solely in the hands of France and the European Space Agency. In March and April 2017, populist tempers flared when Guianese protesters took over the Korou space facility over charges that France was ignoring the people of the colony. Youth unemployment, for example, is at a staggering 55 percent.

Moves by Britain to curb the financial independence of its Caribbean-Atlantic territories of the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Bermuda, Anguilla, and the British Virgin Islands (BVI) have faced charges in those territories of Britain’s re-imposition of colonialism on the self-governing territories. The Dutch have been the most blatantly neo-colonialist in rolling back self-government in St. Maarten, Bonaire, St. Eustatius, and Saba. The Dutch totally ignored the results of a 2015 referendum in Bonaire that rejected the island’s incorporation into the Netherlands by 65 percent. A 2014 referendum in St. Eustatius also rejected incorporation into the Netherlands. The Dutch colonizers have moved to impose direct rule on both islands with a wink and a nod from NATO.

Aerial picture of Thule Air Base released by the White House (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

NATO treats its member states’ Caribbean and Atlantic territories as military “terra firma,” where air and naval bases either currently exist or could be ramped up for military actions. Attempts at independence or a strong degree of autonomy are not in NATO’s interests. NATO, through its surrogates in Copenhagen, has deterred any move toward independence by the Faroes and Greenland, both Danish territories that, on paper, enjoy self-government. NATO wants to ensure its continued presence at the U.S. airbase in Thule and deter China from mining operations in rapidly-warming Greenland that target known major deposits of rare earth minerals. Recent elections in Greenland resulted in a victory for Prime Minister Kim Kielsen and his four-party coalition that favors independence from Denmark. One of the parties, Nunatta Qitornai, favors immediate independence from Denmark. A scheduled referendum on a new constitution in the Faroes was postponed for six months. The referendum, which could lead to independence from Denmark, may have been delayed as a result of NATO interference directed through surrogates in Copenhagen and the Faroese capital of Torshavn.

The Dutch have ignored requests for more autonomy in the Caribbean territories of Aruba and Curacao, both sites of U.S. and NATO military and intelligence aerial and naval assets targeting the government of Venezuela and leftist groups in Colombia. The U.S. 12th Air Force, based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, operates two “Cooperative Security Locations” at Hato International Airport in Curacao and Reina Beatrix International Airport in Aruba.

A 2012 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the United States and the Netherlands grants access until 2021 to U.S. military forces for “training” and other purposes to Bonaire, Saba, St. Eustatius, and Saint Maarten. It was after this agreement was signed that the special autonomy enjoyed by these territories began to be rolled back by the governing cliques in The Hague and Amsterdam.

Recent moves by the British government to require its Caribbean and other territories to adopt public ownership registers prior to the end of 2020 or risk having their financial affairs taken over directly from London has resulted in a revolt among the British colonies, especially those in the Caribbean. London maintains that the public ownership registers are necessary to stem the flow of “dirty money” and secret corporate ownership in the wake of the “Panama and Paradise Papers” offshore tax haven financial records’ disclosures. The British territories argued that after the imposition of public ownership records, offshore firms and their money will simply move to other locations where corporate secrecy will continue to be maintained.

Of course, to avoid dictates from London, some British territories are already floating the idea of independence. BVI Premier Orlando Smith said London’s move to infringe on BVI’s self-government calls into question the constitutional relationship between the United Kingdom and the people of the BVI. BVI has moved to establish direct links with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) of independent nations, without the interference of the London colonial authorities. BVI is now represented at CARICOM and Association of Caribbean States meetings by its own External Affairs Secretary. Likewise, Cayman Islands Premier Alden McLaughlin has demanded more control over his islands’ affairs, including national security and membership in the World Trade Organization. British authorities have not only refused but are making moves to impose British financial regulations on the popular offshore business haven.

Caribbean territorial leaders point out that the requirements imposed on them do not apply to the Isle of Man or the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey, which, as crown dependencies of Queen Elizabeth, are not subject to the whims of the British Parliament. If London attempts to impose its will on the crown dependencies, they have let it be known that they will move to cut their links with the British Crown and opt for independence.

NATO, of course, does not want to see any moves toward independence from islands within the Irish Sea, English Channel, or Caribbean. The Trump administration has re-established the U.S. Navy’s Second Fleet, which was disbanded by President Obama in 2011 and will have responsibility for the North Atlantic, including Bermuda and Greenland, the latter also seeking independence from its Danish colonial masters. The U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet continues to dominate the American Caribbean territories of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico; the British territories of the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, BVI, and Montserrat; the Dutch territories of Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire, Saint Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius; and the French territories of Guadeloupe and St. Barthelemy, Martinique, and French Guiana. U.S. Southern Command, based in Miami, exercises an almost viceroy-like political domination over the entire Caribbean region.

NATO is also keeping a wary eye on the French colony of New Caledonia in the Pacific. Neither NATO nor Australia want New Caledonia voters to opt for independence in the upcoming referendum in November of this year. French mainlanders who colonized the island territory are pushing for a “no” vote and French President Emmanuel Macron recently visited the colony to emphasize the importance of retaining the colonial link with France. A major psychological operations campaign is being waged to convince the indigenous Kanaky people that the French colonialists already have the votes to defeat independence. Another psychological campaign is being waged that falsely claims that China is moving in to establish a naval base in nearby Vanuatu.

NATO, while still using the “North Atlantic” designator, does not want to lose its colonial footprints around the world, from Mayotte in the Indian Ocean and Wallis and Futuna in the South Pacific to St. Helena in the South Atlantic and Guam in the West Pacific. NATO has long been accused of waging neo-colonial wars in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. However, when it comes to basic garden-variety colonialism, NATO is intent on maintaining control over of its member states’ territorial toeholds in the seven seas.

*

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club.

Featured image is from the author.

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‘Chutzpah’ is a wonderful Yiddish word that means outrageous nerve, or unmitigated gall. 

This week’s Chutzpah Award goes to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Standing in front of props of data files and cd’s, Netanyahu claimed Israel’s renowned Mossad spy agency had stolen a small mountain of secret Iranian nuclear data from a warehouse in Tehran.

The never-understated Netanyahu claimed that the purloined material proved that Iran was lying about having halted its covert nuclear program and must not be trusted.

Netanyahu’s supposed nuclear bombshell was likely the warm-up act for President Donald Trump to reject Iran’s nuclear freeze deal with the US, Russia, China, Germany, and France, blessed by the UN and the European Union.  The only thing Trump apparently hates more than Muslims is his predecessor, former President Barack Obama (whom he accused of being a secret Muslim). The Iran nuclear deal was the most important foreign policy accomplishment of the Obama administration.

Netanyahu repeatedly warned the world about Iran’s alleged nuclear arsenal while making no mention at all of Israel’s own large, secret nuclear arsenal, which is believed to comprise of over 100 warheads, perhaps even several hundred, that can be delivered by aircraft, missiles and submarines.  Every Mideast nation can be hit by Israeli nukes as well as Russia, which some experts say is or was on Israel’s target list.

Trump, of course, made no mention of the awkward fact that Israel had stolen much of its nuclear technology and uranium from the United States, sometimes with the connivance of very senior US government officials.  France, that paragon of world peace, had the rest.

Listening to Netanyahu accuse Iran of hiding secret nuclear facilities was pure pot calling the kettle black.  Israel’s early nuclear program at Dimona in the Negev desert was entirely concealed from US and UN inspectors, including fake walls in the nuclear complex that completely fooled them.  When Netanyahu accused Iran of cheating, he knows of what he speaks.

Most of what Netanyahu ‘revealed’ about Iran’s alleged nuclear program was old stuff, dating back to 1999-2003 and readily available in reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency.   This respected UN agency now reports that Iran has fulfilled all of its commitments and abandoned its earlier nuclear program that did not produce any weapons before it was ended.

But facts don’t matter in this Trump-produced, made-for-TV drama.  The key point is that with the naming of Michael Pompeo as US Secretary of State, and appointment of the rightwing fanatic John Bolton as US national security advisor, Israel’s rightwing government has completed its virtual takeover of US Mideast policy.  As I’ve previously written, Trump looks more and more like a Trojan Horse for Netanyahu and his extremist allies.

Besides Pompeo and VP Mike Pence, both ardent Christian Zionists, and Bolton, Trump now has around him the UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, of Indian origin, who is the darling of the US far right and a handmaiden of arch-pro Israel billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, a major bankroller of the Republican Party.   Add in Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and, of course, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law.  In short, an amen-chorus for Israel’s far right.

This American Israel-first coalition has joined Netanyahu’s Likud alliance in pressing for war against Iran.  The first skirmishes have already begun with over 100 Israeli air attacks on Syria, ostensibly against Iranian positions. A great propaganda hue and cry against the purported dangers of Iran is being raised in the US and Europe.  According to Israel’s right, Assyrian hordes are about to engulf Israel.

In reality, Iran has very little offensive power.  Like Iraq before it, Iran is militarily dilapidated with 40-year old equipment, a largely grounded air force, little artillery and poor communications.  Tehran has a few inaccurate missiles but no nuclear warheads.

Israel’s powerful air force could easily turn any attacking Iranian forces into chopped falafel.  Iran’s only strength is defensive, in urban combat or mountainous terrain.  Iran has no capability to seriously threaten Israel except by aiding the Lebanese Hezbollah movement in showering northern Israel with light artillery rockets, a nuisance rather than a mortal danger.

Israel is moving to repeat its triumph in 2003 when the Bush administration, US partisans of Israel, and dishonest US media pushed the nation into a war of pure aggression against Iraq.  Israel emerged the victor from this unprovoked war and is trying to repeat its success again with Iran.

Overthrowing Iran’s Islamic Republic would leave Israel the unchallenged power in the Mideast.

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

Baby boomers should recall the cutting edge television series ( 1959-64) The Twilight Zone. Creator Rod Serling, who wrote many episodes himself, was a genius! The shows had this surreal and fantasy aspect to them, revealing all the flaws and nobilities human beings can possess. In one of the show’s  greatest episodes: The Monsters are due on Maple Street (March, 1960), written by Rod Serling, we can see how fear of the unknown can cause such havoc. A street in a typical American town experiences a giant roar and flashes of light that cannot be explained. Then the power goes out completely. The residents of the street begin to panic and fear that aliens are invading. This causes arguments and physical violence between usually friendly and caring neighbors. The parallels to the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the (illegal and immoral) invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are astounding.

Woody Allen, another literary and cinematic genius, made so many great films depicting the foolishness and ego driven acts by just ‘regular people’. Allen delved into the world of fantasy to make these points so well. His landmark movie using fantasy to make his critique of American society was his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo. A lonely housewife during the Great Depression is seen by a (supposedly) fictional character in a film, causing him to question his own existence. He suddenly ‘leaves the film screen’ and becomes lifelike due to his attraction to her. All hell breaks loose as fantasy and reality become entangled to the Nth degree! To this writer, the ‘hidden’ message of Allen’s storyline is that perhaps this 3rd dimension we operate in is really ‘Just a dream’. Thus, anything goes, as we all create our dream.

Here is the kicker to all of this: Can what is happening here in 21st Century Amerika be real? I mean, come on, Donald Trump is actually president of the United States! It’s somewhat similar to how the truly sophisticated German citizens must have felt in 1933 when Hitler ascended to Chancellor, and his party of far right wing thugs and scoundrels ‘controlled the streets’. Recalling Hitler and his near crazy antics in the 1920s, with the barbarity of many of his SA and later on SS minions, must have given pause to the millions of decent and rational Germans.

They must have said to themselves and their friends “How could this character be leader of our nation now?” Hitler was a cartoon character right out of a Rod Serling or Woody Allen script… and so is Trump!

Of course it is much deeper a problem than just Donald Trump, as it was with Hitler, and Stalin and all the other dictators and despots throughout history. No, it is now and always has been about us, we the people of all those countries. When good people see a trend that is developing and choose to ignore it… bad things usually happen. Empires can only grow and exploit when their citizens refuse or ignore the warning signs. The ‘Big Lie’ can only work when too many of us continue to lie to ourselves. The Pogo cartoon character was correct: We have met the enemy and he be US!

*

Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].

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Scheme to Let OPCW Name Perpetrators of Alleged Syria Chemical Attacks

By Stephen Lendman, May 07, 2018

No evidence suggests Syrian use of CWs anytime during years of war. Plenty indicts US-supported terrorists, toxic agents supplied by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, perhaps by Washington and Israel as well – each incident falsely blamed on Damascus.

The Blurred Line Between War and Business

By Julian Vigo, May 07, 2018

In 2009, Rand Paul called out Dick Cheney for supporting the invasion of Iraq to benefit his former company, Halliburton, claiming that Halliburton had received a billion-dollar no-bid contract. KBR, or Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, was neck-deep in military contracts with the United States government, under a no-bid LOGCAP III (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) agreement, a contingency-based contract invoked at the convenience of the Army.

NATO in Afghanistan: A Dagger Struck Into the Heart of Asia

By Christopher Black, May 07, 2018

On April 27 the NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg issued an ultimatum to the Taliban fighting the US and NATO allied forces that have invaded and occupied Afghanistan; negotiate–meaning surrender-or be destroyed.

US Navy Resurrects Its Cold War-Era Atlantic Fleet to Counter Russia

By Zero Hedge, May 07, 2018

Admiral John Richardson, chief of naval operations, said the fleet, deactivated in 2011, could oversee roughly 6,700,000 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean from the North Pole to the Caribbean Sea and from the East Coast of the United States to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Fate of the Iran Nuclear Agreement. Israel Has Begun the Countdown to May 15

By Norman Finkelstein, May 07, 2018

​Today Israel almost certainly killed the six Hamas militants in Gaza just as it killed the six Hamas militants in Gaza on the eve of Operation Cast Lead in 2008.  ​It is desperately trying to provoke a violent Hamas reaction so as to have a pretext to drown the mass nonviolent Great March of Return in a sea of blood.

Trump Disregards Caravan Migrants’ Legal Right to Apply for Asylum

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, May 07, 2018

More than three-quarters of asylum claims from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans between 2012 and 2017 were denied, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, and this year’s caravan of asylum seekers are facing a climate made even more hostile by the xenophobic Trump administration.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

The OPCW is untrustworthy, its findings notoriously serving Western interests, functioning as an imperial agent.

Last October, Russia blasted the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), probing reported uses of CWs in Syria – totally ignoring evidence and conclusions submitted by Russian experts, according to its Foreign Ministry, saying:

“(I)t is evident after looking through the report that the conclusions and opinions of Russian specialists that were referred to JIM at its own request have been totally ignored.”

“Moreover, it gives no answers to our questions either. Instead, the report has diametrically opposite conclusions derived by some anonymous research centers and ‘independent experts,’ which lack convincing proof to be backed.”

The OPCW’s JIM report lied, wrongfully blaming Damascus for an alleged Khan Sheikhoun CW attack in April 2017, along with another committed by US-supported terrorists, not Syrian forces, in Maarat Umm Hawsh on September 16, 2016.

No evidence suggests Syrian use of CWs anytime during years of war. Plenty indicts US-supported terrorists, toxic agents supplied by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, perhaps by Washington and Israel as well – each incident falsely blamed on Damascus.

Last November, Russia and Washington presented opposing Security Council resolutions on extending the OPCW/UN Joint Investigation Mechanism (JIM).

The sinister US text included a provision for invoking the UN Charter’s Chapter VII, authorizing “action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security” – rejected by Russia.

Its draft resolution called for revising JIM’s conclusions. Work done failed to conform to international standards, it said.

OPCW/JIM inspectors failed to visit the Kahn Sheikhoun site reported on – presenting phony conclusions lacking credibility. Russia and Washington vetoed each other’s resolutions.

A deplorable French-led initiative proposes empowering the OPCW to name perpetrators of CW attacks, a scheme to bypass Russia’s ability to veto US-led Western resolutions, aiming to justify unjustifiable greater aggression on Syria, Iran in the wings for something similar.

The OPCW is charged with promoting and verifying adherence to the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Its mandate includes conducting “credible and transparent” on-site inspections to verify use of and destruction of these weapons.

Transforming the organization into more of a pro-Western tool than already is totally unacceptable.

Empowering it to name perpetrators of CW attacks assures unjustifiably blaming Syria with greater authority – a step toward escalated US-led aggression rather than stepping back from the brink.

Washington, Britain, France and their imperial partners stop at nothing to advance their destructive agenda – why it’s crucial to challenge their aim for escalated aggression in Syria and elsewhere.

*

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

Featured image: Then-Vice President Dick Cheney introduces President George W. Bush at the Black Tie and Boots Inaugural Ball in Washington in 2005. (David Bohrer / White House)

In 2009, Rand Paul called out Dick Cheney for supporting the invasion of Iraq to benefit his former company, Halliburton, claiming that Halliburton had received a billion-dollar no-bid contract. KBR, or Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, was neck-deep in military contracts with the United States government, under a no-bid LOGCAP III (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) agreement, a contingency-based contract invoked at the convenience of the Army. Let’s not forget that the official narrative of weapons of mass destruction was the lie sold to the American people to justify an oligarchical class growing wealthier through creating war.

In November 2002, a $7 billion LOGCAP contract was given to KBR for extinguishing oil well fires in Iraq. In 2003, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a public bid contract with a maximum value of $1.2 billion to KBR to continue repairing the oil infrastructure in southern Iraq. In 2004, the Army Corps handed KBR yet another contract, with the value of $1.5 billion, to cover engineering services in the U.S. Central Command’s area of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The contract had a $500 million ceiling for the first year and four one-year options, each with an annual ceiling of $250 million. In 2004, KBR received more orders under the LOGCAP contract for work in Afghanistan, which added up to $489 million. And then there is the $400 million in payments KBR made in subcontracting private securities services like Blackwater in Iraq.

In 2004, the public was made aware of Halliburton’s monopoly on billions of dollars in Iraq contracts and in the accumulation of tremendous influence over state matters. Or as Rand warned: the dangerous powers given to large corporations when they “get so big that they can actually be directing policy.” The funneling of vast fortunes to KBR was an egregious problem the government ignored. Major media also gave a pass to these contracts, with no questions asked about the larger structures within government that made this all possible.

In total, $138 billion was awarded in federal funds to private contractors for the Iraq War, with Halliburton receiving more than $39.5 billion of the federal contracts related to the Iraq military invasion and occupation between 2003 and 2013. There were three other primary contractors in Iraq: Blackwater Worldwide, a mercenary army responsible for countless murders and massacres of Iraqis; CACI International, which received $66.2 million in state funds while being accused of the beating, starvation, sexual assault, sleep deprivation and torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad; and Titan Corp., which supplied interpreters to Abu Ghraib and also was implicated in human rights abuses at the prison.

KBR was not alone in these kinds of dealings. The Carlyle Group, a Washington-based private equity firm and defense contractor, has had its hand in bringing together private investment and war, largely orchestrated by former heads of state. In a 2001 Guardian article, Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger document what they call the “ex-presidents’ club,” naming former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, former British Prime Minister John Major and one-time World Bank treasurer Afsaneh Masheyekhi.

“Among the companies Carlyle owns are those which make equipment, vehicles and munitions for the US military, and its celebrity employees have long served an ingenious dual purpose, helping encourage investments from the very wealthy while also smoothing the path for Carlyle’s defense firms,” the report states.

While Carlyle was the focus of numerous exposés around the time of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, major media has provided limited follow-up coverage, and the company has been allowed to “rebrand” itself as an “investment group.” Some might argue “coincidence,” with so many specialized contractors making deals and forming policy with the U.S. government, but it does look suspicious when, for instance, on Sept. 11, 2001, The Carlyle Group was set to hold an investor meeting in Washington with the guest of honor being Shafiq bin Laden, brother of Osama bin Laden. We know the bin Laden family had close ties to George W. Bush; in addition, there were many economic and political links between the Saudi Arabian regime and the financing of 9/11. It is impossible to deny the systemic problems of corruption that occur when private corporations are allowed to dictate government policy.

Tweaking George Santayana’s infamous quote to reflect today’s reality,

“Those who get away with injustices in the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And so it goes. In 2017, The Carlyle Group purchased CMC Networks, Africa’s largest network connectivity provider, based in Johannesburg. In 2016, Carlyle invested in the U.K.-headquartered provider of digital automation intelligence solutions, Testplant, now Eggplant. Carlyle has gone from private military contractor to private equity group to data systems mogul. Carlyle’s interest in big data and security has been covered by Jeffrey St. Claire, who notes,

“Two Carlyle companies, Federal Data Systems and US Investigations Services (USIS), hold multi-billion dollar contracts to provide background checks for commercial airlines, the Pentagon, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.”

There is little not to worry about here.

Peter Eisner, former managing director of the Center for Public Integrity, questions the ethics of private industry making profits while advising the president of the United States. When speaking of George H.W. Bush’s involvement with The Carlyle Group, Eisner notes the conflicts of interest that blur the lines between public policy and business:

“What hat is former president Bush wearing when he tells Crown Prince Abdullah not to worry about U.S. policy in the Middle East? What hat does he use when he deals with South Korea, and causes policy changes there? Or when James Baker helps argue the presidential election in the younger Bush’s favor?”

Now skip to the recent breaches of online user data and the abuses of alleged democracies in creating draconian laws authorizing the spying on its citizens. On the one hand, we have the 2016 case where the FBI tried to oblige Apple to create a backdoor interface that would allow access to an iPhone. On the other hand, the same government that spies on private citizens also takes Mark Zuckerberg to task for similar abuses of data at Facebook. From the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions in the early 2000s, the U.S. government and private sector have numerous conflicts of interest—some might say, a collusion—between private industries making a killing from war and a cabal of current and former politicians who ushered forth this gold rush.

Among the most flagrant examples of corporate and governmental malfeasance is the Trump administration’s link to the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. President Trump’s erstwhile chief strategist, Steve Bannon, oversaw the collection of data by Cambridge Analytica, according to a former employee. U.S. national security adviser John Bolton also is linked to this scandal, given that his super PAC has paid Cambridge Analytica over $1.1 million since 2014 for “research” and “survey research.” Bolton has spoken openly of how his super PAC’s execution of “advanced psychographic data” would help elect “filibuster-proof” majorities in 2018.

More recently, Bannon, when he was a Trump adviser in the White House, pushed the proposal of Erik Prince (image on the left), Blackwater’s founder, to deploy private military contractors in Afghanistan, where 6,000 contractors plus U.S. special operations troops and support personnel would embed with local Afghan units. Beyond this, we have the Trump administration also considering Prince’s plan to build a mercenary force in Syria, despite Prince’s conflicts in the United Emirates, where he brought into the country several hundred Colombians posing as construction workers to fight in Yemen. When it emerged that Prince has collaborated with Oliver North and former CIA officer John R. Maguire to develop a plan to create a private spy network to circumvent the CIA, the White House opened its doors. All this plus a 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with the United Arab Emirate’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev and Prince that ended in a House Intelligence Committee hearing.

Journalist Josh Marshall, from Talking Points Memo, has noted how Prince regularly uses “ex-military and intelligence operatives to build parallel national security forces that operate for profit and outside the rule of law.” However, operating outside the law seems to be more the rule than the exception if we are to honestly approach the common pattern repeating itself wherein U.S. foreign policy and private industries collaborate. We cannot ignore that SCL/Cambridge Analytica (which could be reborn under a new name after announcing it is shutting down) works on the tracking, analysis and manipulation of popular opinion abroad related to both U.S. and U.K. military and diplomatic services, any more than we can negate the questionable ties between SCL and Republican billionaire Robert Mercer, his daughter Rebekah Mercer and Bannon (Mercer’s business partner), who later became Donald Trump’s de facto campaign manager.

While everyone worries about his or her data being safe on Facebook, this recent chapter of history is a repeat of the cyclical media stories that every now and then convince us that we should be worried, even if we aren’t quite sure why. Facebook is the cover story here. But we need to insist on answers to the vast conflicts of interest that are dotting American foreign policy. They have created an industry where those who should have nothing to do with big data and private militia are running the show.

*

Julian Vigo is an independent scholar, filmmaker and activist who specializes in ethnography, cultural studies, political philosophy and postcolonial theory. She has been a professor at New York University, the Université de Montreal and Goldsmiths, where she has taught anthropology, comparative literature, performance studies, cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy of science, postmodernism and gender studies. 

It all seems like an effort to confirm offensiveness and instability, to be appalling in order to be relevant.  The Israeli prime minister, handicapped by domestic travails and a watchful Knesset, is very keen to push the Iranian demon into the spotlight, making the case that the wily mullahs in Tehran are not to be trusted on anything from weapons development to security ambitions.  (Such points tend to be of equal application to their accusers: in this case, the refusal to accept, or deny, that Israel is a nuclear state at all.  To each his own.)

The effort of tying Iran to agreements hammered out with the UN Security Council’s Permanent Five and Germany – the so-called Iran nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – had the effect of placing a halt on the Persian nuclear juggernaut, though it did have a heavily qualified sense to it.  The ultimate point there was one of regional stability: the moment Iran acquires such a device, Saudi Arabia has vowed to cause a disturbance of uncertain danger.  But keeping the Islamic Republic on the straight and narrow would, at the very least, maintain some tense status quo.   

Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, will hear none of that.  He has gone through another phase of urgent warning against the deal, donning his doomsday fatigues in the hope that leaders will listen to his blood curdling warnings of theocratic Armageddon. His voice of fear was been heard across various capitals, suggesting nothing less than a degree of incitement.

It all came about with a Monday night bonanza at the end of April, featuring a display of turning intelligence into the raw material of crude politics, a lights-and-camera briefing designed to draw in the ratings and interest of foreign television networks.

“That’s what he was after,” wrote Yossi Verter for Haaretz.  “And that’s also why the presentation was made in English, which is anyway the language in which Bibi feels most at home. We, the natives, are small fry.” 

The title of the speech and overall display was soon assumed: “Iran lied”.  During his speech, he made good use of props, pulling back a curtain to reveal bookshelves stacked with files, CDs and various copies of original Iranian documents gathered by Israeli agents. This was the “nuclear archive” covering Iran’s 1999-2003 nuclear weapons program known as Project Amad, in of itself not a clear breach of the JCPOA.  Having not disclosed the nature or extent of this program, Iran, argued Netanyahu, entered into the 2015 agreement under false pretences. 

As Or Rabinowitz noted with some salience,

“The deal did not require Iran to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”  

The prevailing expectation was that Tehran would supply the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) with “explanations regarding outstanding issues” but those economic with the verite were not made the basis for voiding the deal.

While the archive also reveals morsels beyond the clandestine items usually kept within the intelligence community, Netanyahu’s implied purpose was to impute bad faith, suggesting that weapons development continued after 2003.

This extravagant display had the express purpose not only of tarring the country and its leadership, but also with keeping members of his Cabinet in check.  At the very least, it would grant the PM near imperial powers to go to war even in the absence of the security cabinet convening.     

It was also designed to overturn a perception that Netanyahu has had it rough on the issue of intelligence successes, linked as he was with Mossad’s bungling 1997 effort to assassinate Hamas senior figure Khaled Meshaal in Jordan. (As a trade-off to save exposed Mossad agents from conviction and execution by Jordan, Netanyahu relented in supplying the antidote that revived a poisoned Meshaal.)

As Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay observed, the speech was “a valuable gift” showing that Netanyahu was capable “of mixing political considerations with state security”.  More to the point, the Iran nuclear trove had given Netanyahu a thick life line, with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Gabbay himself striking the no-confidence motion off the agenda.  The theatrics had done the trick.

Netanyahu is so convinced about Iran he has sought to press its ally in Syria.  Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been told to put the brakes on Iranian advances in Syria and Lebanon, a point that brings Tehran into proximity with Israel’s borders.  Moscow, in turn, has made it clear that continued Israeli strikes of the sort that took place on the T-4 airfield in Homs are to stop. Such acts of aggression are deemed destabilising, though they have become very much part of the brutal normality that is the Syrian conflict.

Where Netanyahu has the most sympathetic of voices is in the White House, where he already has a good running. President Donald Trump is certainly doing more than flirt with the idea of withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, though he has promise till May 12 to make the decision.

Israeli belligerence and frothy insistence on voiding the JCPOA has one logical and dangerous consequence.  It feeds the reactionaries and super patriots, not to mention the argument that having such weapons is actually what the doctor ordered.  They think us atrocious; why disappoint? 

At most, the archive unveiled by Israel shows cheek on the part of Tehran’s leadership to play loosely with its obligations as a Non-Nuclear Weapon State, being a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But as long as powers such as Israel remain undeclared nuclear states, and Iran maintains its reputation in some quarters for bloody villainy, such violations are bound to be expected.

*

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]

Featured image is from Massoud.

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

On April 27 the NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg issued an ultimatum to the Taliban fighting the US and NATO allied forces that have invaded and occupied Afghanistan; negotiate–meaning surrender-or be destroyed. Taking his cue from the Nazi diktats in the countries they invaded and occupied across Europe in the Second World War, he acted like a Reinhardt Heydrich, the Nazi SS Security General, making threats against the resistance on behalf of the warlords in Washington and the other NATO capitals and like the German Nazis before him, repeated the same lies the Germans used; that NATO’s presence “creates the conditions for peace and reconciliation.” But a more severe war lurks under their guise of peace.

The threats did not stop with the Taliban. He also warned Pakistan to “take additional steps to close all “terrorist sanctuaries” and “encouraged Iran and Russia to contribute to regional stability,” meaning that they should accept the American and NATO occupation of the country and abandon the joint Russian, Iranian, Chinese efforts at concluding a peaceful resolution of the war in Afghanistan so that the Americans will have no pretext to stay.

But what is NATO doing in Afghanistan in the first place? Afghanistan has not attacked any NATO nation. No Afghanis have attacked a NATO nation. NATO claims to be a defensive military alliance yet it is engaged in supporting American aggression against a sovereign nation that did nothing whatsoever to justify its invasion by the US in 2001, except of course that it occupies a strategically important region of the world.

The NATO presence there is a violation of the NATO Treaty and a violation of the UN Charter. In fact the very creation of the NATO alliance is a violation of the UN Charter since NATO claims to be able to act outside the rules of the UN Charter that forbids any use of force by one nation against another without the approval of the Security Council. In the Soviet days this evasion or renunciation of the UN Charter was balanced by the answering response by the USSR and its European allies in the creation of the Warsaw Pact. But the counter-revolution in the USSR and consequent abandonment of the Warsaw Pact defensive wall against NATO resulted in the rapid movement of NATO forces from the western Atlantic right up to Russia’s borders. The restoration in Russia of a sense of national sovereignty and pride and the replacement of quislings with those who understood what the big game was all about have saved the day so far. But the threat against Russia continues to mount and there appears to be disagreement within the Russian government on how to deal with it; between those who want to accommodate the US and its allies to, hopefully, end the economic warfare being conducted against Russia under the name of sanctions and those that realise that accommodation will only result in Russia being broken into pieces so that it can never resist the west again; the tragic fate of Korea, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

But what is the war for? As I said in an earlier essay, one of the reasons has to do with gas pipelines and the Taliban not agreeing to the dictated terms put to them by the Bush regime in 2001, similar to the diktats put to Yugoslavia just two years before, “Do what we tell you, or we will bomb you.” In the case of the Taliban, which the Americans helped to create, along with other reactionary groups, when they used those groups to attack and destroy the socialist government of Afghanistan and the Red Army that came to protect it, the diktat was to make sure that the proposed American gas pipeline projects to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean were secure.

The Americans demanded that the Taliban form a coalition government of all factions, a government of “national unity,” in order to stop the ongoing civil war. The Taliban refused the offer. In Berlin, in July 2001, according to Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquiein, the Americans insisted, “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”

The war was never about Bin Laden. The hunt for Bin Laden was just an excuse for the invasion of Afghanistan, an invasion decided upon several months before the incident in New York City on September 11 of that year, the incident that was used as the cover, first for the invasion of Afghanistan, then for the invasion of Iraq.

Bin Laden himself was a long time American asset whose family had strong links to George Bush through interlocking companies such as the BCCI bank and Bush’s Harken Energy, in which Bin Laden’s half brother Salem Bin Laden was an investor. Osama Bin Laden helped the Americans set up Al Qaeda to fight the socialists in Afghanistan and was seen as recently as 1998-99 in Yugoslavia with his mujahidin, under American Army command, fighting to destroy the socialist government there.

Shafiq bin Laden with George H. W. Bush

Just a day before the September 11 incident, his brother Shafiq Bin Laden attended a meeting of the Carlyle Group, an American holding company, at the Ritz Carton Hotel in Washington that was also attended by George Bush senior. Both were investors in the company. The claim that Bin Laden attacked the United States is absurd on the face of it to anyone who knows his connections and his family’s connections to the American leadership and intelligence and military services. They tried to make him a patsy but he refused to play the role and denied he was involved in the tragedy in New York. The American government has never presented any proof that he was.

Another primary reason for the American invasion of Afghanistan is its vast mineral wealth, from oil, gas and coal, to gem stones and rare earths such as lithium, to gold and iron ore; some of the richest deposits of minerals in the world. The Americans invaded to take those resources and to keep them. In the meantime, while the war continues and mineral extraction is inhibited, the Americans exploit the huge production of heroin and other opiates that has grown manifold since their invasion. Essentially Afghanistan has been reduced to an American mining and heroin extraction concession, and others can have access only in regard to their contribution to the invasion and occupation to secure that wealth. The Americans, like all the other colonial powers of the past and present, choose to call this racket “foreign policy.”

But minerals are not the only reason. Afghanistan is strategically located between India, Pakistan, China, Iran as well as Russia, through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north, all of which have their own large mineral deposits. It is an important link for the Silk Road routes of the past and present and for China’s development.

For years the war has spilled into Pakistan with the Afghan puppet regime routinely accusing Pakistan of supporting the groups labeled as Taliban while Pakistan states that it is trying to prevent “terrorist attacks from groups in Afghanistan. Everyone is tired of this endless war, everyone, except the Americans, who seem to lose all purpose if they are not at war. But today the Americans and their Afghan puppets are wondering what will transpire next after Russia began a major diplomatic initiative with a meeting held in Moscow in December 2016 between China, Pakistan and Russia to talk about Afghanistan’s “security.”

Russia knows the presence of ISIS fighters in Afghanistan is a threat to its security. The Taliban also have clashed with them so both have a common interest insofar as dealing with ISIS is concerned. Since there is good reason to believe that some elements of ISIS are supported by the United States these clashes are also skirmishes between Russia and the United States, just as they are in Syria.

The Chinese know that the Americans want to stay in Afghanistan to increase American economic and political power in central Asia as part of its unquenchable lust for world power and control and diminish Chinese development along its new Silk Road connecting Beijing to Berlin and beyond.

To the south lies India, further west Turkey. Whoever holds Afghanistan has an advantage in exerting its power in all these spheres. The Americans invaded to get that control and they care nothing for what the people of Afghanistan want. The reality behind the platitudes is that the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan is a dagger struck into the heart of Asia.

The Americans intend to stay, they say, and “win.” But the phrases they use to express their intent are the same meaningless propaganda that they used before they were defeated in Vietnam.

In August 2017 President Trump unveiled what he called his South East Asia Strategy, centred on Afghanistan. In a speech to members of the American forces in Virginia, Trump played the role of Richard Nixon and repeated the same words Nixon used to justify the continuation of the war against Vietnam. He stated, as did Nixon, that the American strategy can have no timelines attached to it. As Nixon talked about “peace with honour.” Trump referred to an “honourable outcome.” As Nixon claimed that to hastily exit Vietnam would allow communism to flood Asia, Trump claimed that “a hasty exist from Afghanistan will allow terrorists to attack America.” As Nixon claimed Cambodia and Laos were providing safe havens to communist forces and then bombed, invaded and destroyed those countries, Trump claimed that, “Pakistan provides safe havens to terrorists that threaten America.” As Nixon claimed that it was up to the Vietnamese people to decide their own future as American troops killed any Vietnamese who thought they should, Trump claimed it is up to the Afghani people to “take ownership of their future”, as his forces plunder the country and kill anyone who resists them and, to justify their claims of “terrorists” existing there, import their ISIS mercenaries to blow up civilians on the streets so that the Americans can pretend to hunt them down.

On March 22, of this year the American general in charge of the US and NATO occupation forces, and the de facto head of state in Afghanistan, General Nicholson, stated that additional military forces are now in place, more are being sent and that “the main effort in the US Central Command area of operations has shifted from Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan and that these “additional capabilities will enable the Afghans to get on the offensive,” meaning that they and their puppet forces will go on the offensive.

In parallel with this offensive, Nicholson stated that the overall objective is to reconcile the Taliban with the “nation,” an attempt to undermine the negotiations already underway between Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and the Taliban as part of the Russian initiative to bring about a peace deal that would then require the NATO and US forces to leave. The US has also arranged for “elections” to take place which they hope will give legitimacy to the puppets they control in Kabul and are even trying to put religious pressure on the Taliban through the Ulema Council in Indonesia that is expected to “delegitimise jihad in Afghanistan.

But just as Nixon was whistling Dixie as the USA was going down in defeat in Vietnam, President Trump and his generals are whistling the same tune in Afghanistan since they are unable to defeat the Afghan resistance after all these years and so seek to widen the war to try to win it, just as Nixon decided to widen the Vietnam War to win it and invaded Cambodia, with horrific results.

It is not the first time they have tried bringing Pakistan into the war. We remember that in 2009 Raymond Davis, a CIA officer in Pakistan, shot dead two Pakistani Intelligence officers who were tailing him and when arrested was found to have in his car cameras with which he had been surveilling sensitive installations. He also had in his possession maps of Islamic schools and mosques where bombings had taken place, which had been blamed on Al Qaeda, linked groups, such as Tehreek-e-Taliban with which curiously he was in contact. The Pakistanis also found in his car multiple cell phones that could be used for triggering bombs, bomb making equipment and other paraphernalia. His arrest caused panic in Washington and a lot of pressure was exerted on Pakistan to release him. Pakistan’s President Zardari stated that the US was arranging the “suicide” attacks inside Pakistan. The US denied it but since the arrest of Davis there have been no further bombings of mosques in Pakistan. Those who have read Graham Greene’s essential novel, The Quiet American, will know what I am taking about.

Interestingly President Zardari said at the time the US was engaged in a plot to destabilise Pakistan so the US could justify an invasion and seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and that the CIA linked terrorists assassinated his wife Benazir Bhutto. Eight years later President Trump stated, “We must prevent nuclear weapons”, meaning Pakistani nuclear weapons, “from coming into the hand of terrorists and being used against us…”

The United States and NATO are not in Afghanistan to fight ‘terrorists” for they are the terrorists, creating conditions that give a pretext for their aggression and occupation and for a wider war; a war to save themselves from their endless folly, a strategy which will ultimately bring about, after much death and destruction, their own defeat, as it did in Vietnam.

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

Featured image is from the author.

In a stunning surprise, the United States Navy announced Friday that it would reactivate its Second Fleet to counter the increasing threat from Russia.

Admiral John Richardson, chief of naval operations, said the fleet, deactivated in 2011, could oversee roughly 6,700,000 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean from the North Pole to the Caribbean Sea and from the East Coast of the United States to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Our National Defense Strategy makes clear that we’re back in an era of great power competition as the security environment continues to grow more challenging and complex,” said Admiral Richardson.

The re-establishment of the US Second Fleet is part “of re-orientating the US armed forces towards a world of renewed big power competition and away from the counter-insurgency campaigns they have been fighting over recent decades,” said BBC.

The strategy makes countering Russia a top priority. Admiral Richardson added,

“that’s why today, we’re standing up Second Fleet to address these changes, particularly in the north Atlantic.”

The Fleet was established following World War II for the sole purpose of supporting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Before the 2011 deactivation, the Second Fleet had approximately 126 ships, 4500 aircraft, and 90,000 personnel situated at major naval installations along the East Coast.

Adm Richardson also said that the Second Fleet would “exercise operational and administrative authority over assigned ships, aircraft and landing forces.”

BBC said the revived fleet would be headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, where the United States Department of Defense (DoD) will build a staff of about 15 personnel for the intermediate timeframe, then increase to more than 200.

At the moment, it is a mystery who will command the Second Fleet, nevertheless, what military assets it will include.

According to Military.com, the reactivation of the Second Fleet could bring some relief to other fleets stretched around the globe.

“Bringing the Second Fleet back to life will free up Fleet Forces to focus on such bigger-picture issues as manning, training and equipping the entire fleet, which took on increased scrutiny in the wake of two deadly collisions involving U.S. warships in Asia. Davidson led the Navy’s comprehensive review of those incidents, which called for restructuring how the Navy operates.”

NATO has recently suggested that Russia expanded its naval patrols in the Baltic Sea, the North Atlantic and the Arctic regions, along with its submarine activity at levels not seen since the Cold War.

Back in 2011, the prospect of U.S.-Russia relations seemed healthy, after the Obama administration declared a reset in 2009. Now, it appears as the Trump administration has performed an about-face with a dramatic reversal to reactivate the Second Fleet amid Moscow’s continued support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. War is coming…

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge.

Dialogue between a master (A) and his pupil (B):

B: The Universe, or what is referred to as ‘space’, seems to be a kind of ethereal void, populated here and there by stars, planets, occasional meteors, comets and such like.

A: The Universe seems like a vast and mysterious place, but when you consider that it is contained within a dew drop or a human cell, it becomes less distant. In fact, it becomes very immediate. I refer, of course, to the microcosmic condensation of the macrocosm.

What is ‘space’? It is not what it seems. The word does not describe the reality. It seems void because you are only using your five senses to analyse it. There is no ‘space’, the area referred to is full of energy. An energy field. But you don’t recognize that which you can’t experience with your five senses.

B: What other sense do we possess, other than that which recognizes reality through touch, sight, taste, smell and sound?

A: We have our perception and intuition; these are receptors that pick up vibrational messages due to the absolute interconnectivity of all matter and energy. When you connect up with the source of all that is, you find that you are part of it, not distant from it. You cannot observe or experience it dispassionately – from a distance – because you yourself are part of the composition.

B: But rational observation forms the basis of all science, it enables us to understand the nature and structure of things, including the Universe. We want to understand how and what life is.

A: Such curiosity is a perfectly acceptable condition in mankind, but it arrives at the wrong answers;
unless man feels himself to be part of that which he observes. Not only this, but recognizes that he affects that which he focus’s upon. Both intentionally and unintentionally.

B: How is this achieved?

A: One cannot say ‘how’ it is achieved, unless one is prepared to come at it from the opposite dimension and perception from that which one is accustomed to, in one’s experience of everyday life.

B: Oh?

A: What we experience in our typical daily lives is that which operates, almost exclusively, within the realm of the five senses. Take sight: Visible light- what we ‘see’ – constitutes less than 0.5% of what is actually ‘out there’ in our Universe. Or ‘in here’ within our microcosmic and internal Universe. So we cannot understand, within the scientific discipline which belongs to the Newtonian school of thought, how and what life is, if we only rely upon our five senses to reach our conclusion. There is a missing dimension.

B: What holds us back from being able to experience this missing dimension?

A: Almost everything which forms the experience of what we call life, here on Earth. We operate within a three dimensional framework which has become so institutionalized that we take it to be the sum total of everything that is. Whereas actually, it constitutes something quite alien and divorced from the true state of existence: that which we experience in the fourth dimension and beyond.

B: Tell me more about the fourth dimension and beyond..

A: You already know something about this. When you fall asleep and dream, you are entering this dimension, subconsciously. When you get an ‘inkling’ about something – and then find that this inkling turned out to be true – you are also touching the fourth dimension. The problem is that, most of the time, you dismiss these experiences as being irrelevant to the tasks and needs to which you address yourself. Those tasks which form the daily diet of a materialistically aligned world. That superficial repetitive pattern which forms the central point of focus of life on earth at this time. That which broadly operates within what we call ‘the status quo’.

B: I want to understand what this ‘other dimension’ is and how to have greater access to it. I do get these ‘inklings’ from time to time, but never really questioned where they come from.

A: Alright. Intellectually, you can already get closer to the higher dimensions by using something of what (well focused) three dimensional thinking has already been able to ascertain, concerning further dimensions.

Take that chair you’re sitting on. It appears to be hard, doesn’t it? But actually, when seen/experienced from the higher dimensional state, it is not. It is just a mass of whirling atoms, clustering together in such a way as to provoke the sense of shape and form we call a chair. If we understand correctly from science what atoms are, we would not describe them as ‘hard’. Simply as ‘energy’. Mutable energy.

Now, look at me, or look at yourself. We too, seen from the higher dimension, are also a whirling mass of energetic particles (called atoms). The only difference between us and the chair, is that we are imbued with a whole host of sentient, sensitive attributes which operate on a vibrational wave length tuned to a different (higher) frequency than that of the chair.

The fourth dimension and beyond, is actually our true home – where we come from. And in it, we exist as spirit energy. This spirit experiences life as a quantum event. Everything interconnected with everything, everywhere, at all times. This quantum state is our true reality, and everything else is a falsehood.

B: A falsehood?

A: Yes, because in our true state we are at one with all creation. Which means at one with our Creator. The Divine Source of all that Is. Whereas, in a purely five sense, three dimensional state of existence, we do not allow ourselves access to the vibrational waves of higher awareness that constitute the true universal state of reality. The 99.5% of existence we think of as ‘beyond the realms of possibility’.

B: Is this ‘lack of connection’ the cause of our seemingly endless problems, here on Earth? Are we really living in such a tiny match box and imagining we are having a universal experience?

A: Essentially, yes. We experience most of our lives as something completely divorced from what Life actually Is. This has not come about by chance. It is a design which has been imposed upon mankind by a force whose motivation is alien to the will of the Creator, yet which vampires energy from creation. However, since we are gifted with powers that originate with our Creator, but have largely failed to apply them, we are complicit in the problem. We possess all that is needed to return life on Earth to its true state of creative resonance, but fail to do so.

We have instead, allowed ourselves to be won-round by an alien force and its accompanying false agenda: its deception. So, as we awaken to our true reality, we must use the creative, imaginative powers with which we are richly endowed, to dismiss the three dimensional imposter. The imposer of the three dimensional deception – that we have confused with reality. The task of mankind is to rediscover and re-establish its connection to the source of all life.

B: Are we making any progress in that direction?

A: It is called ‘waking-up’. This is an apt expression, as it suggests coming round from a state of unproductive dormancy. Universal energies, whose origins are the higher dimensions, are manifesting strongly on planet Earth at this time. The pace is quickening. The attempt to block that quickening pace and its accompanying awakening, is equally manifesting itself, increasingly obliquely. As a result, people are experiencing a critical confluence of disparate forces. The feeling, for many, is of being pulled apart; a type of dying.

The man and woman emerging out of this storm will be closer to their true state of being. Much closer. They will understand that they embody both sides of the disparate energy mix now manifesting. The alien and the true state.

They will recognize that both the creator and the destroyer exist within, and that each individual has the power of ‘free will’ to choose which to nourish into fullness. They will discover that they are in possession – and always have been – of higher instinctual and intuitive energies. Energies which, when properly directed, make it possible to avoid returning to a repetition of past errors.

They will realize that the source of their power is not their own. Does not belong to them, but is an inherited gift, a seed, whose origins rest with their Creator. Thus, rather than puff themselves up with false pride, they will honour the source from which their divine powers emanate. The life to come, here on earth and beyond, will be uniquely directed towards building upon the fruits of this deepening recognition.

In this way God and Man will be reunited – to put it better – will rediscover their unity. Their oneness. And the quantum Universe, with open arms, will welcome back the profusion of its presently disconnected and alienated parts, and thus become whole.

At that moment, the dance of all joyous dances will manifest throughout. And the purpose of Life will be revealed.

B: Blessed be that day!

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer, actor and international activist.
He is President of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. Julian is the author of two acclaimed titles: Changing Course for Life and In Defence of Life, which can be purchased by visiting www.julianrose.info. His third book ‘Beyond the Mechanistic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ will shortly be available.

US representatives issued a series of demands in Beijing during talks on May 4, ranging from an insistence that China take no action against US measures undermining its development of high-tech industries to the impossible ultimatum that it cut its trade surplus with the US by $200 billion within two years. These demands are not intended as the basis for negotiations, but to escalate economic conflict and military tensions.

“The US demands amount to a call for unilateral Chinese disarmament ahead of a potential trade war and for Beijing to abandon key elements of its industrial policy, which have led Washington to grow increasingly wary of China as a long-term economic rival,” the Financial Times commented.

China economy expert Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the newspaper:

“These meetings could end up going into the books as a formalisation of hostilities rather than as a basis for a negotiated settlement.”

The US delegation included Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and anti-China trade hawks, US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and White House trade policy adviser Peter Narvarro. The demands were set out in a four-page document entitled “Balancing the Trade Relationship.”

The Trump administration claimed it sought to “facilitate candid and constructive exchanges between the two sides.” In fact, the US document resembles the ultimatum handed to Serbia by Austria in July 1914, which led to the outbreak of World War I.

The US had previously demanded that China take immediate action to reduce its $375 billion goods trade surplus with the US by $100 billion. This has been doubled to $200 billion—a reduction of $100 billion in the 12 months beginning June 2018, and a further $100 billion reduction beginning June 2019.

The rest of the document consisted of equally imperious and impossible-to-fulfill demands that China cease its moves toward high-tech development and take no action, nor even issue complaints through the World Trade Organization (WTO), against US measures targeting it.

“China will immediately cease providing market-distorting subsidies and other types of government support that can contribute to the creation or maintenance of excess capacity in industries targeted by the Made in China 2025 plan,” it stated.

In effect, this means China must scrap its industrial program and become completely subservient to the demands of the US.

The document demanded that China take “immediate, verifiable steps” to ensure the cessation of Chinese government-conducted, sponsored or tolerated measures targeting US trade secrets and confidential business information, in line with US claims that China is stealing intellectual property.

China has denied that such theft is taking place and insisted that what the US calls “forced technology transfers” are part of agreements made by US firms wanting to do business in China through joint-venture operations.

The document stipulated that China take no retaliatory action “whether in the form of tariffs on imports of US products or in any other form” against US agricultural products and “cease all retaliatory actions currently being pursued.”

China has threatened tariffs against US agricultural products if the US goes ahead with a 25 percent tariff against Chinese goods, due to come into effect by the end of this month under section 301 of the 1974 US Trade Act.

The US further demanded that China withdraw its current WTO challenge to the US measures and “take no further action related to this matter” under WTO rules and procedures.

In sum, the US is demanding complete subservience by China in its industrial and economic policies. Above all, Washington is focusing on high-tech development, which it regards as a threat to its economic and military supremacy, as made clear in the following paragraph of the document:

“In light of China’s prevailing investment restrictions and state-directed investment in sensitive US technology sectors, including industrial plans such as ‘Made in China 2025,’ China confirms that it will not oppose, challenge, or otherwise retaliate against the United States’ imposition of restriction in investments from China in sensitive US technology sectors critical to US national security.”

On US investment in China, the document said Beijing must list by July 1 any restrictions it had imposed. The US would then identify restrictions that “deny US investors fair, effective and non-discriminatory market access and treatment.” Following such identification, “China is to act expeditiously to remove all identified investment restrictions on a timetable to be decided by the United States and China.”

The delegation demanded that Beijing give Washington carte blanche to impose measures against China. The document stated:

“China also recognizes that the United States may impose import restrictions and tariffs on products in critical sectors, including sectors identified in the ‘Made in China 2025’ industrial plan.”

If China failed to implement US demands,

“China acknowledges the likelihood that the United States will impose additional tariffs or other import restrictions on Chinese products, or on Chinese supply of services to such extent as the United States deems appropriate.”

Moreover, “China understands” that it “will not oppose, challenge or take any form of action against the United States’ imposition additional tariffs,” including action through the WTO.

China must also give up its opposition to US objections to it being declared a “market economy” under WTO regulations. The granting of full WTO market status to a country makes it more difficult for rivals to impose restrictions on it.

Chinese counter-demands included the lifting of the proposed 25 percent tariffs on Chinese exports to the US; open access for Chinese goods in US government procurement; equal treatment for Chinese companies in any national security review; an adjustment on the ban imposed on the Chinese technology company ZTE; and a commitment by the US not to initiate any section 301 investigation into China in the future.

As the US document itself indicated, there will be no concessions by Washington on any of these issues.

No doubt there will be conjecture over the coming weeks as to what concessions both sides could make in future talks—if any take place—now that they have set out their basic positions.

While there may be some moves in this direction, any assessment that regards the conflict as simply a “trade” dispute would completely misread it. The US trade war measures are part of a much broader agenda aimed at turning China into nothing less than a semi-colony, if necessary by military means.

The US National Security Strategy, issued last December, labelled China a “strategic competitor” practising “economic aggression” against the US. In January’s National Defense Strategy (NDS), Defense Secretary James Mattis declared that “great power competition,” rather than terrorism, was “now the primary focus of US national security.” The NDS designated China, along with Russia, as a “revisionist power” seeking to create a world consistent with its “authoritarian model.”

In July 1914, the crumbling and decaying Austrian regime issued an impossible-to-meet ultimatum to Serbia, following the assassination of Austrian archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Austria knew its demands would provoke war, but made a desperate attempt to maintain its threatened European empire.

Today, US imperialism, considering itself threatened on all sides by rivals, old and new, regards China’s economic expansion—above all, in the critical area of high-tech development—as an existential threat to its global economic and military dominance. In issuing its ultimatums to China, Washington has made clear that it is no less prepared to plunge the world into war.

Featured image: A US aircraft carrier in the Atlantic (Source: author)

Russia’s military spending has been declining in recent years, and is expected to shrink even more in the next few years. Despite this, the US seems to have no problem using Russia as an excuse to keep justifying more military spending. The latest move, from the US Navy, is to form an entire new naval fleet.

The US Second Fleet was dismantled in 2011, both to save money and because there is realistically no need for them. This fleet, which is responsible for the US East Coast and the northern Atlantic, is making a comeback, with Navy officials claiming a “great power competition” against Russia.

Even a cursory examination shows this is nonsense. Russia’s Navy is much older and far smaller than America’s. Moreover, Russia doesn’t have a fleet in the Atlantic in the first place. The closest thing to such a fleet would be Russia’s Northern Fleet, in the Barents Sea, which is focused on the Arctic.

There is no purpose to forming a new fleet on the American East Coast, to counter Russia or anyone else. Yet there appears to be no public debate against doing so. The US Navy knows that Russia can be used to justify anything, and with President Trump promising to build more warships, a new fleet fits nicely into the plan to continue the surge in US military spending.

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Finkelstein comments:  A few days ago I wrote this to several correspondents:

The philosopher Étienne Balibar is one of the figures behind the solidarity fund in support of striking railworkers — a fund that now stands close to €1 million. Responding to questions from workers who are taking part in the rolling strike action, Balibar emphasised the need for what he calls “collective resistance against social regression.”

Anasse, a pointsman at Le Bourget: How can an intellectual today show solidarity with workers’ strike action?

There are (at least) two reasons for them to do so, and indeed these reasons overlap. The first reason is that the railworkers who are today defending fundamental social rights are also fighting to stop the rail service itself being dismantled. This is not just any company. It is an essential public service, and now we see various attempts to privatise it (opening it up to competition and aligning its rules of functioning with the managerial norms of private businesses). This is part of a general offensive, which we might call a “neoliberal” offensive. After the attacks on the post office and telecommunications, they are trying to get rid of an essential public service. And other important sectors are also in the firing line.

The second reason is connected to this. As a teacher and researcher (I entered the education system as a trainee teacher in 1960, and today I am an “emeritus” professor) I spent my life working to serve citizens, and not so that a company could make profits. The railways and education are not the same thing, but they do together make up part of a wider whole. And now competition-based standards of evaluation and management are also penetrating into the education system. So I welcome the railworkers’ strike, for the strikers are in the vanguard of the collective resistance to this social regression.

Karim, Landy maintenance centre: It is said that our status is a privilege dating back to a time that has now passed. In your view, what, today, is a right and what is a privilege?

That’s an essential question! The terminology around “privilege” is a propaganda tool, which is used to discredit the railworkers’ resistance against their status being dismantled (or condemned to future extinction). Their status is presented not only as somehow archaic, but as if it were indirectly exploiting other workers. This is the height of nonsense, when we actually look at the railworkers’ wages and working conditions. Without doubt, there are privileged people in our society, in which we can see an exponential rise in inequalities of wealth and power, inequalities before the tax system, and inequalities in terms of who gets to have their say. But these privileged types are not working on the railways. We would be better off looking for them in the Stock Exchange or in Neuilly [posh neighbourhood on the western edge of Paris].

Besides, the very idea of democracy (from the French Revolution onward) has always been based on the elimination of privileges — which have a class character — and the recognition of rights — which are, on principle, universal. Rights belong to everyone. In the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century, these rights also began to include social rights, social security, and protections for workers. This was not the result of the ruling classes’ goodwill, but long and arduous struggles, and exceptional — sometimes even dramatic — circumstances. We should remember that the railworkers’ current status was established in two phases, in the aftermaths of the First and then the Second World War. That is no coincidence! In resisting the dismantling of their status, today’s railworkers are defending this historical inheritance and its continuation for the future generations, who risk living in a society of generalised precarity.

Laura, a pointswoman in Le Bourget: The strike could get tougher over time. They are talking about us as if we were taking people hostage. What do you think about this?

First of all, I should say that my hope is not that the strike “goes on” indefinitely, but that it wins, especially considering the general interest that it embodies. But given the positions to which the government is currently holding firm, it is possible that the strike will indeed have to get tougher, and endure for longer, if it is to emerge victorious. It will be essentially important, therefore, to win the battle of public opinion, to secure the understanding and if possible the active support of the service users (the large majority of whom are also workers). Given the inconvenience that a transport strike will cause for everyone, it is hardly self-evident that the strike will indeed win over public opinion.

“Intellectuals” like us have to do as much as possible to help make this happen. That is, insofar as intellectuals are able to make ourselves heard and affect public opinion (a French tradition that also needs protecting). Just like when they speak of “privileged” workers, the reference to the strikers “taking people hostage” is also mere propaganda. It is so over-the-top that I would be astonished if it worked. But we never know how public opinion could turn, and the government will stop at nothing to make the strikers look like “hardliners,” “selfish,” “terrorists,” etc. So, a lot will depend on the force of the movement, which will need to be united, to keep its cool, to be democratic, and to be clear in its objectives. Here, too, we intellectuals can play a role, even without ever substituting for the railworkers in struggle.

*

First published at Révolution Permanente. Translated from French by David Broder. 

Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher and the most celebrated student of Louis Althusser. He is also one of the leading exponents of French Marxist philosophy and the author of Identity and Difference and The Philosophy of Marx.

Featured image is from the author.

Featured image: Turkish Prime Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu

In the latest sign that Turkey is seriously considering leaving NATO as its relationship with the security bloc (and the US in particular) continues to deteriorate, Turkish Prime Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned on Thursday that the country would retaliate if a bill being pushed by House Republicans to block arms sales to Turkey becomes law.

As Reuters reports, lawmakers released details on Friday of a $717 billion annual defense policy bill that included a provision to temporarily halt weapons sales to Turkey. During an interview with broadcaster CNN Turk, Cavusoglu criticized the measure, saying it was wrong to impose such a restriction on a military ally, alluding to the fact that Turkey has graciously allowed the US to use its Encirlik air base to launch its air strikes against ISIS (as well as against Turkey’s enemy the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad).

“If the United States imposes sanctions on us or takes such a step, Turkey will absolutely retaliate,” Cavusoglu said. “What needs to be done is the U.S. needs to let go of this.”

While still a ways away from becoming law (and its unclear if President Trump, who has publicly praised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan) the proposed US National Defense Authorization Act would block sales of “major” arms to Turkey until a report on the relationship between the US and Turkey (which is also a component of the law) is completed by the Pentagon.

The implied target of the bill would be the 116 F-35 Lightning II fighters that Washington has promised to sell Ankara, of which 100 are almost ready to be delivered.

The bill is in many ways a response to Turkey’s recent purchase of S-400 air defense systems from Russia. Though Turkey’s relationship with Russia is still far from amicable (indeed, the two countries almost became embroiled in a military confrontation after Turkey shot down a Russian jet that was allegedly flying through its airspace back in 2015), the purchase has unnerved NATO and the US. The Russian weapons, Reuters notes, aren’t compatible with NATO’s defense systems.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Cavusoglu last month that the US was “seriously concerned” about Turkey’s buying of the S-400s (of course, we imagine American defense contractors weren’t thrilled either).

Cavusoglu criticized NATO’s consternation over the sale of Russian arms and accused it of trying to control Turkey and infringing on its sovereignty.

“Turkey is not a country under your orders, it is an independent country… Speaking to such a country from above, dictating what it can and cannot buy, is not a correct approach and does not fit our alliance,” he said.

Despite Trump’s warm feelings toward Erdogan, the Turkish president’s recent visits to the US have only served to inflame the conflict as his body guards repeatedly attacked Kurdish protesters that showed up to confront Erdogan during a trip to the home of the Turkish ambassador outside Washington DC and during a speech he gave in New York City while he was attending a session of the UN General Assembly. The beatings elicited charges against one of Erdogan’s body guards and a Turkish national living in New Jersey.

Last year, both countries temporarily curtailed embassy processing of visas after Turkey arrested an employee of the Turkish consulate in Istanbul as tensions flared.

Turkey leaving NATO would only be the latest sign that the Cold War alliance has entered a state of collapse as President Trump has repeatedly criticized it and castigated most of its members for not paying their fair share for their defense.

Of course, we doubt the bill will be successful – as it stands, it appears to be merely a threat by hawkish Republicans in the House. But if Turkey does eventually leave NATO, would that too be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fault?

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. The second, updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was published in November. Visit her website: MarjorieCohn.com. Follow her on Twitter: @MarjorieCohn. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Of relevance to the upcoming Malaysian elections on May 9 2018, this article first published in Feb 2016, confirms  that the outgoing Prime Minister Najib Razak received close to $700 million dollars in his personal account from the House of Saud.

The banning of Shia Islam is but the tip of the iceberg. This gift from Saudi Arabia has broad geopolitical and economic implications. It is directed against Iran and its relations with Malaysia.

It has contributed to the development of Saudi interests in Malaysia not to mention support for extremist wahhabi rebel groups.

It is tied up to the multibillion IMDB financial scandal.

M. Ch. GR editor

***

On Wednesday last week [February 2016] Malaysia’s attorney general confirmed that Saudi Arabia’s royal family gave Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak a $681 million personal gift. The confirmation of the scandal ended months of speculation about the source of the huge personal donation received from ‘a middle eastern donor’ by the Prime Minister. The country’s top anti-graft agency had recommended Najib Razak be charged with criminal misappropriation.

The transfer of almost $700 million was made ahead of the 2013 re-election of the Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Najib Razak who had been in office since 2009 is widely known for his clamp down on Shia minority Islam in the nation.

In 2010 the nation declared that Shiites in the country, who have been termed a “deviant” sect, were barred from promoting their faith to other Muslims.

In December that year, 200 Shi‘a were arrested by the Selangor Islamic Religious Department for celebrating ashura under the Selangor state shari‘a criminal enactment law. Religious authorities who accused them of “threatening national security” in multicultural Malaysia.

The nation has since continued to persecute and arrest Shia citizens.

In 2014 in Perak another 114 were arrested during a Shia event.

Images filled global media of Shia Muslim, children and women laying sprawled in prisons in the nation.

Countries In Contest To Persecute Shia Muslims For Saudi Dollars

The Saudi Royal family is known for sponsoring administrations and fanatic clerics that support its political campaign against Shia faithfuls in their countries. Its massive financial backing of the Malaysian Prime Minister is one such example of how billions of petrodollars from the nation’s oil sales are used to back radical fanatic administrators and politicians across the world.

Following a recent deadly crackdown by the Nigerian army that saw as many as 1000 Shia minority Muslims killed in Nigeria, the Saudi government immediately voiced public support of the massacre, elucidating similar fears of similar financial support towards the state and Federal administrators.

Zakzaky loaded in wheel barrow

This week a former Chief Imam of the Saudi grand Mosque described Saudi policies as identical to those of ISIS.

Sheikh Adel al-Kalbani said, “We follow the same thought [as IS] but apply it in a refined way,” he said. “They draw their ideas from what is written in our own books, from our own principles.”

The cleric said that “we do not criticize the thought on which it (IS) is based”.

Notably, most notorious global terrorists groups, Boko Haram, AQIP, ISIS or Daesh, al-Qaeda and the like are Sunni-extremist groups who recruit their followers from extremist Sunni nations and are known to receive financing from these governments. There are no known Shia terror organizations.

The donations to the Malaysian Prime Minister have put suspicion in various countries who are worried that their political administrators may like wise be sponsored by the Saudi royal family.

The only way PM Najib Razak could win this election on May 9 is by fraud and manipulation of the elections of results. 

The outgoing PM is desperate. A state of emergency is also contemplated. 

The grassroots support of the opposition coalition led by Tun Mahathir is overwhelming.

Across the land, Malaysians have united with a view to throwing Najib and his cronies out of office. 

In all likelihood, if Najib looses, he will be indicted on criminal charges. 

According to Pater Tenebrarum in a 2016 article: 

Mr. X Found: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on Saudi Arabia’s Payroll

Mr. X Found: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on Saudi Arabia’s Payroll

Overall, more than $1.05 [Aus] billion landed in Mr. X’s private account in a little over two years. This was bound to raise eyebrows, considering Mr. X’s official salary only amounts to approx. $100,000 per year. Not a bad salary to be sure, but even if he were to save half of it every year, it would take him 210,000 years to save up Aus$1.05 billion, not just two.

Then the head of a government-owned Malaysian company put millions of ringgit into Mr. X’s credit card accounts, which had been a tad overdrawn (by slightly over $ 1m.), due to Mr. X’s wife splurging a bit on jewelry in 2014.

Apparently Mr. X was not shy about spending some of his new-found wealth either. Apart from his wife’s predilection for expensive jewelry and other luxury items, he himself occasionally displayed a yen for fancy cars and reportedly also favored swanky accommodation. Friends and partners of Mr. X also enjoyed a windfall.

Thy “mysterious Saudi Prince” who wired sums ranging from $25 million to $50 million in one fell swoop into  Mr. X’s account was one “Prince Faisal bin Turki bin Bandar Al-Saud”. These deposits were accompanied by letters penned by yet another Saudi prince, “HRH Prince Saud Abdulaziz Al-Saud”, pledging quite generous “gifts” to Mr. X. One promise of $375 m. was accompanied by the following reassuring words:

“This is merely a token gesture on my part but it is my way of contributing to the development of Islam to the world. You shall have absolute discretion to determine how the Gift shall be utilized. This letter is issued as a gesture of good faith and for clarification, I do not expect to receive any personal benefit whether directly or indirectly as a result of the Gift. The Gift should not in any event be construed as an act of corruption since this is against the practice of Islam and I personally do not encourage such practices in any manner whatsoever.”

The title “HRH” (“his royal highness”) implies that the man is either a son or a grandson of King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the first king of modern Saudi Arabia. Given that Ibn Saud had 22 wives, 45 sons and approximately 1,000 grandchildren, all of whom are “Al-Sauds”, with a great many “Abdulazizes” among them, this could really be anyone. It was nice of him though to provide Mr. X with this get-out-of-jail card (“there’s absolutely no corruption involved, honestly!”).

Aides to US President Donald Trump have reportedly hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to devise a “dirty ops” campaign against key Obama administration officials who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal in a scheme to discredit the agreement.

Trump administration officials contacted private investigators in May of last year, directing them to “get dirt” on former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, the deputy assistant to former President Barack Obama, as part of an elaborate scheme to undermine the deal, UK-based The Observer newspaper revealed in a report on Saturday.

Screenshot: Guardian, May 5, 2018

The extraordinary development comes days before Trump’s May 12 deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international pact regarding Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

“These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it,” said former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Officials linked to Trump’s team contacted Israeli intelligence elements days after the US president visited Tel Aviv a year ago. Trump then made a pledge to Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons – despite the fact that Tehran has always maintained that it is principally and categorically opposed to development and use of nuclear arms.

The British newspaper further cited a source familiar with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” as saying that “the idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”

The Israeli investigators in the “dirty ops” mission were to look at Rhodes’ and Kahl’s personal relationships with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and to determine whether they had benefited personally or politically from the nuclear deal.

Rhodes slammed the the scheme by the Trump administration as “chillingly authoritarian” in a statement to the British newspaper.

“I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do,” he said.

A spokesman for the White House’s national security council offered “no comment” when contacted about the revelation.

Trump has repeatedly signaled his intention to scrap the Iran deal, denouncing it as “the worst deal ever.” In a January speech, he accused his predecessor of having “curried favor” with the Iranian government so as to “push through the disastrously flawed Iran nuclear deal.”

The development comes days after Netanyahu again accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons know-how after the 2015 deal, in what was widely regarded as a scripted, publicity presentation to further pressure the Trump administration to reject the nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a scripted presentation broadcast on Israeli TV on April 10, 2018.

During the televised show, Netanyahu claimed that the Israeli regime possessed a wide array of “new and conclusive proof” of purported Iranian violations.

Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron visited the White House for an official state visit, during which he tried to persuade Trump to remain in the agreement. Following the visit, Macron told reporters that he still expects Trump to exit the deal.

“My view — I don’t know what your president will decide — is that he will get rid of this deal on his own, for domestic reasons,” said the French president.

The European Union, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany have expressed support for the deal in the wake of the Israeli claims.

Iran has on numerous occasions asserted that its nuclear program is merely peaceful and not meant to make nukes.

This is while Israel is widely thought to possess hundreds of nuclear nuclear warheads and refuses to either allow inspections of its nuclear facilities or join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

Some explosions shook Syrian Arab Army positions in Aleppo and Hama provinces early Monday morning in what was widely reported to have either been an American, Israeli, or other Western allied strike on alleged Iranian military positions in the country that supposedly killed a few dozen people. It’s unclear exactly what took place because Israel won’t comment on its participation in the latest events, while unnamed sources in Iran told the national Tasnim news outlet that no attack even happened despite video evidence of the explosions.

Ominously, the Israeli Defense Minister warned right beforehand that his air force will continue to operate freely over Syria’s skies in spite of Damascus promising to defend itself and having previously shot down one of its neighbor’s jets in February. Netanyahu had also been making a big deal about what he alleged were 80,000 Iranian-backed fighters amassing in the Arab Republic, so circumstantial evidence points to Israeli involvement in what appears more and more likely to have been an actual attack.

Whether it was Israel, the US, or their allies, whoever carried out this bombing – if that’s indeed what it actually was – ended up proving a few points. The first is that Syria’s Soviet-era air-defense systems aren’t as effective as they were portrayed as being last month when they supposedly shot down most of the US, French, and British cruise missiles, drawing into question exactly what happened back then if they weren’t able to repeat their success this time around.

Furthermore, Russia’s militarily passive stance confirms its neutrality in what is increasingly shaping up to be an ever-escalating proxy war between the West and Iran in Syria. Not only that, but it’s highly unlikely that Moscow was even caught off guard by what happened judging by what its Ambassador to Israel said last week in reaffirming to the world that

“We are mutually coordinating and updating about Syria … So far, there have been no incidents between us, nor even hints at incidents, and I hope there will not be.”

Having acknowledged that, it’s improbable that Russia would be okay with Israel dropping a “tactical nuke” on Syria like what the viral fake news reports from some Alt-Media outlets are claiming, meaning that the 2.6 magnitude earthquake that followed the supposed strikes was probably triggered by a thermobaric or fuel-air bomb and not anything radioactive. Given Russia’s very close relations with Israel and its excellent ones with Iran, however, there’s a chance that Moscow could serve as a regional “balancer” in attempting to bring both sides together just like it might be trying to do through its interlinked Eurasian Union free trade deals.

Russia’s de-escalatory role will therefore be pivotal in determining the future of the proxy war between the West and Iran over Syria, but Moscow might ultimately have to “lean on” Damascus and “convince” it to make some “compromises” on Iran and Hezbollah’s post-Daesh military presence in the country if there’s to be any real chance of preventing these tensions from spiraling out of control.

*

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

Featured image is from the author.

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.

Featured image: Pete Seeger performing in 1986

This was originally published on February 28, 2018 by The American Prospect.

Fifty years ago this week, folk singer Pete Seeger performed the controversial anti-war song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour show on CBS television. The story of that appearance, and that song, illustrates the tumultuous political tensions of the era and was a bold act of defiance against corporate media power.

Seeger, who died in 2014, is now viewed as a legendary figure in American history. But when Tom and Dick Smothers invited him on their show, many people still viewed him as a dangerous radical, marginalized by the nation’s political, business, and media establishment.

Seeger had been blacklisted from network television since the 1950s because of his leftist politics. For a brief period in the early 1950s, as a member of the Weavers quartet, he performed in prestigious nightclubs, appeared on network television shows, and recorded several hit songs, including “Goodnight, Irene,” “Tzena Tzena,” “Wimoweh,” and “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You.” But as engaged radicals, they were an easy target for the Red Scare’s blacklist. They lost their television show contracts and nightclub bookings. Radio stations stopped playing their songs and their records stopped selling.

Seeger left the Weavers but his solo career also fell victim to the Red Scare. In 1955, Seeger was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to discuss his political affiliations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. (He never spent time in jail and the conviction was overturned on appeal in May 1962). Most colleges and concert halls refused to book him and he was banned from network television.

During the blacklist years, Seeger scratched out a living by giving guitar and banjo lessons and singing at the small number of summer camps, churches, high schools, colleges, and union halls that were courageous enough to invite the controversial balladeer. In the 1960s he sang with civil rights workers in the South and at the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and helped popularize “We Shall Overcome.” But ABC refused to allow Seeger to appear on Hootenanny, which owed its existence to the folk music revival Seeger had helped inspire.

Tom and Dick Smothers were among many musicians inspired by Seeger’s artistic and political contributions. In 1967, CBS invited the brothers to host their own variety show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which became a huge success, appealing to young viewers by inviting major rock and folk artists as well as comedians who reflected the political and cultural rebelliousness of the era. One sketch that lampooned President Lyndon Johnson so upset the president that he phoned CBS founder William S. Paley at home at 3 a.m. to complain.

The brothers had requested that Seeger be invited to perform, but CBS refused. Midway into the first season, however, the show’s popularity gave the Smothers more leverage with the recalcitrant network executives. Network chief Paley agreed on the condition that Seeger avoid singing any controversial songs—a demand that was, from the outset, guaranteed to provoke the Smothers brothers’ and Seeger’s defiance.

Seeger showed up to tape the second season’s opening show on September 1, which was scheduled to air September 10. At the taping, Seeger sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a song he had written earlier that year, inspired by a photo of American troops slogging through a deep river in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

The song tells the story of a platoon of soldiers wading into the mud of a river while on a practice patrol in Louisiana in 1942. The captain, whom Seeger calls a “big fool,” ignores his sergeant’s warnings that the river is too deep to cross. The captain drowns and the sergeant orders the unit to turn back. The song doesn’t mention Vietnam but the “big fool” obviously refers to Johnson who got the country deeper into the quagmire in Southeast Asia.

Understandably nervous about offending Johnson again, CBS executives erased Seeger’s song from the tape of the show. The censors had no objection to his performance of the African song “Wimoweh” (in classic Seeger style, he had the whole studio audience singing along), the Cuban song “Guantanamera,” and “This Land Is Your Land.”

In his network comeback, Seeger sang four songs that reflected his internationalism and humanism, which helped him escape the media establishment’s blacklist—in prime time, no less. Close to 12 million American households watched the program.

But the Smothers brothers weren’t happy. Tom, in particular, made sure that the story of CBS’s censorship appeared in the media. Because of the bad press, an outcry among the public, and the Vietnam War’s growing unpopularity, CBS allowed the brothers to invite Seeger back later in the season.

To whet the public’s appetite, Tom Smothers leaked the story to The New York Times, even announcing that Seeger would perform the banned “Big Muddy” on the show. A week before the scheduled broadcast, Seeger taped the show in Los Angeles.

Seeger performed five songs, including a medley of anti-war songs from American history which led up to “Big Muddy.” He ended the song with an uncharacteristic dramatic flourish, bringing his guitar up to his face, suggesting both a sigh of relief and moment of pride that he had managed to pull it off.

The audience for this show—13.5 million households—was even larger than Seeger’s appearance five months earlier. Two days after Seeger sang “Big Muddy,” CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite—perhaps the nation’s most trusted person—called on Johnson to withdraw American troops from Vietnam. On March 31, Johnson—facing strong opposition from anti-war candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy—announced he would not seek re-election that year.

Meanwhile, the Smothers brothers continued to find themselves in trouble with CBS. In the 1968-1969 season premiere, the network deleted an entire segment featuring Harry Belafonte singing “Lord, Don’t Stop the Carnival” while newsreel footage of the violence at the 1968 Democratic national convention played in the background. In March 1969, folk singer Joan Baez paid tribute to her then-husband, David Harris, who was about to enter prison for refusing military service. CBS censors permitted Baez to mention that her husband was in prison, but edited out the reason.

But CBS CEO Paley abruptly canceled the show on April 4, 1969, explaining that the Smothers brothers had failed to comply with the order to submit the shows to network executives ten days in advance. (The show won an Emmy anyway.) The Smothers brothers sued CBS for breach of contract, and in 1973, a federal court ordered CBS to pay them nearly $800,000. Two years later the brothers returned to television with The Smothers Brothers Show that was less controversial and less successful, lasting only 13 episodes.

Image on the right: Pete Seeger

The brothers continued to perform until they retired in 2010, but their popularity never recovered after the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. But Seeger’s two appearances on the show—and the controversy surrounding “Big Muddy”—helped revitalize his career.

Over the next five decades, through persistence and unrelenting optimism, Seeger became a symbol of a principled artist deeply engaged in the world. Many of his eighty albums, which include children’s songs, labor and protest songs, traditional American folk songs, international songs and Christmas songs, reached wide audiences.

In 1994, at age 75, he received the National Medal of Arts as well as a Kennedy Center Honor, where President Bill Clinton called him “an inconvenient artist, who dared to sing things as he saw them.”

In January 2009, Seeger and Bruce Springsteen sang “This Land Is Your Land” at a Lincoln Memorial concert honoring President Barack Obama’s inauguration. That spring, more than 15,000 admirers filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden for a concert honoring Seeger on his ninetieth birthday. The performers included Springsteen, Baez, Dave Matthews, Emmylou Harris, Billy Bragg, Rufus Wainwright, Bela Fleck, Taj Mahal, Roger McGuinn, Steve Earle, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Dar Williams, Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, and John Mellencamp. Seeger continued to perform, mostly benefits for social causes, until his death.

Seeger’s made his final television appearance in 2012 on another comedy program’s Stephen Colbert’s iconoclastic Colbert Report on Comedy Central. The 93-year-old Seeger talked with the awestruck Colbert about his new book, Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words, and then performed his song, “Quite Early Morning,” on the banjo. The song begins, “Don’t you know it’s darkest before the dawn. And it’s this thought keeps me moving on.”  Unlike “Big Muddy,” it is a song of hope, urging people to abandon cynicism and look forward to more “singing tomorrows.”

The Houthi rebels in Yemen, officially known as Ansurallah, have vowed to intensify rocket attacks on Saudi Arabia’s critical oil infrastructure, warning that they are now manufacturing their own ballistic missiles to achieve those aims, the Financial Times reports.

The threat comes at a time when Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia have begun to increase. Just this Saturday, Saudi Arabia’s air defense system intercepted four ballistic missiles over the southwestern region of Jizan. The debris of those missiles reportedly killed one person. Just a week prior, two other missiles were launched at the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) facilities on the Red Sea.

At the beginning of April, the London-based IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center noted that the Houthis claimed to have carried out three separate rocket attacks on Aramco facilities in ten days, including an attack on a Saudi oil tanker, which suffered some damage and led to the intervention of a coalition naval vessel, which in turn repelled the attack.

The Houthis also unveiled their new Badr-1 surface-to-surface weapon system (a heavy artillery rocket system) approximately a week prior, which the rebels claimed they had used to attack Aramco facilities.

Mohammed al-Boukhaiti, a member of the Houthi political council, also told the Financial Times that these attacks were “only the beginning of the response” to the death of Houthi leader Saleh al-Samad, who was killed by Saudi air strikes in April.

“Yemenis will not pass on the death of Samad easily and they will do their best to take revenge for him,” Mr. Boukhaiti said.

Boukhaiti also dismissed allegations that Iran has supplied the Houthis with sophisticated missiles, claiming instead that the rebels have been developing and manufacturing their own rockets and drones.

“The Yemenis have added new systems for manufacturing missiles, so more missiles are targeting Saudi Arabia as a part of an escalation,” Mr. Boukhaiti also said.

The claim that Iran is responsible for the Houthis’ supply of arms is one that continues to skim the surface of mainstream discourse without being bolstered by any hard, credible evidence.

Despite this, these recent developments are raising fears that the war in Yemen may begin to spiral out of control even more so than it has already in the last three years. As even the Financial Times admits, so far into the conflict Saudi Arabia has struggled to make any decent advancement against the rebels. It is also worth noting that in recent times, the Houthis’ confidence only appears to be strengthening, and these recent attacks targeting vital Saudi infrastructure may only improve their standing in the conflict.

According to Graham Griffiths, a consultant with Control Risks Group, these Houthi-led attacks have raised concerns for the safety of employees and assets even if the Houthis cannot exact any significant damage to the Saudi-led coalition.

“This perception of the risk is likely to greatly increase if even a single strike hits a sensitive target,” Griffiths said, according to the Financial Times. “The sustained pace of the attacks allows the Houthis to demonstrate that despite three years of war, they can still retaliate against a much more powerful foe.”

Most importantly — and largely missing from any serious analysis of this conflict — is Mr. Boukhaiti’s statement to the Financial Times that the Houthis will continue these attacks on Saudi Arabia until Riyadh “stops its aggression completely.”

As far as international law is concerned, Yemen is entitled to the right to defend itself from foreign aggression, including striking directly at Saudi Arabia, which is by all accounts the principal instigator of this conflict.

One might be inclined to believe a simple solution worth pursuing would be for the Saudi-led coalition to withdraw from its aggressive and criminal war in Yemen and allow Yemenis to conduct their own affairs.

*

Featured image is from the author.

“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business

What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

Played out on the national stage and eagerly broadcast to a captive audience by media sponsors, this farcical exercise in political theater can, at times, seem riveting, life-changing and suspenseful, even for those who know better.

Week after week, the script changes—Donald Trump’s Tweets, Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, Michael Cohen’s legal troubles, porn star Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit over an alleged past affair with Trump, Michelle Wolf’s tasteless stand-up routine at the White House correspondents’ dinner, North and South Korea’s détente, the ongoing staff shakeups within the Trump administration—with each new script following on the heels of the last, never any let-up, never any relief from the constant melodrama.

The players come and go, the protagonists and antagonists trade places, and the audience members are forgiving to a fault, quick to forget past mistakes and move on to the next spectacle.

All the while, a different kind of drama is unfolding in the dark backstage, hidden from view by the heavy curtain, the elaborate stage sets, colored lights and parading actors.

Such that it is, the realm of political theater with all of its drama, vitriol and scripted theatrics is what passes for “transparent” government today, with elected officials, entrusted to act in the best interests of their constituents, routinely performing for their audiences and playing up to the cameras, while doing very little to move the country forward.

Yet behind the footlights, those who really run the show are putting into place policies which erode our freedoms and undermine our attempts at contributing to the workings of our government, leaving us none the wiser and bereft of any opportunity to voice our discontent or engage in any kind of discourse until it’s too late.

It’s the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

Indeed, while mainstream America has been fixated on the drama-filled reality show being televised from the White House, the American Police State has moved steadily forward.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people.

All the while, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

None of these dangers have dissipated.

They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.

The new boss has proven to be the same as the old boss, and the American people, the permanent underclass in America, has allowed itself to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter what you call the old/new boss—the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter who occupies the White House, it is a profit-driven, an unelected bureaucracy that is actually calling the shots.

In the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer to spell out the grim realities of life in the American Police State that no one is talking about anymore.

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the cop culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. This governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice wherein government agents (usually the police) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property.

D is for DRONES. It is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be airborne in American airspace by 2020, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones will be used for benevolent purposes, many will also be equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for ELECTRONIC CONCENTRATION CAMP. In the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, all aspects of a person’s life are policed by government agents and all citizens are suspects, their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness dependent on the government’s say-so.

F is for FUSION CENTERS. Fusion centers, data collecting agencies spread throughout the country and aided by the National Security Agency, serve as a clearinghouse for information shared between state, local and federal agencies. These fusion centers constantly monitor our communications, everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for inane crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between us and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. As of 2008, there were some 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION and OVERREGULATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a police officer should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button.

U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.

V is for VIPR SQUADS. So-called “soft target” security inspections, carried out by roving VIPR task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams, are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you can now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age.

You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.

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

Featured image: Alexei Kudrin

If reports coming out of Russia are true, Vladimir Putin is considering appointing Washington’s agent, Alexei Kudrin, to negotiate Russia’s surrender to Washington. See this and this.

In checking out this story with well-informed and connected experts, I am advised that John Helmer in his report might have put too much credence in the story planted on the Financial Times by Kudrin.  One expert whose judgment I trust told me that Kudrin and other members of the “pro-US lobby”—the traitors that The Saker calls the Atlanticist Integrationists—are playing their  usual games. Kudrin may have gone too far this time by planting the story in the UK’s Financial times of his forthcoming appointment as negotiator of Russia’s surrender to Washington. The expert, whom I trust, told me that everyone in the Putin administration really dislikes Kudrin as a person and political figure — the sly games he plays, exploiting Putin’s personal loyalty from the past. It is widely said in Russia that Putin is too loyal to old friends like Kudrin who no longer serve him well. Kudrin’s few allies are in Medvedev’s group, and Washington’s incompetence recently sanctioned a couple of Kudrin’s Russian allies.  

Another expert whom I trust responds that rumors fly in Russia like they do everywhere as ambitious people jocky to elevate themselves in the media.  In contrast to the rumors that Putin is going to turn Russia’s fate over to an American agent, he reports rumors that Putin, pushed by nationalist patriotism and the military, is about to purge the Russian Fifth Column—Kudrin and the pro-Washington faction.

On the other hand, a Russian journalist tells me that in actual fact Putin himself is the biggest pro-Western liberal of them all and that Kudrin was instrumental in bringing Putin from St. Petersburg and installing him in the Moscow establishment.

Perhaps Putin’s inaugural address will indicate whether Kudrin will be given the power to surrender Russia or whether the pro-American Fifth Column will be finally excluded from the government or whether nothing changes.

Kudrin sounds like a traitor who should be put on trial for treason.  It seems unlikely that Putin would make Kudrin the number two man in the Russian government.  Kudrin, a protector of oligarchic control of Russia by billionaires who stole their fortunes by “privatizing” public assets, is also known for his advocacy of austerity for the Russian population while creating more billionaires by privatizing state assets.

Possibly there is as much fake news in Russia as there is in the US and Europe and that the truth is that Kudrin is a nonentity and not a player in Russian government decisions.  However, if Kudrin is elevated, perhaps his rise is due to neoliberal economics.

Kudrin along with the Russian central bank and most Russian economists who have been brainwashed by American neoliberal economics—“junk economics” in Michael Hudson’s accurate characterization—believe that the success of Russia’s economy depends on being tied to Washington’s imperial system.  They believe—very erroneously and quite stupidly—that without American investment and the lifting of the sanctions, the Russian economy is doomed.  That is what they say. The case could be that, like global economic interests everywhere, the oligarchs are only concerned with money, not with their country’s sovereignty.

As Michael Hudson and I have pointed out, the neoliberal economics taught to Russians by Americans in effect makes Russian economists agents of the West.  The Russian economists represent policies that work to Washington’s, not to Russia’s, interest.  Pepe Escobar, who believes Putin is moving in the opposite direction from Kudrin, acknowledges the pro-Washington faction’s control over Russian economic and financial policy. See this.

As there are few economists to tell Putin any different, the Russian government receives advice that Russia will fail unless its economy is integrated with the West.  

Kudrin also intends to cut Russia’s military capability in order to save money with which to pay interest on foreign loans that oligarchs will use to privatize public assets. The consequence would be to make Russia’s vassalage permanent as a colony of the West.

In my article on May 3, I asked if Russia knows what’s up.  Apparently not in the Middle East.  The Russian government thinks Syria is about fighting terrorism and working out a peaceful settlement.  But this is the last thing that Washington and Israel want.  Washington and Israel want Assad and Iran overthrown so that Hezbollah is left without support and Israel can occupy southern Lebanon.  Perhaps the Russian government’s inability to decipher the situation is the reason that Russia, always hoping to involve Washington in a peace settlement, never decisively brought the war in Syria to an end.  Now Russia is faced with US, French, and British forces in the American-occupied part of Syria and with Israeli military attacks on Syrian army positions.

If Kudrin is permitted to put Russia under Washington’s control, China, whose government also seems impervious to the real situation that it confronts, will stand alone. By privatizing state assets and creating billionaire oligarchs more loyal to money than to China, the Chinese government has created levers for Washington to use to neutralize China.  

Even if Helmer’s report is true, Washington and its ally Kudrin might still fail for any number of reasons, including the mounting problems of the US.  Nevertheless, that Putin is reportedly considering endorsing Kudrin and his surrender policy is an indication that Russians face a challenge to their sovereignty from the pro-American forces in Russia.

*

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

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

A foreign policy crisis is coming May 12. President Donald Trump’s likely decision on that day to not continue waiving sanctions on Iran under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will significantly increase the chances of war.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed by China, Russia, and most of western Europe requires the American president to certify every three months Iran’s nuclear program is in compliance with the deal. In return, the next quarter’s economic sanctions are waived against the Islamic Republic. Earlier this year, Trump warned he was waiving sanctions for the final time, setting a May 12 deadline for significant changes in the agreement to be made. Failing those changes, Trump’s non-signature would trigger sanctions to snap into place.

The changes Trump is insisting on — reduce Iran’s ballistic missile capability, renegotiate the deal’s end date, and allow unrestricted inspections — are designed to force failure.

Iran’s ballistic missile program was purposefully never part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action; as learned during the Cold War, trying to throw every problem into the same pot assured no agreement could ever be reached. Trump trying to add the missile program in three years after the agreement was signed is wholly outside the norms of diplomacy (and the art of dealmaking.) Ballistic missile capability lies at the heart of Iran’s defense. Sanctions have already kept the country from fielding any significant air force, and memories in Tehran of Iraqi air strikes on its cities in the 1980s when Iran lacked retaliatory capability lie deep. The missile program is the cornerstone of Iranian self-preservation and thus understood to be non-negotiable.

The 2030 agreement end date is to the Trump administration a ticking time bomb; Iran will nefariously lie in wait, springing whole into nuclear status 12 years from now. Leaving aside the original agreement was negotiated with such a deadline, and American policy has generally been for presidents to honor agreements in place as they take office, the worry over an Iran of the future going nuclear is pure drama.

Twelve years is a lifetime in the Middle East. Some 12 years ago Syria was at peace with its neighbors, and the United States happy to outsource torture to Assad as part of the War on Terror. Turkey was a democracy, Russia mostly a non-player in the region, and Iran was timidly facing the American military on two of its borders, open to broad negotiations with Washington. There is more than enough to focus on in the Middle East of 2018 than what the area might look like strategically in 2030, even assuming Iran could surreptitiously keep its nuclear development going such to pop out of the cake in 12 years with a nuclear surprise. Washington’s demand for an indefinite extension of limits on Iran’s nuclear activities is political theatre.

As for the concern Iran is not compliant with the agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body charged with monitoring the deal, has presented no such evidence. Iran has in fact shown itself anxious to stay in compliance; in two past minor instances where the Agency noted Iran exceeded its heavy water limits, Tehran immediately disposed of the excessive amount. Trump has suggested he wants unprecedented access to any and all Iranian sites, including military sites not known to be part of any nuclear program. The United States never allowed carte blanche to the Soviets during the Cold War, no nation with the power to say no would. Following the inspections ahead of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, where intelligence officers were embedded in the process and the results politicized, American credibility for this ask is low.

So these aren’t really negotiating points, they’re excuses for the United States itself to step out of compliance with an agreement.

“President Trump appears to have presented the [Europeans] with a false choice: either kill the deal with me, or I’ll kill it alone,’ said Rob Malley, a senior American negotiator of the deal, and now head of the International Crisis Group.

None of this is a surprise. Trump has always wanted out of what he calls the “worst deal ever.” His new foreign policy team — Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton — are also ardent opponents. While anything can happen inside a White House fueled by chaos, there is no plausible scenario that says the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will survive May 12. What happens next?

The likely effects of walking away from the agreement are global. Iran may immediately kick start its nuclear program. Tehran’s hegemonic efforts in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria would remain untouched if not intensify in retaliation. Iran’s current missiles will still be able to reach Jerusalem and Riyadh. The odds of the North Koreans agreeing to a nuclear deal decrease; imagine being the new State Department envoy sitting across from an experienced North Korean diplomat trying to answer his question “What is to say you won’t do this to us in three years?”

European allies will be reluctant to join in future diplomatic heavy lifting in the Middle East or elsewhere, shy to commit only to see the Americans turn up their noses following another election. Relations could easily sink to the level of 2003, when America’s bullheaded invasion of Iraq split the alliance. Russia and China, signatories to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, will have a chance at being the “good guys,” seizing an opening to expand cooperation with Iran at a time when American diplomacy might instead be looking for ways to drive wedges among them.

Meanwhile, the impact of renewed sanctions may be quite limited strategically. It is unclear if American pique will be followed by all of Europe falling into line with re-imposed sanctions; there is a lot of money in doing business in Iran and absent unambiguous proof Iran violated the agreement it is hard to see them going along in earnest. It is even less clear Russia and China will follow the new sanctions regime. And even if some signatories agree to reimpose sanctions, there is little to suggest Iran’s ambitions have been severely thwarted by decades of sanctions anyway. Had they been fully effective, there’d have been no need for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in the first place.

Without the agreement, there is, to misquote Churchill, nothing left to “jaw jaw,” leaving Iran free to develop its weapons and America only the option of destroying them. It’s perhaps the dangerous scenario Washington, encouraged by an Israel who has sought the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities for years, wants. The Israeli air strikes which decimated Saddam’s nuclear program and Syria’s were small scale, directed against nearby, discrete targets, vulnerable above ground. Not so for Iran, whose nuclear facilities are far away, dispersed, underground, and protected by both a decent air defense system and a credible threat of conventional, terrorist, cyber, and/or chemical retaliation. And that’s all before the newly-emboldened Russians weigh in.

The chance of terminating Iran’s nuclear program is held against the risk of full-on war in the region. The United States is playing with real fire if it walks away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on May 12.

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

Featured image: Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American citizen and journalist working in Syria (Source: Twitter)

Two journalists have today filed federal court cases in the United States to challenge their inclusion on a classified US “Kill List”, Reprieve said in a statement.

Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American citizen and journalist working in Syria, escaped being killed by drone strike on five occasions, including two strikes on cars he was travelling in. Two additional strikes were executed on his independent news agency, On the Ground News, while he was working in the studio.

Ahmad Zaidan (image on the right), a senior reporter with Al Jazeera has appeared in a top secret SKYNET document, a US computer programme which has classified him as an Al-Qaeda courier based on “metadata”. Zaidan was the first person to interview Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda’s former leader in the 1990s.

“Bilal and Ahmed are journalists, not terrorists. All they are asking for is the chance to prove it. Yet, the government seeks to deny them that chance. In doing so, he is asking the courts to jettison the very value, which sets America apart from dictatorships and despots – due process,” Jennifer Gibson, head of Reprieve’s drones project, said.

“The courts must not let him. The executive should not be allowed to act as judge, jury and executioner unchecked. In a country founded on the rule of law, these men have a right to challenge the government’s decision to kill them,” Gibson continued.

SKYNET, operated by the National Security Agency, pinpoints targets based on individuals’ mobile phone calls and travel patterns. It does not take into consideration any direct evidence to ensure legality, Reprieve said.

“The government has acknowledged that it maintains a ‘Kill List’ of suspected terrorists, and that there is a process to determine who should be included on that list. The plaintiffs were incorrectly placed on the kill list. They have the right to make the case that the government got it wrong,” Tara Plochocki, parter at Lewis Baac Kaufman Middlemiss PLLC, said.

Kareem and Bilal seek to remove their names from the US “Kill List” or any other list from which individuals can be targeted for lethal action. The case will also seek to address whether the US followed its own internal procedure on listing individuals and what that procedure comprises of.

Under the drones policy inked by former president Barack Obama and continued by Donald Trump, only individuals who pose a “continuing, imminent threat to US persons” may be targeted outside war zones. But Reprieve, a legal action charity seeks to argue that Kareem and Zaidan are journalists who are provided special protection inside and outside war zones.

Obama previously warned high risk counter-terrorism operations should be used sparingly and only after internal review. Trump has sidestepped that rule and provided the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Military broader powers. In addition, the US considers some countries “areas of activity hostilities” or temporary battlefields where looser targeting rules apply. US drone warfare has taken the lives of some 10,858 individuals since 2004, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

“Prominent” economic analysts maintain the myth, including a NYT report in its latest edition, saying:

An “unemployment rate (was achieved) below the 4 percent threshold,” the Times calling it a “milestone,” claiming it indicates a “tight…labor market…”

Reality is polar opposite. Trump crowed about the phony Friday Labor Department (BLS) report tweeting: “JUST OUT: 3.9% Unemployment. 4% is Broken!”

America’s privileged class never had things better. Unreported is continuation of protracted main street depression conditions.

Economist John Williams reverse engineers monthly employment numbers based on how calculated in 1980.

The so-called headlined U-3 unemployment number omits individuals without jobs wanting them, including many long-term unemployed ones not looking after months of failure to find work.

Most jobs created are low-wage, poor-or-no benefit temporary or part-time ones. Monthly BLS reports reflect BS ones without the L in between. They conceal the nation’s true employment picture. It’s not pretty, nothing suggesting a robust jobs situation.

The broader U-6 figure comes closer. It includes:

(1) “Marginally attached workers: people wanting jobs but not actively looking in the past 30 days, but have looked unsuccessfully in the last year.”

This category also includes “discouraged workers” who completely gave up in frustration within, but not exceeding, the past 12 months.

(2) Also included are people looking for full-time work but forced to take part-time or temporary jobs to be employed.

Williams’ latest reengineered calculation, the most accurate unemployment picture, has U-3 at 4.07, U-6 at 8.0%, and his ShadowStats-Alternative at 21.7% – remotely distant from anything approaching full employment.

In the Labor Department’s latest Household Survey, full-time employment declined by 311,000, continuing the erosion of what long ago was the hallmark of industrial America, mostly now operating abroad in low-wage countries, why the trade deficit it so high.

The nation’s economic strength is weak. Williams cited “weakening annual growth and no economic expansion,” adding:

“Mixed but faltering annual real growth in construction spending continued in a pattern last seen leading into the 2007 recession.”

Paul Craig Roberts calls monthly Labor Department employment reports “a bad joke.”

David Stockman explained “if the U-3 unemployment rate actually measured labor ‘slack,’ wage rates would be rising smartly.”

They’re not, Stockman calling the latest U-3 report “statistical noise,” using “deeply flawed employment models,” adding:

The phony “Awesome Economy narrative is actually built on institutionalized lies that service the needs of Bubble Finance on both Wall Street and at the Fed -until the don’t” once inflated bubbles burst.

Job numbers are inflated, manufactured out of thin air, partly based on a so-called birth-death model, estimating net non-reported jobs from new businesses minus losses from others no longer operating.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics admits misreporting, saying

“(t)he confidence level for the monthly change in total employment is on the order of plus or minus 430,000 jobs.”

The headlined monthly unemployment number conceals the job market’s dismal state, along with deplorable economic conditions for most people, struggling to get by.

Except for its privileged class, the state of the nation’s economic health is far different from how its portrayed by the administration and major media – concealing reality from the public.

*

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

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Global Geopolitical Rundown: Syria, Armenia, North Korea and Beyond. Mahdi Nazemroaya

By Michael Welch and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, May 06, 2018

Arabians have failed in Yemen, and what it wants to do is, and what the United States is doing and even Israel and Britain, is they are arming Saudi Arabia and they’re pushing Saudi Arabia to create an Arab front against Iran.

Israel’s Murderous Strikes on Syria, Via ‘Pacified’ Lebanon

By Andre Vltchek, May 06, 2018

This time, Lebanon, which in the past suffered from several brutal Israeli invasions, and where Israel is commonly referred to as ‘Palestine’, decided not to protest too loudly against the violation of its airspace. There were some statements made by individual Lebanese politicians, as well as a statement by the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which objected to the attack against Syria, claiming that Lebanon will file a complaint to the UNSC. Most of the statements, however, appeared only in the Arabic language. There was definitely no robust national response, as one would have expected.

The “Arab NATO” to Make Syria’s “Internal Partition” a Reality

By Andrew Korybko, May 06, 2018

The possible deployment of Saudi-led GCC and other fellow “coalition” troops to northeastern Syria would formalize the de-facto “internal partition” of the Arab Republic and represent the fulfillment of the RAND Corporation’s plans to “contain” Iranian influence in the region, thus forcing President Assad to finally decide on the post-Daesh military fate of his country’s most loyal ally.

De-Briefing Academics: Unpaid Intelligence Informants

By Prof. James Petras, May 05, 2018

In the course, of my activity I have discovered that many academics are frequently engaged in what government officials dub ‘de-briefing’! Academics meet and discuss their field-work, data collection, research finding, observations and personal contacts over lunch at the Embassy with US government officials or in Washington with State Department officials.

Trotskyist Delusions. Split into Rival Tendencies

By Diana Johnstone, May 05, 2018

In reality, a much more pertinent “framing” of Western intervention, taboo in the mainstream and even in Moscow, is that Western support for armed rebels in Syria was being carried out to help Israel destroy its regional enemies.

UK Media Told to Conceal Connections Between Sergei Skripal and MI6

By Thomas Scripps, May 05, 2018

A D-notice (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) is used by the British state to veto the publication of potentially damaging news stories. Formally a request to withhold publication, the slavishness of the mainstream media ensures these notices function for the most part as gag orders.

“Since the Ukrainian crisis of 2013-2014, to many observers of the Russian scene it was clear that Putin was not a master strategist who plots his moves well ahead of his opponents. …  At best he is a manager who keeps divergent forces within Moscow’s power structure in balance, rather than a statesman.”

Tens of thousands of Armenians converged on the capital Yerevan on Wednesday morning, blocking roads and government buildings in protest over the ruling party’s reluctance to transfer power in the country to opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan.

Protesters said they would stay on the streets for as long as it takes to oust the ruling Republican Party and install Pashinyan as prime minister. Apparently it worked: by the end of the day Pashinyan announced that all parties would support his bid for power, and called for an end to protests.

“The issue has practically been solved,” he told the cheering crowd at a rally in Yerevan. “All [parliamentary] factions say they will support my candidacy.”

The regime-change operation in Armenia has been a textbook color revolution every step of the way, tried and tested in Belgrade (2000), Tbilisi (2003), and most notably Kiev (2004, repeated 2014). There is a significant difference, however. Unlike Serbia, Georgia or Ukraine, Armenia is a formal ally of the Russian Federation, a member of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEC)—two pillars of President Vladimir Putin’s presumed geopolitical strategy. Significantly, Armenia also hosts a major Russian military base in Gyumri, leased until 2044, which the current government’s defense minister Vigen Sargasyan described last year as “a vital component of our country’s national security system.”

Armenia is déjà vu all over again.

“Envision people from all walks of life—students, teachers, workers, artists, journalists, clergy, soldiers—smiling, laughing, and hugging one another,” a friendly observer gushed. “A sea of flags . . . fills the square, and taxi drivers are honking their horns and popping champagne. The atmosphere is stirring and electric! These are ordinary people who stood up for transparent and accountable government. They mobilized to fight for a cause from a grassroots level, and they eventually won against almost impossible odds.”

Unsurprisingly, the “ordinary people” interviewed for major Western networks just happened to be young, well-groomed, fluent English-speakers. Initially they demanded the resignation of recently appointed prime minister Serzh Sargasyan, who had been Armenia’s president for a decade before arranging—contrary to earlier promises—the sideways move to the new post, which would let him keep old power. In the early days of protests Sargsyan appears to have expected support and advice from Moscow, and—failing to get it—resigned on April 23 with a strangely worded statement:

“The street movement is against my tenure. I am fulfilling your demand.”

But his admission of defeat no longer satisfied the protesters, however, who shifted their demand to an outright regime change, i.e. immediate transfer of power to Pashinyan.

Source: Russia Insider

The demand was hardly in line with the protesters’ claim to revere “democracy.” Described as “a muckraking journalist turned politician,” Pashinyan has modest electoral credentials. His Way Out Alliance won just under 8 percent of votes in Armenia’s 2017 parliamentary election, the legitimacy of which has not been disputed, and currently has only nine deputies in the country’s 105-seat national assembly. “Way Out” is a classic “pro-Western, pro-EU,” self-avowedly liberal party, intricately linked to a tight network of foreign-supported NGOs. It is opposed to Armenia’s membership of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and has been fiercely critical of what it regards as the current government’s excessive reliance on Moscow.

The script was familiar in every detail, including the unwillingness (or inability) of the Kremlin to anticipate and influence events.

“In general, Russia acted with incredible caution,” noted a protest-friendly Armenian analyst, which is to say that Russia remained invisible.

There was nothing “incredible” about the Kremlin’s inertia, however: Moscow was equally unable or unwilling to exert influence in other color revolution theaters, most notably in Ukraine in 2014. When an openly Russophobic regime came to power in Kiev after the February coup d’etat, Putin merely warned of the “tragic consequences of the wave of so-called color revolutions.”

As we now see, his warning was purely rhetorical. Four years later, with the same old scenario unfolding, he did nothing to prevent the reprise in Armenia—even though its objective was to topple the lawful government of a country (one of very few), which has entered both a military and an economic alliance with the Russian Federation.

Putin’s apologists in the Russian media and elsewhere were quick to claim that the change in Yerevan would not mean much in geopolitical terms, supposedly because its causes were “purely internal and any future government would need to rely on Russian protection against Turkey and/or Azerbaijan. With the same dismissive indolence, pro-government media have hardly taken note of the decision of Kazakhstan to discard Cyrillic and adopt Latin as the national language script. They consistently ignore the signs of estrangement of Belarus, where President Lukashenka is quietly trying to make himself grudgingly acceptable to the West . . . just as Montenegro’s Milo Djukanovic had successfully done in the waning days of Milosevic’s power.

(Talking of Montenegro, the Russians invested heavily in the tiny former Yugoslav republic in the early 2000’s, and actively supported its separation from Serbia in 2006, only to be rewarded by the imposition of sanctions by the Djukanovic regime in Podgorica in 2014, and its joining NATO in 2017.)

If the remaining two non-Russian members of the EAEC go, and the writing is on the wall, there will be literally nothing left. Moscow seems to display an extraordinary degree of complacency in areas Russia regards as safely within its historic sphere of influence, foreign affairs analyst James Jatras warns, even though the West—and especially the United States—explicitly rejects such assignment:

“The neglect Russia showed toward Ukraine after 1991 is now revealed to have been replicated in Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan. After they’re ‘flipped,’ what does Russia have left except its own territory? Then Russia itself will be treated with no greater respect by the authors of regime change operations. As I have pointed out recently, Russia really IS America’s No. 1 enemy (as per Mitt Romney’s assessment), if ‘America’ means the ruling establishment, which is totally united in its Russophobia.”

It is not coincidental that the Armenian operation came in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s display of weakness in Syria, after the false flag operation in Douma (April 8) and the ensuing bombing of Syrian government targets by the United States, Britain and France (April 14). Putin has been indecisive and weak throughout the crisis, I concluded in these pages two days later, doing nothing after his senior officers repeatedly warned of a forthcoming stage-managed atrocity leading to a Western attack, and leaving Bashar al Assad’s air-defense units to their own modest devices.

On April 16 Putin merely reinforced the impression of weakness when he said that yet another such attack on his nominal Syrian ally would “cause chaos.” Predictably, this has prompted the Russophobic full-spectrum hegemonists in Washington (and their minions in London) to demand decisive escalation, because “Putin has blinked” and “Russia has shown itself to be a paper tiger.” One predictable consequence is that Assistant Secretary for Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell, during his visit to Kiev and Tbilisi, urged Russia to “withdraw troops from Georgia” (meaning Abkhazia and South Ossetia, an utterly impossible demand) and expressed support for both Ukraine’s and Georgia’s bid to join NATO.

Eventually the Russians may be forced to respond to ever-escalating provocations. The price of their current appeasement will be a radically reduced maneuvering space, however, and therefore an exponentially greater danger of lethal escalation. Part of the problem, according to an astute British analyst of Serbian origin, is that Russia simply does not understand soft power, its economy is about the size of Spain’s, its nuclear arsenal is useless in localized power ploys, its conventional forces have not impressed anybody, and Putin is too frightened of confronting the West except when things threaten to go over the top (Georgia 2008, Crimea 2014): “Russia is not behaving like a superpower because it isn’t one.”

An additional sign of disorientation and utter feebleness in the Kremlin is the news that former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to “mend fences with the West” in order to revive Russia’s economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia’s fifth-columnists were exalted:

“If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia,” said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. “It would be a powerful message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the west and towards whom there is a certain trust.”

Putting Kudrin—an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus—in charge of Russia’s international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls’ school. It would mark Putin’s de facto collapse as a leader. We shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of what he does (or doesn’t do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.

Last but not least, over the past four weeks Israel has acted in a manner almost calculated to humiliate Putin. “Russia blames Israel for strikes on Syrian base,” the Western media reported on April 9, and Russia was right—Israeli jets did pound Syria’s T-4 facility near Homs, killing 14 people, seven of them Iranians, and turning the base to rubble. Israel did not officially declare that its aircraft attack the base at Tiyas, but Israeli military sources confirmed it. Calmly and deliberately, the government in Jerusalem thus ended its “deconfliction” arrangement with Russia which was negotiated between Putin and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2015. The agreement gave Israel a free hand against weapons transfers from Iran to Hezbollah, and allowed continued Israeli deterrence on its northern border.

Putin responded meekly, literally pleading with Netanyahu on April 12 to refrain from further action in Syria. The response from Israel could hardly have been more harsh and offensive. Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman announced on April 25 that Israel would be prepared to strike at any S-300 missile defense system in Syria threatening Israeli planes. This effectively means that Israel declared its readiness to attack Russian-operated systems if they are not granted a free run, since Moscow had abided by its decision—made originally at Israel’s request!—not to send the S-300 to Bashar’s forces. As if to make the point, Israeli jets mounted a massive attack on another Syrian military base near Hama on April 29, allegedly destroying 200 Iranian missiles and killing over 20 military personnel. Yet again Russia did nothing (verbal condemnations and warnings are no longer worthy of mention). As a Washington insider told me, the war hawks inside the Beltway are delighted:

“When all is said and done, Israel is behaving as a world power, and Russia isn’t. With its strikes in Syria and threats against Russia and Iran, Israel—backed up by the U.S.—feels free to act with impunity. Moscow meanwhile restrains itself under some fictive notion of ‘partnership’ with western powers. This only spurs further provocations under the expectation, based on experience to date, that it is cost-free.”

The interventionists believe that it is now time to take advantage of Putin’s weakness by chasing the Russians out of Syria altogether, reopening the Ukrainian front, completing the regime change in Armenia, and encouraging the implosion of the remnant of the Russian-led security and economic alliances. My prediction is that they will also sabotage the FIFA World Cup, which is due to be held in Russia June 14 – July 15, by encouraging their proxies to stage another false-flag operation (which will be blamed on Moscow directly), or to carry out a terrorist attack on one of the competition’s venues.

Ever since the second Ukrainian crisis erupted in the winter of 2013-2014, to many observers of the Russian scene it was clear that Putin was not a master strategist who plots his moves well ahead of his opponents. As I noted here during my visit to Moscow a month ago, after 18 years in power he has been shockingly unable to sort out the structural deficiencies of Russia’s economy, which is still dominated by corrupt oligarchs and globalist fifth-columnists. At best he is a manager who keeps divergent forces within Moscow’s power structure in balance, rather than a statesman.

Over the past three weeks his credibility has been deeply eroded. It is uncertain whether he can regain it—belatedly acting more like Churchill than Chamberlain—and thus make the danger of nuclear holocaust less acute.

Protesters said they would stay on the streets for as long as it takes to oust the ruling Republican Party and install Pashinyan as prime minister.

*

The author is a Serbian-American writer on international affairs and foreign affairs editor for the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles.

Janine Jackson interview Dahr Jamail about melting Antarctic ice for the April 27, 2018, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Link to the audio.

Janine Jackson: Antarctic glaciers are melting at dramatic rates, scientists are finding. Antarctica is of course a continent of ice, roughly twice the size of Australia. The retreat of its oceanfront glaciers raises serious concerns about the resulting rise in sea levels. The most severe projections of potential impact are almost impossible to grasp: billions of people displaced? coastal cities disappeared?

Yet the Washington Post was virtually alone among major outlets in reporting the latest findings. Corporate media have, in the main, stopped entertaining denial of human-driven climate disruption, but that’s a long, long way from the serious and sustained attention that would be appropriate to the myriad phenomena involved, and it’s categorically different than actually picking a side in the question of priority our guest’s work invokes: planet or profit?

Dahr Jamail is staff reporter at Truthout. He’s author of, most recently, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. His new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, is forthcoming from New Press, and he is just lately recipient of the 2018 Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, named for passionate, critical journalist I.F. Stone. He joins us now by phone from Port Townsend, Washington state. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dahr Jamail.

Dahr Jamail: Thank you. Great to be with you.

JJ: There’s more than one piece of relevant work here, of course. What is the research that you’d like to spotlight, and can you tell us, in layperson’s terms, what this new research seems to show?

DJ: The most important study recently regarding the Antarctic and sea level rise was published in Science Advances on the 18th of this month, and the title of the study is “Freshening by Glacial Meltwater Enhances Melting of Ice Shelves and Reduces Formation of Antarctic Bottom Water.”

So what this essentially means is that even in the Eastern Antarctic, there are glaciers that are melting that are actually freshening the ocean around them. So the freshwater of the ice melts, flows into the oceans, and then that is, in turn, blocking a process: that normally cold, salty ocean water is dense and heavy and sinks down to the bottom, where it forms what is known as the densest water on earth, because it’s the coldest and the saltiest.

And so what’s happening is that bottom water is stopping being formed, because of the melting of these coastal glaciers in two places of Antarctica: off the Western Antarctic coast, as well as the Totten Glacier, which is in Eastern Antarctica. And so these are the two fastest-melting regions of the ice continent.

So what this is causing, according to this study, is the cold surface water is no longer making its way all the way down into the depths, so it’s not forming that deeper layer of water that can travel across areas where it normally would. And so what this essentially means is that these two regions of Antarctica’s glaciers are now in a feedback loop where they are melting, it’s causing this effect on the oceans, and then that’s causing even more melting.

And so this is worrisome for numerous reasons. One, that for a long time, scientists believed that Antarctica, being the ice continent, would either not be dramatically impacted by  human-caused climate disruption, or at least minimally. But now what this means is that at least 10 percent of Antarctica’s coastal glaciers are now in full retreat, and because of this feedback loop, that retreat’s only going to speed up, and ultimately this feedback loop will start happening on other glaciers in Antarctica as well.

And so for sea level rise, we already know that the Arctic sea ice is dramatically melting, which is going to only intensify the melt rate in the Arctic. Of course, Greenland, we know, is melting at record rates as well. And so now with Antarctica—save dramatic, dramatic changes in mitigation, in fossil fuel CO2 emissions across the planet, on a very, very abrupt timescale—right now, at current trajectories, we are on course, at a minimum, to hit the worst-case projections of sea level rise, which, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is 8.5 feet by 2100. But these worst-case projections, unfortunately, keep being upgraded every time more and more reports, like the one we’re discussing today, are being released.

JJ: In terms of attention to what is obviously an almost staggeringly important development, the New York Times had a big three-part photo piece last May, with really spectacular images of Antarctica, and a kind of virtual reality thing. At one point the piece said, if the sea level rise turns out to be as rapid as the worst-case projections, it could lead to “a catastrophe without parallel in the history of civilization.”

And then, since then, and that’s May of 2017, well, the Times hasn’t really gone back to the story. Their recent Antarctica stories have been about penguins, you know. I just don’t know that the attention is commensurate, and there’s all kinds of reasons for that, and I’m going to ask you, but I just want to throw in: There’s amount of coverage, and then I want to say a little thing about the tone of coverage, because within that same New York Times piece, in the Part One of it (it was three parts), it noted that US and British scientists were working to get better measurements in the main trouble spots, and then it added, “The effort could cost more than $25 million, and might not produce clearer answers about the fate of the ice until the early 2020s.” And the next sentence is, “For scientists working in Antarctica, the situation has become a race against time.”

Well, surely part of the reason we aren’t running as fast as we might is the amount of coverage, or lack of it, and then this tone that, “Oh, it’s expensive.” I just wonder what you make in general, on this issue in particular, of the way media are covering it.

DJ: It is really shocking to me, and I think you really hit the nail on the head when you discussed the fact of the gravity of this crisis and the implications of this on the entirety of human civilization on the planet, not even to talk about other species. And one would think that that would demand a level of coverage that would be path-breaking, urgent and backed up by citing all of the scientific data that’s being released at a fairly rapid pace right now, whether it’s sea level rise, temperature-increase projections, what’s happening to methane in the arctic, etc., etc.

For example, I would add another quote by Dr. Eric Rignot, a glaciologist with UC Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, back in 2014, who said, “Today we present observational evidence”—we’re not talking about projections—“observational evidence that a large sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has gone into irreversible retreat…. It has passed the point of no return.” That was four years ago.

So the urgency is clear. Sea level-rise projections are being increased dramatically. We are talking, in the longer run, billions of people being displaced by sea level rise. Entire megacities on the coast, like New York and Tokyo, that are going to have to be relocated entirely, or completely abandoned to the sea.

And so with that being the context, the reportage of, “Oh, OK, well at least we’re not giving the denialists coverage….”  We need to be reporting on specifically what is happening, what the projections are, and what this means, because pretending, “Oh, it’s not that bad,” or “We’re still going to be able to mitigate it to the point where we’re not going to have to relocate much of New York City,” for example, it’s just not honest coverage.

JJ: And the idea it could cost more than $25 million—this particular project: $25 million is a pittance! They could have easily said it would cost “as little as $25 million.” The idea that we should be thinking in terms of millions of dollars and what that might cost, rather than putting it in a context of what we stand to lose…

DJ: Or put it in the context of $25 million for more studies, compared to the Pentagon budget, which is roughly between $700 and $800 billion that we know of, not even talking about the black budget, which puts it up at well over a trillion dollars annually. And so if we need $25 million or $50 million or, you know, heaven forbid, a billion dollars for some more scientific studies, not even talking about mitigation and starting a planned relocation of people and transfer of infrastructure, that that conversation is not happening is just mind-boggling to me.

Because the reality is, for example, the US military, in their Quadrennial Defense Review Report, they are already acutely aware of this. They know that at least half of their naval bases, their bigger naval bases in the US on the coast, have to be relocated. They’re watching the water come up to the docks and start to inundate infrastructure. So they’re acutely aware of this, and yet the coverage, as you just cited, in the New York Times is not even coming close to keeping up with that.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dahr Jamail. You can follow his Climate Disruption Dispatches at Truthout.org, and his book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, will be out soon from the New Press. Dahr Jamail, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DJ: My pleasure. Great to be with you.

*

Dahr Jamail is staff reporter at Truthout. He’s author of, most recently, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. His new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, is forthcoming from New Press, and he is just lately recipient of the 2018 Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, named for passionate, critical journalist I.F. Stone.

Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview Press). 

Featured image: Campaign Posters Adorn Concrete Wall

Brett Redmayne-Tittley reporting from Beirut

Beirut, Lebanon: Sat, May 5, 2018- On this lovely morning here on the coast of the Mediterranean there is not a cloud in the sky. In less than twenty-four hours voting will begin. However, on this day before the election, a howling wind is blowing from the south making the thousands of posters, banners and building-sized placards that feature the faces of the scores of potential Lebanese parliamentarians dance and sway wildly above the throngs of tomorrows voters.

But this wind, one that just yesterday seemed to bring the promise of a new future for Lebanon, will it be an ill wind that instead dashes this attempt at populist democratic reform, one cast from nine years of progress, onto the rocks of US-backed history?

Judging from the past twelve hours on the streets of Beirut, there is suddenly strong pause for concern. Someone is buying votes!

And just about everyone knows it.

Prior to arriving in the wee hours of this morning, this reporter had checked the newspaper offerings in the three airports transited for features on this very important election. In the New York Times, London Times, UK Independent, Financial Times, their Friday-before-the-election editions included not so much as a mention. In the English language papers of Turkey to the north, neither the Daily News or the Daily Sabah had a similar omission.

Why?

These same papers had news about Armenian, Moldovan and/ or the Maldivian elections where the western powers were already far along in bringing their unelected candidates back to power despite contrary election results past. The many Lebanese spoken with this day did not know of this glaring omission but were not surprised. As one local commented, “Well, they always ignore us…until war breaks out, again.”

The Rules of Engagement.

It’s now 7 PM on this Saturday and the bars are closing; unheard of in this town known for its vibrant nightlife that routinely parties to 4 AM even on a Sunday. It has been nine years since this nation’s last election and the Lebanese government wants everyone sober enough tomorrow to make it to the voting booth. So, if you want a drink only a restaurant can legally serve alcohol; hopefully on a full stomach.

Voting for any of the almost seven hundred different candidates from across the country begins at 7 AM tomorrow. An interesting requirement for voting is that all Lebanese must return to their place of birth to do so, and because of the closed bars, tonight is extraordinarily quiet. As one taxi driver accurately stated, Sunday “will see the return of old Beirut.”

Ready to Vote for tomorrow 

In what appears to be a form of Gerrymandering, when the voters return home to vote, many travelling over a hundred miles to do so, they must vote from a set list of candidates specific to their region. This would appear to be a violation of the Lebanese constitution that allows for universal suffrage and will restrict these voters from voting for more favorable candidates within the party of their choice, but not on their ballot. Despite the excitement of tomorrows historic election, many are quite unhappy about this limited choice that certainly affects their decision at the ballot box.

These separate ballots will be divided across the nation- similar to US congresspersons- by population. This means that Beirut, the largest city, has three different districts and three different ballots. The smaller cites have only one and in the rural areas of many small towns and villages, their ballots are apportioned to a set region.

One hundred and twenty-eight candidates will be elected tomorrow- the entire parliament. This has never before happened and is just as unusual in other worldwide elections where the election cycle is split instead- as in the US- to every two, four or six years. This makes this election all the more important since, post-election, it is these same parliamentarians that will subsequently elect the new Prime Minister, the very powerful three-member Cabinet and the President. Hence the stakes for this election have never been higher and this election will see a wholesale and long-lasting change in influence.

In an attempt to level the playing field for all candidates, all of them are currently under a national gag order that began this morning and will be enforced until the election is over and the results are in. None may, in this period, speak with any Radio, TV, Internet, or newspaper news source. Additionally, any manipulation by virtue of misleading advanced polling data has been restricted making the outcome an unknown to the voter and a further encouragement to get out and vote.

Everyone interviewed, without exception, views the many Hizbullah candidates as the status quo that will prevail. The only question is the final tally of seats. Hizbullah’s growing power has been achieved in the past by it creating various coalition alliances such as the March 7 or March 14 coalitions of many years ago. So the question is not whether Hizbullah will retain power, but whether it may achieve an actual majority.

While there are many other candidates in opposition to Hizbullah, they are aligned with either the Christian, Alawite, Sunni, Druze religious factions. These have previously failed to garner significant support since they have done very little, compared to Hizbullah, to bring real societal change to Lebanon. They also have repeatedly done nothing to defend their country in the three previous wars of incursion by Israel, while the people of Lebanon and Hizbullah have fought side-by-side. This memory applied at the ballot box to the horrors of war past and will have many voters discounting religious affiliations in favor of the national defence. These concerns have given current Minister of the Interior (which manages the police and domestic security), Mouhad Al Mashouk, perceived front-runner status for many who are looking beyond the Hizbullah offerings.

Mashouk may have trouble with this since the Shia candidate, retired Colonel Ali Al Shaer is featuring his own defensive track record as a reason for votes.

Image on the right: Posters Everywhere: Saad Hariri on Pop Corn Machine

The image of Saad Hariri, son of venerated Rafik Hariri, is so prevalent by itself, and alongside those of the many candidates, that one would think he was running for election. His image and presence of support for these candidates are designed to hopefully bring him to power again via parliamentary vote. There is no doubt that he is riding the coattails of his father in a similar fashion to Justin Trudeau despite his brief resignation and defection to Saudi Arabia. This is not lost on the voters, but strangely many believe he has a chance since most have forgiven him for his treason.

Western Desperation: Who is Buying All Those Opposition Votes?

What does not bode well for a peaceful and long-lasting result of this election is that some of the opposition candidates are paying for votes. This reporter spoke with five different voters who all told the same story: The going price in South of Lebanon is $800 and the mortita for Beirut is as high as $2000…plus airfare!!

One woman voter spoke of her anguished conversation with her parents who wanted her to change her vote and had admitted to her that they had been given $1000 each for their votes. Another bar patron informed this reporter that, due to the requirement of voting in the district of one’s birth, opposition candidates were going to be bused in from across Lebanon since Beirut is the plum of this election, having far the most seats to win. One bartender spoke with disgust about an opposition staff member visiting his bar- not an hour before- and offering he and other patrons $1000 per vote.

Worse, yet another taxi driver spoke of his parents being contacted in Canada with an offer of airfare and $2000 per vote to come to Lebanon on Sunday.

While this might seem outrageous and expensive, it shows the panic that the opposition is in regarding the likely outcome in favor of Hizbullah. These allegations were made all the more legitimate based on this reporters observations and conversations with arriving passengers from Brazil, which, interestingly, has a larger Lebanese population that Lebanon itself.

On the inbound flight arriving to Beirut, a large contingent of twenty or more Brazilians was on the same flight. However, during a casual conversation, they revealed few things about their trip other than two key facts: They were staying only until just Monday morning… and had brought with them almost no luggage. This made little sense at the time; until the testimony of many in Beirut certified their true reason for an 11,000-mile, two-day vacation.

Of further concern was how these paid for voters would be monitored in performing their deeds in the confines of a secret voting booth. With the Lebanese being known for corruption, all spoken with assumed there would be secret monitoring to be sure the opposition got what it paid for.

These facts put together and many Lebanese are concerned about some sort of Maidan Square event taking place tomorrow. So is the army.

Beirut has a strong military presence at all times, but in recent days, here in Beirut, that presence has more than doubled. This morning, this reporter witnessed a convoy of troop transport vehicles head into the city carrying over 150 uniformed soldiers. Every soldier is armed and everyone you encounter is cautious, unsmiling… and locked and loaded.

Despite these tangible concerns, the Lebanese spoken with were taking it all in stride. As one woman put it, draining here cocktail glass and cheerfully chiming in, “ They bomb…we rebuild. They bomb…we rebuild. That’s Lebanon.”

Smacking her glass down loudly on the bar for emphasis, now staring me in the eyes directly, she concluded in an accurate note of optimism, “But they have never defeated us…and they never fucking will!”

*

Author’s Note: For the previous article and for the upcoming Part Three please re-visit this publication or the author’s archive: www.watchingromeburn.com

Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 150 in-depth articles over the past seven years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, KXL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out and many more. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author.

The Israeli occupation forces have barred Jordanian and Arab publishers from entering the Palestine International Book Fair, held in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported on Saturday.

The Jordanian Publishers Association (JPA) denounced the Israeli measure, describing it as another chain in Israel’s oppressive blockade imposed on the Palestinian people.

JPA said that Jordanian and Arab publishers have been denied access into the 11th Palestine Book Fair although their books have been already shipped through border crossings to the occupied Palestinian territories.

The association said that the Palestinian Authority has always submitted entry permits for publishers to Israeli occupation authorities to attend the periodical book fair and “have been always accepted except for this time”.

“This measure makes part of an Israeli policy to destroy all attempts to build bridges with the Palestinian people,” the statement read.

Describing the Israeli measure as an “aggression” on culture, history and humanity, JPA called on all concerned parties to intervene and pressurize the Israeli occupation to lift its ban on cross-cultural exchange with the Palestinian people and grant Arab publishers the necessary permits.

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Featured image is from TPIC.

In 1888, Marx wrote, “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

On this 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx we focus on Marx as a political activist, rather than what he is best known for, an economist and philosopher who wrote some of the most important analyses explaining capitalism and putting forward an alternative economic model.

In the “Communist Manifesto”, Marx wrote,

“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”

He believed political change stems from the history of conflicts between people who are exploited against the people who are exploiting them. This exploitation leads to conflict and revolt, Marx posited revolution as “the driving force of history.”

The root of the political struggle for Marx was the economic system creating a struggle between classes. This conflict has varied throughout history, e.g. the serfs vs. the lords in the Feudal Era, the slaves vs. their owners in the era of slavery and today between workers and their bosses or capitalists.

Iconic picture of the 1848 revolution in Berlin. Unknown artist. Public domain.

Marx Was a Political Activist Working to Change the World

In an interview with Immanuel Wallerstein, Marcello Musto described Marx’s political activism, noting:

“For all his life, Marx was not merely a scholar isolated among the books of London’s British Museum, but always a militant revolutionary involved in the struggles of his epoch. Due to his activism, he was expelled from France, Belgium and Germany in his youth. He was also forced to go into exile in England when the revolutions of 1848 were defeated. He promoted newspapers and journals and always supported labor movements in all the ways he could. Later, from 1864 to 1872, he became the leader of the International Working Men’s Association, the first transnational organization of the working class and, in 1871, defended the Paris Commune, the first socialist experiment in history.”

Wallerstein adds that Marx played a major role in organizing people on an international level and that

“Marx’s political activity also involved journalism. . .  He worked as a journalist to get an income, but he saw his contributions as a political activity. He had not any sense of being a neutral. He was always a committed journalist.”

At 24 years of age, Marx was writing fiery articles opposing Prussian authoritarianism. The newspaper he edited was closed in 1842 by the government, he was exiled and moved to Paris from where he was expelled in 1844.

In 1848, Marx and Engels published the “Communist Manifesto.” “The Manifesto” was written as a declaration of the principles of socialism for the Communist League in Brussels. It remains a statement of the core principles of socialism to this day. At 45 years of age, Marx was elected to the general council of the first international where he was active in organizing the International’s annual congresses.

Marx’s vision of socialism had nothing in common with one-party dictatorships like the former Soviet Union that declared themselves to be socialist or communist. For Marx, the key question was not whether the economy was controlled by the state, but which class controlled the state. A society can only be socialist if power is in the hands of workers themselves.

Our Tasks: Expose Inequality, Create New Economic Systems

Marx’s critique of capitalism focuses on how it inevitably leads to concentration of wealth. Marxism was seen as extinct after the Reagan-Thatcher eras and the end of the Soviet Union. But, now after nearly 40 years of neoliberalism, the inequality of deregulated global capitalism has made the occupy meme of the 99 percent versus the one percent a factual reality.

The Independent reports on Marx’s anniversary:

“Unsurprisingly, several decades of neoliberalism have been the greatest testament to how a deregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw, siphons wealth to the top 1 per cent or even 0.1 per cent. Recent figures show that the wealthiest eight billionaires in the world (whom you could fit into a people carrier) have as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population, or some 3. 5 billion people. Astonishingly, the equivalent figure was the 62 wealthiest billionaires in 2016. Back in 2010 it was more than 300. This is how rapidly wealth is being sucked up to the top – this may be termed the vacuum-up effect as opposed to the myth of trickle-down economics.”

In the United States, three people hold more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the domestic population, “a total of 160 million people or 63 million American households.” Roughly a fifth of USians “have zero or negative net worth.” That figure is even higher for black and Latino households, the result of decades of discrimination. In some US corporations, the CEO earns more than 1,000 times the average worker, i.e. workers would have to toil more than nine centuries to make as much as the CEO makes in just one year.

The contradiction between extreme wealth and widespread poverty and economic insecurity, between the efficient production of goods and services and the refusal to share the prosperity created by efficiency, and between the use of natural resources and the destruction of the planet and enormous threats of climate change are leading people to see the failures of capitalism.

In 2017, the National Review reported that a poll found as many as 40 percent of people in the U.S. “now prefer socialism to capitalism.” A 2016  YouGov survey found that respondents younger than 30 rated socialism more favorably than capitalism, 43 percent vs. 32 percent. “Socialism” was the most looked-up word on Merriam-Webster’s site in 2015. “Socialism has been near the top of our online dictionary look-up list for several years,” said editor-at-large Peter Sokolowsk.

In 2014, David Harvey, a top Marxist academic, wrote, in Seventeen Contradictions And the End of Capitalism, that the extreme contradictions are leading to major transformations:

“It is in a political climate such as this that the violent and unpredictable eruptions that are occurring all around the world on an episodic basis (from Turkey and Egypt to Brazil and Sweden in 2013 alone) look more and more like the prior tremors for a coming earthquake that will make the post-colonial revolutionary struggles of the 1960s look like child’s play.”

How will that change occur? The answer is in part up to what those working for change do. Youssef El-Gingihy writes in the Independent of one likely possibility:

“The transition of capitalism to an alternative political and economic system will likely play out over a protracted period, even if it is catalyzed by revolution. Much in the same way that feudalism evolved into capitalism through the dual industrial (economic) and French revolutions (political), in which the bourgeoisie superseded the aristocratic order preceded by the 17th-century English civil war.”

We see the slow transition in process with the development of a myriad of economic democracy projects that give workers control of their employment through worker cooperatives, give communities control over their development through land trusts, give people direct control over budget decisions through participatory budgeting and democratize banking through public banks. These are some efforts to create an economy that serves the people without limiting control to workers, whose numbers are shrinking due to automation. Many of these new economic models are in their early stages of development.

Marx believed that:

“No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

The lessons of Karl Marx show that our tasks are to heighten class conflict by exposing the reality of abhorrent inequality and create new systems to replace failing capitalism.

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

Things are escalating again in one of Syria’s many wars. On 29 April, two massive strikes – presumed to be Israeli – reportedly hit the Syrian Arab Army’s 47th Brigade military base and arms depots near Hama, as well as Nayrab Military Airport in Aleppo.

The strikes reportedly targeted Iranian surface-to-surface missiles intended for deployment in Syria, and killed between 26 and 38 people, including 11 Iranians.

Red lines updated

The attack appears to have been coordinated with the US, coming just hours after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left Jerusalem – where, according to Haaretz, he had “thrilled Netanyahu with hawkish talk on Iran”. That same day, noted the Times of Israel, “news also broke of a phone call between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump“, while Israel’s defence minister, Avigdor Liberman, was meeting his US counterpart James Mattis in Washington.

This feverish activity came less than a week after General Joseph Votel, the head of the US army’s Central Command, or Centcom, whose sphere of responsibility includes Syria and Iran, made “a largely unpublicised visit to Israel.”

The Times of Israel article concluded:

“All this is beginning to look rather like a coordinated Israeli-American operation to limit Iran’s military activities in Syria – simultaneously conveying the message to Moscow that Russia’s green light for Iran to establish itself militarily in Syria is not acceptable in Jerusalem and Washington.”

The war on Iran, in other words, has begun. It has been brewing for some time.

In January 2018, with the battle against the Islamic State (IS) almost won, former US secretary of state Rex Tillerson announced new goals for US troops in Syria, vowing that they would remain until “Iranian influence in Syria is diminished, and Syria’s neighbours are secure from all threats emanating from Syria.”

In February the International Crisis Group warned that Israel had “updated its red lines – signalling it would take matters into its own hands if necessary to keep Iran from establishing a permanent military presence in Syria”.

Since then, Israel has been directly targeting Iranian personnel and facilities. Its shooting down of an Iranian drone on 9 February led to one of its own F-16s being downed by the Syrian army after it bombed the drone’s command centre, the first time an Israeli warplane had been shot down since the 1980s. Yet, in a very rare admission of responsibility, Israel still called the mission a success, claiming that between one third and one half of Syria’s air defences had been destroyed in the strikes.

Russia’s response

Two months later, on 9 April, Israeli missiles again struck the same “T4” military base they hit in February. The target was specifically Iranian installations and equipment, and 14 Iranian soldiers were killed. According to one Israeli official, this was the first time Israel had attacked “live Iranian targets”.

It was also, apparently, the first time Israel had failed to inform Russia to provide advance warning of an upcoming strike, breaking the “de-confliction” agreement made between Israel and Russia right at the start of Russian entry into the Syrian conflict in 2015.

Russia’s response was similarly unprecedented, with Russia immediately revealing Israel’s role in the attack, and Russian President Vladimir Putin calling Netanyahu to warn him that Israel can no longer expect to be able to attack Syria with impunity.

Then, following the US-UK-French air strikes on Syria on 13 April, the chief of the Russian General Staff’s main operations directorate, Colonel General Sergey Rudskoy, floated the idea of providing Syria with the powerful Russian-made S300 air defence system.

The S300, capable of tracking up to 100 targets simultaneously over a range of 200km, “would create a no-go situation for Israel if allowed to be made operational by the Syrian regime”, according to former US naval officer Jennifer Dyer, who added that:

“The kinds of low-level, preemptive strikes (in Syria) the IAF [Israeli Air Force] has executed in the last few years, against Hezbollah targets and the special weapons targets of Iran and the Assad regime, would become virtually impossible.”

Israel would lose the ability to carry out pre-emptive strikes. Russia had originally signed a contract with Syria to deliver the S300 system in 2010, but this was scrapped after pressure from Israel. But, on 23 April, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that the decision to reverse that suspension and supply the S300 had now been made, with only the technical details left to iron out.

A few days later, the Israelis struck again, this time with their earth-shaking bunker busters, directly targeting Iranian troops and equipment for the second time. No S300, you see.

The unfolding scenario

Media reports, both mainstream and alternative (my own included), are increasingly nervous about the scenario now unfolding, and rightly so. Yet while the danger of escalation and miscalculation – and specifically, the drawing in of Russia into the Israeli-Iranian conflict developing in Syria – remains real, many analysts have overstated the friction between Russia and Israel – and, indeed, the convergence of interests between Russia and Iran.

Despite both being opposed to western-backed regime change in Syria, Russian and Iranian objectives in the region are in fact very different. According to intelligence analysts Stratfor:

“Russia’s strategic vision is chiefly focused on eliminating sources of instability and preventing US-led military interventions”, with a “broader goal of establishing itself as an indispensable guarantor of collective security in the Middle East”.

In Syria, therefore, the Russians have the “limited objective of ensuring that Assad controls enough territory to negotiate with Syrian opposition factions from a position of strength” in order to create a mediated, negotiated settlement, overseen and guaranteed by Russia.

The Iranians, however, are more focused on “containing Saudi Arabia’s power projection capacity across the Arab world”, according to Stratfor analysis, leading to an “unwillingness to suspend military operations in Syria until Assad has completely vanquished opposition forces… Iran’s belief in the feasibility of a military solution in Syria has made it less willing than Russia to diplomatically engage with Syrian opposition or Kurdish factions during diplomatic negotiations, limiting the scope of the Moscow-Tehran partnership.”

Furthermore, “Iran’s use of Syrian territory to create a permanent transit point of weaponry to Hezbollah has alarmed Russian policymakers who seek to preserve strong relations with Israel.”

Iranian entrenchment

From this point of view, far from seeking to protect Iranian entrenchment in Syria, Russia has a direct interest in restricting it. Israeli strikes may thus serve a function for Russia, putting pressure on Iran to “rein in” the activities Russia views as disruptive to its own aims.

Furthermore, Russia may believe that the Iranian presence in Syria – as an alternative source of support for President Assad – makes the Syrian government itself less willing to sign up to Russia’s diplomatic initiatives. Indeed, on a very basic level, a reduced Iranian presence leaves Assad more thoroughly dependent on Russia.

And anyway, a cynic might argue, now the rebellion has been all but quashed, haven’t the Iranians served their purpose? Many people claim that the alliance with Iran is too important for Russia to risk a gambit like this.

And no doubt it is. But what if there is no risk? While the Russian-Iranian alliance remains crucial for Moscow’s projection of power into the Middle East, Russia may well calculate that Iran has no interest in jeopardising this, however poorly they are treated by their Russian “ally” in Syria.

After all, the provision of protection against a US attack on Iran is hardly a buyer’s market – Russia is a monopoly supplier. Safe in the knowledge that Iran really has no-one else to turn to, Russia can afford to let Israel loose on them in Syria.

Certainly, Israel’s belligerent defence minister does not appear to see Russia as an obstacle to Israeli plans for Syria. “What is important to understand is that the Russians, they are very pragmatic players,” he said in Washington recently. “At the end of the day, they are reasonable guys, it’s possible to close deals with them and we understand what is their interest.”

He certainly doesn’t sound like he is referring to a steadfast ally of a state Israel is just about to wage war on.

Isolating Russia

It may even be that Russia is still, against all hope, expecting to get something out of the Trump administration, in the form of sanctions relief, or at least some recognition of their security concerns in Ukraine and eastern Europe, and does not wish to damage that possibility by resisting strikes on Iran. Such hopes are surely forlorn.

I would like to think Russia is neither so cynical as to stand back and allow Israeli aggression against Iran in order to gain leverage in its own relationship with the Iranians and Syrians, nor so naive as to expect anything from the US. But the omens are not good.

The failure to deliver the S300s, or to create any other meaningful deterrent, even after the opening shots in this new war on Iran were fired on 9 April, suggests either cowardice or collusion. And the Russians are not cowards.

If Russia really is going to allow their erstwhile Iranian comrades to get wiped out, they really should understand that this is not simply a matter of Israel’s “legitimate security concerns”. This is about eliminating Iran’s chance of building up a deterrent in Syria, in advance of an all-out war against Iran itself.

And the destruction of states such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Iran is, in turn, about isolating Russia when its own turn comes.

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Dan Glazebrook is a political writer and editor of stopstarvingyemen.org. He is author of Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis and blogs at danglazebrook.com.

The bombing of Syrian sites where chemical weapons are allegedly being manufactured or stocked, allegedly to be used by the Bashar al-Assad government against the rebels, has left citizens all over the world in a state of confusion, filled with a mixture of perplexity and skepticism. In spite of the bombing by the Western media (a particularly apt metaphor in this case), in their attempt to persuade public opinion of the latest atrocities committed by al-Assad’s regime; in spite of the near unanimous opinion of political commentators that this was nothing but a humanitarian response, a fair punishment, and one more proof of the vitality of the “Western alliance”; in spite of all this, citizens in the West (and much more so in the rest of the world), whenever asked, expressed their doubts about this media narrative and for the most part spoke against the attacks. Why is that?

The consequences 

Because citizens who possess at least a modicum of information have a better memory than commentators, and because, although they lack expertise on the causes of such acts of war, they have an expert knowledge of their consequences, which is something that said commentators always fail to notice. They remember that in 2003 the justification for the invasion of Iraq was the existence of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. They remember that the photos that were exhibited at the time had been tampered with so as to lend credibility to the big lie. They remember that then, as now, the attack occurred on the eve of the arrival of an independent commission of experts sent to investigate the existence of such weapons.

They remember that the lie left behind a million dead and a destroyed country, with fat reconstruction contracts being handed over to US companies (such as Halliburton) and oil exploration contracts given to Western oil companies. They remember that in 2011 the same coalition destroyed Libya, turning it into a den of terrorists and traffickers in refugees and emigrants, and yielding the same type of fat contracts. They remember that so far the war in Syria has caused 500,000 dead, 5 million refugees, and 6 million displaced within Syrian borders. Above all, thanks perhaps to that mysterious cunning of reason whereof Hegel spoke, they remember what the media does not tell them. They remember that two genocides are underway in the region.

They are being perpetrated by state terrorism but they are almost never mentioned because the aggressor states are “our” allies: one is the Yemeni genocide at the hands of Saudi Arabia, the other is Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.

These are the more visible consequences. But there are other victims, of which the ordinary citizen is hardly aware, her suspicions sometimes not more than a vague discomfort. I will focus on three of those victims. The first is international law, which has once again been violated, given that actions of war are legitimate only in case of self-defense or under a UN Security Council mandate. None of these conditions has been met. Bilateral and multilateral treaties are being thrown out one after another, as trade wars become increasingly fierce. Are we in the process of entering a new Cold War, with fewer rules and more innocent deaths? Are we heading toward a third world war? Where is the UN, to prevent it through diplomacy? What else can countries like Russia, China or Iran be expected to do but move further away from Western countries and their fake multilateralism, and come up with their own alternatives for cooperation? The second victim is human rights. Here the West reached a paroxysm of hypocrisy: the military destruction of entire countries and the killing of innocent populations has become the sole means of promoting human rights. It somehow seems that there is no other means of fostering human rights except by violating them, and Western-style democracy does not know how to flourish except among ruins. The third victim is the “war on terror”. No person of good will can accept the death of innocent victims in the name of some political or ideological goal, much less when perpetrated by the countries – the United States and its allies – that over the last twenty years have given full priority to the war on terrorism. So how can one comprehend the current financing and arming, by the Western powers, of groups of Syrian rebels that are known to be terrorist organizations and that, like Bashar al-Assad, have also used chemical weapons against innocent populations in the past? I allude in particular to the al-Nusra front, the extremist Salafist group also known as the Al Qaeda of Syria, which seeks to establish an Islamic state. In fact, the most frequent accusations, by US institutions, with regard to the financing of extremist and terrorist groups point the finger precisely at that most loyal of US allies, Saudi Arabia. What are the hidden goals of a war on terror that supports terrorists with money and arms?

The causes

Image on the right: Destroyed Syrian tanks

Given that the causes elude all the news noise, it is more difficult for ordinary citizens to identify them. Convention has it that one can distinguish between proximate and structural causes. Among the proximate causes, the dispute over the natural gas pipeline is the one most frequently mentioned. The large natural gas reserves in the Qatar and Iran region can take two alternative routes to reach the wealthy, voracious consumer called Europe: the Qatar pipeline, going through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, and the Iranian pipeline, across Iran, Iraq and Syria. For geopolitical reasons, the US favors the former route while Russia prefers the latter. Bashar al-Assad was also in favor of the latter, as it benefitted Shiite governments only. From that moment on, the West viewed him as a target to be taken down. Major Rob Taylor, a professor at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, wrote in the Armed Forces Journal of March 21, 2014:

“Viewed through a geopolitical and economic lens, the conflict in Syria is not a civil war, but the result of larger international players positioning themselves on the geopolitical chessboard in preparation for the opening of the pipeline in 2016”.

The structural causes are perhaps more convincing. It has been my contention that we are at a transitional moment between capitalism’s globalizations. The first globalization took place from 1860 to 1914 and was dominated by England. The second took place from 1944 to 1971 and was dominated by the US. The third began in 1989 and is now coming to an end. It was dominated by the US, but with the growing multilateral participation of Europe and China. In between globalizations, rivalry between would-be dominant countries tends to increase and can give rise to wars between them or their respective allies. At this point in time, the rivalry is between the US, an empire in decline, and China, a rising empire. In a study titled “Global Trends, 2030”, the US National Intelligence Council – an institution that could hardly be viewed as biased – states that in the year 2030 “Asia is going to be the center of world economy just as it was until 1500,” and China could become the world’s first economy.

The rivalry escalates but cannot lead to head-on confrontation because China already has a major influence in the domestic economy of the US and is a major creditor of its public debt. Trade wars are critical and they spread to the high-tech areas, because whoever gets to dominate those areas (namely automation or robotics) will be poised to dominate the next globalization. The US will only enter treaties that are likely to isolate China. Since China is already too strong as it is, it has to be confronted through its allies. The most prominent among them is Russia, and recent agreements between the two countries provide for non-dollar denominated transactions, especially oil-related, which poses a fatal threat to the international reserve currency. Russia couldn’t possibly be permitted to boast about a victory in Syria, a victory, let it be said, against terrorist extremists, and one that Russia has been on the verge of obtaining, thanks supposedly to President Obama’s lack of direction when he left Syria out of his list of priorities. It was therefore necessary to find a pretext for returning to Syria to resume the war for a few more years, as is the case with Iraq and Afghanistan. North Korea is also an ally and must be treated with hostility so as to embarrass China. Finally, there is the fact that China, like all rising empires, is pursuing (fake) multilateralisms and therefore is responding to the trade war by fostering open trade.

BRICS

But it has also pursued limited multilateral agreements aimed at creating alternatives to US economic and financial dominance. The most salient of these agreements was the BRICS, formed by Russia, India, South Africa and Brazil, besides China. The BRICS even created an alternative world bank. They had to be neutralized. Since Modi’s rise to power, India has lost interest in the agreement. Brazil was a particularly strategic partner because of the country’s articulation – albeit a reluctant one – with a more radical alternative that had emerged in Latin America at the initiative of a number of progressive governments, notably Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Mention should be made, in this regard, to ALBA, UNASUR and CELAC, a set of political and trade agreements aimed at freeing Latin America and the Caribbean from US century-old tutelage. The most vulnerable of the BRICS countries was Brazil, perhaps because it was also the most democratic. The process whereby it was neutralized began with the institutional coup against President Dilma Rousseff and was taken further with the illegal imprisonment of Lula da Silva and the dismantling of every single nationalist policy undertaken by the PT governments. Curiously enough, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, no doubt a corrupt leader and a BRICS enthusiast, has been replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa, one of the richest men in Africa (not as corrupt as Zuma?) and a staunch advocate of global neoliberalism. The Summit of the Americas, which took place in Lima on 13-14 April and was virtually ignored by the European media, was a most relevant geopolitical piece in this context. Venezuela’s participation was vetoed, and according to El Pais of 15 April (Brazilian edition), the meeting signaled the demise of Bolivarian America. The strengthening of US influence in the region has become very clear, judging from the way in which the US delegation criticized China’s growing influence on the continent.

For all these reasons, the war in Syria is part of a much broader geopolitical game, whose future looks very uncertain.

*

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Portuguese professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal), distinguished legal scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, and global legal scholar at the University of Warwick. Co-founder and one of the main leaders of the World Social Forum. Article provided to Other News by the author.

“So the Saudis want to get back at the Iranians by fighting in Lebanon because they don’t like the support that Iran gives to Ansarullah … in Yemen…They’re called the Houthis.

So Iran supports the Houthis, not just the Houthis, also the other political forces which are Sunni Muslim as well… it’s mixed: secular, theocratic, Sunni, Shiite, Daesh… in Yemen are in a fight in a war with Saudi Arabia. And you can see that.

Arabians have failed in Yemen, and what it wants to do is, and what the United States is doing and even Israel and Britain, is they are arming Saudi Arabia and they’re pushing Saudi Arabia to create an Arab front against Iran.”

– Mahdi Nazemroaya (from this week’s interview)

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Some dramatic events have been playing out on the international stage in the first half of 2018.

In Syria, the Syrian Arab Army with the assistance of Russian forces is succeeding in capturing rebel held areas. Yet, at the same time, attempts to develop a mostly Kurdish border force, armed by the U.S. resulted in a major incursion to the Afrin canton by NATO partner Turkey!

And in the month of April alone, a supposed chemical weapons attack by Syrian military forces in the town of Douma was followed by a retaliatory missile strike a week later by the U.S, U.K, and France. Later Israel launched missile attacks against Iranian-backed militia in Syria. The international community very much divided on whether the U.S. led attacks constitute illegal aggression.

Meanwhile, the Caucasus State of Armenia has been undergoing tremendous upheaval with the elected President Sargsyan stepping down in the face of major demonstrations all over the country, reminiscent of the Maidan in 2013 Ukraine.

And perhaps most famously, after months of acrimonious rhetoric being exchanged between U.S. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, peace on the Korean peninsula is starting to look like a distinct possibility.

But in a media environment where seeing is not always believing and where appearances can be deceiving, a closer examination of the ambitions of all the regional players is in order.

To distill the interests at stake and the realities behind the official rhetoric, the Global Research News Hour is tapping the expertise of a seasoned geopolitical analyst and friend of the program. Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya returns to the program for the first time in over a year to break down these and other developments on the world stage.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an award-winning author and geopolitical analyst, author of The Globalization of NATO (Clarity Press) and a forthcoming book The War on Libya and the Re-Colonization of Africa. He is a Sociologist and Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), a contributor to the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF) and a member of the Scientific Committee of Geopolitica, Italy.

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

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Featured image: Horrid border at Majdal al-Shams

On April 9, 2018 at least 14 people were killed during the murderous strike by the Israeli air force on the Syrian T-4 airfield at Homs.

Israeli F-15 fighter jets flew over Lebanese airspace, as they have done on many previous occasions, in total disregard of international law.

Both Israel and Lebanon are still technically at war, and the latest action could easily be considered as yet another shameless provocation.Apparently, whatever terror Western allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel decide to spread throughout the region, their actions will always go unpunished.

To add insult to injury, instead of condemning Israel, the Western mass media outlets began their predictable and embarrassing servile howling against the government in Damascus, some ‘correspondents’ even calling President al-Assad an “animal” (The Sun, 9th April, 2018).

This time, Lebanon, which in the past suffered from several brutal Israeli invasions, and where Israel is commonly referred to as ‘Palestine’, decided not to protest too loudly against the violation of its airspace. There were some statements made by individual Lebanese politicians, as well as a statement by the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which objected to the attack against Syria, claiming that Lebanon will file a complaint to the UNSC. Most of the statements, however, appeared only in the Arabic language. There was definitely no robust national response, as one would have expected.

Ms. Zeinab Al-Saffar, an Iraqi educator and television anchor based in Beirut, Lebanon, shared her thoughts on the subject:

“It is not the first time that this is happening.  Israeli forces have been violating the airspace of Lebanon, as well as the land and sea belonging to Lebanon. Violation of the territory of Lebanon [by Israel] became something ‘regular’. What happened recently is a flagrant intrusion which should not go unanswered, as they were using Lebanese air space in order to attack the Syrian land. I believe this is the right time for the U.N. to do something more than just to make the reports and write numbers. This is an extremely serious situation; to use the territory of a neighboring country in order to attack a third nation; it is a barefaced crime.”

*

Why do Lebanon’s protests not resonate louder?

There are several reasons. One: the country recently ‘secured’ an enormous package of mostly loans from the West, at a ‘Paris conference’, amounting to more than 11 billion dollars.

Two: A great percentage of the ‘elites’ of Lebanon is accustomed to taking orders from the West. The West is where their villas are, where their relatives live, and their permanent residency cards issued.

A much greater war may be nearing; both the U.S. and Europe are now attacking Syria directly. In this decisive time, the Lebanese rulers are opportunistically showing where their allegiances lie: not with the people of the devastated Middle East, but with Paris, London, Riyadh and Washington.

But back to the first point – to money. As reported by Reuters on April 6, 2018:

“The pledges include $10.2 billion in loans and $860 million in grants, France’s ambassador to Lebanon Bruno Foucher said on Twitter…

Donors in turn want to see Lebanon commit to long-stalled reforms. In a nod to those demands, Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri pledged to reduce the deficit of the budget as a percentage of GDP by 5 percent in the coming five years.

Macron told Hariri in a news conference the aid aimed to give Lebanon a fresh start, adding that it put “an unprecedented responsibility” on authorities there to carry out reforms and preserve peace in the country. 

“It is important to continue reforms in the coming months,” Macron said, adding: “We’ll be by your side.” …

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told the conference: “… Lebanon needs major reforms of its economy, structural and sectoral.””

‘Structural reforms’ is a key term. This shameful package of loans which will further tie the hands of Lebanon could insure the complacency of the country: both economic and political obedience at the time when the West is ready to unleash a new wave of its military onslaught in the region.

There is hardly any transparency in Lebanon, and therefore almost no guarantee that the loans will be used to improve the standard of living of the suffering population. Corruption in Lebanon is endemic – it is institutionalized – to the point that it is often not even called ‘corruption’, anymore.

Social services are almost non-existent. Here, the contrasts are truly appalling. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, as well as outrageously expensive sailing boats, co-exist side-by-side with absolute misery and lack of social services, such as, at least periodically, garbage collection.

Hezbollah, a movement which is on the so-called terrorist list of many Western countries, is often the only reliable source of social services in the country.

The West will now demand more and more neo-liberal ‘reforms’. Almost nothing social will be build. Funds will disappear into the deep pockets of the shameless Lebanese ‘elites’ and ‘leaders’. It will be the poor, who will be expected to service the loans, as the rich in Lebanon hardly pay taxes.

In exchange for their booty, many Lebanese politicians will be further obliged to follow the Western line towards the region, including the neo-liberal and increasingly neo-colonialist policy of Washington and France (Lebanon’s former colonial master) towards Syria and the rest of the region.

*

And across the border line, the war is still raging. Washington and London fulfilled their shameful promises to perform ‘punitive actions’; to ‘chastise Syria’ for something that was clearly invented/manufactured just in order to justify an invasion, destabilization and in the end, the destruction, of this small but strong and proud nation.

In Damascus, shelling a park right next to Four Seasons Hotel, the UN accommodation, from East Ghouta

A Syrian intellectual, who lives in both Beirut and Damascus, offered his analyses for this article. However, he requested not to be identified by his name, afraid of repercussions from both Lebanon and the West:

“The Israeli attack comes at a time when the Syrian army is winning its fight against terrorist groups in Damascus suburbs, and it could be read as an indirect answer to these wins. It is also a dangerous move since the T4 airbase is heavily involved in the fight against the remaining of ISIS in Syria. This attack is unacceptable aggression against a sovereign nation and it is a violation of international laws. It also shows that Israel is helping directly and indirectly various terrorists groups operating on the Syrian territory.”

*

However, the commentaries that are being spread by the Western mainstream press are increasingly defying all logic. They are progressively turning out to be racist, supremacist. Well, actually now they are what they have always been earlier, throughout the centuries of European and then North American colonialism.

Just read The Guardian article from April 9th, 2018- “Israel has launched countless strikes in Syria. What’s new is Russia’s response”:

“Israel has launched many previous strikes into Syria, mainly to protect its borders from a buildup of Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces and armaments on the Golan Heights. Israel, has not, as a rule, attacked al-Qaida or Islamic State positions in Syria.

On all previous occasions, Russia – which has controlled Syrian air space since it sent troops to defend the regime of Bashar al-Assad in 2015 – has turned a blind eye. There had been an understanding that Israeli interests in Syria would be preserved by Russia, primarily by limiting the presence of Iranian-backed troops in Syria’s south-west. The Israeli fear is that access to the Syrian side of the Golan Heights allows Hezbollah to launch attacks into Israel.”

At least The Guardian does not pretend that it believes in the Western fabrications that President Assad is poisoning his own people…

But the article is clearly trying to justify and find logic behind the Israeli terrorist attacks against the independent nation.

‘Poor Israel – it is worried about ‘Hezbollah forces and armaments on the Golan Heights.’

But the Golan Heights is by international law an inseparable part of Syria. I repeat: by all international norms! Including, the United Nations Security Council UN Resolution 497. Golan Heights had been attacked, occupied and forcefully (and it looks like indefinitely) annexed by Israel, during the so-called ‘Six-Day War’ in 1981.

I visited the Golan Heights. I worked there, for several days, clandestinely, some 5 days ago. What I encountered there was true horror: ancient villages were totally destroyed, most of the original population deported from their land, Israeli-paid spies and provocateurs approaching and scrutinizing random visitors. All around – scattered rich Israeli agricultural enterprises protected by barbed wire and tall concrete walls. It all felt like working in Angola or Namibia, during the South African apartheid, or perhaps even worse; divided communities, stolen land, electric wire, and omnipresent fear and oppression.

Spy – surveillance base on the hill overlooking Syria

But it is Israel which now has the right to ‘worry’ and to murder people in the name of its ‘security’. That is precisely what the tone of the Western mainstream periodicals clearly suggests.

Israel had stolen more than a thousand kilometers square of the Syrian territory in 1981, and now it is mercilessly bombing its victim; from Lebanese territory, in order to assure its ‘safety and security’. It is doing so from the territory of Lebanon, a country which was invaded by the Israeli military, on several occasions.

And the West is cheering.

*

Of course, Israel is acting with total impunity, because it enjoys both the support and encouragement from its allies: The United States, the U.K. and Macron’s France.

Lebanon is panicking. Its’ ‘elites’ are trying to both survive, and not to anger the West.

Syrians have, it often appears, nerves of steel.

They worry but are determined not to give one single inch of their land to the invaders.

My friend in Damascus wrote to me, just a few hours before I submitted this report:

“People are worried and they constantly follow up the news. My brother asked us to go to Safita for one month, as it is safer there. I’m not sure if we do it, but we are closely monitoring the situation.”

My colleagues and comrades on the ground in Syria are angry, very angry. They can clearly see through the lies, which are being spread by the West.

Israel is repeatedly bombing heroic Syria.

On April 29, 2018, the Israeli attacks killed 26 Syrians and Iranians, just before Midnight, near Hama and Aleppo.

The U.S. and Europe are bombing and threatening to cause even more damage.

But this is 2018, not those dark years when the West could murder and rape without any consequences. If these attacks continue, there will be a counterpunch: fully justified, determined and powerful.

Then even the tiny Lebanon would have to decide where it stands.

*

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. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author.

The possible deployment of Saudi-led GCC and other fellow “coalition” troops to northeastern Syria would formalize the de-facto “internal partition” of the Arab Republic and represent the fulfillment of the RAND Corporation’s plans to “contain” Iranian influence in the region, thus forcing President Assad to finally decide on the post-Daesh military fate of his country’s most loyal ally.

The Mideast has been abuzz for the past couple of weeks about the possibility of Saudi-led GCC and another fellow “coalition” troops (the so-called “Arab NATO”) deploying to northeastern Syria ever since the US dropped several clear hints that there’s a distinct chance of this happening, and the Egyptian Foreign Minister just confirmed that this proposal is being seriously considered “during discussions and deliberations amongst officials of states”. Should it come to pass, then the US would essentially be “Leading From Behind” by calling in its military allies to do some of the “heavy lifting” in what’s partially being presented as “containing” Iran, at least according to one of the three main objectives that the US’ Representative to the UN Nikki Haley spoke about pursuing in the middle of last month.

Old News For Those In The Know

The scenario of foreign powers carving a “Kurdistan” and “Sunnistan” out of Syria for use as proxy buffer states against Iran isn’t new but was actually predicted by the author in a two–part analysis from October 2015 titled “The Race For Raqqa And America’s Geopolitical Revenge In ‘Syraq’”, after which the influential RAND Corporation published the third part of their “Syrian peace plan” in February 2017 describing “Agreed Zones of Control, Decentralization, and International Administration” to be presided over by a US-backed coalition in this very same region. The author also documented this and other think tank plots in a March 2017 analysis titled “SYRIA: Approaching the Finishing Line, Geopolitical ‘Jockeying for Position’ Intensifies”, proving that the possible occupation of northeastern Syria was planned long ago.

Yemen 2.0? Yeah Right!

While some might mock this as being nothing more than a disastrous repeat of the Yemeni quagmire, that example isn’t all that relevant to prognosticating the future success of this possible operation. Unlike in the South Arabian country where the majority of the inhabitants are fighting against the occupying forces that utterly destroyed their homeland, some of the people in the landlocked desert region of the Mideast might actually welcome a more robust international military presence and the billions of dollars of foreign aid that look likely to accompany it. The US-backed Kurds ethnically cleansed Arabs from Raqqa and other cities, and there’s indeed an incipient multisided “Rojava Civil War” simmering, but the West and its Arab allies have more than enough experiencing dividing and ruling others to be able to manage this.

Money Talks

It’s indeed possible that “Arab NATO” leaders Saudi Arabia and the UAE might enter into a “friendly competition” with one another in northeastern Syria over who ends up wielding more proxy influence over the Arabs and Kurds just like they’re already doing in Yemen when it comes to Hadi’s government and the South Yemeni separatists, with each wealthy monarchy pouring billions of dollars into rebuilding the capabilities of their preferred group. In addition, money – which is sorely missing from Yemen – won’t just pour into this part of the Arab Republic from the Gulf, but also from the US, which recently passed a bill that allows Washington to only fund reconstruction projects in areas that aren’t controlled by the democratically elected and legitimate Syrian authorities, which will likely prompt the Europeans to implicitly follow suit too.

New Cold War Standoff

This means that the remainder of Syria where the bulk of the population resides will have to court aid from supportive powers such as Russia, China, and Iran, which is already forthcoming but will lead to a crystallization of the New Cold War divide between the unipolar and multipolar “blocs” along the Euphrates River “deconfliction line”. It will naturally become much more challenging to bridge this de-facto “internal partition” line the longer that time goes on and the two parts of the country begin moving along totally separate geopolitical trajectories, though existing UNSC Resolutions such as 2254 will ensure that Syria remains nominally united, though it will probably never again exist as the constitutionally centralized state that it once was. Accordingly, the only realistic “solution” is to “decentralize” or “federalize” the country.

Divide And “Balance”?

The Russian-written “draft constitution” for Syria that Moscow unveiled in January 2017 leaves open this possibility via a collection of very vague clauses that in hindsight might have been included precisely for this reason, especially seeing as how the “progressive” faction of Moscow’s “deep state” is visibly succeeding in its quest to make their Great Power the 21st-century’s supreme “balancing” force in the Eurasian supercontinent and that this political outcome is best suited to advancing its grand strategic designs. The only “obstacle” standing in the way to its implementation and the peaceful “compromised” end to the war is Syria’s legitimate and sovereign right to refuse to recognize the foreign occupation of its territory by Turkey, the US, France, pro-“Israeli” proxies, and possibly soon even the “Arab NATO”, but there’s also the interlinked Iran-Hezbollah factors as well.

Après Iran, Le Déluge

Russia is the only foreign actor that accepts Syria’s decision to invite Iran and its Hezbollah ally into the Arab Republic for anti-terrorist assistance, but Moscow recognizes that their continued presence there after the defeat of Daesh is serving as a trigger for expanded “Israeli” military intervention that dangerously risks transforming the Hybrid War into a conventional state-to-state proxy one fought on Syrian territory. That’s why Russia is predisposed to “lean on” Syria and attempt to “convince” it to “compromise” on its relationship with the “Resistance” in the interests of regional peace, notwithstanding that Damascus has both the moral and legal right to continue cooperating with its anti-terrorist allies no matter what anyone—let alone the US, Saudi Arabia, and “Israel” (“Cerberus”) – thinks about it.

Damascus also realizes that the phased removal of the IRGC and Hezbollah from Syria would almost immediately lead to what already appears to be the inevitable “decentralization” or “federalization” of the state after the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) loses its last hope (key word) to have ever stood a chance at regaining what President Assad previously promised would be “every inch” of the country. That’s already all but impossible as it is because Russia refuses to overstep its strictly anti-terrorist military mandate in directly intervening to support the SAA in confronting the dizzying array of foreign occupiers all across the Arab Republic, but the patriotic population nevertheless believes that Iran and Hezbollah might help them with this anti-imperialist effort, however unlikely it is to succeed for all practical intents and purposes.

“Multi-Aligning” In A Neo-Realist World

The deployment of “Arab NATO” troops to northeastern Syria will make this even much more difficult than ever before, crushing the last glimmer of hope that many may have had for this liberation scenario to succeed, thereby – as the US-backed “coalition” probably anticipates – putting even more pressure on Iran to downscale its military commitment to the country. It’s ultimately Syria’s choice whether the IRGC and Hezbollah remain or leave, but Damascus has an economic-strategic self-interest in retaining their support in order to avoid overreliance on any one partner, in this case Russia. “Multi-alignment”, as the Indians call it, is the zeitgeist of contemporary International Relations, so it’s reasonable for Syria to believe that it can use Iran to “balance” Russia as well as reward Tehran for its loyalty throughout the war.

From the Neo-Realist perspective of the “19th-Century Great Power Chessboard” paradigm that’s powerfully shaping Russia and other similarly important countries’ strategic calculations at the moment, that would become much harder to pull off if Iran’s elite forces and their Hezbollah allies were requested to leave the Arab Republic, as the remainder of Syria not under the occupation of foreign forces and solidly under the SAA’s control would then fall almost entirely within Moscow’s de-facto “sphere of influence”. Instead of “provoking” the neighboring countries by entering into joint projects with their Iranian rival, Russia would more likely cooperate with China here instead, thus possibly representing the loss of future economic dividends that Tehran may have counted on to help compensate for the financial costs that it bore in supporting Syria throughout the war.

Syrian “Stubbornness”

President Assad is aware of this geostrategic reality and has accordingly operated with it in mind, ergo why he has yet to “comply” with what can be presumed has been Russia’s “gentle suggestion” behind the scenes to progressively disengage from his country’s wartime alliance with Iran and Hezbollah for the “greater good”. Syria’s leaders don’t want to accept that they’re powerless to reverse the occupation of their country’s periphery by the US, France, Turkey, pro-“Israeli” proxies, and possibly soon the “Arab NATO”, nor do they want to make themselves almost entirely dependent on Russia after some of them feel that Moscow should have “done more” to prevent this from happening and/or are incensed that it’s leveraging this development to its grand strategic advantage in advancing multipolarity as it understands it.

There’s almost nothing that Syria can realistically do at this point to reverse the de-facto “internal partition” dynamics that have already set in, with or without IRGC and Hezbollah support, but as the saying goes, “hope dies last”, and no patriot wants to be forced to confront the fact that there’s no longer any chance of this happening. President Assad is, therefore, loathe to limit his country’s excellent relations with Iran and Hezbollah because he understands the importance of keeping hope alive among his people, but he also knows how the optics of it would look in the sense of them being framed to make it appear as though he’s “submitting to foreign pressure”, something that’s totally unacceptable to his base that have fought, struggled, and died for over seven years to prevent this from happening.

Concluding Thoughts

Syria is therefore stuck in a state of strategic paralysis at the moment and would probably prefer not to have to make any decision in this regard, though it accepts the Catch-22 dilemma that it’s in and is aware that there is no “good move” in this case, with the choice between both options – allowing the IRGC and Hezbollah to remain, or requesting their phased removal – essentially being over which of the two is the “least bad” for the country’s long-term interests. The possible introduction of “Arab NATO” troops to northeastern Syria might have the effect of forcing Damascus to make a decision in the near future, though this will probably be the opposite of what the US-backed “coalition” and, it can be said, maybe even Russia at this point, expects, with President Assad potentially throwing down the gauntlet and daring the world to do something about his two most loyal allies.

*

This article was originally published on Regional Rapport.

Andrew Korybko is Moscow-based political analyst, journalist and a member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Studies and Predictions at the People’s Friendship University of Russia. He specializes in Russian affairs and geopolitics, specifically the US strategy in Eurasia. His other areas of focus include tactics of regime change, color revolutions and unconventional warfare used across the world. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

The month of May is always associated with V-E Day. The sentiments of “never again” were strong 73 years ago, in 1945 when the UN was founded. Since then Europe has put a huge amount of effort into creating a unique security system to prevent armed conflicts. It was never perfect, but by and large it worked. Other continents used to look on with envy and try to establish security regimes of their own.

Multiple agreements are still in force, working to prevent the worst scenarios, but today they appear to be somewhat forgotten and are failing to meet their objectives. Yet by no stretch of the imagination would anyone have imagined that May 2018 would be a month spent teetering on the brink of war, with the experts left trying to guess when it will ignite, how far it will spread, and how many actors are likely to be involved. It’s scary but that’s where we are. It’s never been this tense since the worst days of the Cold War.

On May 2, Siil (Hedgehog), the largest NATO exercise to be held in the Baltics since 1991, began in Estonia and Latvia, involving 3, 000 troops from 16 countries. It will last until May 14. Estonia and Latvia border the Russian Federation. Latvia will host five military exercises in May and June. All of this activity is intensive enough for Moscow to interpret it as preparation for war.

June will see large-scale BALTOPS and Sabre Strike 2018 exercises in the Baltics. Europe will host a US armored brigade – a force of at least 4,000 soldiers accompanied by about 90 Abrams tanks, Bradley combat vehicles, 18 self-propelled Paladin howitzers, and other vehicles.

The largest-ever NATO exercise, Anakonda 2018, will be held in Poland this summer. This is the biggest event staged by the alliance since the end of the Cold War and will include about 100,000 troops, 5,000 vehicles, 150 aircraft and helicopters, and 45 warships. Such a huge force will naturally make Russia wary. The NATO Air Policing was stepped up last month. The alliance will conduct 80 joint exercises in Europe this year, mainly aimed at prepping for a war with Russia.

This intensified training is taking place at a time when the Donbas conflict in Ukraine is really heating up. The escalation of tensions is coming on the heels of the US deliveries of Javelin antitank systems to the Ukrainian military. This is the first transfer of lethal weapons.

On May 1, the US State Department released a statement announcing that the American military is shifting to a new phase in its Syria operation. The US-led coalition, the SDF, and its mysterious “local partners” are to be involved. Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon have also been mentioned as having a role. The Islamic State has not been much of an issue for Beirut, but now Lebanon is very likely to become a battlefield that will draw in many actors, especially Israel and Iran.

Officially the mission is intended to sweep away the remnants of the Islamic State (IS) forces, but that claim should be taken with a grain of salt. Whatever is left of IS is insignificant and can be dealt with without the help of the US-led coalition. The situation in Syria is very explosive now that the US has ratcheted up the tensions instead of pulling out as President Trump said he wanted to do. A wider conflict is right around the corner there. The US-led SDF and the Syrian regular forces have recently been involved in direct clashes — a very worrisome development and coinciding with the Israeli airstrikes against Syrian and Iranian forces.

These war preparations are taking place at the same time that Prime Minister Netanyahu is accusing Tehran of allegedly cheating on the nuclear deal. The US was quick to claim that the evidence was “compelling.” The Israeli parliament has just voted to grant the prime minister the authority to declare war or to order a major military operation without the prior approval of his security cabinet.

US President Trump is widely expected to decertify the Iran deal on May 12 and pay a high-profile visit to Israel when the new US embassy’s provisional site in Jerusalem opens on May 14. The opening ceremony will be the right place and time to announce new moves against Iran — a country that works closely with Russia in Syria and elsewhere.

All the events taking place in Europe and Syria have a direct impact on Russia’s security. A spark is enough to kindle a conflict in Europe. The never-ending NATO exercises and other operations conducted right up against Russia’s borders are extremely provocative. A war against Iran in Syria appears to be almost certain, since Russian forces are deployed near Iranian positions. It will be next to impossible to strike Iranian or Syrian sites without provoking the Russian military into taking measures to defend itself. A single strike against Iranian forces could be contained but a military campaign against them will inevitably put Russian personnel at risk. Russia has some very formidable military forces positioned in Syria that must be a serious factor in any war scenario.

Tensions are running high in Europe and a wider conflict could ignite at any time in Syria. In either situation it won’t be Russia that provokes the explosive situations that threaten to deteriorate into a full-blown conflict.

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Peter Korzun is an expert on wars and conflicts.

One year into the unorthodox presidency of Donald Trump, the United States faces an array of complex and dangerous foreign policy challenges that require principled leadership, pragmatism, patience, and smart diplomacy.

So far, Trump has not exhibited any of these traits. Nevertheless, he will soon make consequential decisions affecting the future of the successful 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the course of the North Korean nuclear crisis, and the potential for renewed strategic nuclear competition with Russia.

Unfortunately, his appointment of the bellicose John Bolton to serve as national security adviser (Trump’s third in 16 months), along with hawkish CIA Director Mike Pompeo as secretary of state, could tilt the malleable president in the wrong direction. The result could be three full-blown nuclear crises.

The Iran deal. 

By May 12, Trump must extend waivers on nuclear-related sanctions to avoid violating U.S. commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. A decision to not extend the waivers will worsen proliferation risks in the Middle East and undermine U.S. credibility.

Trump has threatened to blow up the Iran deal if European partners do not agree to impose additional missile- and nuclear-related restrictions on Iran. The Europeans have made it abundantly clear they will support additional measures to address Iranian ballistic missile and arms transfers that violate UN Security Council resolutions. But because “a deal is a deal,” they will not seek to renegotiate certain nuclear-related requirements already agreed to under the existing agreement. Unfortunately, Bolton, who has long advocated bombing Iran instead of pursuing a deal to verifiably curb its nuclear program, has said he wants the United States to abrogate the accord with Tehran.

There is no rational reason why Trump, without cause, should trigger another Middle East proliferation crisis. It would be the greatest U.S. foreign policy blunder since the 2003 invasion of Iraq under false claims about weapons of mass destruction.

The argument that the deal can or needs to be “fixed or nixed” is misplaced and dangerous. Common sense suggests the United States should strictly enforce the deal and build on it, rather than scrap it without a Plan B. There is nothing in the deal that constrains the United States and Europe from pursuing a follow-on agreement to reduce Iran’s incentives to expand its nuclear program once certain restrictions on uranium enrichment and fuel cycle activities expire.

North Korea negotiations. 

Trump’s appointment of Bolton is odd in that Bolton’s policy prescriptions on North Korea run counter to Trump’s stated policy and that of ally South Korea of using sanctions pressure and diplomatic engagement, including a summit with Kim Jong Un, to halt and reverse North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

In the early 2000s, Bolton was among those in the George W. Bush administration who called for confrontations and ultimatums rather than dialogue with North Korea, an approach that ultimately allowed North Korea to advance its nuclear program and test nuclear weapons.

More recently, Bolton argued that it would be legal for the United States to launch a “preventive attack” on North Korea, which would result in a catastrophic war. Three days before his appointment in March as national security adviser, Bolton said that if the summit takes place, Trump should not offer economic aid nor should the United States offer security assurances to North Korea, the latter being the very basis of Kim’s offer to negotiate about his nuclear weapons program.

Bolton’s formula is a recipe for confrontation and possibly war. Instead, Trump should recognize that his planned summit with Kim, at best, can solidify the suspension of North Korean nuclear and missile testing and launch serious sustained negotiations on steps toward denuclearization and a peace regime on the peninsula.

Avoiding a new arms race with Russia.

In the next year or so, Trump will also need to decide whether to engage in talks with Russia to extend the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which is due to expire in 2021. Bolton has never supported the treaty, calling it “an execrable deal.”

As U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated, New START serves an even more important role in reducing nuclear risks, and it continues to enjoy strong support from the U.S. military. Now is the time for the two presidents to agree to extend the treaty for five years, until 2026, which is essential to avoiding an unconstrained arms race. It would also buy time for the two sides to explore new, follow-on approaches to maintain strategic stability at lower nuclear force levels.

Given Trump’s new set of advisers, Congress and U.S. allies will need to play a stronger role to steer him in the right direction and away from avoidable nuclear crises.

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Daryl G. Kimball is Executive Director of Arms Control Association.

Featured image is from the author.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

A nation affording rights to its favored people over others is profoundly hostile to democratic values – what apartheid is all about.

Arabs aren’t welcome or wanted in Israel except as servants to Jews. Israeli laws and customs discriminate against them – hostility toward Arabs in the Occupied Territories extreme.

“Israel’s regime of occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations,” B’Tselem explained, adding:

“End(ing) (it along with Israeli Arabs afforded rights no different from Jews) is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

Institutional racism is longstanding Israeli policy – its 20% Arab population (Muslims and Christians) mistreated and consider a fifth column threat. [Arab Jews are not categorized as Arabs despite the fact that a significant share of Israel’s Jewish population is of Arabic descent]

In 2011, legislation was introduced to enshrine Israel’s definition of a Jewish state into Basic Law. No constitution exists. Basic Laws substitute.

Initially not acted on, it resurfaced in November 2014. Extremist cabinet ministers voted to draft a New Basic Law for consideration, saying it’s to:

“(D)efine the identity of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and to anchor the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the spirit of the principles of the Declaration of the Independence.”

Proposed legislation declared “the right to express national self-determination within the State of Israel only to the Jewish people.”

The measure failed to become law. A revised version was drafted, calling the “State of Israel…the national home of the Jewish people.”

Its draft language declared the “right to self-determination…unique to the Jewish people,” codifying discrimination against Arab citizens.

On Tuesday, the measure passed its first reading – three readings required for enactment into law.

If adopted as Israeli Basic Law, it would enshrine the nation as “the national home of the Jewish people.”

The measure was sent to a Knesset committee for further consideration. Its controversial provisions include recognizing Israel’s Jewish character over democratic values when both are at odds.

Another section approved establishment of exclusive Jewish communities, codifying apartheid into Basic Law, making it more binding and permanent than already.

The measure declares Hebrew the official “language of the state,” Arabic permitted but subordinated, aiming to limit its public use.

Advancing the bill to second and third readings will likely occur after the next election. Kulanu, Yisrael and ultra-orthodox parties oppose the current version.

Having passed its first reading by a 64 to 50 margin in the 120-seat Knesset, eventual enactment into Basic Law is likely.

According to co-sponsor Likudnik MK Avi Dichter,

“(a)nyone who does not belong to the Jewish nation cannot define the State of Israel as his nation-state,” adding:

“The Palestinians will not be able to define Israel as their nation-state. The nation-state law is the insurance policy we are leaving for the next generation.”

The measure is hugely discriminatory, affording rights to Jews denied to Arabs.

Despite language saying everyone has the right “to preserve his or her culture, heritage, language and identity,” the right to self-determination “is (declared) unique to the Jewish people” – indicating opposition to Palestinian self-determination in any future no-peace/peace process talks.

The final version of law adopted may differ in part from its current form, its discriminatory nature virtually certain to be kept intact.

*

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

The US State Department has confirmed the delivery of anti-tank missile systems Javelin to Ukraine.

“They have already been delivered,” a US State Department official said on April 30 in response to an RFE/RL query on the handover of Javelins.

In March, the US confirmed the deal to sell 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 37 Javelin launchers to Ukraine. According to the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the deal also includes “United States Government and contractor technical assistance, transportation, training and other related elements of logistics and program support”

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko also confirmed the delivery and said his country would continue “to strengthen” its “defense potential.”

“I am sincerely grateful for the fair decision of [U.S. President] Donald Trump in support of Ukraine, in defense of freedom and democracy,” Poroshenko said.

“Washington not only fulfilled our joint agreement, it demonstrated leadership and an important example.”

Ukrainian Minister of Defense Stepan Poltorak thanked Poroshenko and wrote on his Facebook page that Ukrainian troops would begin training with the new weapons on May 2.

Further details of the delivery have not been provided yet.

Meanwhile, Czechoslovak Group (CSG), a private defensive and industrial company, secured a contract to deliver refurbished Russian-designed BVP-1 (BMP-1) amphibious tracked infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and 2S1 amphibious tracked self-propelled howitzers (SPHs) to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the US Jane’s Defence Weekly reported on May 3.

“The contract was signed recently and is worth hundreds of millions of crowns and involves dozens of vehicle platforms,” the CSG spokesman Andrej Cirtek told Jane’s Defence Weekly.

“Excalibur Army will completely overhaul the armoured vehicles and self-propelled howitzers at VOP 026 Sternberk and then transport them to our partner Wtorplast in Poland, which will export them to the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine,” Cirtek added.

Moscow has repeatedly warned against supplies of weapons to Ukraine saying that this would result in the escalation of the military conflict in the country’s eastern Donbas region, ongoing since 2014.

*

Featured image is from South Front.

You may be aware of the recent CBC coverage of Dr. Hassan Diab’s ordeal and the role the Canadian Department of Justice played in facilitating his extradition to France. When the case against Hassan was falling apart, after the defense discredited the French handwriting analysis, Senior Department of Justice lawyers urged French authorities to produce “new” handwriting analysis. Justice Department lawyers also suppressed fingerprint evidence showing Hassan’s innocence.

We are gravely concerned about the problematic role that Department of Justice lawyers played in pushing for Hassan’s unjust extradition, and troubled by Canada’s deeply flawed extradition law that puts all Canadians at risk.

We urge you to join us in calling for an independent public inquiry into Hassan’s case and reforming Canada’s extradition law so that no other Canadian is subjected to such a flawed and unfair process. We do not have faith in an internal review by the Department of Justice which, in the first place, was responsible for Hassan’s ordeal.

Amnesty International Canada and the BC Civil Liberties Association sent an open letter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Foreign Affairs calling on them to launch a thorough public inquiry into Hassan’s case. Also, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) called for an independent public inquiry into Hassan’s treatment. MP Murray Rankin, Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, raised Hassan’s case in Parliament and called for an independent public inquiry.

We ask you to add your voice by writing to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, calling upon him to launch a thorough, independent public inquiry into Hassan’s case. Please copy the Ministers of Justice and Foreign Affairs and your member of Parliament on your letter, and share your correspondence with [email protected].

Email addresses:

• To: [email protected]
• Cc: jody.wilson-raybould@parl. gc.ca
• Cc: chrystia.freeland@internat ional.gc.ca
• Cc: Your Member of Parliament: http://www. ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians /en/members

A sample letter is available:

• PDF version of sample letter
• Word version of sample letter

Also, please post on social media and write articles and op-eds calling for a public inquiry.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

Featured image: A woman living in the New York City subway. Liberation News photo.

Picture the Homeless, a NYC-based organization that advocates for the rights of homeless people and affordable housing solutions, recently published a report that highlights the inadequacy of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s so-called progressive plan to tackle the housing crisis. The group goes so far as to claim there is a “shelter-industrial complex” which has as its main priority securing funding instead of ending homelessness.

The homelessness crisis in New York City is dire. There are approximately 76,000 homeless people here according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  In one of the richest cities on earth, there are over 18,000 children who don’t have a roof over their heads thanks to unchecked real estate speculation and the commodification of housing. In fact, almost 30 percent of the country’s homeless families with children can be found here, according to DHU. On top of that, roughly 1 million residents rely on outdated, underfunded public housing.

Rather than addressing the root cause of homelessness by building long-term housing that all can afford, the city’s approach prioritizes for-profit development and homeless shelters. The city government’s emphasis on for-profit housing development will likely make more people homeless, and the over-emphasis on shelters will actually prolong the homeless crisis, Picture the Homeless says.

Why people become homeless

Homelessness is not the result of individual shortcomings or “laziness.” The primary cause is the lack of affordable housing.  Working class and poor people don’t get to decide how much rent will cost, which is oftentimes over 30-50 percent of wages. Nor do we have guaranteed access to healthcare, including mental health services. Medical emergencies that cause job loss or inability to work are oftentimes the straw that breaks the camel’s  back when it comes to housing security.

Another contributor to homelessness is the lack of legal protections for LGBTQ children who are often forced to leave their homes due to bigotry, abuse and violence. LGBTQ young people make up 40 percent of homeless minors in the U.S. today, and many of them wind upon the streets of New York City.

Luxury housing displacing affordable rentals

Why are rents too high? All fingers point back to the city government and capitalist developers as the ones to blame.  In the name of “cleaning up” the city’s image, construction of luxury housing has raged unabated for decades at the expense of working class communities, particularly Black and brown working class communities.

On paper, it looks as though de Blasio is attempting to turn this trend around and develop more affordable housing. The city’s primary response, however, is pumping over $1.8 billion into shelters. While shelters play a necessary part in the fight against homelessness, they are an incomplete and dehumanizing solution.

The Picture the Homeless report questions the disproportionate role of shelters in the Mayor’s plan, when permanent subsidized housing could best help homeless individuals and families get back on their feet.   “Over the next  7 years, the city will spend more on operating shelters than the amount of city subsidy required to create new housing for every single homeless household in NYC, ” the group says.  This will prolong the crisis rather than resolve it.

Politicians use technical language to deceive the people

One of the report’s key advantages is that it clearly defines some of the technical language associated with zoning and housing laws. Local politicians sometimes hide behind this language so only they can tell the public what is “possible,” “impossible,” or “affordable.” As organizers and activists, we need to make use of this language to articulate an alternative vision based on the idea that people have a right to a home and a right to live in the communities they grew up in without the fear of racist gentrification/displacement.

Area Median Income, or AMI, is one such politically loaded term. AMI is a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development standard that looks at the median, or middle figure of reported incomes in a given area. The AMI figure is used to establish standards for assessing poverty/affluence relative to one’s peers. Politicians have been quick to call anything below AMI “affordable” for everyone. However, a family who can only afford  housing at 15 percent AMI  will not be helped by projects developed for households at 50 percent AMI.

Speaking on de Blasio’s ambitious plan to create 200,000 new units which the city calls “affordable,” the report states, “tenants’ rights and homeless activists were quick to observe that the plan’s focus on households at 50-80 percent AMI (between $34,360- $68,720 for a household of three) put it largely out of reach to New York City households most severely at-risk of displacement and homelessness.”

The most in need are left out

Rather than providing genuinely affordable housing for the city’s poorest residents, de Blasio’s plan is accommodating to for-profit developers and prioritizes the needs of lower middle income families. While the creation of some new units, even if only affordable to middle income residents, provides a much-needed respite from seemingly limitless rent hikes, the mayor’s strategy is not intended to rapidly assist those most negatively and most violently affected by the housing crisis.

What’s worse, “affordable housing” developed for lower middle income families deployed in poor neighborhoods can actually drive gentrification and displacement. Since the median income is calculated at the level of a city as a whole, households at 80 percent AMI can be making thousands of dollars more than their neighbors in a new “affordable” development. The Picture the Homeless report speaks to the city’s use of “affordable”  housing to drive the rezoning and gentrification of historically working class/oppressed neighborhoods:

“These concerns were further amplified with the adoption of the Mayor’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) proposal by the City Council in 2015. The proposal leveraged floor area increases through rezoning in order to require landlords to provide a set-aside of affordable units in private housing, without any need for subsidy. …But the devil is in the details: the MIH proposal approved by the council required only 25-30% of units in private buildings to be affordable to households earning between 60-80% AMI (an annual salary of $42,950-$68,720 for a family of three) but in many of the neighborhoods where MIH was set to be implemented — low income neighborhoods like East New York, East Harlem, and the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx — most residents would not be eligible for any of the units created through MIH.”

Residents of neighborhoods targeted for rezoning countered by demanding that the city provide housing they could actually afford, and subsidies in local affordable housing developments, especially those built on public land. They were told by the city that this was “too expensive,” “not economically viable.”  Low income housing, the city said, had to be “tied to a greater number of units at market rate rents or, in some cases, “affordable” rents that met or exceeded the market rate in rezoned neighborhoods,” the report says.

The business of homelessness

To make up for the lack of deeply affordable units, the city continues to rely on shelters to pick up the slack. Picture the Homeless identifies a “shelter-industrial complex” that, rather than trying to solve homelessness, relies on homelessness to exist in the first place. Shelter staff, administrators and associated contractors receive funding based on the continued use of shelters.

A whole business of homelessness has emerged and views homeless individuals as potential sources of revenue, thanks to the local, state and federal funding that keeps homeless shelters in operation. What should be a temporary, emergency measure on the path to ending homelessness has become the solution in and of itself.

The Picture the Homeless report calls for diverting resources away from shelters to preserve and expand housing for the most at-risk individuals and families; capital subsidies to develop new affordable housing for people below 30% AMI; and a more rigorous inspection and accountability process for the shelters that remain open.

Despite harsh conditions, a hostile political environment and government inaction, many homeless advocates and housing groups continue to fight for real change in New York City. Most recently, Picture the Homeless was instrumental in getting the City Council to agree to audit all vacant city-owned land with the intention of developing truly affordable housing on it in the future.  In East Harlem, rent stabilized tenants have filed a suit to stop that area’s rezoning for high-rise luxury buildings.

A multitude of solutions exist to solve the housing crisis and end homelessness in this country, but they must be fought for.  They require the de-commodification of housing and the recognition that the capitalist real estate market exists to make a profit, and will never go out of its way to meet people’s needs.

As I write, with over 75% of all yesterday’s English local election results in, Labour has a net gain of 55 councillors compared to the high water mark of the 2014 result in these wards, while the Tories have a net gain of one seat against a 2014 result which was regarded at the time as disastrous for them, and led the Daily Telegraph to editoralise “David Cameron Must Now Assuage the Voters’ Rage”.

Yet both the BBC and Sky News, have all night and this morning, treated these results, in which the Labour Party has increased by 3% an already record number of councillors in this election cycle, as a disaster. What is more, they have used that false analysis to plug again and again the “anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” witch-hunt. It was of course the continuous exacerbation of this mostly false accusation by Blairite MP’s which – deliberately on their part – stopped the Labour Party doing still better. The Blairites are all over the airwaves plugging this meme again today.

What is more this Labour result has been achieved despite the complete collapse of the UKIP vote, which collapse had been expected to boost the Tory Party. In fact the net loss of over 100 UKIP seats has not resulted in overall net gains for the Tory Party, even though those ex-UKIP voters demonstrably did mostly split to Tory. The very substantial UKIP voter reinforcements simply saved the Tories from doing still worse. The Liberal Democrats are showing some signs of life.

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and the tendentious media misrepresentation of the election results reminds me why I could not get excited about it. A media with the extremely concentrated ownership we see in the UK can never be free, and certainly does not represent a wide spread of political opinions. Even the views of the official Leader of the Opposition are almost entirely deemed to be outside the Overton window. In Scotland the Scottish government is subject to unreasoning media attack, day in and day out, which contrasts strikingly with the treatment of Westminster ministers and issues.

There is a seriously worrying example from Leeds of the decline of free speech, where disgracefully a meeting discussing the bias of the corporate and state media has now been banned by Leeds City Council because of its content. We are not allowed even to get together to discuss media bias. Retired Ambassador Peter Ford, Professors Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward, Vanessa Beeley and Robert Stuart were to address the meeting at Leeds City Museum entitled “Media on Trial”. I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead.

British society truly has changed fundamentally if a former British Ambassador to Syria is banned from speaking in public premises on his area of expertise. What is still worse is the tone of this sneering report from Huffington Post, now firmly a part of corporate media, in which Chris York libels the speakers as “Assad supporters”, interviews none of the speakers and nobody to make the argument for free speech, but does manage to interview the “founder” of the jihadist “White Helmets.” In terms of banning dissent while simultaneously ramping up the official narrative, York has won himself top establishment brownie points. The man – and I use the term loosely – is unfit for polite company.

This article is also available in Russian, read here.

Introduction

Over the past half-century, I have been engaged in research, lectured and worked with social movements and leftist governments in Latin America. I interviewed US officials and think tanks in Washington and New York. I have written scores of books, hundreds of professional articles and presented numerous papers at professional meetings.

In the course, of my activity I have discovered that many academics are frequently engage in what government officials dub ‘de-briefing’! Academics meet and discuss their field-work, data collection, research finding, observations and personal contacts over lunch at the Embassy with US government officials or in Washington with State Department officials.

US government officials look forward to these ‘debriefings”; the academic provided useful access to information which they otherwise could not obtain from paid, intelligence agents or local collaborators.

Not all academic informants are very well placed or competent investigators. However, many provide useful insights and information especially on leftist movements, parties and leaders who are real or potential anti-imperialist adversaries.

US empire builders whether engaged in political or military activities depend on information especially regarding who to back and who to subvert; who should receive diplomatic support and who to receive financial and to military resources.

De-briefed academics identify ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ adversaries, as well as personal and political vulnerabilities. Officials frequently exploit health problems or family needs to ‘turn’ leftists into imperial stool pigeons.

US officials are especially interested in academic gate-keepers who exclude ‘anti-imperialist’ critics, activists , politicians and government officials.

At times, US State Department officials claim to be sympathetic ‘progressives’who oppose ‘Neanderthals’ in their institution, in order to elicit inside information from leftist academic informants.

Debriefing is a widespread practice and involves numerous academics from major universities and research centers, as well as non-governmental ‘activists’ and editors of academic journals and publications.

Academic participates in debriefing frequently do not publicize their reporting to the government. Most likely they share their reports with other academic informers. All claim they are merely sharing research and diffusing information for ‘science’ and to further ‘humane values’.

Academic informers always justify their collaboration as providing a clear and more balanced picture to ‘our’ policymakers, ignoring the predictable destructive outcomes likely to ensue.

Academics in the Service of Empire

Academic informants never study, collect research and publicize reports on US covert, overt and clandestine policies in defense of multi-nationals and Latin American elite which collaborate with empire builders.

US officials have no interest in ‘debriefing’ academics conducting anti-imperialist research.

US officials are keen to know any and all reports on ‘movements from below’: who they are, how much influence they have, their susceptibility to bribes, blackmail and invitations to the State Department, Disneyland, or the Wilson Center in D.C.

US officials fund academic research on militant trade unions , agrarian social movements , feminist and ethnic minorities engaged in class struggle ,and anti-imperialist activists and leaders, as they all serve as targets for imperial repression.

The officials are also keen on academic reports on so-called ‘moderate’ collaborators who can be funded, advised and recruited to defend the empire , undermine the class struggle and split movements.

Academic informants are especially useful in providing personal and political information on Latin American leftwing intellectuals, academics, journalists, writers and critics which allows US officials to isolate, slander and boycott anti-imperialists, as well as those intellectuals who can be recruited and seduced with foundation grants and invitations to the Kennedy Center at Harvard.

When US officials have a difficult time understanding the intricacies and consequences of ideological debates and factional divisions within leftist parties or regimes, ex-leftist academic informers, who collect documents and interviews , provide detailed explanations and provide officials with a political roadmap to exploit and exacerbate divisions and to guide repressive policies, which undermine adversaries engaged in anti-imperialist and class struggle.

The State Department works hand and glove with research centers and foundations in promoting journals which eschew all mention of imperialism and ruling class exploitation; they promote ‘special issues’ on ‘class-less’ identity politics, post-modern theorizing and ethnic-racial conflicts and conciliation.

In a study of the two leading political science and sociological journals over a period of fifty year they published less than .01% on class struggle and US imperialism

Academic informants have never reported on US government links to narco-political rulers.

Academic informants do not research widespread long term Israeli collaboration with death squads in Colombia, Guatemala, Argentina and El Salvador, in cases because of their loyalties to Tel Aviv and in most cases because the State Department is not interested in debriefings which expose their allies and their joint complicity.

Academic Informants: What do they want and what do they get?

Academic informers engage in debriefing for various reasons. A few do so simply because they share the politics and ideology of the empire builders and feel it is their ‘duty’ to serve.

The great majority are established academics with ties to research centers who inform because it fattens their CV– which helps secure grants, prestigious appointments and awards.

Progressive academics who collaborates have a Janus face approach; they speak at Leftist public conferences , especially to students and in private they report to the State Department.

Many academics believe they can influence and change government policy. They seek to impress self-identified ‘progressive’ officials with their inside knowledge on how to ‘turn’ Latin critics into moderate collaborators. They invent innocuous academic categories and concepts to attract graduate students to further collaboration with imperial colleagues.

The Consequence of Academic Debriefing

Former leftist academic informers are frequenly cited by the mass media as a reliable and knowledgeable ‘expert’ in order to slander anti-imperialist governments, academics and critics.

Ex-leftist academics pressure rising scholars with a critical perspective to adopt ‘moderate’ reasonable critiques , to denounce and avoid anti-imperialist ‘extremists’ and to disparage them as ‘polemical ideologues’!

Academic informants in Chile helped the US Embassy identify neighborhood militants who were handed over to the secret police (DINA) during the Pinochet dictatorship.

US academic informants in Peru and Brazil provided the Embassy with research projects which identified nationalist military officials and leftist students who were subsequently purged, arrested and tortured.

In Colombia, US academic informers were active in providing reports on rural insurgent movements which led to massive repression. Academic collaborators provided detailed reports to the embassy in Venezuela on the grass roots movements and political divisions among Chavista government and military officials with command of troops.

The State Department financed academics working with NGO who identified and recruited middle class youth as street fighters, drug gangsters and the destitute to engage in violent struggles to overthrow the elected government by paralyzing the economy.

Academic reports on regime ‘violence’ and ‘authoritarianism’ served as propaganda fodder for the State Department to impose economic sanctions , impoverishing people, to foment a coup.US academic collaboraters enlisted their latin colleagues to sign petitions urging rightwing regimes in the region to boycott Venezuela.

When academic informers are confronted with the destructive consequences of imperial advances they argue that it was not their ‘intention’; that it was not their State Department contacts who carried out the regressive policies.The more cynical claim that the government was going to do their dirty work regardless of the debriefing.

Conclusion

What is clear in virtually all know experiences is that academic informers’ ‘de-briefings strengthened the empire-builders and complemented the deadly work of the paid professional operatives of the CIA, DEA and the National Security Agency.

*

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