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“Our grandma is in jail,” Madeline tells a woman wrestling a shopping cart at Target.

“She went over a war fence and tried to make peace,” Seamus adds helpfully. “They arrested her, and she is in jail now.”

“Where?” the woman asks, looking from them to me in disbelief and maybe pity.

“We don’t remember,” the kids say, suddenly done with their story and ready to make passionate pleas for the colorful items in the dollar section over the woman’s shoulder.

“Georgia,” I say, but I don’t have a lot of energy to add detail to my kids’ story. They hit all the high points.

“There’s a lot going on these days,” she says. I agree, and we move on into the store and our separate errands.

I was happy not to say more at that moment, happy to avoid a sobbing breakdown at Target, happy to wrestle one little bit of normal out of a very abnormal day.

My mom, Liz McAlister, who turned 78 in November, had been arrested deep inside the King’s Bay Naval Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Along with six friends, she carried banners, statements, hammers and blood onto the base. They started their action on April 4: the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Their statement made connections between nuclear weapons, white supremacy and deeply embedded racism. It is a long statement, but given that they were carrying it into a free-fire zone — where military personnel are authorized to use deadly force — there was no particular need for brevity:

“We come to King’s Bay to answer the call of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) to ‘beat swords into plowshares’ by disarming the world’s deadliest nuclear weapon, the Trident submarine. We repent of the sin of white supremacy that oppresses and takes the lives of people of color here in the United States and throughout the world. We resist militarism that has employed deadly violence to enforce global domination. We believe reparations are required for stolen land, labor and lives.”

They walked onto King’s Bay Naval Station just hours after Saheed Vassell was shot and killed in a barrage of bullets by New York City police officers, just hours after hundreds of demonstrators filled the streets of Sacramento for another day, shouting “Stephon Clark, Stephon Clark, Stephon Clark” and demanding accountability after the young father of two was killed by police officers on March 18. These seven white activists know that when you are black in this country, your own corner, your grandmother’s own backyard, is a free-fire zone more dangerous than any military base.

There is indeed a lot going on these days.

The statement continues:

“Dr. King said, ‘The greatest purveyor of violence in the world (today) is my own government.’ This remains true in the midst of our endless war on terror. The United States has embraced a permanent war economy. ‘Peace through strength’ is a dangerous lie in a world that includes weapons of mass destruction on hair-trigger alert. The weapons from one Trident have the capacity to end life as we know it on planet Earth.”

Kings Bay is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world at about 16,000 acres. It is the home port of the U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet’s Trident nuclear-powered submarines. There are eight in total, two guided missile submarines and six ballistic missile submarines. These submarines were all built in Groton, Connecticut — right across the river from our home in New London. Each submarine, my mom and her friends assert, carries the capacity to cause devastation equivalent to 600 of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima, Japan.

“Nuclear weapons kill every day through our mining, production, testing, storage and dumping, primarily on indigenous native land. This weapons system is a cocked gun being held to the head of the planet. As white Catholics, we take responsibility to atone for the horrific crimes stemming from our complicity with ‘the triplets’ [of evil]. Only then can we begin to restore right relationships. We seek to bring about a world free of nuclear weapons, racism and economic exploitation.”

That is not the end, you can read the whole statement and their indictment of the United States on their Facebook group.

These sorts of actions — called Plowshares — have a nearly 40-year history, since my father and uncle and six others broke into the King of Prussia plant in Pennsylvania in 198o to “beat swords into plowshares.” They struck at nosecones with hammers and marked the weapons with blood to reveal the human costs and mess and suffering the weapons are built to wreak in the world.

The seven members of the King’s Bay Plowshares, who entered the Georgia naval base on April 4 to protest nuclear weapons, white supremacy and racism. (WNV/Kings Bay Plowshares)

My father participated in five of these Plowshares actions in his lifetime and helped organize countless others. Committed conspirers, steeped in active nonviolence, have carried out more than 100 of these actions since 1980. This is my mom’s second action. She and her current co-defendant Clare Grady, were part of the 1983 Griffiss Plowshares in upstate New York.

My parents estimated that they spent 11 years of their 27-year marriage separated by prison, and it was mostly these actions that kept them apart and away from us. Countless life events in our family — birthdays, graduations, celebrations of all kinds — were stuttered by the absence of one of our parents. I say this with pain and loss, but no self-pity. Dad was able to attend my high school graduation, but not my brother’s. We went straight from my college graduation to visit my dad in jail in Maine. I missed all the raging keggers, sweaty dance parties and tearful goodbyes that marked the end of college for my friends to sit knee-to-knee with my father in a cramped and soulless room. On chairs designed for maximum discomfort, I tried to share my momentous day and all my 22-year-old big feelings while ignoring the guards and the room crowded with a dozen others doing the same thing. We wrote thousands of letters. They often crisscrossed each other so that there was a constant weaving of story and sharing across the miles.

So, when I explained that grandma was in jail to my kids — 11-year-old Rosena, 5-year-old Seamus and 4-year-old Madeline — I felt the weight of a lifetime of missing and provisional family experiences, frequently lived in prison visiting rooms and through urgently scrawled letters.

I tried to figure out a way to talk to them that would make sense and, in thinking it through, I realized that none of this should make sense to anyone! Nuclear weapons? Absurd! Police brutality and white supremacy? Senseless! Plowshares actions with their symbolic transformation and ritual mess-making? A foolhardy act of David versus Goliath proportions!

So, I didn’t try to make it make sense. I just forged ahead, grateful that they had some context: We had participated in the Good Friday Stations of the Cross organized by Catholic Worker friends at our local submarine base a few days earlier, and — the night before — we had gone to hear a dramatic reading of Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

“Hey guys, know how we went to the sub base on Friday? Grandma was arrested in a place like that late last night. She is in jail now. She and her friends broke onto the base to say that nuclear weapons are wrong. Remember how Dr. King talked about just and unjust laws?” They nodded and remembered that King said “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” I told them that Grandma thinks that nuclear weapons — things that can destroy so much life on our planet — shouldn’t be built and protected and paid for when so many people are hungry, so many kids don’t have good schools to go to, so many people don’t have good homes. I went on and on.

“Wait, these nuclear weapons … They are war things?” Seamus asked.

“Yep, they are war things, bud.”

“Good for grandma,” he said, and that was the end of our serious conversation.

Mom and her friends are charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass and two felonies: possession of tools for the commission of a crime and interference with government property.

The kids and I didn’t talk about the kind of jail time that could mean for their grandma. It is all I am thinking about right now, but they moved on, imagining out loud and with a lot of enthusiasm how grandma got by the attack dogs and police officers they had seen at the Groton Submarine Base. They were sure there was a similar set up in Georgia. “Grandma needed a ladder and a cheetah,” said Madeline. “A cheetah is the only animal that can outrun dogs and police officer’s bullets.”

I am pretty sure no cheetahs were involved in the Kings Bay Plowshares, but I am happy my daughter sees her grandmother as a fierce and powerful anti-war activist astride a wild cat.

*

Frida Berrigan is a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and the author of “It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood.” She lives in New London, Conn. with her husband Patrick and their three children.

Russian forces deployed in Syria, including S-400 and Pantsir-S1 air defense systems and Sukhoi Su-30SM multirole fighters, have been put on a combat alert, according to reports appearing from local sources in the country’s provinces of Tartus and Latakia where Russian military facilities are located.

Meanwhile, the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS claimed citing US officials that the US military is going to provide President Donald Trump with “a set of options for carrying out strikes against the Syrian government”.

“Both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CENTCOM, the US forces in the Middle East, were compiling target lists and attack options to be presented to Trump and his national security team within hours, the officials said,” i24NEWS wrote.

A few hours earlier, a group of Israeli top officials and public figures officially called on Trump to conduct missile strikes against Syrian government forces in response to the alleged chemical attack in Douma.

In turn, Trump forgot that no confirmation of condicting the attack by government forces had been provided and claimed that “Animal Assad” will pay a “big price”. He also blamed “President Putin, Russia and Iran” for the incident.

Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced the chemical attack reprots as “hoax” and warned that military actions against Syria could lead to the “gravest consequences.”

The conflict Syria is on the brink of another large-scale escalation.

Military intervention under false and fabricated pretexts in #Syria??, where the Russian servicemen stay at the request of the legitimate government, is absolutely unacceptable and may trigger the gravest consequences – @MFA_Russia??
.https://t.co/LQsBIFmUPx ?@DeptofDefense pic.twitter.com/YovbmlOQaS

— Russia in USA ?? (@RusEmbUSA) April 8, 2018

The US media has seized on the latest claims by CIA-backed groups of a poison gas attack on civilians to demand a further escalation of the US-led war for regime-change in Syria and an increased confrontation with Russia.

The Syrian government claims that one of its airbases, in Homs province, has already come under missile attack. While the Pentagon is denying that it has launched any strikes on Syria yet, the rhetoric of the Trump administration indicates that preparations are being made for stepped-up military operations.

As with previous allegations of chemical weapons’ use, the public is being inundated with unverified footage of suffering victims, while government officials and the corporate media, prior to any investigation and without any substantiation, declare the government of Bashar al-Assad and its Iranian and Russian allies to be guilty of a war crime.

Within minutes, the New York Times and the Washington Post dashed out breathless articles placing the blame for the alleged attack at the feet of the Syrian and Russian governments. The Guardian declared in an editorial that

“Syria’s renewed use of chemical weapons against its own people at the weekend is shameless and barbaric.”

The current claims are no more credible than those that preceded it. The official narrative that Assad carried out a gas attack in Eastern Ghouta in 2013 was used to prepare a massive US air strike that was canceled at the last minute by the Obama administration—a retreat that earned Obama furious recriminations that continue to the present. Subsequent investigations proved that the attack was actually launched by US-backed “rebels” in conjunction with the Turkish government.

The alleged gas attack that was used in April 2017 to justify the major US cruise missile assault on a Syrian air base was similarly exposed to have resulted from an air strike on a “rebel” poison gas facility.

The previous pretexts for military escalation were staged by the CIA and its proxy forces in Syria. The latest provocation is no different.

There is no credible evidence concerning the claimed attack in the Eastern Ghouta city of Douma, a few miles from the Syrian capital. There are video clips that prove nothing, since they could have been manufactured at any time and edited to serve the purpose. The sole on-the-spot accounts come from the White Helmets, celebrated by the media as a rescue organization, but affiliated with the anti-Assad “rebels” and largely funded by the United States, Britain, Germany and other imperialist powers. This includes $23 million from the US Agency for International Development, a longtime front for the CIA.

The Trump White House has denounced the alleged atrocity, with officials making the usual warning, prior to military action, that “everything is on the table.” The US National Security Council (NSC) will convene Monday for the first time under newly appointed chief John Bolton, who played a major role in the Iraq War and has publicly advocated bombing both Iran and North Korea. The NSC will recommend military options to the president.

Any such action would bring with it the imminent threat of a wider war. Both Iranian advisers and Russian military personnel are integrated with the Syrian government forces and could well be hit in any significant US military strike, triggering demands for retaliation in both countries.

A wider conflict is the deliberate aim of the US military-intelligence apparatus. For a month, the world stage has been dominated by a British-American campaign against Russia, centered on the supposed poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a British spy, and his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury, England. There has been an escalating campaign of accusations, expulsions of Russian officials, and suggestions that the incident amounts to a nerve gas attack on Britain by Moscow, i.e., an act of war.

Last week, however, the official narrative of Russian government poisoning collapsed. The British chemical weapons authority announced that it could not determine the source of the supposed poison and both Skripals were reported to be recovering—making nonsense of the claim that they had been poisoned by a deadly nerve gas manufactured in Russia.

The new media hysteria over a poison gas attack in Syria serves to divert attention from the collapse of the Skripal provocation, while providing a fresh pretext for escalating the offensive against Russia.

There is an additional reason for the focus on Syria. Over the past week, President Trump had publicly questioned continuing the US intervention in that country, given the debacles suffered by the CIA-backed Islamist forces and the consolidation of control over most of the country’s population centers by the Assad government. He initially declared that US troops would leave Syria shortly, only to reverse himself after intense pressure from the Pentagon and CIA, Congress and the media. The Douma incident has put an end to such wavering.

As the New York Times noted Sunday night:

“Days after President Trump said he wanted to pull the United States out of Syria, Syrian forces hit a suburb of Damascus with bombs that rescue workers said unleashed toxic gas. Within hours, images of dead families sprawled in their homes threatened to change Mr. Trump’s calculus on Syria, possibly drawing him deeper into an intractable Middle Eastern war that he hoped to leave.”

The “rebel” group now holding out in Douma, Jaysh al-Islam, part of the Islamist opposition to Assad that includes the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda as well as the remnants of ISIS, has itself been credibly accused of using chlorine gas in the course of fighting against Kurdish forces and civilians in Aleppo in 2016. That charge, made by the Kurds, was given extensive publicity by Voice of America, the propaganda arm of the US government.

It is possible that Syrian warplanes struck a weapons cache belonging to the rebel group, causing the gas to leak out. More likely, the poison gas was deliberately released by Jaysh al-Islam, at behest of its CIA backers, to provide a pretext for US military intervention. Assuming, that is, that the reports of poison gas exposure are not simply manufactured by the US intelligence agencies for rebroadcast by a servile media.

What is least likely, from a political standpoint, is that the Assad government, just as it was on the brink of final victory in Eastern Ghouta after more than five years of bitter fighting, should suddenly unleash a poison gas attack, which would have no military value but would invite a savage response from the Trump administration and the other Western powers. A Syrian government statement pointed this out, declaring that “an army that is progressing quickly… does not need to use any kind of chemical weapons.”

According to Al Jazeera and Russian news sources, Jaysh al-Islam has been so thoroughly defeated that it has struck an agreement to completely withdraw all its militia and their families from Douma over the next 48 hours or so. Russian troops will reportedly move in to take control of the city.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry rebuffed the US claims of a gas attack in Douma.

“Such claims and allegations by the Americans and some Western countries point to a new plot against the Syrian government and people, and are an excuse to take military action against them,” a spokesman told the press.

The Russian government denounced the US campaign over the supposed gas attack as a political provocation aimed at justifying deeper US military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

“The spread of bogus stories about the use of chlorine and other poisonous substances by government forces continues,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “We have warned several times recently against such dangerous provocations. The aim of such deceitful speculation, lacking any kind of grounding, is to shield terrorists… and to attempt to justify possible external uses of force.”

The latest provocation follows a well-worn pattern, from the lies over Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” to the present. The American intelligence agencies give the signal. Nonstop coverage is immediately launched on cable television, then demands for action are made by the White House and congressional leaders, boosted by editorials written by CIA mouthpieces such as the New York Times.

The brazen lies of the media are accompanied by breathtaking hypocrisy. The Times, the Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and company downplay and cover up the atrocities carried out by American forces and their allies—the incineration of Mosul and Raqqa, the gunning down of demonstrators in Gaza by the Israeli military, the mass killings in Yemen carried out with US support by Saudi Arabia, even as its crown prince is feted by the US ruling elite, and the ongoing slaughter in Afghanistan.

The overwhelming responsibility for the continuing carnage and suffering in Syria—as well as in Iraq, Yemen and throughout the Middle East—rests squarely with US imperialism, which has launched one war after another based on lies in an attempt to establish control over the region and its vital energy resources. The prospect of US strikes in response to the allegations of a chemical attack urgently poses the danger of a wider war and the need for an international working class movement against war and for socialism.

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Iraq, Massacre of a Country: “A War on Terror” when you are the Terrorist

By Felicity Arbuthnot, April 09, 2018

“How can you make a war on terror when you are actually the terrorist?” (Unknown.)

America’s 2003 assault on Iraq, already devastated by thirteen years of sanctions, infrastructure destruction consequently unrepaired from the 1991 bombing was, in the ridiculous annals of names the US military gives to their slaughter-fests, entitled: “Shock and Awe.”

Turkey Publishes the Whereabouts of Five Secret Military Bases in Syria that Belong to France

By Voltaire Network, April 09, 2018

One of these bases is the cement factory of the transnational group, Lafarge-Holcim, which is currently under a French judicial inquiry for financing terrorist groups.

15 Years Since the Fall of Baghdad: A Broken Statue in a War Built on Lies

By Patrik Paulov, April 09, 2018

The war brought mass death, devastation, hunger, illiteracy, sectarian violence and the birth of the terrorist group ISIS, causing fatal consequences for millions of people both inside and outside Iraq’s borders.

Swiss Mining Corporations in Flagrant Violation of Human Rights – Swiss Government Complicit

By Peter Koenig, April 09, 2018

Violent attacks have been carried out by the copper mining giant Glencore’s security forces and Glencore-contracted national police on defenseless women and even children, on the poorest of the poor segment of Peru’s population.

Video: Dr. Chris Busby on Novichoks and the Skripal Russia Poisoning Affair

By Prof. Christopher Busby, April 09, 2018

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

15 Years Ago, The Battle of Baghdad, April 2003: Killing the Independent Media, Killing the “Unembedded Truth”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 09, 2018

The underlying objective was to unseat the “unembedded media” and disrupt factual and objective reporting from the war theatre. The killing of the journalists was also a warning to media organizations from Asia and the Middle East, which were covering the war from Baghdad, without due accreditation of the US military.

It’s deja vu all over again.

Remember when the US admitted Syrian “Rebels” have used chemical weapons? Or when earlier this year, now former Secretary of State blamed Russia for an alleged Syrian chemical attack despite admitting he doesn’t know who actually did it? Or when the US finally admitted there was “no evidence” Assad used sarin gas? Or just last week, when Trump said that the US is finally pulling out of Syria as a result of the defeat of ISIS  (much to the Pantagon’s fury and open-ended timetable for extracting Syrian resources)?

Well, maybe you do, but the neocons back in charge of US war preparations foreign policy – now that war hawk John Bolton is Trump’s National Security Advisor – are so stuck with the age-old narrative that Assad is desperate to be bombed at any cost, that none of this actually matters, and instead the big story overnight is once again that, lo and behold, Assad decided to gas some “rebels” again, despite now overwhelmingly winning the war against US-backed insurgents, and despite knowing very well that exactly one year ago an alleged “chemical attack” prompted Trump to launch dozens of Tomahawks at Syria.

This is what happened (if you’ve seen this script played out before, you are not alone).

On Saturday night, an alleged chemical attack on a rebel-held town in eastern Ghouta reportedly killed dozens of people, according to US-linked medical services with Washington immediately responding that the reports – if confirmed – would demand an immediate international response. Actually scratch the “if confirmed” part – after all, the last time the US “intervened” in Syria, on April 7, 2017, the US did not need confirmation; Trump just needed a geopolitical distraction.

It seems that he needs another one again, and ideally one that shows just how angry he is with Putin now that an interview with Mueller is reportedly imminent.

A joint statement by the medical relief organization Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) and the civil defense service, which operates in rebel-held areas, said 49 people had died in the attack late on Saturday. Others put the toll at 150 or more.

Horrific images out of besieged Douma tonight of a suspected Chlorine attack by the Assad regime. Medical services on the ground say 35 confirmed dead, treating more than 700 for exposure. pic.twitter.com/OfveWyeg5D

— Tobias Schneider (@tobiaschneider) April 7, 2018

The response from the Assad side was similarly predictable: the Syrian regime, whose overthrow the US failed to achieve in the course of the 6 year proxy war in order to facilitate the transport of Qatari natural gas to Europe, denied its forces had launched any chemical attack as the reports began circulating and said the rebels were collapsing and fabricating news.

The Syrian state news agency SANA said Jaish al-Islam was making “chemical attack fabrications in an exposed and failed attempt to obstruct advances by the Syrian Arab army,” citing an official source.

Meanwhile, Reuters said it could not independently verify the reports. Others did the same: The Syrian Observatory said it could not confirm whether chemical weapons had been used in the attack on Saturday.

But, as we noted above, who needs confirmation: after all, if the 2013 “chemical attack” that started it all and was later proven to be a hoax was sufficient, just do the same. And sure enough, a video uploaded by “local media activists” allegedly showed bodies of victims – including women and children – of the reported chemical attack in Douma. Once again, nobody has actually confirmed if anyone has died.

Video uploaded by local media activists shows bodies of victims – women and children – of tonights reported chemical attack in Douma. Death toll keeps climbing. pic.twitter.com/ovDr4QfOje

— Tobias Schneider (@tobiaschneider) April 7, 2018

Meanwhile, the US, itching for that military spending GDP boost was ready with the outraged retort: the U.S. State Department said reports of mass casualties from the attack were “horrifying” and would, if confirmed, “demand an immediate response by the international community”. At the same time, Britain’s Foreign Office also called the reports, if confirmed, “very concerning” and said “an urgent investigation is needed and the international community must respond. We call on the Assad regime and its backers, Russia and Iran, to stop the violence against innocent civilians.”

Note the “if confirmed” part, and keep an eye on how the narrative switches from that to “the attack was confirmed.” If the Skripal case is any indication, just repeating it often enough, should be sufficient.

Trump already did his part on Sunday morning, when he tweeted several statements on the alleged attack as if it was already confirmed, just as one would expect to accelerate the escalation:

Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay. Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!

Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018

….to pay. Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018

Then, for good measure, Trump decided to throw Obama under the bus for not crossing his “red line in the sand”, once again assuming the attack was confirmed.

If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!

If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018

After the alleged attack, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert recalled a 2017 sarin gas attack in northwestern Syria that the West and the United Nations blamed on Assad’s government. “The Assad regime and its backers must be held accountable and any further attacks prevented immediately,” she said adding that “The United States calls on Russia to end this unmitigated support immediately and work with the international community to prevent further, barbaric chemical weapons attacks.”

The US also said yet again that Russia is “ultimately bearing responsibility” for all chemical incidents in Syria, regardless of who carried them out, after rebel sources accused Damascus of gassing dozens in Eastern Ghouta’s Douma.  In other words, even if the “chemical attack” was carried out by US-backed “rebels”, or better yet “ISIS”, it’s Putin’s fault.

“The regime’s history of using chemical weapons against its own people is not in dispute,” said the US State Department, indicating, however, that it was relying on “reports,” being unable to confirm the incident. “Russia ultimately bears responsibility for the brutal targeting of countless Syrians with chemical weapons.”

As for Russia, its Defense Ministry immediately denied and dismissed as false reports that the Syrian government had carried out a chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta’s Douma:

“We strongly refute this information,” Major General Yury Yevtushenko, head of the Reconciliation Center in Syria, said in a statement on Sunday. “We declare our readiness, after Douma is liberated from the militants, to immediately send Russian radiation, chemical and biological protection specialists to collect data that will confirm the fabricated nature of these allegations,” he stated.

Yevtushenko said that “a number of Western countries” are trying to prevent the resumption of an operation aimed at driving militants from the city of Douma.

“For this purpose, the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces – one of the most widespread claims in the West – is being used,” he added.

And, knowing where this is all headed, Russia’s Foreign Ministry says in statement on website that reports of chemical weapons attack in rebel-held town of Douma are fabricated, and any military operations against Syria on false pretenses may lead to “gravest consequences,”

Russia warns the US not to strike Syria after the chemical attack: "Military intervention under false & fabricated pretexts in Syria, where Russian servicemen stay at the request of the legitimate government, is absolutely unacceptable and may trigger the gravest consequences."

— Liz Sly (@LizSly) April 8, 2018

The Russians added that

 “The goal of such reports is to aid terrorists and justify possible military strikes from outside Syria.”

Russia is correct, and it is now just a matter of time before Trump unveils his next grand diversion from the chaos at home and the trade war with China, by launching another 50 or so Tomahawks at some venue deep inside Syria, in a carbon copy repeat of what happened exactly one year ago.

It goes without saying that recently ‘fake news’ has become one of the most trending search phrases on the net. Moreover, representatives of Collins English Dictionary have gone as far as to name it official Word of the Year for 2017, and there’s a very good reasons for this term to enjoy such popularity. For instance, it was used by American President Donald Trump, who accused leading Western media sources of spreading deceitful reports by describing them as ‘fake news’.

The uncontested prevalence of such news could be observed during all the major political campaigns of recent years: presidential election in the US and France, parliamentary elections in Germany, Brexit and Catalan referendums… Perhaps there is no country in this world that escaped fake news as they are being manufactured and distributed via social media on the global scale, as there are whole “troll factories” and even all sorts of government bodies that justify their existence by claiming that they’re engaged in a “fight against disinformation”.

The Guardian experts tasked with analyzing disinformation campaigns in the online media came to a conclusion fake news is not just a Western problem, as it can be found in the media space of pretty much every corner of the world. In Brazil, for example, since early 2016, the popularity of false news reports has exceeded the coverage enjoyed by the mainstream media. This can be explained by the corruption scandal and the subsequent impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. According to the BBC, out of the five most popular (according to the number of reposts) news reports in Brazil, three were false. In India, the main distributor of false reports is the WhatsApp messenger, as The Guardian adds.

Fake news – an integral attribute of information wars, which, in turn, accompany real wars. One of their most striking manifestations in recent years has been the so-called fight against “Russian propaganda” in Europe, which has recently become an obsession in a number of European countries, reaching the European Parliament.

In the course of the information war that is being waged against Russia for years, Western and especially European media sources suddenly faced a situation when their readers would cease trusting their reports on the situation in Ukraine. This mistrust manifested itself in the so-called Salisbury incident staged by London and Washington as a part of its Russophobic campaign, as no facts were being presented to Western readers to support their anti-Russian arguments, so readers preferred to look the other way.

Therefore, the results of a social survey carried out by the Monmouth University, which showed that at least six out of ten Americans, regardless of their political views, believe that the Western mainstream media intentionally deceives by presenting fake reports can hardly be described as surprising.

In Europe, especially among the so-called new EU member states, the absence of any possibility to challenge the Russian narrative about the presence of unknown foreign-backed actors at the EuroMaidan protests or about the ongoing war crimes Kiev is committing in Donbass, politicians decided to label their attempts to silence truthful reports by branding them as a “fight against Russian propaganda”, restricting access to the information provided by Russia’s media sources and launching various anti-Russian media projects, while spreading disinformation in a bid to distract people’s attention.

As early as 2015, it became known that the EU created a special group to combat “Russian propaganda.” In the UK there is a new governmental agency being created that, according to London’s official rhetorics, will specialize in “countering misinformation and fake news.” According to British Prime Minister Teresa May, this agency will allow London to ensure the preservation of its national security priorities and will allow it to deter British opponents more systematically. According to Evening Standard, this body will be working under the supervision of the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, which has already shown its adherence to fake reports during the Salisbury incident.

Moreover, at the beginning of the year France’s President Emmanuel Macron announced a new legislative initiative to be transformed into a law aimed at countering fake news.

The issue of fake news and propaganda is now being supervised by the EU Parliamentary Commission, which has already demanded Facebook and Twitter to provide them reports on this matter.

Lately it’s become known that a special unit to counter “fake” information was created under the supervision of the European Parliament. The unit is tasked with the goal of preserving the reputation of the European Parliament and responding to false reports, which can be published by both foreign and local media sources. From 2018 to 2020, this team will be receiving 1.1 million euros annually.

However, there’s little doubt that when the heads of Western countries talk about fighting “fake news”, they, first of all, mean strict censorship of the information space. And the more often Western leaders pronounce the phrases “struggle for democracy”, “freedom of speech” and the fight against “fake news”, the more rigid a form of total surveillance we are going to encounter. And we clearly see today that the fight against the alternative narrative in a great many of Western countries starts to take truly Orwellian shapes.

Against this backdrop, a special attention must be paid to a report published under the title of the Final report of the High Level Expert Group on Fake News and Online Disinformation drafted by an independent group of expert on “fake news” and disinformation. The group, which is supervised by the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel (Bulgaria) was established on behalf of the Chairman of the EC, Jean-Claude Juncker last January with the goal of providing advice to the European Commission members on the issue of “fake news.”

It was formed out of 39 various practitioners, including media representatives (RTL, Mediaset, SkyNews), IT experts (Facebook, Twitter, Google), the scientific community, along with various NGO representatives. The group was presented with a list of following tasks: identifying the phenomenon of misinformation, provide info on existing measures of combating it, proposing the creatia of choosing the tools for countering disinformation disseminated on the Internet, facilitating the development of a common EU strategy in this area, its key principles and goals for short and long terms.

According to Vice-President of the European Commission, François Timmermans, in an era when an unprecedented amount of information and false information is being published every day, it is especially important to “provide citizens with tools for identifying false news” and managing the information received.

A careful examination of the report prepared by the European Commission shows that the departure of the group of experts from the term “fake news” in favor of “misinformation” is an attempt to make the subject of its study less odious and more scientific in nature. According to the authors, they studied the best practices in this field. Apparently for this reason, the report does not mention the Strategic Communication Group East operating within the structure of the European foreign policy service, the main task of which is exclusively to draft false reports about “hybrid threats” and “all-powerful Russian propaganda.”

The report emphasizes that the basis for measures to combat disinformation should be the preservation of the absolute priority of freedom of speech and journalistic freedom in order to avoid any forms of censorship. The red line is the idea of the importance of minimum legal regulation while encouraging “horizontal” coordination of stakeholders. Putting high hopes on the consciousness of the latter, the commission emphasizes self-regulation. To do this, it is proposed to create a kind of “coalition” that would unite online platforms, media, journalists, legislators, civil society and other players.

One can only hope that this report of the European Commission will allow to unite the efforts of all countries to wage a real war against “fake news” and political disinformation, without strengthening of the ongoing censorship of the publications of alternative media sites that are trying to convey to the population of countries true information about the criminal activities of individual political figures and uncover lies in various mainstream publications.

*

Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Featured image is from the author.

Translation by Anoosha Boralessa

Fifteen years ago, April 9, 2003, The Occupation of Baghdad. This article by veteran war correspondent Felicity Arbuthnot was first published by Global Research in April 2012

“How can you make a war on terror when you are actually the terrorist?” (Unknown.)

America’s 2003 assault on Iraq, already devastated by thirteen years of sanctions, infrastructure destruction consequently unrepaired from the 1991 bombing was, in the ridiculous annals of names the US military gives to their slaughter-fests, entitled: “Shock and Awe.”

This approach to nation destruction is technically known as: “rapid dominance”, the concept based on use of “overwhelming power.” It was devised by two arguably psychologically challenged military strategists, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, in 1996.(i)

Their days devising Machiavellian “shock” in destroying all means of: “communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure must (cause) the threat and fear of action that may shut down all or part of … society (rendering) ability to fight useless short of complete physical destruction.”

Further: “Shutting the country down would entail both the physical destruction of appropriate infrastructure … so rapidly as to achieve a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.”

In an interview with CBS Ullman stated: “You’re sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you’re the general and thirty of your division headquarters have been wiped out.

“You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, their water.”

Iraq’s water had been deliberately targeted in 1991, on orders to the twenty seven country coalition, from Central Command (ii) and had never recovered, as was intended: “We estimated it will take Iraq’s water six months to fully degrade”, stated the circulated instructions, which also advised:.”Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable …”

Ironically, in an unprecedented action after 1991 hostilities ended, UN Security Council Resolution 687 held Iraq responsible, indeed liable, for all damage, including the Coalition destruction of its water supplies, targets prohibited by both Hague and Geneva Conventions.

Then, after twelve years of deprivation and bombing, of deformed and dying children poisoned by the radioactive and chemically toxic Depleted Uranium (read nuclear waste) weapons used in 1991, Iraqis were subject to further toxic “shock” of enormity, but certainly no “awe.”

As Baghdad’s great bridges spanning the Tigris, which I had walked and driven days before, burned and fell, for the second time in a decade, as the flames consumed Harun al Rashid’s eighth century “Round City”, and its history was raped by looters, as it shook and tumbled, Iraqis hid in cupboards under stairs – or just waited to die, as Hades itself erupted around them – and Washington and Whitehall called it:“liberation.”

Perverts in US and British uniforms put bags over peoples heads, tied their hands, chucked them in to transportation and took them to hastily opened prisons, where they were stripped naked, tortured, sexually abused, murdered.

Fellow perverts took “trophy pictures” of the dead – and trophy fingers, bone fragments and worse, as momentos.

Journalists attempting to relay reality were also targeted and murdered by invading forces, setting a trend. Iraq is now the most dangerous place for journalists on earth and the third most corrupt.

On 9th April, the day Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down by US marines, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it: “a very good day.” Destruction by occupying forces of cultural history, ancient or modern, is, of course, another war crime. It is also low life vandalism and a damn cheek of – literally – historic proportions.

Anthony Shadid was a journalist who survived the invasion’s forces, but lost his life in Syria last month. His testimony to Iraq’s tragedy and his own courage as the carnage enveloped, remains part of his legacy, in countless words.

As the morgues filled to overflowing (victims were soon piled in refrigerated trucks outside) he visited the Mosques, where the “caretaker” of humanity’s last hours on earth, tended the the dead.

Haider Kadim, was carefully washing the body of fourteen year old Arkan Daif, killed with two friends. He had suffered: “a hole in his skull, when the sky exploded.” His relatives described Arkan as: “like a flower.”

“It’s very difficult”, said Haider, his labour of love and respect over and the men closing the coffin.

Earlier in the week: “he had gone to another Mosque to help bury dozens, when a blast ripped through a teeming market nearby. The memories haunted him. He remembered the severed hands and heads that arrived; he recalled bodies, even that of an infant, with more gaping holes.”

Even funeral parties were attacked, from day one. Shadid records an eighty year old lady, whose family had risked the missiles to take her to be buried in the ancient cemetery in southern Najav, Shia Islam’s most holy site.

They never made it. U.S. forces, wrote Shadid, attacked the three cars, one carrying her body. It was 31st March 2003.

Troops then moved in to the nations’s palaces, painted murals of missiles raining down on the walls – and subsequently held Christian Baptism ceremonies in the swimming pools, having brought in an “Alpha” Christian indoctrination course, enthusiastically run and embraced by the self- appointed “Vicar of Baghdad”, Canon Andrew White (iii,iv) who also came in with the tanks.

Dismiss any doubts about it not really being a “Crusade” and that being another George W. Bush “miss-speak.”

By 1st May, to declare: Mission accomplished”, George W. Bush landed on USS Abraham Lincoln in a little flying suit, his manhood apparently encased in lead. Seldom “in the field of human conflict”, has a Commander in Chief looked such a prat. (Apologies to Winston Churchill.)

The episode, did, however, perhaps encapsulate the gargantuan, tragic, fantasy-land concept of the whole illegal, ill conceived Iraq invasion, the venture of a very “New World”, in to the “Cradle of Civilization” and, as Petra, it’s ancient cities, half as old as time.”

Notes

i. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe

ii. http://www.progressive.org/mag/nagy0901.html

iii. http://www.alphausa.org/Articles/1000048248/The_Alpha_Course.aspx

iv. http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/print.php?storyid=4200

”The terror is over after 35 long years – therefore all those who demonstrated for peace were wrong”. The headline is from an article in the Swedish evening paper Expressen on April 10, 2003. It was the day after Baghdad had fallen to the hands of the military coalition led by US.

A similar euphoric mood was found in all major Swedish media portraying the events on April 9 2003, the day when the US troops entered the Iraqi capital. We saw pictures from Paradise Square in central Baghdad where alleged freedom yearning masses crushed the great statue of Saddam Hussein. We learned that the American soldiers were welcomed with flowers and cheek kisses.

The feeling given was that the war was over after only three weeks.

Fifteen years later, it is a surreal experience to scroll through the newspapers from the start of the war on March 20, 2003, and the following dramatic weeks. Certainly, there were depictions of civilian suffering and victims of war. But this was not the main subject.

Today it is obvious that the consistent reporting during these weeks served a higher purpose.

It was about giving legitimacy to a war launched in violation of the UN Charter. It was about weakening the strong anti-war movement that filled the streets around the globe for months. It was about convincing the widespread war-critical opinion in the western world that, despite all, the invasion would be a good thing.

Because when “Residents of Baghdad put flowers in the cannon pipes on Marine corps tanks”, as Swedish Expressen wrote in an extra edition on April 9, then the brothers-in-arms Bush and Blair must have done the right thing.

But the fall of the multi-million city of Baghdad was as much a hoax as the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, that the United States and Britain used to motivate the war.

The masses at Paradise Square were in fact only a few hundred people. It is visible on the overview images from the Reuters news agency, which was later published. The square was also surrounded by American tanks and it was actually one of them that pulled over the statue.

I do not deny that the Iraqis at the square might have felt real joy regarding the fact that the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein’s was gone. But the demolition of the statue was primarily a spectacle.

It was staged for the international journalists who suitably lived at Palestine Hotel just nearby Paradise Square.

The Iraqis, regardless of their views about Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party regime, were hardly excited about being bombed and invaded by foreign countries. It is a fact that the countries behind the invasion in 2003 were the same countries that, long before the war, were responsible for causing mass death and great suffering in Iraq.

A few months before the events at Paradise Square, I traveled around Iraq.

I visited the poor city of Basra in the south, where many children were traumatized by living throughout the threat of the American and British battle planes that everyday flew in the sky.

I went to Mosul in the north and met Yazidis, the minority that was exposed to vicious abuses when terror group ISIS later occupied the region.

I talked to doctors in hospitals in Baghdad who lacked both incubators and common drugs because Iraq was banned from importing them. Incubators, medicines, and even pencils were on the list of ”prohibited products”, as some Western countries in the UN Sanctions Committee on Iraq claimed that Iraq could use these products to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

It was obvious that the when war broke out in 2003, the Iraqis were already a plagued and depressed people. And it was obvious that no matter of their views of the regime and its brutal oppression of political opposition, very few Iraqis wanted a new destructive war.

You can not liberate people and give them a better life by bombing, invading and occupying their country.

I talked to many Iraqis during my stay in Iraq. The interests behind the war were something everyone talked about.

“It’s the oil. If we were poor, no one would have wanted to attack us, no one would have bothered about Iraq”, as the pediatrician Murtada Hassan in Baghdad stated.

Carl Bildt, the coming Swedish minister of foreign affairs had another point of view. On January 28, 2003, he wrote an article in the International Herald Tribune which concluded:

“Removal of the Saddam Hussein regime is the only way peace can be achieved. The next few weeks should be the beginning of the end of decades of war for the peoples of Iraq and for the region.”

Fifteen years after the start of the war we know what happened. It was not the anti-war movement but all those who cheered loudly about the victory of freedom that was wrong. The truth is that the development in Iraq became even worse than anyone could imagine.

The war brought mass death, devastation, hunger, illiteracy, sectarian violence and the birth of the terrorist group ISIS, causing fatal consequences for millions of people both inside and outside Iraq’s borders.

The war brought torture to a rare extent. A couple of the Iraqis whom I met before the hell broke out were eventually seized by the occupying power and were placed in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture prison.

Bush and Blair and all others who backed the attack on Iraq have committed one of the worst war crimes in our time. It’s a shame that they are not convicted of their crimes.

And all mainstream media in Sweden – it was not only Expressen – played along by uncritically spreading the lies and propaganda that came from Washington and London. It is no wonder that the MSM today is quiet about what they reported fifteen years ago.

The events on April 9, 2003, at Paradise Square are important to remember. Not because some Iraqis destroyed a statue but because it symbolizes how the western powers shattered Iraq and laid the foundation for the chaos that still characterizes the Middle East.

*

Patrik Paulov is a journalist at Swedish Proletären (www.proletaren.se).

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

According to China’s Global Times, “(t)he probability for a trade war is increasing” – so far no bilateral talks held, differences between both sides widening.

“The US action has reinforced a notion in China that this is no ordinary trade war but a strategic move to counter China’s rise and perpetuate the overall advantage of the US,” said GT, making it harder to resolve differences.

Beijing fears Trump aims to harm its core economic interests, aiming to keep it from surpassing America as the world’s dominant economy.

It’s already the largest industrial country, surpassing America as well in savings, trade and GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP) – an exchange rate between currencies measured by the cost of a representative basket of goods in one country v. another.

China’s growth through the years was much more robust than many economists expected. In 2005, it was less than half the size of America’s.

By next year, it’s expected to be 20% larger on a PPP basis. Its phenomenon reflects overall emerging market growth v. developed ones.

In 2007, they accounted for around half of global output. By the 2020s, they may surpass two-thirds.

China’s growth since 1979 is one of the greatest economic success stories in modern times.

After nearly four decades of extraordinary growth, Beijing wants higher-quality development achieved, including by promoting greater domestic consumption at the expense of direct foreign investments while maintaining or increasing its exports.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz accused Trump of “inflaming passions and taxing US relationships with key allies,” adding

“(H)is actions are motivated by pure politics. He is eager to seem strong and confrontational in the eyes of his electoral base.”

“(W)hat matters is the multilateral trade deficit, not bilateral trade deficits with any one country.”

His scheme won’t produce domestic jobs. Fewer imports from China would increase them from other low-wage countries.

Where new US manufacturing jobs are created, they’re increasingly performed by robots in many cases.

China appears unwilling to compromise its growth plan. Trump believes President Xi will yield to his demands, casually saying “it is the right thing to do.”

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin thinks a trade war is possible, though doesn’t expect thing to go this far.

Increasing loss of US dominance to emerging economies is what the bilateral trade dispute is mostly about, China the largest of these economies, others chipping away against US market share as well.

They’re also gaining greater technological competence at America’s expense.

Waging a trade war with China would makes matters worse, not better. Beijing may make modest adjustments to appease Trump.

It’s not likely to compromise on its longterm growth and development strategy.

“(T)he balance of power has changed from six decades ago,” said GT, adding:

“Today’s trade war will be fought between two relatively equal powers. The absolute advantage is Washington’s bluff.”

“Beijing is capable of hurting Washington in every trade battle, making the US suffer the same losses as China suffers.”

“Let the two systems engage in this trade war competition. When the fight begins, we will see which one is more capable of persisting.”

The above remarks don’t sound like China intends backing off – girding itself for trade war if things go this far.

*

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

After failing utterly to produce public support for a US-led attack on Syria following an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, northeast of the capital Damascus, the US appears to have immediately circumvented the United Nations and international law, apparently tasking its proxies in Tel Aviv with carrying out initial attacks on Syria’s T-4 airbase.

The Western media has reported missile attacks on the airbase in Syria.

CBS in its article, “U.S. denies missile strike in Syria, Russia says Israel did it,” claims:

Missiles struck an air base in central Syria early Monday, but the Pentagon quickly denied claims from Syrian state media that the strikes were “an American aggression.” As a war monitoring group said Iranian-backed militia members were killed in the strikes, Russia accused Israeli jets of firing the missiles.

An Israeli Strike is Still a US Strike

However, regardless of who carried out the strike, it was still ordered by the US.

US policymakers – who have sought regime change in Syria and its ally Iran for decades – have meticulously laid out their plans for covert terrorism, staged provocations, feigned peace offers, and even the use of Israel as an intermediary for carrying out attacks the US itself could not initially justify or rally public support behind.

In the 2009 Brookings Institution paper, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF), US policymakers would state under a section titled “Allowing or encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” that (emphasis added):

…the most salient advantage this option has over that of an American air campaign is the possibility that Israel alone would be blamed for the attack. If this proves true, then the United States might not have to deal with Iranian retaliation or the diplomatic backlash that would accompany an American military operation against Iran. It could allow Washington to have its cake (delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon) and eat it, too (avoid undermining many other U.S. regional diplomatic initiatives).

The report also states (emphasis added):

It would presumably be easier to convince Israel to mount the attack than it would be to generate domestic political support for another war in the Middle East (let alone the diplomatic support from a region that is extremely wary of new American military adventures). 

The same report would also state (emphasis added):

However, as noted in the previous chapter, the airstrikes themselves are really just the start of this policy. Again, the Iranians would doubtless rebuild their nuclear sites. They would probably retaliate against Israel, and they might retaliate against the United States, too (which might create a pretext for American airstrikes or even an invasion).

Clearly these options laid out for Iran in 2009 have been repeatedly used instead against Syria. The fact that US regional aggression has stalled in Syria and has yet to fully manifest itself against Iran indicates a tipping balance of power against Washington.

The response by Syria and its allies to these staged chemical attacks, provocations, and strikes will determine whether or not Washington’s failed attempts at regime change ebb into an indignant withdrawal, or provide a vector toward greater and more destructive war.

A US failure in Syria will likely permanently derail its attempts to reassert is global preeminence as a multipolar world order emerges. How far the US and the special interests driving its policy – regardless of America’s elected representatives – is willing to go to preserve global hegemony remains to be seen. The task of Syrian, Iranian, and Russian intelligence would be to ascertain this – providing significant deterrence toward engaging in a wider war, and pushing the US back behind its borders as international law, the global public, and even the American people demand.

*

This article was originally published on Land Destroyer Report.

Tony Cartalucci is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Violent attacks have been carried out by the copper mining giant Glencore’s security forces and Glencore-contracted national police on defenseless women and even children, on the poorest of the poor segment of Peru’s population. Glencore, is a Swiss registered Anglo-Swiss mining corporation, exploiting mineral resources in developing countries around the globe, where they pay almost no taxes, as their profit center is in Switzerland, in Baar, Canton Zug, one of the Cantons, that has the lowest tax rates in Switzerland.

In addition, none of the socioenvironmental standards, to protect the environment and the local communities, are generally applied in developing countries. In the specific case of Peru, local laws are totally ignored. In fact, never mind Peruvian laws, they are like non-existent for the corporate world; they are simply bought. Never mind Glencore’s own “Due Diligence” rules, they are not respected in a country so corrupt, where laws, judges, lawyers, police, politicians – and even medical facilities are bought.

Above Espinar, on about 4,000 to 4,200 m elevation, Glencore operates open pit copper mining complexes, Tintaya and Antapaccay (“Antapaccay” was a Peruvian mining company bought by Glencore in 2013). The mine is also yielding gold (copper and gold usually go together), at the tune of some 221,000 tons of copper and 115,000 Troy ounces of gold per year (Troy ounce = 31.1 grams). Both figures are for 2016. To do so, Glencore moves some 80,000 to 100,000 tons of earth and rock per day.

Source: www.glencoreperu.pe

An adjacent new mining area, Coroccohuayco, is being explored for continuous exploitation as the current mine is approaching its end. The capacity of this mining complex is estimated at 20 to 30 years, about two and a half generations of rural dwellers will be exposed to this horrendous Glencore atrocities and injustice, if nobody takes actions in their defense. Plus, after the mine is fully exploited, the miners usually packs up and leave – leaving an environmental disaster of poisoned soil and water – what’s left of it – behind. Restauration of such huge areas of mining ruins can take hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Glencore, with a total production of 1.23 million tons (2016) is the world’s third largest copper producer, employing some 55,000 people in 30 countries. According to MarketWatch, Glencore’s profit for 2017 registered a massive increase to $5.78 billion, from $1.38 billion in 2016 (compared to the Swiss food Giant, Nestlé, with CHF 8.3 billion, or US$ 8.6 billion, equivalent – 2017).

Glencore would have no shortfall of money to respect socioenvironmental laws, which includes compensating local communities for confiscated land and water, for avoiding deadly contamination of water and soil, spreading into human and animal bodies, causing countless deaths. They have plenty of means to take such protective measures. But it’s obviously cheaper and less cumbersome to corrupt Peruvian authorities, so that nobody dares opening their mouth and speaking up in front of such abuse. Local authorities are all afraid or bought, or both.

Anti-mining riots in 2012, when the new pits “Antapaccay” opened, caused 3 deaths and more than 100 injured. The mayor, who supported the protesting campesinos was temporarily jailed. Peruvian central government authorities have taken full position in favor of the mining corporations; and this throughout the country, where similar disasters are repeated – no respect for local communities, force-expropriating them, poisoning their waters and soil with toxic heavy metals – mercury, cyanite, cadmium, arsenic and others, causing slowly countless deaths and destroying the landscape, water and soil.

Source: EJAtlas

Arriving in Espinar in the early morning hours of 4 April, we were hit by the news of violent physical aggressions having been perpetuated by Glencore’s security forces and hired national police, on destitute defenseless, unarmed women around noon the day before, 3 April. This happened when the men were out working either at the mine or in the fields, eking out a modest living for their families.

The mine is surrounded by some 6 mountain communities of an average of 1,200 people. None of them have running water or electricity. They are extremely poor and would fall way below the World Bank standard of extreme poverty (less than US$ 1 / day). The community that was attacked has a well and a close-by small river which the mine wants for refining purposes and for diversion to other mining communities where water had already been stolen. There was not even an attempt of negotiating compensations. A local leader, advised about the violence, reached the community towards the end of the assault and took video testimonies of the beaten women.

In an exercise of intimidation, the assault was executed by some 30 to 50 Glencore security forces and hired police. The police were equipped with government provided riot gear. They were beating down on the totally vulnerable women with their typical police batons. In one case, four men grabbing a 65-year-old woman, beating her almost to death. A bulldozer was ready to destroy their modest stone shacks. While one house was already destroyed about two weeks ago, thanks to the protesting women and the village men that eventually came to their rescue, it didn’t happen this time.

We met with activists, including the former mayor of Espinar. They all confirmed the Glencore assault. Then we went to the mining area, surrounded by small impoverished farmer communities. We met with the women who told us in tears what happened, showing their bruises all over their bodies – crying. The elderly 65-year-old woman was so badly beaten, she almost died. She was laying in her rickety stone hut that was earlier demolished and shakily rebuilt, moaning from pain, possibly with several broken ribs, no medication and no medical attention. Her situation is highly precarious. In addition to her state of health, her stone hut could collapse at any moment from the tremors of the daily mining explosions.

This bullying campaign is by no means new. It’s a common practice, as was confirmed by former mine workers and farm laborers of the area. Glencore wants to expropriate the peasants without compensation, because they want their water. Mining needs a huge amount of water to the detriment of the population – and Glencore doesn’t pay a penny for the water they consume and pollute with toxic heavy metals. Glencore doesn’t even offer the peasants alternative housing and living areas. – The women attempted to file complaints with the local police – but the police refused to even hear them. Of course, they are paid and fully under Glencore’s control.

Other leaders and activists told us about their health situation. How people die like flies from cancer around them and living in the vicinity of the mine – even if they are not directly working for the mine – water, earth and vapor contamination of the air they breathe, is so toxic, affecting every living being in the surrounding area, eventually dying a slow death.

Corruption is almost unimaginable. Glencore buys literally not only all police, lawyers, judges, politicians, but also medical doctors, clinics, laboratories in the vicinity. Two community inhabitants told us how already three months ago they were giving blood and urine samples to be tested for heavy metals. The analysis results have not been returned yet – and will probably never be handed out to the victims, as they would reveal the heavy intoxication. One of them said under tears that he had lost one of his sons (31) to mine-induced cancer.

Source: teleSUR

According to them, a similar fate afflicts a number of other inhabitants living in the zone. Some 1,200 victims suffer from various heavy-metal related diseases, mostly in their lungs and joints, extreme tiredness, memory loss and lack of concentration. Heavy metals accumulate in the body and are known to affect the nervous system. Several of the people interviewed said they and many of their neighbors and friends were resigned to simply die without any help.

Not only does Glencore not provide for medical assistance, but mine workers are hired from other regions of Peru. When they get sick, protest or die they are immediately ‘repatriated’ to their home region, so as not to cause havoc in the Espinar vicinity. Hence, it follows Glencore’s unethical logic: They pay doctors, clinics and labs not to reveal the level of toxins they discover in the victims’ bodies.

According to testimonies from several inhabitants of the region, including the ex-mayor of Espinar, mental retardation of children and other birth defects are increasing exponentially since Glencore first started operating in 2006 under Xstrata which later merged with Glencore.

The Swiss Government is fully aware of and consequently complicit with these corporate crimes. They know what is going on outside the Swiss borders – inside of which the same corporations would have to adhere to strict rules and follow the rule of law. About four years ago, a Swiss parliamentary delegation visited the Glencore site in Espinar. The visit was announced much in advance, so that Glencore had plenty of time to “clean up”, getting rid of potentially protesting voices. The delegation met with the then mayor, who worked in defense of the people and who gave the Swiss parliamentarians a dose of reality. Nevertheless, the delegation was wined and dined during two days by Glencore. The report back to Parliament was accordingly benign.

When recently approached on another case of flagrant mining abuse, including child work, prostitution and drug trafficking – in this case goldmining related to Metalor in Rinconada, near Puno, Peru – representatives of the Swiss Foreign Ministry’s Ethics Office simply said they had nothing to do with this case. Each one of these companies observed their “Due Diligence” and the government trusts them to adhere to their own standards. In case they wouldn’t, it was up to the host government where they work, i.e. Peru, to hold them responsible. Period.

That’s the noble stand of the Swiss authorities, who know very well that in Peru, like in many other countries where these Swiss-registered corporations operate, corruption is so rampant, that they buy themselves out of every crime, including homicide caused by intoxication of heavy metals from their mining operations. After all, Switzerland like other countries, have diplomatic representations in almost all countries, reporting back home on the state of their host country.

It is not widespread knowledge among the Swiss people, that the highest echelons of the Swiss Government meet regularly with CEOs of key corporations to discuss Switzerland’s future finance and economic policies. This may be common practice also in Germany, France and other EU countries – typical for neoliberal economies, that big business decide on the economic fate of the people.

Switzerland is the only OECD country where parliamentarians are allowed to sit in as many Boards of Directors of the business and finance sectors as they please. It is a virtually built-in lobby. This accepted inherent conflict of interest is diagonally opposed to the democratic principles of which Switzerland boasts itself as being a model.

Switzerland has long seized being the Switzerland where I was born. I feel deep pain for the peasant women living in the area of the Glencore exploited mine, the victims of Glencore’s abject and shameless human rights abuses, and for other sufferers of unethical corporate misconduct.

*

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

International Appeal From Catalonia

The Spanish state’s repression against Catalonia’s democratic rights gets worse every day. There are at this moment 10 leading politicians and activists in prison, without having been condemned of any crime. They are accused of violent rebellion, although they have never used violence. By mid April the two leaders of the main Catalanist organizations, Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sánchez, will have spent 6 months in prison.

And apart from the 10 political prisoners and 6 political leaders in exile, from 1 October until now there have been: 1,500 people injured while voting or demonstrating; 150 fascist attacks; 140 web sites closed; police attacks on journalists; censorship of rappers, writers and artists…

In protest at this situation, there will be a united demonstration in Barcelona on Sunday 15 April at 112. am, organized by a very broad platform of social movements, including the ANC, Òmnium Cultural, trade unions, the neighbours’ organizations, youth movements, cultural and sporting organizations, the federation of NGOs… It will be a massive call for solidarity with the political prisoners, and with all those suffering the current attacks in Catalonia and increasingly in other parts of the Spanish state.

We call on international solidarity movements to organize actions over the weekend of 14 and 15 April: demonstrations, rallies, public meetings, symbolic events…

If we allow repression to go unchallenged in Catalonia today, then fundamental rights can be repressed tomorrow in any part of the world.

Please mobilize on 14-15 April. Defend democracy and human rights. In Catalonia and everywhere.

***

Introduction

Richard Fidler

The poster above portrays some of the major Catalan political leaders imprisoned without trial at this moment, while the text below it outlines the balance-sheet to date of police and legal attacks on Catalans trying to implement their right to self-determination.

The Spanish state’s repression is now a major issue in Germany, where former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont was arrested March 25, pursuant to a Spanish judge’s warrant while travelling by car from northern Europe to Belgium, where he was living in exile. His arrest provoked immediate mass protests in Catalonia.

German prosecutors are seeking to extradite Puigdemont to Spain where, along with other jailed and exiled Catalan nationalist leaders, he faces charges of “rebellion,” which carries a sentence of 30 years imprisonment.

The Spanish court has issued similar arrest warrants against other Catalan leaders now in exile in Belgium, Scotland and Switzerland. Writing in the Catalan daily Ara April 3, legal expert Javier Pérez Royo noted that each of the extradition judges, irrespective of their country, “knows that the individual cases that they are expected to decide on are all linked by a common thread. And all of them realise that this affair has taken centre stage as far as Europe’s public opinion is concerned, as a browse through the papers will easily confirm.”

There is “a shared link” in all of these cases, Pérez Royo added:

“what constitutes a crime of rebellion in a democratic European country well into the 21st century?”

In a manifesto concerning the Catalan prosecutions published in November in the Spanish on-line newspaper El Diario, more than 100 professors of criminal law from throughout Spain state that

“it’s seriously mistaken to consider the facts as constituting a crime of rebellion [as defined by] article 474 of the Penal Code” because… the “structural element of this crime, which is violence, is absent.”

In fact, as many commentators point out, the violence in Catalonia in the events in question, in September and October, was exercised by the police in their widely publicized efforts to stop the Catalan people from voting in the referendum on independence.

Professor Pérez Royo argues that

“all four judges know that their answer will establish a European common denominator on the subject of rebellion crimes. Even if they do it in their own individual way, together they will decide what a crime of rebellion is and what it is not; what sort of ‘violence’ is required for an event to be characterized as a crime of rebellion.”

And he finds a Canadian angle:

“There are times when a decision by one nation’s jurisdictional body becomes a reference for the others. The case of the Canadian Supreme Court’s opinion on Quebec springs to mind. Even though it was not a ruling – it was not prompted by a court case, but by a formal enquiry from the federal government – and, therefore, it did not set a trial precedent, this opinion has become the single most influential piece of doctrine on what the right to self-determination is – and what it is not – as well as on the conditions under which a secession referendum may be held within a democratic country.”

Pérez Royo is optimistic about the outcome of the extradition cases. All of the judges, he writes,

“will seek the European common denominator, something that can be objectively and reasonably justified in front of Europe’s public opinion… On the subject of the crime of rebellion, all four judges will dismiss the arrest warrant. They will not allow the Catalan politicians to be tried for rebellion in Spain because it is impossible for the European judges to make that sort of collective decision. And they know that they cannot make contradictory decisions.”

However, the Catalan issue is a hot potato in Europe, where politics may well prevail over legal considerations. And no European government or state institution has expressed support for the Catalan right to self-determination; many of them face actual or potential challenges to their territorial integrity from oppressed national minorities. This points to the prime importance of developing a European-wide and international public campaign in defense of the Catalan people and their nationalist leaders, a goal the mid-April demonstrations should help to promote.

Source: UK Local News

Already, there are some encouraging signs of growing sympathy in Europe for the Catalan defense, even in the German media. For example, in an editorial titled “Asylum for Puigdemont,” Jakob Augstein – an influential journalist and co-owner of Der Spiegel – calls for the Catalan leader to not be extradited. Augstein writes that

“The detention of Puigdemont is an embarrassment. For Spain. For Europe. For Germany.”

And he also reminds readers about the arrest of another Catalan president, Lluís Companys:

“The Germans already handed over one Catalan politician to the Spanish. Lluís Companys declared independence in 1934. He was arrested and tried. After the victory of the leftist forces he was freed, fought against Franco, escaped to France, and was captured there by the Gestapo and sent back to Spain. He was executed on October 15, 1940.”

Germany must reject the Spanish demands, says Augstein.

“A politician who uses peaceful means to fight for his objectives should not have to go to prison.”

In Scotland, Clara Ponsatí, education minister in the Catalan pro-independence government and the subject of a Spanish extradition demand, raised nearly £200,000 in less than a day through a crowdfunding appeal for her legal expenses. Ponsatí is currently teaching at St. Andrews University.

In Spain itself, the government and mass media are waging an intense battle to consolidate and win further public support for their campaign against Catalan self-determination and sovereignty. Catalan socialist Martí Caussa notes:

“The immediate objective … is to reduce independence to a minority fraction of the Catalan population by resorting to temporary emergency measures. The fundamental objective is to consolidate the authoritarian evolution of the monarchical regime of 1978, and this requires convincing the population that – after the end of the Basque ETA struggle – new and dangerous internal enemies have appeared, against which we must defend ourselves by restricting democracy.

“Two conditions are necessary if this fundamental objective is to be met:

1. convince the majority of public opinion that there is a collective (a group) that ‘is not ours,’ to describe it in terms that make it appear as an enemy and discredit those who don’t agree with this narrative; and

2. justify the exceptional measures with the argument that will be limited to a particular territory and duration, but promoting legislation and a method of applying it that can be generalized throughout the state and without limits in the future.”

Although the first of these conditions, which is fundamental, has been achieved, this may be only a provisional success for the Spanish state, Caussa adds.

“At present, the solidarity in major sectors of the population is weak. But there are already some magnificent examples, like those we have included in the box ‘Solidarity with Catalonia’ on the Viento Sur website…. The growth of a sense of fraternity among all of us fighting against authoritarianism and for democracy is a necessity. Becoming a majority is what can save us.”

Republished below is the translation of an article by prominent Galician writer Suso de Toro, published in El Diario on March 28, that explains the background to the Catalan crisis and what the Spanish repression means for the future of the country’s politics. I have reproduced it from the live blog maintained by Dick Nichols, Barcelona-based correspondent of the Green Left Weekly, an indispensable source for day-by-day news and analysis of current events in relation to Catalonia’s quest for self-determination.

And I follow it with an article by Dick Nichols published in the current issue of Green Left Weekly. Dick addresses some key problems confronting the Catalan movement as it struggles to develop a unified line of struggle against the repression and in defense of Catalonia’s right of self-determination.

***

Puigdemont is Our President Too¹

Suso de Toro

In the middle of a Spanish National Radio (RNE) broadcast from Valladolid² in front of a live audience the presenter announces the news of President Puigdemont’s arrest by the German police at the request of the Spanish prosecutor, i.e., of the Spanish government.

Immediate reaction of the audience – applause. But surely not all the audience: some would have been people who instead of feeling jubilant would have been cringing at news announcing something deplorable, a politician pursued by the police on the orders of the corrupt government of M. Rajoy.³ It may even have been that some people who instinctively joined in the applause later felt ashamed.

Surely so, but what a sinister reaction from that audience, which could have been any audience that follows the RNE in many other cities of Spain. A reaction typical of volunteer jailers: the hatred implanted by Spanish politics and media towards the rulers of Catalonia and the more than two million who voted for them has degraded people and social life to a degree not known for forty years. And that corresponds to the image the Kingdom of Spain has re-acquired, of a repressive country where political differences are solved with police and prisons, a country from which dissidents either flee or end up in jail.

These are the striking results of an implacable plan drawn up from the very moment M. Rajoy arrived at the Moncloa,⁴ transported there by all the bank-owned media of the monarchy. They immediately “took over” Spanish public television (TVE) and this was indicative of what they were going to do elsewhere. To apply their program of theft of social rights and looting of the state they needed to end freedom of expression – they already had the newspapers and television stations on side – and so they drafted the Gag Law.⁵

Over the years since then they have been administering successive but regular doses of Francoism, doses so small that they have gone almost unnoticed, imperceptibly intoxicating us: as we swallowed they took away everything, the welfare state and freedom. We went along accepting what they did to others by identifying with the flag (the Borbon flag) and a hymn (the Borbon military march) and a “unity” that meant persecution (“Go, get ‘em!”⁶) of those who would not submit. We got a little more Francoist every day as we laughed at the Catalans who got bashed up for wanting freedom, made jokes about the prisoners,⁷ turning ourselves every day a little bit more into the jailers of the free. They have been vaccinating us against freedom to the point that we are scandalized that there are people who want to vote about whatever they want to vote about. Here freedom is something quite forgotten or unknown.

However, brainwashing and police repression were not enough: they also needed the judges and so carried out a reform of the legal system that not only withdrew legal protection and rights from individuals but also transformed the legal system as a separate power into a repressive instrument of the executive power. In addition to unblushingly placing openly Francoist judges into positions of power – thus controlling the National Court (Audiencia Nacional⁸) and the Supreme Court – in 2015 they adopted the law reforming the operation of the Constitutional Court. That reform implied reform of the entire state, the cancellation in practice of the legislative branch. On the pretext of carrying out an express reform to prosecute the then-president of the Catalan government, they transformed the Constitutional Court into a reactionary instrument with unfettered power to carry out its repressive function.⁹

Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy

The People’s Party (PP) of M. Rajoy, after its Spain-wide campaign of collection of signatures against the Statute “of the Catalans”, filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court and maneuvered so that the composition of that court would accord with their interests. Thus the judges appointed by the PP challenged a colleague, Pablo Pérez Tremps.¹⁰ And so a court in agreement with the PP issued a ruling that was far more important than the offense and the damage it inflicted on the Catalans. In fact, that ruling not only expelled Catalanism¹¹ from the consensus on which the Constitution had been built, but also represented, I believe, a real refounding of the judicial system born of the Transition.¹²

A statute that had been drafted and approved by the Catalan parliament, trimmed back, given a brush,¹³ approved by the Spanish parliament and then approved in a referendum by the Catalan people was changed by the Constitutional Court. The Catalans are today governed by a legal text that is no such thing. The statute that the parliaments and they themselves approved was not accepted by the Constitutional Court, which replaced it with another text, the original reworked with cuts. I won’t go now into the fact that court took out its frustration by cutting out points recognized in other statutes¹⁴: once the cutting and polishing began it was back to zero. It’s not just a question of the suspension of the judicial framework in which the Catalans have been left since then, but also of the establishment of two principles: the Constitutional Court can interpret and modify any statutory text and it is not parliaments, the legislature, that establishes the law but the Constitutional Court, which stands above it. Thus, the Kingdom of Spain is no longer a full parliamentary system as commonly understood. But these things, so serious that they seem incredible, are much better known to Professor Javier Pérez Royo.¹⁵

For years it has been hard for me to believe the things that I have been writing about here: we were just not prepared to imagine this Francoist degeneration of Spanish public life. However, as regards hatred of the Catalans, yes, I believe everything. Just as I believe that everything that has been happening for months now has been a plan executed implacably step by step: from the Constitutional Court sentence they have been cornering the Catalans, giving them no respite, no negotiation, no way out, taking them to where they now have them – against the wall in a prison state.

When President Tarradellas returned from exile,¹⁶ bringing back the Generalitat, the Catalan republican institution of self-government, he did it on the promise of Adolfo Suarez and the previous king¹⁷ that it would get recognition and fit into the constitution that was about to be drafted. But Suarez was pushed aside by the King himself and the Army, Suárez’s democratic cheque account was left without funds, and now the Generalitat and its legitimate president (since no other has yet been elected) is in exile detained by the German police at the request of the government of M. Rajoy.

Moreover, none of this could have happened without a PSOE [Socialist Workers Party of Spain, the Social-Democracy] committed to the state strategy carried out by M. Rajoy and Felipe VI.

I shall not go on, I only recall what we have been saying for some time, it is not a question of independent republic or a Spanish kingdom, but of democracy or not. And in Spain that “not” means Francoism. Puigdemont is the president of the Catalans, no matter how much it galls M. Rajoy and Felipe of Borbon, but he is a democrat and it is our duty to defend his freedom.

***

Catalan Movement Struggles for United Strategy Against Spanish State

Dick Nichols

“General strike! General strike! General strike!”: in protests across Catalonia after the March 23 jailing of five MPs and the March 25 detention in Germany of president Carles Puigdemont, these words rang out loud and appeared on placards and banners everywhere.

A general strike! Well that would certainly make the Spanish government of prime minister Mariano Rajoy and the senior judges doing its bidding think twice about maintaining their persecution of Catalonia’s pro-independence MPs.

Except that a general strike, while desirable and important to raise as an objective, just won’t happen as an offensive weapon to help advance the Catalan Republic – not until there’s an earthquake in the Catalan trade union movement.

Source: Alwaght

The reasons why point to the underlying causes of the Catalan independence movement’s difficulties in developing a stable and united strategy against the tightening legal siege of the Spanish state.

This siege reached its latest “high point” on March 23 when Spanish Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena confirmed charges ranging from rebellion to embezzlement and disobedience against 25 Catalan political and mass movement leaders.

Poles in a Debate

The independence movement’s basic debate, crossing both parties and mass organizations, is about the conditions that need to be in place for disobedience towards Spain to have some chance of success.

At one pole are those, mainly but not only around the left-independentist People’s Unity List (CUP), who think that the conditions for success already exist: what’s more, that actions of disobedience will spark a virtuous circle of revolt as more people become convinced of the chances of success.

This position points to the victory of the October 1 referendum in the face of the baton charges of the Spanish police, the October 3 general stoppage and the vast demonstrations that accompanied it, along with the confirmation of a pro-independence majority at the December 21 elections.

On this basis, the CUP abstained on the investiture on March 22 of Together for Catalonia (JxCat) leader Jordi Turull as president of a JxCat-ERC government on grounds that this would simply be another Spanish regional administration and would not “unfold the Republic”. Without CUP support, the investiture failed.

The other pole, around the centre-left Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and with some support within JxCat, acknowledges these positives. But it holds that they alone are insufficient to give the movement the strength its needs to withstand a Spanish establishment intent on imposing a final solution to “separatist defiance.”

This is all the more so because on the same day the Catalan parliament declared independence, the Spanish government ended Catalan self-rule under article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, having already taken charge of the Catalan government’s finances.

Also, while winning a majority of seats, the independence bloc only managed to win 47.5% of the vote. The rabidly Spanish-centralist Citizens also emerged as the largest party (with 25.4% of the vote) on the back of a campaign that cynically exploited Spanish versus Catalan identity sentiment.

For the ERC, the priority is to recover Catalan self-government and implement a program that improves the life of all Catalans irrespective of origin. In this way, it seeks to show the lie in Citizens’ demagogic rant about the independence bloc sacrificing ordinary people’s lives to a “mad fantasy.”

Of particular concern is the possibility of the Spanish State taking advantage of any violence – real or manufactured – to declare a state of siege under article 116 of the Spanish constitution. Incidents of violence at the pickets called by the Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) on the evening of March 25 showed that this concern is not misplaced.

These incidents also confirmed who gains politically from any outbreaks of violence. The day after the protest, Spanish interior minister Juan Ignacio Zoido questioned the independence movement’s commitment to peaceful methods. Citizens’ leader Albert Rivera was tweeting about how the violence represented Catalan nationalism’s true face of “hatred and confrontation.”

On March 29, José Luis Ábalos, the organizational secretary of the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), said the CDRs were “the seed in Catalonia” of the Basque kale borroka (“street struggle”), which engaged in violent action against the police. Ábalos also gave his listeners a history lesson: similar groups had been formed in the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan revolutions.

It has since emerged that a lot of the violence was due to balaclava-wearing people no-one could identify, leading to suspicions they were plants and calls for face-covering to be banned at demonstrations.

On March 30, [football team] Manchester City’s Catalan manager Pep Guardiola said that

“those who compare us to the generators of violence commit a great injustice.”

Defensive and Offensive Alliances

Catalonia has experienced one general strike recently. This was the October 3 “civilian stoppage” in protest against Spanish state violence on October 1. It was convened by the two major unions – the Workers Commissions (CCOO) and the General Union Of Labour (UGT) – as part of a broader platform that contained social movement, business and religious organizations.

It was also supported by the minority trade union confederations, the pro-independence Intersindical-CSC and the anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour. These were to later call a general strike of their own (on November 8), but despite achieving road and rail line blockades, they could not repeat the success of October 3 without the involvement of the major confederations.

The relative weakness of the pro-independence Intersindical-CSC in Catalonia contrasts with the situation of trade unionism in the Basque Country (Euskadi), where the main two nationalist confederations enjoy majority coverage.

In Catalonia, pro-independence trade unionism has so far been weak because the major confederations recruited workers originating from other parts of Spain on the basis of Catalonia being “a single people.” As a result, the majority confederations, reflecting the attitude of a lot of their members, are prepared to carry out defensive industrial action – such as against the police violence of October 1 – but the divisions in the Catalan working class at large mean that UGT and CCOO action in support of the independence goal and the declared Catalan Republic is unthinkable.

On the other hand, as October 3 showed, the majority confederations support defence of Catalan institutions and Catalan self-government. After meeting on March 26 with parliament speaker Roger Torrent, their leaders expressed support for action to lift the article 155 intervention, restore Catalan self-rule and achieve the release of the political prisoners.

At the same time, they made it clear they would have nothing to do with CUP or CDR plans for unilaterally “unfolding the Republic.”

On March 27, the UGT and CCOO were part of the launching of a “Space for Democracy and Social Harmony.” This included the two main pro-independence associations Òmnium Cultural and the Catalan National Assembly – and small and medium business organizations. This alliance, which repeats previous broad coalitions in defence of Catalonia’s national rights and self-rule, has called a mass demonstration in Barcelona for April 15.

On March 26, JxCat, the ERC and the CUP announced that they would move a motion to parliament asserting the inviolability of all elected MPs, their right to stand for any position and demanding the release from jail and return from exile of those who have been charged by the Spanish courts.

On March 28, this resolution was adopted, as was a second resolution moved by Catalonia Together – Podemos (supporters of a Catalan right to decide but not independence), which affirmed the need to implement Catalonia’s national rights on the basis of broad social majorities.

However, unity still remains to be achieved on the question of forming government. The arrest of Carles Puigdemont has convinced JxCat and the CUP to re-propose Puigdemont as president, if only to increase the political price Spain and its allies will have to pay for putting him in jail. The ERC remains sceptical about the usefulness of this exercise, which would violate a Constitutional Court order that candidates for president have to be physically present at the investiture session.

By March 30, however, with pressure for the Spanish state to negotiate with an elected Catalan government rising across Europe in the wake of Puigdemont’s arrest, the ERC seemed more inclined to risk supporting an “illegal” investiture of Puigdemont so as to further pressure the increasingly exposed Spanish legal system.

To disobey now, or avoid conflict until more certain of having a broader base of support? This remains the dilemma for the independence movement. If it is not solved within two months, Catalonia will go to new elections.

*

The issue of chemical weapons pertaining to Syria is front-page news. we bring to the attention of our readers this article first posted on GR in December 2013

The release of a United Nations chemical weapons inspectors’ report [December 2013] pointing to multiple sarin gas attacks carried out by so-called “rebel” forces further exposes the Obama administration’s lies about Syrian government responsibility for an August 21 chemical shelling of the Ghouta area outside of Damascus.

Washington seized on the incident as the pretext for a planned bombing campaign and stepped-up drive for regime-change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The UN report’s appearance (December 2013) follows the publication of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s detailed article in the London Review of Books revealing that the Obama administration deliberately manipulated intelligence to falsely assert it had proof of Syrian government and military responsibility for the Ghouta attack.

Hersh cited current and former US military and intelligence officials on the falsification of intelligence regarding the August 21 attack as well as the Obama administration’s concealment of the existence of intelligence reports warning that the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front militia had the capacity to manufacture and weaponise the nerve gas sarin used in the Ghouta attack.

The 82-page UN chemical weapons report is based on extensive on-the-ground investigations of multiple sites where allegations of chemical weapons use were raised by either the Syrian government or the American, British and French governments. The inspectors analysed soil and other environmental samples, examined hair, urine, tissue and blood samples for trace chemicals, interviewed survivors, witnesses and medical personnel, and documented munitions allegedly used to deliver the sarin in each incident.

They concluded that in addition to the Ghouta incident, there were at least four “probable” sarin attacks. In three of these attacks, Syrian army soldiers were the victims of the deadly gas, while in the fourth, civilians were affected. Not a single one of the confirmed chemical attacks were against “rebel” militia fighters.

Two of the now confirmed chemical attacks occurred within days of the Ghouta gassing. On August 24—three days after Ghouta and at the same time Obama was readying the US military for a strike, while denouncing the Syrian government for crossing his “red line”—sarin gas was deployed against Syrian soldiers in the Damascus suburb of Jobar. What the UN report describes as a “relatively small attack” was confirmed through interviews with survivors and clinicians, and through sarin-positive blood samples collected by Syrian authorities and authenticated by the UN inspectors.

The report says of the incident: “A group of soldiers were tasked to clear some buildings under the control of opposition forces. Around 1100 hours, the intensity of the shooting from the opposition subsided and the soldiers were under the impression that the other side was retreating. Approximately 10 meters away from some soldiers, an improvised explosive device reportedly detonated with a low noise, releasing a very badly smelling gas. A group of 10 soldiers was evacuated in armoured personal vehicles to the field medical point with breathing difficulties and with, not further specified, strange symptoms.”

A day after this gas attack, on August 25, sarin was again used “on a small scale against soldiers” in the southern town of Ashrafiah Sahnaya, during clashes between “rebels” and troops in control of a government checkpoint. The UN again based its findings on interviews and blood samples recovered by the Syrian government.

The inspectors were not asked to determine who was responsible for the sarin attacks they confirmed, and the report is therefore silent on this issue. The report, moreover, is couched throughout in the most cautious language, restricting itself to relaying scientific findings.

If anything, this only makes the contents of the document all the more damning. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the US-backed, Islamist-dominated “rebel” militias were responsible for multiple war crimes in the form of chemical attacks against both Syrian soldiers and civilians.

These were carried out in an attempt to reverse battlefield losses and trigger a Libyan-style US-British-French military intervention to crush the Assad regime and install the imperialist-backed opposition in power. The Obama administration deliberately lied about the Ghouta attack as it weighed up an opportunity to remove another perceived obstacle to US imperialist domination of the oil-rich region and further isolate Iran, ahead of a possible military strike against that country.

Ultimately, Obama pulled back amid sharp tactical differences within his administration and the US military-intelligence establishment over the implications of handing control of Syria over to Al Qaeda-dominated forces, as well as overwhelming opposition from the people of America and the world to another unprovoked war in the Middle East.

Washington instead engineered a tactical shift, agreeing to Russia’s plan for Syria to destroy its chemical weapons and opening up talks with the Iranian government. A major motive in this shift was the desire to free up American military forces for the “pivot” to Asia and a potential war against US imperialism’s rising international rival, China.

The latest revelations concerning the Obama administration’s lies on Syria further expose the politically criminal role played by the US and international media. Ten years ago, the Bush administration’s fabrications about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were promoted as good coin by the establishment press. In August and September of this year, the media proceeded as though the world population was affected by collective amnesia, with bogus “intelligence” and unsubstantiated assertions from the White House once again relayed via front-page news stories and television news bulletins.

Now that this propaganda barrage has been thoroughly exposed, the cover-up continues. Both Seymour Hersh’s article and the UN findings on chemical attacks in Syria have been either downplayed or blacked out entirely.

The international pseudo-left organisations have served as accomplices in these efforts to suppress any exposure of the Obama administration’s war propaganda. The misnamed International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the US, the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and the Left Party in Germany continue to agitate for a stepped-up US intervention against the Syrian regime, maintaining that the “rebel” militias are spearheading a democratic “revolution.”

From the time of Obama’s war preparations in August to the present day, these middle-class, pro-imperialist organisations have rejected any challenge to the US allegation that the Assad government was responsible for Ghouta. They now avoid any mention of the Hersh and UN revelations.

In stark contrast, the World Socialist Web Site immediately challenged the claims made about Ghouta by the Obama administration and allied governments internationally. In an article published the day after the incident, the WSWS noted: “The unsubstantiated charges that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus killing large numbers of civilians have all the hallmarks of a staged provocation aimed at provoking Western intervention… If one were to ask who benefits from such a crime, it is clearly not the Assad regime, but the Islamist-led forces fighting to overthrow it. Accusations of war crimes by the Syrian government come as these forces are confronted with growing crisis and a series of military defeats.”

This analysis, developed in numerous subsequent articles and commentaries, stands entirely vindicated.

Relevant to the unfolding chemical weapons saga, we bring to the attention this article by award winning author Manlio Dinucci first published by Global Research in October 2013.

For years, Syria and Egypt refused to abandon their chemical weapons facing a threatening neighbor, Israel, which develops very sophisticated ones, in addition to biological and nuclear weapons. However, while Syria has joined the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , we are taking a look at Israeli activities.

Translation Roger Lagassé

Relevant to ongoing developments in Syria, this article was first published by Washington’s Blog and Global Research in September 2013

One of the U.S. government’s main justifications for its claim that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack is that the rebels don’t have chemical weapons.

However, multiple lines of evidence show that the rebels do have chemical weapons.

Potential Looting of Syrian Weapons

The Washington Post noted last December:

U.S. officials are increasingly worried that Syria’s weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of Islamist extremists, rogue generals or other uncontrollable factions.

Last week, fighters from a group that the Obama administration has branded a terrorist organization were among rebels who seized the Sheik Suleiman military base near Aleppo, where research on chemical weapons had been conducted. Rebels are also closing in on another base near Aleppo, known as Safirah, which has served as a major production center for such munitions, according to U.S. officials and analysts.

***

A former Syrian general who once led the army’s chemical weapons training program said that the main storage sites for mustard gas and nerve agents are supposed to be guarded by thousands of Syrian troops but that they would be easily overrun.

The sites are not secure, retired Maj. Gen. Adnan Silou, who defected to the opposition in June, said in an interview near Turkey’s border with Syria. “Probably anyone from the Free Syrian Army or any Islamic extremist group could take them over,” he said.

***

As the Syrian opposition steadily makes territorial gains, U.S. officials and analysts said the odds are increasing that insurgents will seize control of a chemical weapons site or that Syrian troops guarding the installations will simply abandon their posts.

“It’s almost inevitable,” [Michael Eisenstadt, a retired Army officer who directs the military and security studies program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy] said. “It may have already happened, for what we know.”

***

Last week, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said the al-Nusra Front — an anti-Assad group that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and is also known as Jabhat al-Nusra — had seized a chlorine factory near the town of Safirah, east of Aleppo. “Terrorist groups may resort to using chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” the ministry cautioned.

AP reports:

Questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria’s chemical weapons stores ….

A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats — including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime’s chemical weapons are stored ….

U.S. and allied spies have lost track of who controls some of the country’s chemical weapons supplies, according to the two intelligence officials and two other U.S. officials.

***

U.S. analysts … are also not certain that when they saw what looked like Assad’s forces moving chemical supplies, those forces were able to remove everything before rebels took over an area where weapons had been stored.

AP hit the nail on the head when it wrote:

U.S. intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said.

***

Another possibility that officials would hope to rule out: that stocks had fallen out of the government’s control and were deployed by rebels in a callous and calculated attempt to draw the West into the war.

Looting of Libyan Chemical Weapons

Fox News reported in 2011:

In August, Fox News interviewed Rep. Mike Rogers, R.-Mich., who said he saw a chemical weapon stockpile in the country during a 2004 trip. At the time, he said the U.S. was concerned about “thousands of pounds of very active mustard gas.”

He also said there is some sarin gas that is unaccounted for.

The Wall Street Journal noted in 2011:

Spread across the desert here off the Sirte-Waddan road sits one of the biggest threats to Western hopes for Libya: a massive, unguarded weapons depot that is being pillaged daily by anti-Gadhafi military units, hired work crews and any enterprising individual who has the right vehicle and chooses to make the trip.

In one of dozens of warehouses the size of a single-family home, Soviet-era guided missiles remain wrapped inside crates stacked to the 15-foot ceiling. In another, dusted with sand, are dozens of sealed cases labeled “warhead.” Artillery rounds designed to carry chemical weapons are stashed in the back of another. Rockets, antitank grenades and projectiles of all calibers are piled so high they defy counting….

Convoys of armed groups from all over Libya have made the trek here and piled looted weapons into trailer trucks, dump trucks, buses and even empty meat trucks….

The highly-regarded NTI reported the same year:

In the desert near Sirte, there was no security for dozens of small armories at the complex, where weapons are removed every day by opposition fighters, paid contractors and others. In one structure, the word “warhead” was stamped on dozens of sealed containers. At another depot, empty chemical agent munitions were found.

There is at present no viable Libyan government-sanctioned force with the capacity to keep freelancer fighters from taking what they please from the warehouses, according to the Journal.

***

U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) visited the Libyan capital, where he said gaining control over the country’s armories was a “very big topic.”

“We have a game plan to secure the weapon caches, particularly biological and chemical weapons,” McCain said.

The Telegraph reported last year:

Al Qaeda terrorists in North Africa could be in possession of chemical weapons, a leading Spanish intelligence officer said on Monday.

The head of National Police counter-terrorist intelligence, Commissioner-General Enrique Baron, told a strategic security conference in Barcelona that it was believed that the self-styled Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb – AQMI – could have acquired such arms in Libya or elsewhere during the Arab Spring last year.

***

Commissioner Baron told his audience: “The Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb has acquired and used very powerful conventional arms and probably also has non-conventional arms, basically chemical, as a result of the loss of control of arsenals.”

The most likely place where this could have happened was in Libya during the uprising which overthrew the Gaddafi regime, said Commissioner Baron.

In his position as the head of Spanish National Police intelligence the Commissioner-General works closely with MI6, the CIA and other Western European intelligence services.

Remember, the head of the Libyan rebels admitted that the rebels were largely Al Qaeda.  CNN, the Telegraph,  the Washington Times, and many other mainstream sources confirm that Al Qaeda terrorists from Libya have since flooded into Syria to fight the Assad regime … bringing their arms with them.  And the post-Gaddafi Libyan government is also itself a top funder and arms supplier of the Syrian opposition.  (CNN notes that the CIA may have had a hand in this operation.)

Other Countries

A reporter who has written extensively for Associated Press, BBC and National Public Radio reports that locals in the area hit by chemical weapons allege that Saudi Arabia supplied the chemicals. And see this.

Bush administration official Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and British MP George Galloway speculate that Israel or another country may have given chemical weapons to the Syrian rebels.

We don’t know which countries did or didn’t give chemical weapons to the rebels. The point is that there are quite a few opportunities or possibilities.

Evidence of Possession and Use

The above, of course, is simply speculation.  More important is actual evidence of possession and use.

Turkish state newspaper Zaman reported earlier this year (Google translation):

The Turkish General Directorate of Security … seized 2 kg of sarin gas in the city of Adana in the early hours of yesterday morning. The chemical weapons were in the possession of Al Nusra terrorists believed to have been heading for Syria.

Haaretz reported on March 24th, “Jihadists, not Assad, apparently behind reported chemical attack in Syria“.

UN investigator Carla Del Ponte said that there is strong evidence that the rebels used chemical weapons, but that there is not evidence that the government used such weapons:

There is also evidence that the rebels have recently used chemical weapons.  See this and this.

No wonder experts are skeptical.

This article was first published in April 2017 following the accusations directed against the Syrian government of using chemical weapons against its own people. In a bitter irony, CNN confirms in a 2012 report that the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels were trained by the Pentagon in the use of chemical weapons. 

Update, March 19, 2018, April 9, 2018.

“The last terrorist-held bastion of East Ghouta to the east of Damascus city center, Duma, has been devastated by a chemical weapons attack that has killed at least 70 people. The majority of the victims were women and children.

However, characteristically and typically, the mainstream media have immediately blamed the Syrian military for the dreadful attack even before investigations can occur. Their sources? The White Helmets and Jaish al-Islam.” 

Another Chemical Attack in Syria: But Why Is the Corporate Media Missing Crucial Points?

By Paul Antonopoulos, April 08, 2018

**

 A March 17, 2018 Russia’s Ministry of Defense  report stated the following: 

“We have reliable information at our disposal that US instructors have trained a number of militant groups in the vicinity of the town of At-Tanf, to stage provocations involving chemical warfare agents in southern Syria. …  The provocations will be used as a pretext by the United States and its allies to launch strikes on military and government infrastructure in Syria.’

In a bitter irony, Moscow’s allegations directed against the U.S. are confirmed by CNN. 

While the Western media casually upholds Washington’s narrative which consists in blaming Bashar Al Assad of killing his own people, coincidently they also refute their  own lies.

Trump’s earlier decision to strike a Syrian airbase (April 2017) in retaliation for Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people confirms that the “False Flag” Chemical Weapons attack scenario first formulated under Obama is still “on the table”.  Our analysis (including a large body of Global Research investigative reports) confirms unequivocally that Trump is lying, the Western media is lying and most of America’s allies are also lying.

The Pentagon’s Training of  “Rebels” (aka Al Qaeda Terrorists) in the Use of Chemical Weapons

CNN accuses Bashar Al Assad of killing his own people while also acknowledging that the “rebels” are not only in possession of chemical weapons, but that these “moderate terrorists” affiliated with Al Nusra are trained in the use of chemical weapons by specialists on contract to the Pentagon.

 The CNN report by Barbara Starr below dated September 2013:   

In a twisted logic, the Pentagon’s mandate was to ensure that the rebels aligned with Al Qaeda would not acquire or use WMD, by actually training them in the use of chemical weapons (sounds contradictory):

Moreover, in an earlier report dated December 9 2012, CNN confirms that:

“The training [in chemical weapons], which is taking place in Jordan and Turkey, involves how to monitor and secure stockpiles and handle weapons sites and materials, according to the sources. Some of the contractors are on the ground in Syria working with the rebels to monitor some of the sites, according to one of the officials.

The nationality of the trainers was not disclosed, though the officials cautioned against assuming all are American. (CNN, December 09, 2012, emphasis added)

screenshot of the CNN article, the original link has been redirected to CNN blogs, 

The above report by CNN’s award winning journalist Elise Labott (relegated to the status of a CNN blog), refutes CNN’s numerous accusations directed against Bashar Al Assad.

Who is doing the training of terrorists in the use of chemical weapons?  From the horse’s mouth: CNN

Sources: U.S. helping underwrite Syrian rebel training on securing chemical weapons

And these are the same terrorists (trained by the Pentagon) who are the alleged target of  Washington’s counterterrorism bombing campaign initiated by Obama in August 2014:

“The Pentagon scheme established in 2012 consisted in equipping and training Al Qaeda rebels in the use of chemical weapons, with the support of military contractors hired by the Pentagon, and then holding the Syrian government responsible  for using the WMD against the Syrian people.

What is unfolding is a diabolical scenario –which is an integral part of military planning– namely a situation where opposition terrorists advised by Western defense contractors are actually in possession of chemical weapons.

This is not a rebel training exercise in non-proliferation. While president Obama states that “you will be held accountable” if “you” (meaning the Syrian government) use chemical weapons, what is contemplated as part of this covert operation is the possession of chemical weapons by the US-NATO sponsored terrorists, namely “by our” Al Qaeda affiliated operatives, including the Al Nusra Front which constitutes the most effective Western financed and trained fighting group, largely integrated by foreign mercenaries. In a bitter twist, Jabhat al-Nusra, a US sponsored “intelligence asset”, was recently put on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

The West claims that it is coming to the rescue of the Syrian people, whose lives are allegedly threatened by Bashar Al Assad. The truth of the matter is that the Western military alliance is not only supporting the terrorists, including the Al Nusra Front, it is also making chemical weapons available to its proxy “opposition” rebel forces.

The next phase of this diabolical scenario is that the chemical weapons in the hands of Al Qaeda operatives will be used against civilians, which could potentially lead an entire nation into a humanitarian disaster.

The broader issue is: who is a threat to the Syrian people? The Syrian government of Bashar al Assad or the US-NATO-Israel military alliance which is recruiting “opposition” terrorist forces, which are now being trained in the use of chemical weapons.” (Michel Chossudovsky, May 8, 2013, minor edit)

Note: Reference to an ambiguous Daily Mail report has been removed

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At a rally in Cleveland last week, President Donald Trump said that the US will get out of Syria “very soon.” It is now clear that the 4,000 US troops currently occupying Syria (Washington Post, 10/31/17) will in fact stay in Syria (Independent, 4/4/18), even though keeping troops in another country in defiance of that country’s government is a violation of international law. Yet the very possibility of US withdrawal from Syria rendered apoplectic journalists who are convinced of the legitimacy of Washington’s domination of the country—international law be damned.

Some writers want America to occupy Syria to weaken Russia. In the Washington Post (3/30/18), Josh Rogin claimed that “there are a lot of good arguments for maintaining an American presence in Syria after the fall of the Islamic State,” but stressed that the “larger US mission in Syria” was necessary for “stopping Russia from exerting influence over the region.”

Michael Gerson, writing in the same paper (4/2/18), was concerned that a US departure “would leave Russia as the undisputed power broker at the heart of the Middle East,” a dubious claim in a region that includes Saudi Arabia (whose military budget by some counts exceeds Russia’s) as well as nuclear-armed Israel, both close US allies.

The White House made clear that Trump’s talk of pulling out of Syria was just talk (Independent, 4/4/18)–but not before numerous media figures expressed alarm that the illegal occupation might end.

CNN ran two articles that made the same point about Russia, with Dan Merica and Jim Acosta (3/30/18) writing “Trump Promise to Get Out of Syria ‘Very Soon’ Could Be a Win for Russia,” and Zachary Cohen and Ryan Browne (3/31/18) telling readers “that most foreign policy experts agree that” the void left by US forces in the event of a withdrawal “would likely be filled by Russia.” The Syrian government’s alliance with Russia supposedly justifies Washington’s occupying Syria, in defiance of international law. Partnership with Russia is unacceptable; only submission to the US is permissible.

Moreover, Gerson fretted, a US pull out “would cede [Syrian] oil fields under the control of US-allied forces,” an intolerable outcome if one accepts that the US is the rightful owner of other countries’ resources.

Rogin worried that “if the United States leaves, [Syria’s] oil will likely fall into the hands of Iran.” What he described is the possibility that the Syrian and Iranian alliance could lead to an arrangement wherein Iranians have access to some amount of Syria’s oil, the type of agreement between states that exists the world over. The prospect of two states in the Global South working together in this fashion alarms Rogin, who therefore calls for America to maintain control over Syrian oil. He said Trump should

remember that he has constantly complained that in Iraq, “We should have kept the oil.” Of course, we can’t and shouldn’t take or keep Syria’s oil. But there’s a grain of truth in Trump’s idea. Control over oil is the only influence we have in Syria today.

Apparently Iran has no right to make use of Syria’s oil, even if the Syrian government agrees to that, but the US has a right to “control” Syria’s oil irrespective of the wishes of Syrians.

“The United States and its partners control almost all of the oil” in Syria, writes the Washington Post(3/30/18). “And if the United States leaves, that oil will likely fall into the hands of Iran.”

Several reporters argued that the US should continue an illegal military occupation of Syria as a cudgel against Iran. Rogin said that American forces should stay in Syria to guard against “Iranian expansionism,” without explaining what he means by “expansionism” or offering any evidence that it’s taking place. Gerson, similarly, contended that taking US troops out of Syria “would reward Iran’s search for regional hegemony,” and would amount to “surrender[ing] Syria to Iran.”

Rogin continued:

In May, Trump is expected to pull the United States out of the Iran deal, meaning that he will reimpose US sanctions on Iranian oil. It would be profoundly counterproductive to hand Iran control over a swath of Syria that contains huge amounts of oil at the exact same time.

Cohen and Browne likewise suggested that Syria should continue to serve America’s proxy war against Iran, writing,

If the US were to leave its base located at the At Tanf garrison in southeastern Syria, Iran would be able to secure its overland route from Damascus to Tehran, further securing its regional influence.

Such approaches devalue the lives of Syrians, who are cast not as humans with intrinsic value and rights to self-determination and self-governance, but as pieces on a geopolitical chessboard that America can use as it sees fit to try to outmaneuver Russia and Iran.

Another common theme in reporting was the idea that US forces need to stay in Syria to keep the war in that country from getting worse. Rogin claimed that the US military presence in Syria is about “preventing a new refugee crisis.” Gerson declared that “the immediate result of an American withdrawal would be a major escalation of the conflict in eastern Syria.” Cohen and Browne said that the possibility of American forces leaving Syria

is raising concerns among some national security officials who warn that withdrawing now would not only undermine American credibility in the region but prompt a significant escalation to an already devastating conflict.

But the US military exists to fight wars. It is the most heavily armed, most violent organization in the world. Saying that it should continue to occupy Syria is a way of saying that the war in that country should continue. In fact, it’s a call for escalation of that war, because eventually the Syrian government will want to reclaim the portion of its country America controls, and that will mean a military confrontation with the US. The US has already killed fighters allied with the Syrian government who the US claimed were trying to take back land from the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (Reuters, 2/7/18).

CNN (3/30/18) warned US withdrawal from Syria could help the Russians by “mak[ing] their job of combating forces hostile to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad considerably easier.”

Underlying all of these positions is the assumption that the United States has the right to determine Syria’s future. Merica and Acosta explicitly worried that removing US troops from Syria would interfere with regime change efforts: “A US withdrawal would make [Russia’s] job of combating forces hostile to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad considerably easier.” Cohen and Browne were troubled that “the Syrian regime could also benefit from the economic advantages of seizing oilfields currently controlled by US-backed allies.”

According to this perspective, US allies are entitled to Syrian oil, while it’s a frightening possibility that the Syrian government might use Syrian resources to strengthen the Syrian economy, which has been ravaged by war and Western sanctions, with profound effects on the Syrian population.

Rogin says that “fighting extremism” is one purpose of America’s presence in Syria, and Cohen and Browne warn that “a US withdrawal could help ISIS”—despite the fact that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and US policies throughout the Syrian war were central to the birth and proliferation of ISIS and comparable organizations (Extra!, 11/14; Jacobin, 3/29/16; Newsweek,12/14/17).

That Syrians might not want to be occupied by the US is never considered in any of these articles, such is the extent of the authors’ imperial hubris.

*

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

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This week, both sides of a polarized Brazil were on tenterhooks, awaiting the Supreme Court’s judgment on former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva‘s appeal for habeas corpus — his right to remain free until all his appeals have been exhausted. Having already been convicted in the second instance — and having had his nine-year sentence increased to twelve — his prospects looked dim. This, in spite of two appeals processes still remaining, which could take months or years.

Into this context sauntered the military top brass. One the eve of the judgment, the commander of the Army Reserves wrote in the Estado de São Paulo newspaper that if Lula were left free to run and won the presidency, there would be no option but military intervention. His comments were shortly followed by those of the commander of the Brazilian army, Eduardo Villas Boas, who took to Twitter to ask the public — rhetorically, of course — who it thought had the good of the country in mind, and who was only looking after their own. The Brazilian military, he continued, “shares the longing of all good citizens to repudiate impunity” and is “attentive to its institutional missions.”

As left-wing economist Laura Carvalho commented,

“the revolution won’t be televised, but the coup will be tweeted.”

Lula’s habeas corpus was duly denied the following day. Whether Lula gives himself up is still to be seen; noises from his camp suggest he may resist arrest. On the night of the judgment, supporters rallied to the headquarters of the metalworkers’ union in suburban São Paulo, with more resistance promised from across the Left.

What has made events come to such a head now is the decision by investigating judge Sergio Moro to depart from the constitutional norm and mandate Lula’s imprisonment before his appeals process is exhausted. For Moro, this is his triumphal moment, the capture of the trophy beast he’s been hunting for years. According to his logic, sending Lula down would signal the end of political impunity. For Moro’s supporters — more anti–Workers’ Party (PT) than genuinely anti-corruption — this one imprisonment is the final nail in the coffin of corruption.

One is reminded of George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” stunt aboard an aircraft carrier in 2003: an astoundingly premature declaration of victory, a conclusion to an illegitimate campaign announced by a vain man, whose results have been nothing but institutional chaos and an even more corrupt state. Tarnishing a perfect analogy, in Brazil the levels of violence sadly predate the campaign.

Whatever happens next — and last week’s shooting at Lula’s traveling pre-election roadshow seems a very grim foreshadowing of growing political violence — this feels like a decisive moment.

So argues political scientist Felipe Demier in the article presented in translation below. Originally published on Esquerda Online, Demier’s essay reflects on Lula’s imprisonment, staking out a position between a reflexive defense of Lula’s politics and an ultra-left celebration of his arraignment. It also discusses the highly contingent nature of bourgeois acceptance of democracy — a reconciliation that now must be abandoned through the imprisonment of a former political ally, in the name of preserving “democracy” and the constitution.

*

Exiting from the ranks and struggles of workers, Lula as president did not at any moment propose radical reforms to Brazil’s profoundly unequal social formation. By continuing to religiously pay off the external debt, reproducing the concentration of income, putting the brakes on agrarian reform, militarizing social life, and breaking up public services (to guarantee profits for big financial, industrial, and agribusiness corporations), his governments — like the first term of his successor, Dilma Rousseff — did what needed to be done, from the point of view of those above.

Concomitantly, while in power Lula significantly reduced unemployment, increased salaries and credit for the consumer market, deliberately increased targeted/compensatory social policies, opened up public sector entrance exams, and advanced affirmative-action policies. By means of this social partnership, through this sociopolitical engineering, Lula erected a party machine that showed itself capable of managing Brazilian capitalism better, and more securely, than the traditional bourgeois political representatives themselves; and for that reason, he became nearly invincible in the electoral game of our armored liberal democracy. There was not, up until that point, in that conjuncture, a better form of management of the capitalist order in a backwards, peripheral, and socially fractured country like Brazil.

Supporters of former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put up banners outside the Supreme Federal Court in March. (Source: Senado Federal / Flickr)

It so happens that, as of the second half of Dilma Rousseff’s first term, the economic indices started abruptly to fall. Newly confident, the right-wing opposition was able to win back the love of a significant portion of the “extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie,” which, seduced by financial orgies, had resignedly accepted the PT at the forefront of its state. Now enamored with the neoliberal right, and even flirting with autocratic political tendencies, a large part of the Brazilian bourgeoisie managed rapidly to withdraw from the loveless affair it had been engaged in with petismo for the preceding ten years. PT leaders, meanwhile, would always keep alive the dream of breaking from this stable union. Having withdrawn, the bourgeoisie spilled all its bottled-up hate, a hate that can better be explained as a function of what the PT once was than by what it became while in power.

The deposing of Dilma Rousseff’s government without a doubt signified the success of the coup-monger plot, designed by the most reactionary sections of Brazilian society, led by the erstwhile right-wing opposition and its media and judicial allies. In the construction in favor of impeachment, newspaper editorials abandoned any caution they may have had. Lubricated by ancient class hatred, especially that fed by the demophobic middle classes, the coup had as its principal objective swapping the current governmental agents for a more reactionary set — ones who, unconstrained by a combative or trade unionist past, could now implement fiscal adjustment and counter-reforms, and shut up social movements. All this was to be done at the rhythm and intensity demanded by Brazilian capitalism in crisis. In this, and in contrast to the European bourgeoisies, the dominant class in Brazil demonstrated that, in moments of economic crisis, it could not tolerate even the “left wing” of the party of order; that is, it could not tolerate having the moderates of its own party in power.

The coup-mongers’ offensive — that is, the lancinating withdrawal of rights and the elevation of fiscal austerity to the highest degree possible — must continue. It cannot stop. However, in its insatiable counter-reformist march, the Brazilian bourgeoisie encounters something that, deriving from nothing more than the pages of the calendar, presents a modest obstacle, and one constitutive of its own form of political domination: elections. As is well known, for even minimalist liberal democrats, the existence of periodic elections that allow for the choice of rulers is an inexpungible criterion of any liberal democracy — including its most limited and squalid versions. Such is the habitual control of electoral processes by economic and media powers, and such is the anti-popular armory of contemporary Brazilian democracy, that universal suffrage, far from being a problem, has been for the past decades the way in which political legitimacy was guaranteed for class domination in the country. Now, exceptionally, things have changed, which seems to demand exceptional solutions, from the point of view of capital.

The coup program must continue to be implemented, however, by means of a government supported by the ballot box. Here’s the rub of it, then. The bourgeoisie not only considers Lula incapable of applying such a program according to the standards demanded by it, but also cannot find any trustworthy candidate capable of safely defeating the petista at the ballot box. The basic criteria of “one person, one vote” (be it a resident of São Paulo’s posh Jardins neighborhood or someone in the semiarid northeast), accepted by those at the top for forty years, appears to them today as a horrifying phantasm. As such, in a very peculiar historical contradiction, the simple continuity of the liberal-democratic regime — that is, ordinary elections — appear as a problem for the proper continuity of the liberal-democratic regime. The simple normality of the regime — that is, compliance with its own laws, designed to guarantee the regime’s continuity — now translates into a political anomaly.

Paradoxically, obedience to constitutional norms appears to lead to the elimination of these same norms; compliance with the constitution appears to lead inexorably to the end of this same constitution; and, finally, the realization of a simulacrum of elections (without Lula) — or even suspension of these — appears today as the only means of preserving a political regime based on elections. In an era of social fragmentation without precedent and exorbitant counter-reforms, the preservation of the universal suffrage regime appears only possible, for the bourgeoisie, if universal suffrage itself were tainted or voided, and if the election were to become nothing but a counterfeit. It is this that explains, fundamentally, Lula’s condemnation and his imprisonment, decreed by judge Sérgio Moro. Triplex apartments, ranches, and minor fiscal maneuvers were as decisive for the judicial sentencing as leaving the cap off the toothpaste or dirty clothes on the floor are for the end of a relationship.

Fortified by newspaper editorials, the ordinary bourgeois, taken on his own, with his narrow-minded and mean mentality, never recognized himself in the image of the left-wing administrator of neoliberal capitalism, who once waved red flags and led strikes. Now he cannot even tolerate him. The ordinary bourgeois treats Lula as a nobleman does with a plebeian arriviste who won the heart of his beautiful daughter: without any other viable option, the gallant may even be accepted into the home, but never into the family; and at the first conjugal crisis, the young man is to be expelled from where he should never have been permitted entry in the first place. For all that he might have performed enormous services for the Brazilian bourgeoisie, Lula is not a legitimate son and never will be. In the same way as a domestic maid might eventually be allowed into the dining room, she should never dare to converse with the people only preoccupied with “being born and dying.” In the same way, Lula should never have dared show to the politicians of our oligarchical dominant class that it was possible to combine high profits with reduction of extreme poverty. For our “illustrious” conservative middle sectors, our “reputable men,” and our courtly socialites, the ex-machinist should never have allowed that their shopping malls become places of leisure and consumption for black people, that their airports become bus terminals, that their universities open their doors to the ignorant rabble.

Lula will enter his cell as an establishment politician, rejected by the same bourgeoisie he courted and, at the end of the day, helped. In our gloomy times, the Brazilian bourgeoisie has revealed itself to be not only ungrateful, but also vindictive and exclusive. From now on, it goes back to wanting only those that do it good. The Lula that will shortly go to prison is not the one who distanced himself from an emancipatory working-class project, but rather the one who tried again to provide the working class with three square meals a day within capitalism. The Lula who will find himself behind bars is less the adversary of a socialist project and more the defender of a capitalism with fewer poor. Lula is not being punished by workers in their struggle for social emancipation but rather by the cruelest adversary of that struggle.

As such, for the socialist left, the moment is one of defeat and therefore one in which to prepare a response and resistance. Let us leave it to Merval Pereira and his right-wing consorts to find theirs for their hysterical libations in the great halls. The longing for a world without corruption or mafioso schemes cannot be realized by the same judges who leave in liberty [corrupt former presidents] Collor, Sarney, [current illegitimate and corrupt president] Temer, [failed 2014 center-right corrupt presidential candidate] Aécio, and their kind. Our desires cannot be confused with those of others, otherwise we lose our own identity. There cannot be politico-juridical substitutionism here. Washing one’s hands of the punishment of an adversary at the hands of an enemy — as some reckless types on the Left do — is nothing other than the feeding of a reactionary, inquisitorial wrath that, at the end of the day, has us as its principal target.

*

Translated by Alex Hochuli

Felipe Demier is a political scientist.

Alex Hochuli is a researcher and communications consultant based in São Paulo. He blogs at alexhochuli.xyz.

After Trump ordered the USTR to consider an additional $100BN in tariffs, something we said on Wednesday would happen if the market was dumb enough to allow Trump to think he had a trade war victory by closing green…

…China has suddenly found itself in a quandary: as we showed first thing this morning, if Beijing were to continue responding to the US in a “tit-for-tat”, it would be unable to retaliate to the latest Trump salvo of a total $150 billion in tariffs for the simple reason that the US does not export $150 billion in products to China.

S&P 500 EXTENDS GAIN ABOVE FRIDAY'S CLOSE, UP AS MUCH AS 1.15%

Seeing favorable market response, Trump next raises China tariffs to $100BN

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 4, 2018

Which doesn’t mean that China is out of options; quite the contrary. The problem is that virtually everything and anything else that Beijing can do, would be a significant escalation. In fact, the five most frequently cited options are all considered “nuclear” and would promptly lead to an even more aggressive response from Washington.

Here are the five “nuclear” options that China is currently contemplating:

1. A Currency Depreciation. A sharp, one-time yuan devaluation, like the one Beijing unexpectedly carried out in August 2015, could be used to offset some of the effect of tariffs.
2. Sales of US Treasurys. Chinese authorities could sell some of its large official-sector holdings of US Treasuries, which would lead to a tightening of US financial conditions.
3. Block US services. Chinese authorities could limit access for US companies to the Chinese domestic market, particularly in the services sector, where the US exports $56 billion in services annually and runs a $38 billion surplus
4. Curb US oil shipments. According to Petromatrix, China is one of the biggest importers of U.S. crude oil at 400kb/d, so any counter-tariffs on crude could become very heavy for the U.S. supply and demand picture. Such a move would weigh on U.S. prices and spill over to global oil pricing. As Petromatrix adds, the market would need to start balancing downward price risk of trade-war escalations with upside risk of Iran sanctions as oil flows could be about the same.

All of the above are mostly self-explanatory. The fifth option is one we first previewed back last August, in “Rare Earths Are China’s Most Potent Weapon In A Trade War.” Here is a quick reminder:

In October 1973, the world shuddered when the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other nations that provided military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur war. At the same time, they ramped up prices. The United States realized it was dependent on imported oil — and much of that came from the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia the big swing producer. It shook the nation. How had a few foreign powers put a noose around the neck of the world’s largest economy?

Well, it could happen again and very soon. The commodity that could bring us to our knees isn’t oil, but rather a group of elements known as rare earths, falling between 21 and 71 on the periodic table.

This time, just one country is holding the noose: China.

China controls the world’s production and distribution of rare earths. It produces more than 92 percent of them and holds the world in its hand when it comes to the future of almost anything in high technology.

Rare earths are great multipliers and the heaviest are the most valuable. They make the things we take for granted, from the small motors in automobiles to the wind turbines that are revolutionizing the production of electricity, many times more efficient. For example, rare earths increase a conventional magnet’s power by at least fivefold. They are the new oil.

Rare earths are also at work in cell phones and computers. Fighter jets and smart weapons, like cruise missiles, rely on them. In national defense, there is no substitute and no other supply source available.

Today, The Week‘s Jeff Spross picks up on this topic, and in an article “How China can win a trade war in 1 move” writes that “if things do spiral into all-out trade war, it’s worth noting China has a nuclear option. I’m referring to rare earth metals.”

These are elements like dysprosium, neodymium, gadolinium, and ytterbium. They aren’t actually rare, but they do play crucial roles in everything from smart phones to electric car motors, hard drives, wind turbines, military radar, smart bombs, laser guidance, and more. They’re also quite difficult to mine and process.

Some more details, and the reason why none of this is new to those who have been following the rare earth space and China’s brief trade war with Japan back in 2010/2011:

Basically, if China really wanted to mess with America, it could just clamp down on these exports. That would throw a massive wrench into America’s supply chain for high-tech consumer products, not to mention much of our military’s advanced weapons systems.

In fact, China isn’t just America’s major supplier of rare earth metals; it’s the rest of the globe’s major supplier as well. And in 2009, China began significantly clamping down on its rare metal exports. Once, China briefly cut Japan off entirely after an international incident involving a collision between two ships. This all eventually led to a 2014 World Trade Organization spat, with America, Japan, and other countries on one side, and China on the other.

How did we get to this position where China has a near monopoly on rare earths:

Much of the story centers around Magnequench, an American company that emerged out of General Motors in the 1980s. It specialized in the magnets that account for most of the final components created from rare earth metals. But in 1995 Magnequench was bought out by a consortium that included two Chinese firms who took a controlling 62 percent majority share in the company. They also bought a big rare earth magnet plant in Indiana. Eventually, Magneuquench’s manufacturing capacities were moved to China, and the Indiana plant was shut down.

Executive branch regulators do wield power over foreign investment in and buyouts of American companies, particularly through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS). But this was the post-Cold War 1990s, when optimistic enthusiasm for globalized free market trade was at a peak. CFIUS approved the initial takeover of Magnequench in 1995 under the Clinton administration, as well as the later shutdown of the Indiana plant in 2003 under the Bush administration.

Lawmakers and the Government Accountability Office criticized the agency and both administrations for their lackadaisical approach to the issue. Hillary Clinton even struck a rather Trump-ian note in 2008, trying to turn Magequench’s sale to China into a campaign issue. But it was a tricky topic, given how her husband’s administration got the ball rolling. So rare earth metals have occasionally turned into a political hot potato, but usually for only brief periods.

Which then takes us back to our August preview of precisely where we are today:

At present, the rare earths threat from China is serious but not critical. If President Donald Trump — apparently encouraged by his trade adviser Peter Navarro, and his policy adviser Steve Bannon — is contemplating a trade war with China, rare earths are China’s most potent weapon.

A trade war moves the rare earths threat from existential to immediate.

In a strange regulatory twist the United States, and most of the world, won’t be able to open rare earths mines without legislation and an international treaty modification. Rare earths are often found in conjunction with thorium, a mildly radioactive metal, which occurs in nature and doesn’t represent any kind of threat.

However, it’s a large regulatory problem. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency have defined thorium as a nuclear “source material” that requires special disposition. Until these classifications, thorium was disposed of along with other mine tailings. Now it has to be separated and collected. Essentially until a new regime for thorium is found, including thorium-powered reactors, the mining of rare earths will be uneconomic in the United States and other nuclear non-proliferation treaty countries.

Congress needs to look into this urgently, ideally before Trump’s trade war gets going, according to several sources familiar with the crisis. A thorium reactor was developed in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. While it’s regarded by many nuclear scientists as a superior technology, only Canada and China are pursuing it at present.

Meanwhile, future disruptions from China won’t necessarily be in the markets. It could be in the obscure but vital commodities known as rare earths: China’s not quite secret weapon.

Of course, there is no way of knowing if China will proceed with a rare earth export ban as its response, or whether it will pick any of these options. However, for those who are growing concerned – or convinced – that it’s only going to get worse from here, there is good news: the VanEck Rare Earth ETF REMX makes it easy to make a substantial profit from the first nuclear trade war, should China clamp down on rare earth metals, sending their price to where they traded when China waged a brief trade war with Japan in 2011, when the ETF hit an all time high of $114. Needless to say, should China lock out the US, the price of rare earths would soar orders of magnitude higher.

The United States is in a major upheaval. Trump’s cabinet shake-up moves the country into an alarming direction. From the nomination of torturer Gina Haspel as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director and a vocal opponent of the nuclear deal with Iran as new secretary of state, his selection exposes the White House’s dangerous kill instincts.

An ultimatum came with the president’s appointment of John Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations as his 3^rd national security advisor. Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration is notorious for his hawkishness, with a great zeal for military action against Iran and North Korea. This rearranging of the deck chairs in the sinking empire signals the great calamity of foreign policy ahead with potential threats of war.

In this seeming free-fall toward despotism, what can ordinary people do?

Tackling corruption of our political system and averting a doomed future requires us to truly understand the problems we are facing. The crisis of representation didn’t just arise with Trump, the new commander in chief. A glimpse of it was shown during the 2008 financial meltdown, which was covered up swiftly by bank bailouts and politics of ‘hope and change’. The truth is that seeds for dystopia have been inside this country all along. The roots of the issues that are now emerging in Trump’s America go back to the very beginning of this nation.

In its modern formation, the United States inspired the world with its torch of liberty and equality. At the same time, this beacon of light had its darkness within. From the onset, America contained internal contradictions manifested as the founder’s hypocrisy and the violation of its own ideals with genocide of natives, slavery of blacks and suppression of women. The Founding Fathers of the United States brought a victory of rejecting the power of the King’s monarchy and pioneered a path for one’s own self-determination. The concept of “a government of laws, not of men”was groundbreaking at that time. Yet without reconciling its own shadow, this nation of law failed to fully shield the republic from the tyranny of the Old World.

Supremacy of (t)reason

The unredeemed darkness found in America’s troubled past was a force inside Western civilization that tries to define history, subjugating other perspectives to its single vision. Europe, with its ethos of separation and objectivity set out to conquer the world, spreading its influence across many continents. This domineering power of reason found its new front of exploration in the New World.

America, driven by the monotheistic goal of Manifest Destiny, expanded its territory with brutality. It swallowed what is edible, assimilating immigrants one by one to its conception of what is civil, while spitting out those that it considered impalatable, relegating them into three-fifths of a person or exterminating them from the earth altogether as savages.

This maddened head centricity was manifested in the structure of a new government. Sheldon Wolin, author of Democracy Inc noted how the framers of the Constitution created a so-called managed democracy, a system that favored elite rule and that “the American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy” (2008, p. 228).

The intellectual elites regarded the democratic majority rule as an irrational force and they feared the tyranny of popular majorities. While the faculty of reason positioned itself as a supreme force, a potential to account its autocratic power was found inside America.

The sovereign power of We the People

Expressed in the preamble of the Constitution “We the People” was faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves. This was an intention to shift from the model of government that acts as authority of their lives to one that places power in the hands of ordinary people. In this government established under the rule of the people, the source of legitimacy was not derived from a god or king, but was meant to come from people themselves.

This arrangement of governance was not granted from above. It was first demanded by those who opposed the ratification of the 1787 Constitution that lacked the guarantee of individual liberties. The proponents of the Bill of Rights articulated essential parts of the sovereign power of We the People as a freedom of expression; freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. By building upon First Amendment rights, further efforts emerged from below. From abolitionists’ defiance and the women’s suffrage movement to civil rights and free speech movements, people’s determination for individual autonomy persisted.

Assault on this power of ordinary people intensified with the rise of corporate power in the ‘60s. Manifest Destiny is now carried out with Nike’s slogan of “just do it”. With limited liability and having no human beings in charge, the abstraction of the head inside transnational corporations took flight from the communal ground, plundering their way into the globe, without ever having to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Giant corporations became a sponsor for this managed democracy, gaining control over media to manipulate public perception, keeping American voters in hostage with the lesser of the two evils charade politics.

WikiLeaks, the rise of cryptographic direct action

In the political winter of the post-911 war on terror, as fear and apathy spread around the globe, a new civic force surfaced online. The waves of whistleblowers began shedding light on the collaborative secrecy of elites that deceive and manipulate the public behind a façade of democracy.

WikiLeaks, with its motto of “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful”, opened a floodgate of a free flow of information. This world’s first global Fourth Estate embodies the philosophy of cypherpunks– a loosely tied group of online privacy advocates who saw the potential of cryptography to shift the balance of power between individuals and the state. With the idea that cryptography is the “ultimate form of non-violent direct action” (2012, p. 5), WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief Julian Assange built the system of scientific journalism that would give everyday people around the world tools to combat military might and confront the madness of fallen reason that censors free speech.

The invention of the anonymous drop box was truly revolutionary. It enabled anyone to send information securely without a trace of his or her identity. Through the robust decentralized infrastructure built around this game changing technology, WikiLeaks was able to provide unprecedented source protection in the history of journalism. Here, the organization that derived its source of inspiration in American founding ideas, freed the First Amendment that had been captured through a corporate monopoly and co-optation of the media, making it available to people all around the world.

It is through WikiLeaks’ adamant commitment to the principle of free press that former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning was able to exercise uncompromising free speech and engage in the American tradition of civil disobedience. Manning, whom the late attorney and President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner described as the “conscience of our nation”, let the American public see the US imperialism in action in the Middle East.

In her request for a presidential pardon, Manning stated her commitment to the ideal of America, saying how she was willing to pay the price if it would make this country be “truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.” Through her non-violent cryptographic direct action, she helped America find its conscience.

One individual’s act of courage brought another. Inspired by Manning, Edward Snowden came forward to inform people about the NSA’s mass surveillance. In one of the addresses he made, Snowden also described his act as a public service and connected it with Dr. King’s non-violent civil disobedience. Through his whistleblowing, the former NSA contractor defended individual privacy as fundamental civil rights for all people and tried to preserve the world where people can share creativity, love and friendship freely without every conversation and interaction being monitored and recorded.

Whistleblowers and their faith in ordinary people

From WikiLeaks disruptions to Snowden revelations, courageous act of truth-tellers renewed the faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves. Both Manning and Snowden believed in the public’s right to know and held a view that when people are informed, they can make changes and determine their own destiny.

Edward Snowden

Faith is different than mere belief. It is not about one blindly trusting or passively accepting something. Faith is an active will that requires one to choose out of themselves to believe in something. When established media and trusted institutions failed, Manning chose to put her trust in the journalistic organization that was little known at that time.When the government’s internal mechanisms of accountability were broken, combined with the betrayal of Obama’s campaign promises and his war on whistleblowers, Snowden turned to American journalists whom he could trust by his own judgment of the integrity of their work. They placed faith not in political leaders or authority but in fellow men and women.

It is to this faith in the ability for the wise and knowledgeable public to govern themselves that fearless journalism responded. WikiLeaks, the publisher of last resort kept its promise to the source by publishing full archives with maximum political impact and bringing information back to the historical record. By doing so, it has become an enemy of the most powerful government in the world, being subjected to legal and extra-legal pressure. Through honoring Snowden’s wishes, journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman broke the story of NSA surveillance and led the Guardian’s independent journalism, making the established media fulfill its duty. In the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, when this young whistleblower was stranded in Hong Kong, WikiLeaks demonstrated its extraordinary source protection with journalist Sarah Harrison risking her own liberty to help Snowden attain asylum.

With this faith given by peers, citizens around the world who have been distrusted by their own governments and made powerless began to claim their own power. By recognizing that someone believed in them and sacrificed their lives so that they can be free, they were able to believe in their own ability to protect those they love and preserve rights that they cherish. The will to respond to this faith in one another made it possible for ordinary people to carry out extraordinary acts.

Bitcoin, Innovation without Permission

Contagious courage lit by people’s faith created a fellowship that can withstand the state violence. It began to shift the balance of power, replacing the source of legitimacy from trusted institutions to ordinary people’s trust in one another. As the network of resistance grew, new attacks emerged. Following the release of U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010, WikiLeaks faced the unlawful financial blockade imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. When this economic sanction starved the whistleblowing site, destroying 95% of their revenue, the flow of autonomy that helped the organization circumvent economic censorship came from fellow cypherpunks.

Bitcoin, as a peer-to-peer electronic cash was the holy grail of cypherpunks. With its defining feature of censorship resistance and permissionlessness, Bitcoin makes free speech an app that can be distributed across borders and used by anyone regardless of nationality, religion, race, gender or economic status. Here, imagination from computer science redeemed the reason that lost its connection to the heart, by synthesizing bits of isolated knowledge that had created separation and injustice, transforming them into a higher order of unification.

Networks of equal peers emerging around this invention opened up a new avenue of dissent in a form of decentralization. Adam Back, notable cryptographer whose work was cited in the Bitcoin white paper, described cypherpunks as “a state of mind” and explained its philosophy of “writing code” as a “proactive approach to societal change by doing: building and deploying tech – rather than by lobbying politicians or asking permission.”

This path toward decentralization was first taken by the creator of this technology. The anonymity of Satoshi Nakamoto represents the power of ordinary people. Through an act of publishing the white paper under a pseudonymous name and making the protocol open source, the mysterious author gave up ownership and simultaneously gave users control of the software, making it possible for each individual to use it as a tool to govern themselves.

What is enshrined in a piece of mathematics is wisdom of ordinary people that understands that man is corruptible, as well as perfectible and recognizes the security holes inherent in the existing model of governance that requires trust in third parties. It is the wisdom of history that teaches us how the best way to secure the system is not to have levers of control in the first place through which power concentrates, leading to despotism. With a consensus algorithm placed as a foundation, laws can be built that is more immune to man’s fallen nature. With this, idea of a government of laws, not of men can be truly realized. Governance of We the People now becomes possible, where rules of law are validated by consensus of ordinary people as opposed to elected officials having power over them.

Andreas Antonopoulos, a technologist and one of the respected figures in Bitcoin, in his talk titled “Courage to Innovate”, captured new enthusiasm and passion ignited around this technology in a phrase “innovation without permission” and connected it with civil disobedience. He reminded the audience how “almost every important innovation in history starts out being illegal or unregulated” and interesting technology started out with people who forgot to ask permission. Describing technology’s core invention as a platform to scale trust, Antonopoulos described how this is a system that makes it possible for people to make social decisions without hierarchy, whether it is government bureaucracy, corporations or any other institution. This system Antonopoulos characterized as “rules without rulers” is being built by people around the world without central coordination.

Claiming our revolutionary spirit

Our Founding Fathers, no matter how imperfect they were, brought us ideas conceived in a revolutionary spirit. The genius of the Constitution is that it makes fundamental laws and principles of government amendable. The highest law of the land preserved space for people to not accept authority imposed on them and even to revolt against it when it is necessary, by giving ordinary people means to change rules. America indeed was founded on rebelliousness and distrust of their own government, demonstrated in the Declaration that reads

“whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive… it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and institute a new Government…”

The government brought by our forebears not only allowed dissent, but depended on our rebellion. The realization of the Constitution as the fulfillment of ideals in the Declaration required individuals with a strong and independent mind. It demanded people to develop moral courage to defend these ideals against special interests of single groups or nations and any adversarial forces that try to deny them.

From the civil rights movement to whistleblowers at the frontier of digital liberation, we have seen the awakening of revolutionary spirit in people’s courageous civic action upholding the ideals of this country. The networks from below expands, converging together to build a new global civil society. Bitcoin developers around the world put their knowledge and skills together, making improvement proposals and fixing bugs, striving to meet the demands of all users.

Innovation without permission is enlivening entrepreneurship. Instead of waiting for problems to be solved by politicians or corporate CEOs, working class began to have faith in their ability to make changes, finding strength and resources within themselves. Around this currency, a new economy is now being bootstrapped, with startups and new businesses hiring people and providing them with skills and knowledge, while many other industries are stagnating.

Solutions to the crisis of representation are within us. Ordinary people, through freely associating with one another, can now give birth to the rule of a real democracy, securing Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for all.

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Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., is an essayist and author of WikiLeaks, the Global Fourth Estate: History Is Happening (Libertarian Books, 2018). Find her on twitter @nozomimagine

Left Out, a podcast produced by Paul Sliker, Michael Palmieri, and Dante Dallavalle, creates in-depth conversations with the most interesting political thinkers, heterodox economists, and organizers on the Left.  

The Hudson Report is a new weekly series produced by Left Out with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every episode we cover an economic or political issue that is either being ignored—or hotly debated—that week in the press.

In this episode we discuss the economic and political implications of the attempted murder of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. We also touch upon the long history of collaboration between Russian oligarchs and Western banks and how it fits into the larger neoliberal project pursued after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Michael Palmieri: Professor Hudson welcome back to the third episode of The Hudson report. It’s great to have you here.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here.

Michael Palmieri: So everyone who’s been following the news media for the last week or so has become–even if they didn’t want to be–pretty familiar with the case of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. He was once a double agent for British intelligence and recently there’s been allegations that he’s been poisoned by or attempted to be poisoned by Russian intelligence services. Although much of the coverage seems to be pretty breathless in condemning Russia for an attempted assassination. You seem to have a different perspective or perhaps believe that we should be looking somewhere else and the kind of larger implications of what this may mean. So can you start us off and kind of explain what you see to be going on here right now?

Michael Hudson: Well I was puzzled at first about the whole treatment of the affair of poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter because the treatment is so out of proportion–the reaction is so out of proportion–that it’s obvious that the issue is not about the poisoning itself. First of all there’s no evidence to show Russian involvement. But the important thing to realize is that even if there were a government assassination attempt, the reaction is entirely different things. It’s really about international diplomacy and NATO maneuvering for a military posturing and the reaction has no connection at all according to the poisoning, they’re only using the poisoning as an excuse to wrap a policy that was already thought of and sort through before the actual Skripal Gate occurred. I think anyone who’s seen James Bond movies knows that 07 can kill enemies. And the U.S. assassinates people all the time. It’s killed foreign leaders like the president Allende in Latin America and the whole wave of political terrorism that followed–killing tens of thousands of union leaders, and university professors, and land reformers, and the Obama administration targeted foreigners for drone strikes. Even when this kills large numbers of civilians as collateral damage.

No foreign country broke relations with Britain, or the United States, or Israel, or any other countries using targeted assassination as a policy. So this pretense that Russia has killed someone even without any evidence or with any trial is implausible on the very surface.

So, the question is why are they doing this with Russia? Why are they imposing sanctions and mounting a great publicity campaign? And I think the answer has to lie in looking at why are they doing this now. Timing is the key. So let’s step back a minute and note what seems to be out of the ordinary in the British and US and NATO reaction. For starters the sanctions are supposed to be part of a diplomatic game plan designed to counter the presumed benefits to Russia. When the United States and Britain imposed banking factions they said this is to show you that if you think you can gain we’re going to make you lose even more than you gain. What’s bizarre here is that what gives Russia’s benefit in killing an ex-British spy who has been returned to the West in a spy trade and according to the reports wanted to go back to Russia. Nobody suggested any benefit to Russia at all and obviously there isn’t any. Therefor the sanctions are independent of any benefit and hence the poisonings. And regard to the poisonings themselves, the basis of Western law is a presumption of innocence and reliance on evidence. No judgment without evidence is supposed to be given. Otherwise it’s a rush to judgment or a “He Said, She Said” affair.

And the second principle of Western law is that both sides get to present their case. But in the Skripal affair, which is now being called Skipal Gate, there is no opportunity for Russia to present its case. The Russians have not been given samples of the poison that could exonerate them. They haven’t even been admitted to see Mr. Skripal, although he’s a Russian citizen, or his daughter. who’s now awake and recovering. The British will not even let Skripal’s relatives come to Britain. So the reaction is so out of proportion that obviously there’s a disconnect. This is a double standard and there’s a pre-existing prejudice here. So I think instead of retaliation there seems to be a pre-determined strategy of attack on Russia and an attempt to isolate its economy.

And the question is: why is this occurring? And what are its aims? I wondered at first is it payback for the U.S. failure to use ISIS and Al-Qaeda as America’s foreign legion to destroy Syria and replace Assad with a pro U.S. ruler? Grab its oil? The frustration about Crimea’s vote to join Russia?

There certainly seems to be an economic cold war that’s being escalated and the intention is to isolate Russia but instead it’s driving Russia, China, and Iran closely together. So what we have is a threat to isolate Russia if it does not do certain things. And so to solve the Skripal affair you have to think – what are these things be that the United States and Britain wants? Well one thing is for Russia to pressure North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program which of course it will only do if the United States demilitarizes the peninsula.

Another U.S. aim is to have Russia withdraw from Syria. President Trump announced last week that he wanted just to pull out of Syria. But the question is if he pulls out what will Russia do? Are these sanctions a stick saying, well OK, you see what we can do to hurt Russia but we’ll drop all these sanctions if you withdraw Russia from Syria. Maybe another aim is to get Russian concessions not to back eastern Ukraine.

Michael Palmieri: Professor Hudson I was just going to ask you… if you were to turn open the pages of The New York Times or other mainstream press pages that have been giving this quite a bit of coverage… one of the reasons that they may have used chemicals, and I’d love to see your take on this, is simply to send a chilling effect throughout the world. It wasn’t just that they wanted to kill Mr. Skripal but that they wanted to send some kind of message. That seems to be what a lot of the press coverage is stating the reasons are for Russia to conduct something like this.

Michael Hudson: The United States when it wants to isolate a country traditionally accuses them of chemical warfare. This goes back to George Bush’s accusation that Iraq had chemical weapons of mass destruction. We know that was a lie. It goes back to Obama’s claim that Russia and Assad were using chemical weapons in Syria. So I think when they say that Russia or Assad or Iraq is using weapons that’s part of to generate a fear that is supposed to be met by military preparedness and defense.

Now last week President Trump repeated what he said when he was running for president. He wants European countries to pay more of the military cost of NATO. He’s been saying this for over a year. And I think this is what this Skripal affair is really all about. The aim by using something as emotional as chemical weapons is to create an anti-Russia hysteria that will enable NATO governments to pick up much more of the military budget than they are now doing from the United States. It will force all their countries to pay 2 percent of their GDP to the U.S. Military-Industrial-Complex. So essentially, the Skripal affair is to frighten populations to enable NATO to try to push through more military spending on the U.S. defense industry and to pick up more of the cost of NATO, when the populations are going to say… wait a minute, the European Eurozone budgets can’t monetize a budget deficit… if we pick up more military spending for NATO than we’re going to have to cut back our social spending and we can’t have both guns and butter. So the Skripal is to try to soften the European population, to frighten it into sayin… yes we better pay for guns, we can do without the butter. So you’re having there exactly the fights that happened in the United States in the Vietnam War in the 1960s. And I think there’s also an attempt to use these accusations as a means of employing sanctions to disrupt Western trade with Russia and China by blocking insurance companies such as Lloyd’s of London from insuring shipping and other transportation. Banks saying we’re not going to give you these services anymore, Russia. And the parallel sanction would be to block U.S. banks.

Michael Palmieri: Yeah actually I wanted to jump in here because I mean the irony certainly isn’t lost for anyone who can recall about a year ago to the month. There was a pretty interesting article and a series of articles released by the Guardian which pretty much demonstrated that billions of dollars were moved out of Russia in what they called a “global laundry mat operation” to anonymously owned U.K. companies and banks with Lloyds playing a large role, Barclays, and a host of others… I even believe Citigroup and Bank of America were involved as well. These were actual documents that pretty much proved this kind of operation going on. And it seems that when it occurred there…there didn’t seem to be as much of an outrage nor as much of a concern of painting it as something as important. So can you comment on exactly what that was, and what seems to be a common pattern of these larger banks collaborating with Russian oligarchs?

Michael Hudson: Since 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved the capital outflow to the West has been about twenty five billion dollars per year. That means a quarter of a trillion dollars in a decade and half a trillion dollars in 20 years. And the outflow has been continuing until recently at 25 billion a year. Just in the last two weeks you’ve had in the paper the kerfuffle about the Latvian banks that were vehicles for Russian money laundering… as if the West was shocked to find out that they were actually laundering money for Russia. That’s why Latvian banks were established! Already before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1988 and 89, Grigory Luchansky, who worked for the University of Latvia in Riga, became the vehicle setting up Nordex as a way for the KGB and the Russian military to begin moving its money out of Russia. Billions of dollars a year through the various Latvian banks for the last 25 years. The main business of Latvian banks has been to receive Russian deposits and then move them into the West either into British banks or into Delaware corporations. I was research director and economics professor for the Riga Graduate School of Law for some time -maybe six or seven years ago – so I dealt with the Latvian government, with a prime minister, with bank regulators regularly, and they explained to me that the whole purpose of Latvian banks was to encourage Russia capital outflows to the West. And from the United States point of view, this was a way of draining Russia. It was the idea of pushing neoliberal privatization on Russian utilities, natural resources, and real estate and saying… first of all, privatize these public assets like Norilsk Nickel and oil companies like Khodorkovsky… and the only way you can make money now that you’ve privatized them, you have them in your hands, and the only way you can cash out since there’s no money left in Russia is to sell them to the West. And so that basically they sold them to the West while accumulating huge embezzlements through false export invoicing, moving the money into British banks primarily, and that’s why you see the Russian kleptocrats buying very conspicuous properties in London and bidding up the price of London real estate.

Now all of this has drained Russia tremendously and the United States by threatening to stop the banks drain, and in fact, to begin grabbing the assets of Russian kleptocrats. What’s the effect? The Russian kleptocrats are now frightened and are moving their money out of England, out of the United States, out of Delaware corporate relations, out of the Cayman Islands or wherever they have it back into Russia. So while there are sanctions against U.S. banks giving money to Russia. You have this huge dollar inflow and sterling inflow back into Russia that Russia is using to build up its gold stocks and all of this. So it’s a hilarious example of trying to hurt Russia by threatening the oligarchs, but actually stopping the capital outflow and that’s occurring as a result of privatization.

Michael Palmieri: Wow. Certainly not a take that I’ve heard laid out anywhere that I’ve been reading. And that’s why we have you on the show Professor Hudson, so thank you again for giving us this very nuanced and certainly different insight.

Michael Hudson: Well I’m glad we have a chance to talk about the news.

In rankings of the U.S.’s best urban public transportation systems, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, and New York usually hover at the top. At the bottom are smaller and poorer cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Omaha, and Oklahoma City. The overall takeaway is no surprise: well-resourced cities have better public transit systems than their more economically distressed counterparts.

For people with physical disabilities, this poses a dilemma. Because many disabilities preclude walking long distances and/or driving, and because accessible private transportation options are often expensive, access to public transport is critical for many disabled people to get around. But the cities that are most financially equipped to build and maintain fast, time-reliable public transit systems are those with great clusters of wealth, high-salaried work, and high-octane economic activity in general. And today, an American city with those characteristics is also guaranteed to be gentrifyingand aggressively displacing less affluent residents. Since disability is strongly correlated with poverty – as both a cause and consequence of financial hardship – this means that many disabled people increasingly can’t live in the cities that would best accommodate them.

San Francisco and D.C. have the money for ramps, elevators, and other accessibility infrastructure. The problem is that people who use that infrastructure increasingly don’t have the money for San Francisco and D.C. This situation – in which the people who most need public transit are the least likely to have access to it – stems from a set of neoliberal structures and policies that have left cities more subservient to capital than ever.

For people with disabilities to get to work, visit the bank and post office, and otherwise participate in public life, they need high-quality, accessible public infrastructure. But to achieve that, we need to do more than just monitor compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We need to re-center urban politics around social need rather than corporate profit – which means replacing the balkanized and ever-dwindling social-program patchwork with a more universal and robust system of social provision. In other words, to achieve full equality for people with disabilities, we’ll need to fight capitalism.

The Neoliberal City

There’s a strong correlation between poverty and disability. Nearly half of prime-age adults who live in poverty have one or more disabilities, far above the national average, and the poverty rate for working-age people with disabilities is nearly two and a half times higher than for those without disabilities. The reasons are complex, but suffice to say that causation runs in both directions: being poor can increase the likelihood of becoming disabled, and being disabled can increase the likelihood of being poor.

Not all people with disabilities are poor, however, and in practice they face different problems depending on their class positions. About a third say inadequate transportation is a major problem for them; of those, the majority make less than $35,000 a year. Transportation becomes less of an issue as respondents ascend the income ladder: more money can buy private transportation options, like a taxi or Uber, while poor people in general face longer commutes than the affluent.

Yet, even as they find themselves particularly dependent on quality public transportation, the higher incidence of poverty among people with disabilities means they’re also especially vulnerable to gentrification and displacement. As a result, they find themselves boxed out of the very metropolitan areas most likely to have the money for fast trains, good bus coverage, working elevators, and other accessible infrastructure.

Meanwhile, as federal grant programs for infrastructure projects get the axe under austerity budgets, cities need to attract investment financing on their own. That’s turned municipal governments into desperate fundraisers overly dependent on the whims of mobile capital. Low tax rates, years-long tax abatements, generous subsidies and giveaways, and favorable zoning laws and building codes are just a few of the public policies municipalities are using to goad corporations to set up shop in their cities. And those policies, in turn, result in gentrification and displacement.

For giants like Amazon and Google, courtship from capital-hungry cities represents a powerful form of class leverage. But for the poor living in these cities – the disabled frequently among them – the same leverage functions as class warfare.

From Each According to Their Ability

Right now, a city’s ability to attract business investment is the primary determinant of its ability to fund quality public transit. This arrangement gives capitalists structural leverage over cities and their working-class inhabitants, and they can use this that leverage to wrest pro-corporate policies from municipal and state administrations – policies that often result in urban gentrification and displacement.

But there’s nothing inevitable about this situation. If federal funds raised from progressive income, corporate, and capital-gains taxes were distributed to all cities regardless of their ability to court and appease capital – based, for example, on population – cities would be in a stronger position to fend off the kind of pro-capitalist, pro-gentrification local politics that spring up in the absence of secure public funding streams.

The lesson is that achieving equality for people with disabilities means combating the hypercompetitive, sink-or-swim, profit-driven economic system that governs the life of our cities. It means building a world where resources are distributed according to social needs, not capitalist prerogatives. In other words, it means socialism.

*

The last terrorist-held bastion of East Ghouta to the east of Damascus city center, Duma, has been devastated by a chemical weapons attack that has killed at least 70 people.

The majority of the victims were women and children.

However, characteristically and typically, the mainstream media have immediately blamed the Syrian military for the dreadful attack even before investigations can occur. Their sources?

The White Helmets and Jaish al-Islam.

Let’s first deal with Jaish al-Islam. The media have used Jaish al-Islam for information on the attacks, but how can a group who openly and proudly publish photos of them caging women to be used as human shields as they launch endless mortar and rocket attacks against civilians in Damascus be trusted?

Or how can this same media trust reports coming from a terrorist group whose founder and former leader openly praised Osama bin Laden, the same person blamed for the famous 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 US citizens?

So with it established that Jaish al-Islam are a radical terrorist group who praise Bin Laden and have no qualms in using women as human shields, why is the possibility that they could have been responsible for this latest chemical attack considered?

It was reported by journalist Sharmine Narwani who was on the ground in East Ghouta just last month that the Syrian Army liberated “Eastern Ghouta farmlands between Shifouniyeh and Douma and discovered a well-equipped chemical laboratory run by Saudi-backed Islamist terrorists. Not a single Western reporter showed up to investigate the facility.”

Her report goes into further details and provides photos of the laboratory. Why is it such a far fetched idea to the corporate media that the terrorists could have conducted this latest atrocity?

Then, the second and quoted source for the reports are the White Helmets. I am not going into detail why they are an unreliable source as this has already been done in great detail by other journalists such as Vanessa Beeley.

However, it must be questioned why the White Helmets who claim to be neutral only operate in areas controlled by terrorist organisations such as Jaish al-Islam and Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front, or why their members often change uniforms between the white helmet and militant uniforms.

So we come to the terrible conclusion that the corporate media are relying on two organizations which are ideologically inspired and/or aligned with Al-Qaeda. Yes, let us repeat that again, the main source for the corporate media are two organizations aligned with Al-Qaeda.

But does this prove the Syrian government did not conduct the chemical weapon attack? Of course it does not, but we must question why the Syrian military would resort to such a drastic measure. There was no clear strategic advantage to deploy such weapons.

The Syrian Army in a little more than a month liberated over 90% of the East Ghouta pocket with ease, so why at the final hurdle with every advantage in their favor, would they resort to chemical weapons. The corporate media portrays the Syrian authorities as acting irrationally without thought to consequences, but rather, there has been many examples where Syria could have deployed such weapons to preserve their own soldiers, but has opted not to and risked further casualties to ensure that civilians face minimal harm in any operation.

We must also question why the Syrian air force never put their alarm systems on red alert if they had conducted such an attack. US President Donald Trump has proven he is willing to conduct missile attacks against the Syrian military when mere accusations that it conducted chemical weapon attacks has occurred as the the raid on the Shayrat Airbase on April 6, 2017 just days after the Khan Sheikhoun incident demonstrates. This would be a careless move by the Syrian government, especially just days after Trump announced he wants to withdraw the US military from Syria.

It is known the deep state of the US does not want a military withdrawal from Syria; such an incident could force Trump to stay in Syria despite his openness that he does not want this.

In addition, we must also question why these attacks always seem to kill women and children and never terrorists. The Syrian military takes every precaution that civilians are not killed, so much so that the Syrian government for weeks has been trying to bring a peaceful resolution to Duma, even allowing terrorists to take up amnesty with zero repercussions for their crimes or to be transported to another part of Syria with guaranteed safety, just as their allies in Harasta and other parts of East Ghouta successfully took up.

This same terrorist group has kidnapped civilians from the nearby town of Adra, caged women to be used as human shields, openly praise Bin Laden and refused civilians to evacuate Duma, but all of a sudden we cannot think of the possibility that they gassed women and children to force an international intervention in Syria, especially after US officials have openly said they not tolerate such attacks and are willing to conduct strikes even before investigations have been conducted as the attack against the Shayrat Airbase demonstrates.

We also cannot forget that the Russian and Syrian governments in recent times have both said that terrorists in East Ghouta were preparing a chemical attack. This of course has been omitted from the corporate medias report on this latest incident.

Therefore, before blame can be assigned, we all must wait for investigations to be done. That is to say if investigators are willing to go into Duma under control of Jaish al-Islam to do their report. We know after Khan Sheikhoun, despite all the blame put on the Syrian government, investigators refused to go as it was controlled by Salafi terrorists, just as Duma is.

*

All images in this article are from the author.

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Introduction

As of April 7, nearly three thousand unarmed Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians have been wounded, over three dozens are in critical condition and at least twenty-five unarmed protestors, including children have been assassinated by hundreds of Israeli snipers and heavily armed troops shooting tank shells into crowds of civilians protesting their decades of incarceration by the racist Israeli state.

The Israeli government praised the ‘restraint and morality’ of the IDF, as did the fifty-two Major Jewish American Organizations (MJAO) who largely control the US Congress. These grotesque massacres began during the Christian Holy Week on Good Friday and Easter, coinciding with the Jewish Passover. The self-righteous officials of the MJAO and their relatives and friends broke matzos at joyful Seders as the blood of Palestinians soaked into ground at the fence containing the largest open-air prison camp in history, Gaza.

While tribal loyalties bonded the Israeli and Jewish American leaders, the politicians of the Western oligarchic electoral regimes refrained from criticizing the shocking display of brute force and even defended Israel’s cold blood mass killings of Palestinian civilians in their Gaza prison.

This paper will discuss and analyze the reasons for Israel’s willing Western accomplices and the centrality of its fifth column in the United States.

Israel’s Willing Accomplices

Because of the US veto power, the United Nations Security Council refused to condemn or even discuss Israel’s wanton slaughter in Gaza. The Secretary General of the UN meekly mentioned ‘violence’ and the need for an ‘investigation’ into the killings. The United States Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, prevented any investigation into the ongoing Israeli war crimes. She characterized Israel’s mass murder of unarmed Palestinians as ‘defensive action against terrorists’.

Both major US political parties defended Israel’s crimes against humanity and threatened critics, labeling them as ‘hypocrites’, while deflecting attention away from the state slaughter of Palestinian civilians, pointing to the behavior of the Arab countries.

With the notable exception of Bernie Sanders (image on the right), both legislative houses and the executive branch expressed unconditional support for Israel’s ongoing slaughter.

The mass media, including all the major television, newspaper and radio outlets echoed the vituperative speeches of Israel’s leaders.

All the major political lobbies in Washington followed the leading arm of the US-Israel lobby, the ‘52 MJAO’.

The key question is what explains the power of Israel to continuously commit crimes against humanity with impunity?

Clearly Israel, by itself, lacks the economic, political and media power to influence international organizations. Nor does Israel exercise sufficient ‘soft power’ or cultural influence to neutralize the tens of millions of critics around the world with any persuasive arguments . . . except in the United States.

Where does the power that protects Israel from any consequences for its brutal crimes reside?

The key to Israel’s impunity lies in a chain of command beginning with the local grass roots of hundreds of fanatical, unconditional Zionist-Israel First organizations in the US.

Every major and minor US city has local Zionist-councils who use their influence to intimidate local professional, business, political and media groups into ensuring that critics are censored and Israel’s war crimes are covered up. The tactics range from ‘friendly’ influence within local civic organizations to outright threats, bullying and slander.

Local Zionist organizations are linked to state-wide and national political and economic confederations that influence the nomination and financing of all candidates, the elected officials and the composition of editorial boards of the major media outlets.

Equally important, Zionist activists pressure and recruit leaders of civil society groups through guided propaganda tours to Israel. They enforce obedience and submission to Zionist objectives by blacklisting critics, contacting their places of employment and demanding they be fired. They employ even more repressive tactics against perceived threats to Israel’s interests, including threatening phone calls and unwelcome ‘visits’. At the commanding heights of the Zionist pyramid, hundreds of billionaires and millionaires finance and influence the corporate mass media, the political parties and conservative and liberal religious and educational institutions and demand adherence to Israel’s agenda.

The Zionist power configuration (ZPC) parlays its influence far beyond its dues-paying members, who, in reality, comprises only a very tiny fraction of the US population.

Wider networks extend and magnify the Zionist presence, multiplying power centers up to the highest levels of public policy making. The ideological influence of the Israel Fifth Column is concentrated on a single issue: Defending Israel and its crimes against humanity. They succeed because of their enormous impact on the US role in world politics, including Washington’s trade and military policy in strategic regions, especially in the Middle East.

The members of Israel’s Fifth Column may be liberal or conservative on a broad spectrum of domestic socio-cultural issues, (gay rights, immigration reform, racial and cultural identity, feminism, the environment, etc . . . ) while, at the same time, they provide unconditional support for Israel’s oppression, imprisonment, expulsion and massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

In fact, the Fifth Column’s primary commitment to Israel has guaranteed that the US would wage a sequence of catastrophic wars against Israel’s regional rivals and targeted adversaries – Iraq, Libya and Syria – even at enormous cost in US lives and wasting multi-trillion dollars of US taxpayers funds. This Zionist-promoted drain on the US treasury to finance disastrous wars has completely undermined any policies to address the domestic needs of US working people (which the progressive Zionists have loudly claimed to support!) The consequences have been tragic to the people of the Middle East and to the increasingly impoverished and desperate American working poor and minorities.

Israel’s power to freely murder unarmed civilians in Gaza is derived from the Fifth Column’s influence in the US. Without it Israel would have no power to block the UN from imposing sanctions, or the International Court of Justice from convening a tribunal for war crimes. Israel would not have nuclear weapons or advanced missiles to threaten its neighbors and destabilize the hundreds of millions of civilians who live in the greater Middle East, were it not for the its US-based Zionist power configuration. The nation of Israel would be ‘confined’ within internationally agreed borders and it would be forced to reverse its policy of ethnic cleansing. Israel would have to become a diverse – society based on laws, instead of a lawless, apartheid ethno-fascist police state dedicated to oppressing half of the people within its declared and occupied territories.

The key to Israel’s power is found in its leaders’ command structure, which dictates policy to its tribal diaspora. Their overseas accomplices command the regional, state and local organizations to relay “the message” and apply various means to enforce it. Dissent by Jews and non-Jews are swiftly and viciously punished, adherence to Zionist dictates is rewarded.

Opponents are ostracized, blacklisted and slandered – without recourse.

Ideological conformity or submission to the Zionist agenda ensures employment, promotions and political and judicial appointments. No Jewish critics of Zionism, no matter how prestigious, have ever received senior political or economic appointments. Even academic careers are systematically derailed. This is well understood by everyone in the US, especially by upwardly mobile ‘silenced critics’.

The so-called ‘uniformity’ of the Zionist-Jewish community is maintained by the stick and carrot. The leading stockbrokers, bankers, casino and media moguls know they can hold liberal or conservative opinions on US domestic issues but must support or remain silent on Israel’s war crimes or else . . . suffer reprisals.

Even critics are careful to temper their dissent by blaming ‘both sides’: They equate the 25 murdered civilians in Gaza with the IDF snipers who complain of fatigue from repeatedly pulling the trigger.

Conclusion

Defending Palestinian rights and finally stopping the massacre(s) in Gaza requires taking on the Israel-Zionist chain of command in the United States. First and foremost, it requires opposing Israel’s corrupt and spineless apologists in the US Congress, who have consistently supported the policies of Israel, taken Israeli-Zionist money, submitted to Zionist blackmail and sent thousands of American troops to their deaths to support Israel’s interests in the Middle East. It requires taking on the local Zionist boosters, including the thugs and blackmailers, as well as the local ‘respectable’ elite.

The prestigious Israel First crowd at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elite Ivy League universities just celebrated Passover. Meanwhile, the thuggish enforcer of Zionist expansion, a former nightclub bouncer, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (image on the left) praised the IDF snipers who murdered Gazan school kids, saying they “deserved commendation“ (FT, 4/2/18 p. 3).

Not a single US Congressperson raised a critical voice against the grotesque brutality of Lieberman fearing the Fifty-Two Presidents of the Major Jewish American Organizations. The 52 respectable presidents endorsed the wounding of nearly three thousand unarmed Palestinian civilian protestors, who never even crossed from their horrific mass prison into the Zionist state of Israel.

To support a meaningful protest one must shame and name the Zionist 5th column close at hand, because they are politically responsible for making sure that US political leaders submit to Israel’s agenda and guarantee total impunity and indeed praise for all the brutal ‘Liebermans’.

Zionist tribal organizations and leaders, their networks and organizers who ‘commend’ the IDF killers need to be named, exposed and confronted.

The US enablers, who protect, promote and defend Israeli war criminals are Zionist psychologists, lawyers, journalists and experts who can talk at great lengths about ‘Jewish ethics’ but who have never shown a shred of decent human compassion and solidarity for the victims in Gaza.

The issue of Zionist crimes resonates across the social spectrum.

Prominent progressive working-class leaders, like Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the British Labor Party, are routinely slandered as anti-Semites for speaking publicly about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Leading Zionist spokespeople have launched a vindictive media campaign to destroy Corbyn and prevent a courageous politician from leading tens of millions of British workers in their struggle for social justice.

In the United States, Zionists organize to slander any and all popular leaders engaged in the struggle for social justice, labor and minority rights if they dare to speak against Israel’s injustice against their counterparts – workers and oppressed minorities in Palestine.

The struggle for Palestinian self-determination has a profound significance for the United States as its youth and minorities confront increasing desperation and injustice in their communities. American youth and minorities see their own struggles for justice against an increasingly oligarchic police state mirrored in the protests of Palestinian youth. Their defense of free speech (including the freedom to criticize and confront Israel’s war crimes), freedom of assembly (including the freedom to organize boycotts of Israeli products) and self-determination, mean that American working class youth must confront the oligarchy run by and for the plutocrats at home and in Israel.

*

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

Watching and listening to the 50th anniversary commemorations of the murder of Civil Rights and antiwar leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has been strikingly similar to the decades-long corporate media efforts to minimize and distort his actual legacy.

These efforts to essentially rip Dr. King out of his historical and social context are part and parcel of the overall manipulation of the perceptions surrounding the African American struggles which arose during the post-World War II period of the 1950s and 1960s.

Through every portrayal of the co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who at the time of his death was a leading proponent of the growing demands to end the Vietnam War while building a Poor People’s Campaign to reverse underdevelopment and social inequality in the United States, Dr. King is reduced to soundbites recounting the final one minute of his April 3, 1968 address at Clayborn Temple in Memphis, which is undoubtedly one of his most outstanding presentations in his public career. The final hour-long speech placed the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis that attracted King to the southern city within the framework of the worldwide movement to end national oppression and economic exploitation.

These themes ran through all of King’s addresses from early 1967 to the time of his assassination in Memphis. Editorials at the time in leading periodicals denounced the Civil Rights leader for his views on the Vietnam War. He was accused even by some prominent African American spokespersons of abandoning the racial struggle and damaging the realization of equality in the country.

King continued to articulate that genuine equality and self-determination would not be achieved as long as the government placed imperialist war, the super-exploitation of African Americans and the degradation of other oppressed groups ahead of eliminating the sordid legacy emanating from slavery and the conquest of North America by Europeans. The administration of the-then President Lyndon B. Johnson became completely alienated from King and had every incentive to liquidate him and the African American movement in general.

Just one week prior to his assassination on April 4, Thursday March 28, a mass demonstration to support the predominately African American sanitation workers seeking recognition as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1733 involving thousands of youth, clergy and union members themselves, was ended by the police responding to the breaking of windows by some of the participants. This demonstration had initially been scheduled for Friday March 22. However, an unseasonal snowstorm covered Memphis forcing organizers to postpone the general strike and protest to six days later.

Martin Luther King Jr. leads final demonstration on March 28, 1968 in Memphis

When King came to Memphis to address a mass rally earlier on March 18 at Mason Temple tensions were extremely high in the city. Mayor Henry Loeb, the brother of a businessman who owned a chain of dry cleaners and restaurants throughout the city, had refused to negotiate with the representatives of AFSCME 1733 after they walked off the job on February 12 in response to the failure of the city to adequately respond to the accidental deaths of their colleagues Robert Walker and Echol Cole, stemming directly from faulty equipment.

The Loeb administration declared that public employees were not allowed to strike. He had won injunctions against both Memphis AFSCME officials and national leaders of the union prohibiting them from engaging in industrial action.

Police had attacked a demonstration of 1,000 unionists and their supporters along Main Street on February 22 after they had failed to win a settlement on key issues before a meeting of the City Council. People were beaten, maced and arrested fueling deep resentment among the workers and city residents as a whole.

During the course of the month of March, police reports indicated that there were rocks thrown through the windows of Loeb businesses. People frequenting these establishments were taunted and threatened by others in the community.

Compounding the position of the administration labelling the strike as illegal, pressure was brought on some employees who returned to the job. Several hundred replacement employees were hired aimed at fostering discouragement among those engaged in the work stoppage.

In response strike supporters began blocking the exiting of garbage trucks to collect rubbish which was piled up throughout the city. A boycott of key businesses within the downtown area was initiated to bring to bear the full political pressure of the African American community. The two leading daily newspapers, the Commercial Appeal and Press-Scimitar, were also targeted by the movement for their biased coverage of the strike.

March 28 and Beyond

Of course these tensions came to a head on March 28 when King attempted to lead a march demanding that the Loeb administration agree to dues check-offs for AFSCME 1733 workers along with other benefits including vacation time and insurance coverage. After the window breaking and property appropriation by the people began, the leaders of the Community on the Move for Equality (COME) coalition headed by clergymen and community organizations urged people to return to Clayborn Temple, the base of the strike.

Police then began to savagely beat people on the streets. Later 16-year-old Larry Payne, a student at Mitchell Road High School, was shot to death by police in the nearby Fowler Homes Project. Overnight property damage and arson attacks prompted the deployment of several thousand Tennessee National Guard troops to ostensibly quell the unrest.

New York rebellion after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nonetheless, the demonstrations continued by the strikers and COME. The rebellion on March 28 was blamed by the corporate media on the Black Organizing Project (BOP) composed of students and working class youth agitating for more militant action. Some of these youth had the word “Invaders” written on the backs of their jackets, which the press used to stigmatize them as troublemakers.

The SCLC leader was also blamed for the property damage and arson on March 28 as well. A barrage of criticisms against King utilizing the media and the U.S. Senate was launched claiming that the Poor People’s Campaign should not be allowed to occupy Washington, D.C. since it could easily erupt into a mass rebellion at the seat of the national government.

King and COME were committed to continuing activities surrounding the strike. Another march was planned for April 8 despite the injunction handed down by the Memphis courts proscribing another demonstration under the guise of preventing violence.

After King’s assassination during the early evening hours of April 4 while he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, shock and outrage spread throughout Memphis and the country. Again attacks on property and firebombing took place throughout the night.

By Friday April 5, mass demonstrations, walkouts, and rebellions were spreading across the country. Within one week some 125 cities had been hit with civil unrest.

At the time the corporate and government-controlled media attempted to discourage the rebellions saying that MLK was a man of peace and had never condoned violence. Although this was true, the SCLC leader understood the rebellions as the voice of the unheard. His response to the escalating unrest from 1964-1968 was to advance a program demanding the guaranteeing of full-employment, a minimal annual income for everyone, the institution of national health insurance, the elimination of slums along with an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.

The Significance of King’s Legacy

Today some five decades later the notion of King as separate from the social conditions that produced him permeated the 50th anniversary events which were covered by the corporate and pro-government media outlets. In several cases a few individuals were allowed to note that the character of racial and class oppression in 2018 is just as bad if not worse than what prevailed in 1968.

What was completely absent was the continuing role of the Pentagon budget and now homeland security in the repressive apparatus of the capitalist-imperialist state. Successive U.S. administrations both Democrat and Republican maintain the interventionist policies which marred the 1950s and 1960s related to the wars carried out in Korea, Vietnam, the entire southeast Asia region, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and other geo-political regions.

These expenditures on war and “national security” hamper the ability of the government to address the crises of unemployment, under-employment, low wages, increasing poverty, the status of immigrants and the collapse of transportation, educational and environmental infrastructures, among other social problems. Tens of millions of jobs have been loss in the U.S. due to capitalist monetary and trade policies.

Chicago youth and workers rebellion after the assassination of MLK during April 1968

A revived Poor People’s Campaign is attempting to raise these issues this year. Nonetheless, a multi-pronged approach to ending war, racism, class exploitation corporate dictatorship is required to transform the existing system.

*

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

All images in this article are from the author.

José Maurício Bustani is a Brazilian diplomat who was the first director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) until he was ousted after falling out with the US government in April 2002. He was Ambassador of Brazil to the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2008 and is currently Ambassador of Brazil to France.

It was the first time in history that the head of a major international organization was removed during his/her term of office. There is much controversy surrounding the reasons behind Bustani’s removal. Bustani had been negotiating with the Iraqi government, and was hoping to persuade them to sign up to the OPCW, thus granting OPCW inspectors full access to Iraq’s purported “chemical weapons arsenal”. If Bustani had succeeded, this would have placed a formidable obstacle in the path of the Bush administration’s war plans, by removing their ostensible motive. Bustani’s supporters insist this was the reason why the US forced him out.

In an extraordinary interview with RT today (7th April), Bustani (image on the right) tells of having his family threatened by none other than newly appointed U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton back when Bolton was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control just prior to the Iraq war that led to hundreds of thousands of casualties and the destabilisation of the region.

Bustani tells RT that he had made a proposal for Iraq to join the OPCW and it was only a shock to the Americans “because they had plans already to take military action against Iraq.”

Bustani continues:

“It was obvious that everything (chemical weapons) had been destroyed and that there was nothing left for Iraq to be accused of in terms of still possessing chemical weapons.”

Jose Bustani was then asked by the then Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton to resign. Bustani refused.

“Bolton then came to the Hague to my office and he said you have to resign and I give you 24 hours. This is what we want”

Bustani objected on the grounds that he was elected by all members states of the OPCW, not just the U.S.

Bustani alleges that Bolton physically threatened members of his family if he did not comply and immediately resign.

“If you don’t there will be consequences, there will be retaliation – we know where your kids are.”

Bustani confirmed that his two sons were in New York at the time and is clearly becoming uncomfortable recounting the story for this interview.

Bustani ends the interview with the words

“he is not a man you can have a dialogue with.”

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

According to the London Times, “Sergei and Yulia Skripal will be offered new identities and a new life in America in an attempt to protect them from further murder attempts,” adding:

“Intelligence officials at MI6 have had discussions with their counterparts in the CIA about resettling (them), offer(ing) new identities,” according to an unnamed senior Whitehall official.

They’re both conscious, improving markedly, regaining strength, perhaps enough to be discharged in the coming days or weeks.

If the above scenario is accurate, it’s a scheme to put the Skripals into the equivalent of America’s witness protection program – not to safeguard them from nonexistent Russian threats, solely to silence them and hamper truth-telling on the incident, the Big Lie about fabricated Kremlin responsibility for whatever happened maintained.

Sergey is a UK citizen. A separate scenario has daughter Yulia being granted asylum in Britain, perhaps secreting them both under new identities.

The Sunday Telegraph said they could be given witness protection in Britain, perhaps round-the-clock police protection under new identities.

The Daily Mail said Sergey Skripal’s Salisbury home may be demolished – to eliminate any evidence exculpating Russia for the affair, it failed to explain.

Sergey’s niece Viktoria was denied visa permission to visit her relatives in Britain – on phony grounds of failing to “comply with the immigration rules.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blasted the decision, calling it “a complete and utter disgrace (under) such extraordinary circumstances.”

Sergey and Yulia are Russian citizens. Yet its consular staff were denied access to them.

Clearly US and UK authorities want information about the Skripals controlled.

Now conscious and able to speak, they’re no doubt being fed rubbish claims of Russia wanting to do them in.

They only know what they’re told – so far at least kept unaware of their use as geopolitical pawns, a Russia bashing scheme on top of numerous other false accusations against the Kremlin.

Will the US/UK scheme work? Can the Skripals be kept from access to information showing Russia had nothing to do with whatever harmed them?

Will the Kremlin let the incident pass and move on? Will it press for truth and full disclosure or back off – choosing instead to seek improved East/West relations, an exercise in futility if this approach is pursued!

*

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

While thousands of unarmed protesters marched to fight for their freedom and rights, the IDF tweeted,

“Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.”

How much blood will this viciousness shed before justice is served?

See our selection below and repost to your blogs and websites, share on social media accounts, forward to mailing lists.

*     *     *

Defending Palestinian Rights: The Gaza Slaughter of Palestinians Supported by the U.S. Congress and Major Jewish American Organizations

By Prof. James Petras, April 08, 2018

As of April 7, nearly three thousand unarmed Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians have been wounded, over three dozens are in critical condition and at least twenty-five unarmed protestors, including children have been assassinated by hundreds of Israeli snipers and heavily armed troops shooting tank shells into crowds of civilians protesting their decades of incarceration by the racist Israeli state.

Israelis Gather by Gaza Border to Watch and Cheer as Military Uses Live Fire Against Palestinians

By Daily Sabah, April 08, 2018

A disturbing image of young Israelis sitting by the Gaza border, cheering and watching as bombs fall on Palestinians just a few miles away has evoked widespread condemnation as it circulated on social media.

In Wake of Gaza Massacre, Israeli Leaders Should be Prosecuted for War Crimes

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, April 07, 2018

On March 30, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers shot 773 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, killing 17 and wounding 1,400. Twenty remain in critical condition. The protesters were marching to demand the internationally mandated right of return of refugees to their cities and villages in what now constitutes Israel.

Israeli High Crimes Without Punishment. “Bloody Friday” Followed Week Ago Massacre: 9 more Gazans killed, over 1,000 Injured

By Stephen Lendman, April 07, 2018

IDF spokesman Rone Manelis lied, claiming soldiers thwarted dozens of attempts by Palestinians to enter Israel through the border fence – disgracefully adding they opened fire “in accordance with the rules of engagement.”

After Deadliest Day in Gaza Since 2014: “Accountability” for the Killing of Protesters

By Medical Aid for Palestinians, April 07, 2018

These casualties resulted from a violent response by Israeli forces to mass peaceful protests along the border on ‘Land Day’, where Palestinian refugees – which comprise approximately 70% of Gaza’s population – were demanding the realisation of their right to return, as enshrined in international law. Israeli forces used live ammunition, as well as rubber bullets and teargas against unarmed protesters who had gathered near the border in several locations across Gaza.

Israel’s “Security”: The Official Mantra to Defend Israel’s Crimes against Palestinians

By Rima Najjar, April 06, 2018

To achieve such “security”, Jewish Zionist forces had first to depopulate historic Palestine of its indigenous non-Jewish Arab population. That happened early on when an estimated two-thirds of non-Jewish Arab Palestinians were ethnic-cleansed, their villages erased from the face of the earth.

The Good Friday Massacre: World…We Are All Palestinians, Now!

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, April 06, 2018

Eighteen more Palestinians were unapologetically murdered this past “Good Friday”  by the Israeli military. They were unarmed. They were on their own land. They were desperate.  They screamed their desperation as they marched. Then, they shouted their daily reality of personal horrors too close to Israel’s attention. So, they were killed.

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A disturbing image of young Israelis sitting by the Gaza border, cheering and watching as bombs fall on Palestinians just a few miles away has evoked widespread condemnation as it circulated on social media.

In the photo, shared by Nir Dvori a reporter at Israeli Channel 2 television news on Friday, seven young Israeli adults are seen smiling and waving at the cameras as they sit on an observation tower in Nahal Oz, outside the fenced-off Gaza strip.

Many likened the scene to an “outdoor cinema,” calling it disgusting and barbaric to watch as the Israeli military uses live fire and excessive force against Palestinian protesters.

It is so, so dangerous for Israeli civilians outside the fenced off Gaza strip that they came out to watch their military pick off protesters. https://t.co/z3vwJetNN4

— (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) April 6, 2018

The scene is unfortunately not unfamiliar.

Back in 2014, some Israelis in the border town of Sderot were spotted drinking, cheering and posing for selfies or recording videos with their smartphones while black plumes of smoke rose from behind them across the border, with each bomb the Palestinian death toll mounting.

Nearly 500 Palestinians were injured, 33 seriously, by live fire and rubber bullets on Friday in the second mass border protest in a week, and many more suffered from tear gas inhalation. Meanwhile, at least nine Palestinians were killed, and 1,070 others were injured during clashes with Israeli forces, including five who are now in serious condition. A well-known Palestinian journalist was among the dead, Gaza officials said.

Twitter photo by @ndvori

The deaths brought to at least 31 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since last week.

The border rallies, which began last Friday, kicked off a six-week demonstration that will culminate on May 15. That day will mark the 70th anniversary of Israel’s establishment — an event Palestinians call the “Nakba” or “Catastrophe.”

Demonstrators are demanding that Palestinian refugees be granted the “right of return” to their towns and villages in historical Palestine from which they were driven in 1948 to make way for the new state of Israel.

Israel, for its part, has deployed thousands of troops along the fraught border with Gaza, vowing to use deadly force against anyone who threatens Israel’s “security infrastructure.”

The US media is now priming the global public for US intervention in Syria following alleged “chemical attacks” carried out in the remaining pocket of US-backed militants in Douma, just northeast of Damascus.

This follows comments made by US President Donald Trump just 3 days ago in which he claimed he had instructed the US military to prepare for a withdrawal from Syria.

US forces had illegally invaded and have since occupied Syrian territory for years, with the Washington Post in its April 4, 2018 article titled, “Trump instructs military to begin planning for withdrawal from Syria,” placing the current number of US troops at approximately 2,000.

The Washington Post also claimed that:

President Trump has instructed military leaders to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as soon as possible and told them he wants Arab allies to take over and pay for stabilizing and reconstructing areas liberated from the Islamic State, according to senior U.S. officials.

However, just days after President Trump expressed a supposed desire to leave Syria, allegations of Syrian government chemical attacks on Douma have provided not only the perfect pretext to delay any withdrawal, but to in fact justify a US-led military intervention directly against the Syrian government.

While some have attempted to portray this as “Trump vs. the Deep State,” it is in fact a textbook example of US deception described in US policy papers – a deception President Trump played a central role in creating.

Feigning Withdrawal Before Greater Conflict is Documented US Policy 

In the 2009 Brookings Institution policy paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF), everything from supporting terrorists in a proxy war to staged provocations and full-scale war were planned in excruciating detail.

Included among the US policy think-tank’s schemes was the description of a deception similar to the one now playing out in Syria.

The paper would state (emphasis added):

…any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.

For Syria, the “offer” was a US withdrawal and Damascus and its neighbors “given” the responsibility to humanely end the conflict and stabilize the region. The “rejection” inviting the US to intervene is the staged chemical attacks in Douma the US is now citing.

Regarding staged provocations, the Brookings paper mentions them as well, claiming (emphasis added):

...it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)

Nothing could be more “outrageous” or “deadly” than using chemical weapons on civilians.

That such allegations of a chemical attack already served as a successful pretext for US military aggression in the form of cruise missile strikes across Syria under President Trump before, is precisely why the Syrian government wouldn’t have carried out such chemical attacks then, and most certainly would not carry them out now – especially if the US was allegedly seeking to exit Syrian territory.

Chemical Weapons Good For Only One Thing: A Pretext for US Aggression 

The Syrian military with the support of Russia and Iran, have soundly defeated US-backed militants across Syria with conventional weapons. The only significant territory Syria has yet to retake is that being occupied by the US and NATO-member Turkey.

As it has been mentioned before, the extensive use of chemical weapons during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War – by the US military’s own assessment – proved such weapons to be highly ineffective and inferior to conventional weapons.

Added to the fact that the US has sought to use the deployment of chemical weapons as a pretext for direct military intervention in Syria toward long-sought after regime change in Damascus makes the likelihood that Damascus is using chemical weapons all the more impossible.

There is also the fact that Syria has already turned its chemical weapon stockpiles over under a Russian-brokered deal which was overseen by the United Nations itself.

Reading through the 2009 Brookings document, the US has gone through all possible options prepared for Iran – but against Syria – several times over, but to no avail. Even the prospect of Balkanizing Syria appears tenuous. An attempt to revisit accusations of “WMDs” yet again, signals desperation across Western policy circles.

For those who have invested hope into President Trump – his role in a documented scheme to deceive the global public and make US military aggression appear as a last resort after apparently withdrawing from confrontation – is sufficient evidence that it is not “Trump vs. the Deep State,” but that “Trump is the Deep State.”

It should be remembered that recent appointments to President Trump’s administration included prominent pro-war advocates including John Bolton and Mike Pompeo – both eager for a US-led military intervention in Iran which makes President Trump’s recent calls for a withdrawal from Syria all the more questionable.

Terrorists are Gassing People to Advance Washington’s Agenda 

It is also worth noting that US-backed militants in Douma are essentially gassing people to advance the West’s political agenda. This comes as the UK’s case against Russia regarding the alleged assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal and his daughter unravels.

Considering Washington and London’s history regarding false accusations surrounding chemical weapons – as well as policy papers plotting to stage provocations, the US and UK emerge as the prime suspects in serial crimes against humanity involving so-called “weapons of mass destruction.”

It is becoming abundantly clear that in addition to the West fueling the very terrorism it claims to be fighting globally, it is also the West that poses the primary threat to the globe regarding the use of chemical weapons.

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This article was originally published on Land Destroyer Report.

Tony Cartalucci is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The leaders of the U.S., U.K., France and other Western countries have said they are positive that Putin’s Russia poisoned the Russian double agents living in Salisbury, the Skripals, using a deadly, military grade “Novichok” nerve agent which is of Russian origin.

But this claim falls apart upon inspection …

Specifically, the Times reported:

Stephen Davies, a consultant in emergency medicine at the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, said that no one other than Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey had needed treatment.

Dr. Davies explained:

Further to your report (“Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment”, Mar 14), may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning. Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed. None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved.

Indeed, all three of the three patients being treated for poisoning – Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal, and Detective Nick Bailey – have largely recovered.

Why is this important?

Washington’s Blog spoke with two experts on chemical weapons to find out if the facts on the ground bear out the claim that the military nerve agent Novichok was used.

Initially, the man who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, Francis Boyle – Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, with a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University – told Washington’s Blog:

If this had been military grade nerve agent, the Skripals, the first responder policeman, and many others in the town of Salisbury where the Brits say it was spread around, would have been dead almost immediately. Yet Yulia is now apparently recovering. How did they get over to the park from their home when they should have been dead on the doorstep from contacting the agent on the doorknob?

And, Captain Doug Rokke – former Director of the U.S. Army’s Depleted Uranium Project and an expert on chemical weapons, with a PhD in health physics – told Washington’s Blog:

It is impossible to put liquid nerve agent on a door knob without trashing the entire area  100  200  meters and more radius  for a long time.  weeks months or more.

Any person who touched the so called exposed person would go down too.

You need level 5 ppe [i.e. personal protective equipment] and full decon [i.e. decontamination]… per fm 8-285  that is what we developed.

***

In other words … it is pure b.s.

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The only partially useful antidote is mark 1 kit- atropine, diazapam, prodoxyaline chloride.. no good on vx tabun soman novachuk multiple 7 .

Anyone who went near this would go down anyone who touched them would go down.

Full decon is required but useless. the area for blocks around would be hot deadly.

***

If it was there you can still find it now with m8, m9, m256 kit. And anyone coming close would get zapped

And Former British intelligence officer, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, and Rector (i.e. Chancellor) of the University of Dundee Craig Murray writes:

The Novichok family of nerve agents are instant acting. There is no such thing as a delayed reaction nerve agent. Remember we have been specifically told by Theresa May that this nerve agent is up to ten times more powerful than VX, the Porton Down developed nerve agent that killed Kim’s brother in 15 minutes.

But if it was on the doorknob, the last contact they could possibly have had with the nerve agent was a full three hours before it took effect. Not only that, they were well enough to drive, to walk around a shopping centre, visit a pub, and then – and this is the truly unbelievable bit – their central nervous systems felt in such good fettle, and their digestive systems so in balance, they were able to sit down and eat a full restaurant meal. Only after all that were they – both at precisely the same time despite their substantially different weights – suddenly struck down by the nerve agent, which went from no effects at all, to deadly, on an alarm clock basis.

This narrative simply is not remotely credible. Nerve agents – above all “military grade nerve agents” – were designed as battlefield weapons. They do not leave opponents fighting fit for hours. There is no description in the scientific literature of a nerve agent having this extraordinary time bomb effect. Here another genuine Professor describes their fast action in Scientific American:

Unlike traditional poisons, nerve agents don’t need to be added to food and drink to be effective. They are quite volatile, colourless liquids (except VX, said to resemble engine oil). The concentration in the vapour at room temperature is lethal. The symptoms of poisoning come on quickly, and include chest tightening, difficulty in breathing, and very likely asphyxiation. Associated symptoms include vomiting and massive incontinence. Victims of the Tokyo subway attack were reported to be bringing up blood. Kim Jong-nam died in less than 20 minutes. Eventually, you die either through asphyxiation or cardiac arrest.

If the nerve agent was on the door handle and they touched it, the onset of these symptoms would have occurred before they reached the car. They would certainly have not felt like sitting down to a good lunch two hours later. And they would have been dead three weeks ago.

But that’s not what happened.

Postscript: Even if the poison were Novichok, that means absolutely nothing.

This would not be the first time that governments framed other countries in order to demonize their enemies.

Featured image: A US Navy marine mammal handler and a bottlenose dolphin who has been trained to detect explosives at a Naval base in California. Though DARPA has said it won’t use intelligent mammals and endangered species for the project, the claim is suspect given the US Navy’s use of dolphins and sea lions to detect underwater mines. (Source: Lt. David Bennett/US Navy)

The US military has plans to create genetically modified marine organisms that can be used as underwater spies for the military. Fantastic as this idea may seem, the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA (or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has actually launched a new program that aims to tap into the “natural sensing capabilities” of marine organisms, who are highly attuned to their surroundings, to track enemy traffic undersea.

The project out of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, called the Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program hopes to use everything from bacteria to large fish to find underwater vehicles by recording the creatures’ natural reactions to these vehicles and sending the data to an outside base.

A recent press release about the program said it would “study natural and modified organisms (emphasis added) to determine which ones could best support sensor systems that detect the movement of manned and unmanned underwater vehicles.”

“Beyond sheer ubiquity, sensor systems built around living organisms would offer a number of advantages over hardware alone,” the release said, explaining the program’s reasoning. “Sea life adapts and responds to its environment, and it self-replicates and self-sustains. Evolution has given marine organisms the ability to sense stimuli across domains — tactile, electrical, acoustic, magnetic, chemical, and optical. Even extreme low light is not an obstacle to organisms that have evolved to hunt and evade in the dark.”

The program is currently seeking proposals that would help capture the responses of marine organisms — both natural and transgenic — to the presence of underwater vehicles, interpret those responses, and relay them to a network of hardware devices.

It is unclear right now as to how this will happen. DARPA has stated that “intelligent mammals” and endangered species will not be used in the experiments or in the program itself, but it has been vague as to how it defines “intelligent mammals.” Questions as to the involvement of dolphins and other marine mammals arise, particularly since the US Navy, is notorious for holding nearly 100 dolphins captive in San Diego, conducting experiments on them and using them for military purposes.

PALS concept art. Though the program states that it won’t use transgenic organisms without appropriate environmental safeguards, it’s highly likely that a GM marine organism, if released into the ocean, will interbreed with a regular one of its kind. (Source: DARPA)

Though the program states that if any modified organisms are used it would require “appropriate environmental safeguards to support future deployment,” it is highly likely that a genetically modified marine organism released into the ocean will interbreed with an organism of the same (or similar) species whose genes hadn’t been tinkered with.  And as the animals breed with each other, they will cause more and more of their kind to adopt the genetically modified traits. With time, the entire ocean could be filled with GM creatures and that could lead to changes in marine ecosystems that we can’t even begin to anticipate.

DARPA has said it would create and test modified species strictly in “contained, biosecure facilities.” But as this VICE report points out, “to actually deploy modified species, the military would have to release them into the wild, where they could drive out, outeat, or outbreed unmodified species.”

Another worry with genetically modified sea creatures is the likelihood that humans will consume them. With the amount of fishing and bycatch that currently happens around the world, it is inevitable that many people will end up consuming the GM animals. (While there has been no conclusive evidence linking GM food to negative health impacts, concerns remain that GMOs may cause yet unknown genetic changes, allergies, or other serious harm to human health.)

These concerns apart, forcing these creatures to be spies for the US military is inherently, morally wrong. No animal should be a tool for the military. Animals should not be treated as objects that can be altered and used for their natural gifts. They should be valued what they are, and for being a part of ocean ecosystems.

It is clear that DARPA needs to stop this program. As the creators of the program, it has the ability to discontinue it and place its resources and abilities in more beneficial areas of technology. It needs to understand that the repercussions of a program like this will affect more than just the military; it will hurt the ocean, its creatures, and the people who depend on it.

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Maia Danks is an intern at the International Marine Mammal Project. A senior at Berkeley High School, she’s interested in animal conservation, especially marine conservation, is a certified scuba diver, and loves to travel to see animals around the world. She’s also a ceramic artist, and founded Octopus Ceramics.

The scandal with the poisoning of the former GRU agent Sergei Skripal is gaining momentum. Meanwhile, absolutely innocent creatures suffered because of the diplomatic war between the UK and Russia.

Remember that two dead guinea pigs and a black Persian cat in a critical condition were found in the ex-spy’s home. Then the cat was taken to the Porton Down chemical weapons lab (not to a veterinary clinic which would be more expected). In the laboratory, chemists made a weird diagnosis, which they described as a “distressed state”. The cat was euthanized. Its body, as well as those of the two guinea pigs, were immediately incinerated which was confirmed by the British government.

Shortly after the Russian Embassy in London posed the question on what happened to the animals that Sergey Skripal kept in his Salisbury house, the British side, first in an unnamed leak and then as a DEFRA comment, said that

“when a vet was able to access the property, two guinea pigs had sadly died. A cat was also found in a distressed state and a decision was taken by a veterinary surgeon to euthanize the animal to alleviate its suffering”.

This is, however, the sort of answer that brings about still more questions. Regarding the dead guinea pigs and the malnourished cat, it is said unofficially that they were taken to the Porton Down facility and incinerated there. But it remains unclear if their remains were ever tested for toxic substances, which would constitute useful evidence, and if not, why such a decision was made.

The fact that the animals were locked inside the house for several days suggests that the police did not access the alleged crime scene, which would be very unusual for such a high profile investigation. Such treatment of pets is also hardly consistent with UK laws on animal cruelty and comes as a blatant disregard for Mr. Skripal’s rights as the owner and companion of the animals.

Overall, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the animals have been disposed of as an inconvenient piece of evidence. It is also to be noted that, according to Mr. Skripal’s niece Viktoria, there were 2 cats, not one, in the house – and the whereabouts of the second one is still unknown.

Nevertheless, the way how the UK police treat animals is absolutely awful and unacceptable. Moreover, even their bodies could cast some light on this case. Instead, we have even more questions than before.

Firstly, why were the pets sealed in the house with no food and water? How is it possible to imagine such a mockery and careless attitude towards animals? British officials must be held accountable for their decision to leave the pets inside the sealed-up house without any nutrition. In fact, their actions can be classified as animal abuse, which resulted in their death.

Secondly, no matter how cynical this may sound, any living organism remained at the place where the potential poisoning occurred could indirectly help the investigation process. You don’t even need to be an expert in chemistry to understand it. The use of such a potent substance as Novichok agent might have affected the pets as well. Unfortunately, we will never know this as their bodies were eliminated. No one even asked for their owners’ permission for that.

It seems like the British side is trying to cover up the tracks and destroy all the evidence. In Hollywood movies, criminals act like this when a detective tells them their version is not valid. Draw your own conclusions.

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Afghanistan was invaded on October 2001, unlike a usual US invasion in the month of March which marks the onset of U.S. invasion and occupation of a litany of victim nations.

The events leading to Afghanistan’s occupation adequately convinced the Americans and rest of the world thanks to the enormity of the September 11, 2001 calamity {which was blamed on Afghanistan) and the US subsequently received a green light from the most NATO members to accompany. But Iraq’s invasion was more of a hasty plot that was implemented unilaterally by the US [and the UK] and is still under fire from global observers and media.

The same parties that backed the incursion on Afghanistan stood counter to the pre-emptive, legally dubious and globally controversial US invasion of Iraq in 2003. A US resolution in November 2002 stated that Iraq was in material breach of its 1991 Gulf War ceasefire obligations relating to the possession of weapons of mass destruction.

At the time, the UN weapons inspectors, led by Hans Blix, returned to Iraq and reported increased Iraqi cooperation and disclosure of information. But Bush and Tony Blair rejected Blix’s findings and, despite failing to secure a second UN resolution authorizing the use of coercion, the US and the UK launched the invasion on March 20, 2003.

Two weeks before the invasion of Afghanistan, the underpinnings of the war on terror were laid out in President Bush’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001. Bush declared that,

“we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism… Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists… any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the US as a hostile regime”.

This established the framework for attack on a country [Afghanistan] which was accused of “sheltering terrorists” [Al-Qaeda].

Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech in January 2002 accused Iraq, Iran and North Korea of supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. In 2002, the administration focused increasingly on defining the concept of a pre-emptive war on Iraq.

In the wake of the attack on both countries, the US under the installed governments reformed the economic and political laws there and wrote new constitutions. The manipulation in laws transformed both states’ economic system, only meant to adapt the economic environments to the demands of their corporate globalization policies.

In Iraq, new laws reduced taxes on all corporations by 25 per cent. The ultimate goal was to open Iraq to US oil companies.

Afghanistan’s economy is labeled by many economists as “bogus” due to its heavy dependence upon US funds. More like the US itself, the gulf between labor/lower class and rich people in Afghanistan is widening and the balance is sliding towards the rich.

The conceived poverty in Afghanistan is an evil scheme – not a natural phenomenon – to push people into the ditch of destitution and a state of inevitability to embrace extremism and take up arms for a viable armed conflict against the Afghan Government.

Aimed to throw dust into the eyes of the global audience, the Western Generals and the puppet governments’ functionaries construct false statements.

Recently, US Army General John Nicholson pointed his finger at Russia and Iran for having allegedly supported the Taliban in Afghanistan. There is a brief video clip advertised numerous times on best-selling Afghan TV channels only to deliver Afghan viewers that Russia has armed a Taliban faction in southern Helmand province.

Tajikistan recently dismissed the allegations by the US Generals over Russia’s support of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

If Russia is poised to give an account of the Helmand case, then the US should also come forward to explain the crimes committed at its hand in Afghanistan in the past sixteen years.

Whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, there is nothing to pose about the “failure of the US in the war”. The US is indeed winning everyday that is not visible for many.

Iraq’s war is relatively more in news than the protracted war of Afghanistan. The latter’s armed strife is justified by the growing foothold of the Taliban group as well as deadly suicide blasts in the capital Kabul that kill dozens each time. But for Iraq’s war, there is no longer evidence of a “fabricated” enemy to declare war on.

Opponents of the Iraq war often highlight the importance of oil when explaining why the invasion took place. Oil is the lifeblood of Iraq. It accounts for about 99% of all government revenue.

For decades before the invasion, the Industry had been in the hands of the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company which was famous for its “Arab oil for the Arabs” slogan. In September 2003, the US-led Iraqi Administration announced that foreign investment was acceptable for the rest of the economy but not for the oil sector.

Oil was most plentiful in the supergiant fields of Rumaila and near Kirkuk that, in terms of profits siphoned off to occupiers, is identical to Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province that has been the heartland of poppy cultivation throughout the US invasion since 2001 and account for more than 90 per cent of the global drug trade .

The oil industry can cause or exacerbate conflict in multiple ways: competition over shipping lanes and pipelines, oil-related terrorism, petro-aggression, and resource scarcity in consumer states are all potential sources of international conflict.

In the US, public debates about the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars, all sides focused excessively on the question of whether the US was fighting for possession of oil reserves.

The two occupied nations still host the US forces in different numbers. The justification for continued stay is described as not losing the ground to the Islamic State or Taliban; this is while around half of Afghanistan’s territory is controlled by militants.

The mainstream media often recalls the years 2011 and 2014 as worst turning points for Iraq and Afghanistan respectively when the US pulled out the forces.

The media and Western speakers rhetorically express remorse over withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq in these years and reassert their permanent stay mostly when the legitimacy of the US presence is questioned internationally.

In February 2018, Pentagon and State Department officials said that the US troops can stay in Iraq and Syria for indefinite period of time. While the US military’s footing in Afghanistan and Iraq has proved disastrous, it has encroached into Syria amid its so-called war with the ISIS.

Days after the US’s announcement of stay, Iraq’s parliament demanded the government to set a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign troops stationed in the country to “help fight Islamic State”. This is something the US doesn’t want and proactively seek to fabricate new threats.

Iraq’s parliament could at least daringly pronounce that the US forces should leave, yet such a stance is far off the possibility in Afghanistan’s parliament or other powerful institutions as the US’s presence is deemed legalized by almost all Afghans.

This comes as following the ISIS defeat last year, the (former) US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in October 2017 that American forces would remain in Iraq to fight the Islamic State group, even if the government in Baghdad requests the US leave. The US is well predictive of the future events so that it already conveys its message to target folks.

In Afghanistan, no drastic need is seen for the US Administration to increase the number of troops unless new war policies require it to multiply the soldiers. However, the deadly bombings during 2017, mostly in Kabul, have frequently been picked up by the US officials to justify the influx of fresh batches of reinforcements as well as a longer stay of US forces. 

Studies show that nearly half million Iraqis have died between 2003 and 2013, followed by the even more fatal years of fierce battle against the Islamic State that signifies the time with the highest death toll. Only since February 2018, more than 900 civilians have died in the war.

Afghan civilians bombed from the ground and the air by both Taliban and international forces find nowhere to hide. The UNAMA and news reports each time emerge with higher number of civilian causalities. The civilians here are not always falling prey in the crossfire between Afghan/international forces and militants or mistakenly air raided by drone or helicopters; they are intentionally struck with a variety of arms.

In the modern war’s definition, if there is no enough causality in a war, it may not amount to a conflict that may require the stationing of as much troops and bases as it exists today in Afghanistan.

In 2016, the US-based Brown University’s comprehensive study placed the overall number of Afghan death toll between 2001 and 2016 at 111,000 people and injured at 116,000 people.

I have lived my whole life under the notifications of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and their Doomsday Clock. It is currently set a two minutes to midnight after many years of variance, some as far away as seventeen minutes. After reading Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine, it would probably be more appropriate to move it forward to ten seconds before midnight. A combination of two main factors – global climate change and nuclear weapons launch on warning risks – puts not only humanity but virtually all species under threat of extinction.

Admittedly it is just a metaphor. Obviously if you are reading this at least a several midnight’s worth of ten seconds has gone by without destruction. In consideration of global climate change however it is already past midnight for those killed by the various episodes of storms, droughts, floods, and food shortages accompanying this phenomenon. While global warming is assured by humanities output of carbon dioxide, the chance that some form of humanity will survive into another era does exist.

That chance drops to zero for nuclear war. Unlike global warming, nuclear war for most people, safely cocooned within their fuzzy entertainment distractions and/or the toil of daily life, has no daily impact or reminders. Arguably the vast majority of humanity does not truly understand the ultimate impact of a war anywhere going nuclear, a frame of mind the established powers in the west are quite content to see continue.

Turnabout, the same applies to global climate change. The more distraction and obfuscation and dissimulation (lying, concealing, ignoring) on climate change, the better it is for the corporate-military sector to continue on its wealth harvesting ways. These events will have smaller effects on my lifetime, with increasing problems for all successive generations, a slow turning up of the heat so that every new generation sees it as the new normal. That is, unless somewhere along the line, sooner or later, a tipping point is reached that flips what we now consider a rather benign climate into a threat to most of humanity.

The two are seriously linked together.

Climate change increases the chance of strife between different groups, of mass migrations, mass starvations, devastation of the resources that mankind needs to survive on. With the loss of oxygen producing capabilities and the toxic factor of too much carbon dioxide survival will be difficult. It could result in more wars, arguably already having an influence especially in the Middle East and the Sahel, more wars leading to the possibility of more aggressive wars pitting nuclear nations against other nations nuclear or not.

Nuclear war’s factors for the survival of humanity include the obvious initial destruction, the secondary and lingering radiation effects, and the predicted nuclear winter. This does not include the inevitable melt down of the four hundred plus nuclear plants scattered around the world, four hundred possible Chernobyls, Three Mile Islands and Fukishimas. War planning is such that the U.S. has first strike options ready ‘on the table’, at the same time that Russia has signalled that it has a new generation of both offensive and defensive weapons – created mostly after the U.S.’ abrogation of the 1972 Anti-ballistic missile treaty. China is calculated into U.S. plans, somewhat casually as China is unrealistically still considered to be much less advanced technologically. Initially U.S. war planners understood that hundreds of millions could die in a nuclear war without knowing about the consequences of nuclear winter. Once the latter idea was discussed and considered almost inevitable after such a war, that toll rises to include most of life on earth. Nuclear winter is global climate change writ large and sudden across the face of the earth.

Geopolitics dooms us….?

The dominant factor in all this is the U.S. geopolitical view of global domination – hegemony – under the guise of a neoliberal economic outlook and a neoconservative political perspective. It is a society based on consumer consumption promoted through a lifetime of advertising propaganda in the material sense, the pretentious and unrealistic “rugged individualism” of Reagan and Rand, and in the emotive ideas of being the world’s indispensable nation. To support the material side, the corporate world – ranging from the military industries, the financial corporations, through the large media outlets – supports the ongoing wars and subversions around the world in order to harvest the resources and use the cheap labour required to keep the domestic economy going.

This is aided and abetted by their many sycophantic allies. Europe has essentially been occupied and subordinated since WW II, for sure after NATO was created and even more so with its eastward expansion. Canada is essentially the 51st state of the union. Australia copies and parrots the U.S. line especially across south and east Asia. Japan and South Korea are similar to the European countries having been rebuilt through autocratic dictatorship or subordinate business class governments, along with large remaining contingents of U.S. military personnel. Other countries, many of them theocratic dictatorships (Saudi Arabia and the members of the Gulf Council), have worked out a plan of support with the U.S. in order not to be attacked as others who have rejected U.S. dominance have suffered subversion and direct attack (Iraq, Libya, and Syria as prime examples).

The U.S. is not immune to certain forms of blowback. Israel is the tail that frequently wags the U.S. dog and has a powerful lobbying position inside Congress. Similarly the Saudis have a large lobby, looking for means to ensure their security but foremost to ensure the circulation of the dollars they earn. If they needed to, both countries would ditch the dog in order to turn to another benefactor that suits their circumstances and desires.

The dollar dooms us….?

Without the power of the dollar, the U.S. would collapse geopolitically. It is not the fact of the dollar’s ubiquitous use, its power to bribe and coerce, but its use as the global reserve currency. In order to trade globally, the institutions of the Washington consensus (i.e. those institutions supposedly functioning independently around the world – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, SWIFT, BIS) have created a financial environment in which the US$ reigns supreme. Only the U.S. can ‘print’ its money, only the U.S. can carry a trade imbalance because of the dollar’s global necessity, and only the U.S. can carry such a whopping debt load without collapsing. Only the U.S. can run such a large military budget (trillions of dollars if all aspects such as the nuclear sites and security measures are added in). All this since the U.S. took itself off the gold standard and its limitations.

The real threat to the dollar would be its lack of use, something Russia has indicated it wishes, but even more strongly China has outright stated that the era of the US$ as the sole global fiat currency is drawing to a close. While China has been noted as a trade competitor/challenger, it is Russia that has become the neocon ‘other’, the country that is to be maligned and discredited regardless of evidence and truths. Russia has large resource wealth, a strong agricultural sector, a renewed manufacturing/technology sector, a relatively stable economy (in spite of sanctions and regardless of U.S. media reports otherwise), and a large nuclear arsenal – and now a tested and experienced military force used in an asymmetric war. Having overcome the depredations of the Yeltsin U.S. shock doctrine era, Russia has rebounded to become once again a major power on the geopolitical stage. Russia and China have been pushed together as a result of U.S. actions threatening both economically and militarily.

Moral and intellectual cretins doom us….?

The philosophical meanderings of geopolitics, its hubris, arrogance, wilful ignorance, combine with the power of the dollar and the power of the military to create our existence on the edge of midnight. What has saved us in the past has been the few individuals with enough intelligence and enough moral certitude while being in the right place at the right time that has prevented any nuclear catastrophe to date. Those kind of people are few and far between in the political military mindset of western leaders as it is almost incumbent upon them to at best be unable to think critically and morally. The vetting process through the western ‘democratic’ systems ensures that only the mentally damaged, the mentally unstable, those easy for the deep state to manipulate, ever get to be in leadership roles.

It does not matter a whole lot if a Canada’s blowhard government with its sycophantic support of U.S. foreign policy and its carefully crafted Russophobia rising from Chrystia Freeland’s warped mind calls for actions against Russia or China. However the current turnstile residents of Washington’s cuckoo nest – while simply continuing and aggravating all previous U.S. government’s war mongering – should chill anyone to the marrow. As of today, the military is well ensconced in the major positions of unelected power, while the likes of chicken-hawk neocon John Bolton circle around looking for carrion.

Trump himself is an arrogant, narcissistic, ignorant and readily manipulated leader. His unscripted speaking only demonstrates the inability to put coherent thoughts together in order to formulate a plan, at the same time highlighting his lack of any moral sensibilities. Given that, it is the people he has brought into the White House along with those already on the same trajectory as his “fire and fury” comments that are the big concern, the nuclear war concern. I am not sure how they do it, but somehow in their minds a first strike nuclear war is winnable, a small scale tactical nuclear strike is containable, and threats will not create a response.

Solutions and a pessimistic future

The solutions are easy: get rid of nuclear weapons and change our consumptive lifestyles and become highly innovative with energy technology. Simple. Except that the world that wants the simple solution has to deal with the cretins and morons that for whatever reason are able to convince the majority that they should remain in power. Part of that is achieved by providing the warm fuzzy comforts of life as cheaply as possible, blaming others when that cannot be achieved at the personal level, creating the myth of rugged individualism that it is the person’s own fault. and then, ultimately, finding and creating an enemy to redirect that anger and distract the populace from the domestic roots of the problem.

The ‘simple’ solution is blocked by a rather desultory education system, a corporate controlled media, and an ever increasing militarized police state. It is this latter that will prevent change as the current “one percenters” will not relinquish power and control without a fight, a fight that the domestic populations do not seem to have in them, nor is it latently visible. In other words, while the solutions are available to a rationale moral mind, the imperial structure is such that those minds will have little if any effect on outcomes.

The U.S. (thus the ‘western world’) will change only under two related circumstances. First would be the demise of the US$ as global fiat currency. The sudden rush of dollars returning ‘home’ and the unpayable trillions of debt would collapse the economy, and the economies of the rest of the world would suffer significantly – with a caveat that Russia and China already have in place a system of exchange separated from the previously mentioned Washington consensus. Whither then Israel and Saudi Arabia? Europe?

The next consideration then becomes whether the U.S. will go down without initiating a nuclear war and would bring the military home. China and Russia probably prefer this to be a ‘soft’ landing for the U.S. economy, without really disrupting too much of the wealth of the powers that be, allowing them to continue to reside in relative ease over an impoverished third world country and without support for a global military empire. A ‘hard’ landing, a sudden crash of the economy by either a foreseen event (e.g. the coming gold standard oil bourse in China) or some other unforeseen event might trigger a hard response as associated with all U.S. challenges as being wars (on drugs, on crime). The global set of military bases may then be put into action, into global disaster.

Approaching midnight

The world as such, the natural world, does not require that humans exist. That we do is sort of a miracle, developing from the probabilities of all the interactions that have gone before us. If we cease to exist, the planet will circle our star for billions of years without us. Yet somehow, we care. Call it whatever you want, but people strive for life, strive for fulfillment, strive for the most part to pass on a better world to our children and grandchildren. Humanity as a species is a temporary thing, but while we are here, should we not strive to get rid of that which could kill us, to move into that space that our supposedly well developed minds can create such that all of us can co-exist peacefully? It is a thin possibility, becoming thinner as the clock ticks towards midnight.

“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.

Russia introduced China to Syria during the war when the Chinese navy arrived in the Mediterranean and reached the shores of Tartous and Lattakia to send a message to America and its allies that the monolithic dominance of the world was over.

There are thousands of Chinese jihadists who fought with ISIS and al-Qaeda and Beijing was concerned, willing to see all these killed in Syria. Cooperation between the Chinese and the Syrian intelligence services was established. Damascus has a unique and a very rich bank of information about foreign fighters many countries in the world would like to have access to, since over 80 nationalities of foreign fighters were allowed into Syria in a failed attempt to topple the regime and establish an Islamic State.

But Washington is still trying to protect its position, refusing to give up on the crown of world domination it has enjoyed for over a decade and it is ready to fight against the “axis opposing the US” using other means outside Syria. The US establishment and its allies are expelling Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions on China and Iran. The US defeat in Syria is obviously very painful.

What Washington is pretending to ignore is that the world no longer believes in the US’s military muscles and that there are two potential countries, less arrogant and willing to create alliances rather than bullying weaker countries: Russia and China. These are gathering more allies against the US axis.

The US is still living in the era of 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Its strong decline continued until the arrival of President Vladimir Putin to power in 2000. Washington realised there is a new person at the Kremlin in the castle of the Tsars with a determined intention to restore the lost glory. Russia had only nuclear weapons at that time and nothing else but the will was strong for the Russian bear to wakeup from its hibernation.

Putin did not declare war on America but extended his hand and tried to build friendship or at least not enmity. But Washington saw in Moscow the potentiality to recover in a couple of decades and worked on slowing down the process or interrupting it if possible. This is why the US started to pull to its side many countries of the ex-Soviet Union which have declared independence and include these in NATO and in the European Union surrounding Russia.

China, which includes cheap labor and can clone any commercial or military technology, like Russia has perceived America’s fear of its rapid economic development and wealth. Thus, the Chinese-Russian rapprochement was mainly created by the aggressive US policy towards the two countries, and this mainly because the American concentrate exclusively on military muscle when dealing with the World.

Washington has focused its naval control over the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca, bringing back memories of its military presence during the Second World War with the attempt to tighten its pressure on Beijing. The US is aware of their naval superiority and know that China needs the sea for its commerce and for its supply of energy.

China started to protect itself by setting up the Eurasian political and economic Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in June 2001 with the goal also to focus on economic initiatives, increase military and counter terrorism cooperation with intelligence sharing. This Cooperation includes about half of the World’s total population and the states (including five nuclear states) of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan – and rejected Washington’s and Tokyo’s request to be observers only.

China has gone to the countries affected by US policy to establish a rapprochement. Further, it established the “string of Pearls” of states and islands for marine protection and encircled India, Japan and other American allies. The Indian Ocean sees the passage of 60% of the trade in oil from the Middle East, making the Straits of Malacca indispensable for China to protect. Therefore Beijing established relationships with Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, Coco islands, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and a presence in the African coast in Sudan and Kenya.

Moreover, China revived the world’s oldest overland trade route of the Han Dynasty called “the Silk Road”. The modern Chinese Silk Road will provided a link to Beijing with the world for trade expected worth one trillion dollars (for 900 separate projects). The Silk Road reaches 11 cities in Europe and others in Africa by railway and pipeline and is expected to bring together seven Asian countries under the slogan “One Belt, One Way”. It will offer gas and trade to China and will cover 70% of the planet’s population.

China is also part of the BRICS Group, which was established in 2009 and includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which account for about 40 percent of world production.

And last but not least, in 2013, China presented the Asian World Bank (AIIB) that was set up to strike America at the core and bring together 57 countries – including several European states – but excluding the United States and Japan, its staunch ally.

The Asian International Bank – with $100 billion – aims to get rid of American financial control over the world’s economy. Washington considered this move as provocative, aiming at finding alternatives to its control of the world’s economy and financial that the United States has controlled for decades without any rival.

With its superficial but continuous sanctions, Washington believes it is capable of preventing the Eurasia Union (which begins from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, including six large states containing 3/4 of the world’s energy), to trouble Russia and to bother China.

Moreover, the US was thinking of creating a “Middle Eastern NATO” to counter the “Shiite crescent” and the “Iranian threat”. This idea was destroyed following the Saudi Arabia disastrous war on Yemen  and because Middle Eastern countries are unable to unite politically, economically or militarily.

While the US is fighting and losing in Syria, most countries that rejected American hegemony are gathering together in one way or another. There is cooperation between these countries – as we saw above –  to get rid of Washington’s dominance, arrogance and destructive foreign policy.

The US believes in changing regimes and directly – or through proxies – to occupy or control countries and impose a heavy protection fee to avoid toppling Middle Eastern monarchies (like Saudi Arabia as Donald Trump said himself). The US establishment is also manipulating youth and exploiting it under the title “Freedom activists” to guide them towards failing states, allowing extremists (Libya and both Syria and Iraq) to just get away with it).

America is deploying missiles everywhere where its military bases are deployed all over the world and has never thought of using its energy and power to support the economy and peace. It is only focused  on controlling states and the sources of energy regardless of the consequences, because there is no accountability for its doing.

Failure is everywhere: Washington’s plan failed- as General Wesley Clark, retired 4-star U.S. Army general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia said – to occupy seven countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan), and its failure in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria because it underestimated the reaction to its foreign policy.

However, it has largely succeeded in planting hate among the Muslim population, turning the objective of al-Qaeda (its goal to target the far enemy, i.e. the US) and replaced it with ISIS (the goal is to target the near enemy, i.e. minorities and other Muslims), reviving an animosity between Muslims that is 1400 years old. Today the majority of the western population believes the war in the Middle East is “between Muslims. Let them kill each other…who cares?”.

While the United States is selling for $110 billions weapons to Saudi Arabia to kill more Yemenis and threaten its neighbours (Qatar, Syria and Iran),  Russia has signed 10 year contracts with China worth 600 billion dollars, and with Iran worth 400 billion dollars. Also, China has signed contracts with Iran worth 400 billion dollars. These contracts are aimed at economic cooperation, energy exchange; they promise an advanced economic future for these countries away from US dominance.

The US believes it can corner Russia, China and Iran: Russia has a 7,000 kilometre border with China, Iran is not Iraq and Syria is not Afghanistan. In Syria, the destiny of a world to be ruled by unilateralism is over. The world is heading toward pluralism.

The question remains: Is Washington prepared to accept its defeat and acknowledge that it has lost control of the world and pull out of Syria?

Elijah J. Magnier is a Senior Political Risk Analyst with over 32 years’ experience covering Europe & the Middle East. Acquiring in-depth experience, robust contacts and political knowledge in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Specialized in political assessments, strategic planning and thorough insight in political networks.

Proof read by: Maurice Brasher

If the unconfirmed reports about a possible Russian base in the breakaway region of Somaliland are to be believed, then Moscow is finally flexing its military muscles beyond Eurasia and signaling its eagerness to return to Africa.

The typically trustworthy Alt-Media information portal South Front republished the claims that have been circulating for the past couple of days about a possible Russian military base in the breakaway region of Somaliland, a development that initially caught many observers off guard but is entirely explainable in hindsight if it actually comes to pass. The report alleges that Moscow has been in talks with the self-proclaimed authorities in Hargeisa to build a small multiuse air and naval facility in the Djibouti-bordering town of Zeila in exchange for formally recognizing the region’s “independence”. The UAE is already constructing its own base in Berbera despite not officially recognizing Somaliland, but the Gulf State is a rising military power with much more money to throw around than Russia and therefore probably isn’t subject to the same conditions as Moscow would be for that simple pecuniary reason.

Somaliland Backgrounder

As a brief but incomplete backgrounder, Somaliland used to be a British colony that was reunited with its ethnic Somali brethren in 1960, after which it separated from “rump” Somalia following the overthrow of President Barre and the subsequent multisided civil war that engulfed the country. The de-facto government of Somaliland believes that Barre’s late Cold War-era anti-insurgency policy towards their region constituted what they’ve since termed the “Isaaq genocide” and therefore entitled them to secede for security’s sake. Whatever the legitimacy of this move, the undisputed fact is that geostrategically positioned Somaliland has remained functionally independent and largely peaceful since then, which Hargeisa insists should further its claim to international recognition of its independence. Mogadishu, however, maintains that the region should return back to its formal control, albeit in the newly implemented “federal” system that it says will prevent past abuses from reoccurring.

Geostrategic Significance

Somaliland, just like equally unrecognized but similarly sovereign South Yemen, sided with the UAE in the War on Yemen and now hosts an Emirati military facility in Berbera that Abu Dhabi plans to pair with its existing ones in Aden and the Socotra Islands to make it the “gatekeeper” of the strategic Bab el Mandeb chokepoint over EU-Chinese maritime trade. This process is occurring in parallel with the expansionof the Gulf Cold War to the Horn of Africa and the international militarization of the Red Sea in making the region one of the most conflict-prone hotspots in the world today. It’s with this context in mind that Russia might be considering a dual naval-air base in Somaliland just a few miles away from the US’ one in Djibouti, which if built would complement China’s own to the west of Camp Lemonnier in strategically “flanking” the Americans.

Russia’s “Pivot To Africa”

Somaliland Foreign Minister Dr. Saad Ali Shire (centre right) meets with Russian diplomat Yury Kourchakov (centre) in 2017

Russia’s possible base in Somaliland would be about much more than just spiting the Americans, as it would be part and parcel of Moscow’s intended “Pivot to Africa” that was hinted at during the end of last year following the country’s dispensation of military aid to the Central African Republic and offer by Sudan to set up a military facility on its Red Sea coast. Related to these two developments, there were also signs at the beginning of this year that any African Pivot could see Moscow relying more on mercenaries as the vanguard force in stabilizing conflict-torn countries and creating the conditions for Russia to “balance” intra-state and international affairs across the continent as a result. In this instance, Russia could potentially mediate between Somaliland & Somalia proper and then “balance” between both of them and their much larger landlocked neighbor of Ethiopia.

Ethiopia And The UAE

In connection with this, observers should be reminded of the long-running relations between Russia and Ethiopia that laid the basis for their ongoing rapprochement following nearly three decades of neglect after the end of the Cold War. Ethiopia is China’s top partner in Africa, and the recently built Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway (DAAR) is essentially an “African CPEC”. Given the military “overcrowding” in tiny Djibouti and the relatively long distance between Port Sudan and Ethiopia, Russia might have decided to build a base in Somaliland as a “backdoor” to Ethiopia, with whom Hargeisa is allied. Furthermore, Ethiopia’s joint development of a port in Berbera with the UAE, as well as Russia’s increasing relations with both of these emerging Great Powers, point to tacit economic-strategic motivations behind Moscow’s possible decision to build a base in nearby Zeila because it could “kill several birds with one stone” by strengthening Russia’s ties with all three parties.

The “19^th-Century Great Power Chessboard”

Nevertheless, any move in this direction would undoubtedly be seen as a “betrayal” of Somalia by its one-time Cold War patron despite Russia decisively siding with Ethiopia during the 1978-79 Ogaden War and “trading” Mogadishu for Addis Ababa at that time in unprecedentedly swapping regional allies with the US. Just like then, Neo-Realist calculations would be at the heart of this decision, albeit this time predicated on “balancing” the “19^th-Century Great Power Chessboard” that’s become infinitely more complex in the emerging Multipolar World Order than during the “good ‘ole days” of bipolarity. As proof of this policy in action in an African context, one needs look no further than Russia’s new policy towards Libyathat now regards Gaddafi’s overthrow as an “internal affair” despite having called attention to it as an internationally significant development in the early days of the “Arab Spring” theater-wide Color Revolution.

Concluding Thoughts

The completely unideological and interest-driven foundations of contemporary Russian foreign policy stand in stark contrast to the dogmatic narrative spewed by Alt-Media demagogues who purport that Moscow can only countenance doing the polar opposite of whatever America’s allies are, meaning in this case that Russia “wouldn’t ever” contribute (whether deliberately or not) to Somalia’s “Balkanization” by building a base in Somaliland alongside the US’ “Little Sparta” and in close proximity to the landlocked country that used to be its regional enforcer. The times have certainly changed, proving that the New Cold War is nothing like its predecessor and that the Russian Federation of today definitely isn’t anything like the Soviet Union of the past when it comes to its foreign policy “principles”. That’s not necessarily a “bad” thing, but just a reflection of the international reality in which Russia’s forced to operate if it desires to advance its interests in the face of considerable multidimensional asymmetric American pressure.

*

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.

All images in this article are from the author.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

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(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Israel considers Occupied Palestine a free-fire zone, especially in besieged Gaza.

Soldiers on Friday were ordered to shoot to kill or injure defenseless Palestinians – a high crime by any standard.

A bloody Friday followed the week ago massacre – 9 more Gazans killed, over 1,000 others injured, two dozen or more with life-threatening injuries.

In the past 8 days, at least 31 Palestinians were killed, over 6,000 injured, mostly by live fire, the death toll virtually certain to rise – the world community doing nothing to stop the carnage.

IDF spokesman Rone Manelis lied, claiming soldiers thwarted dozens of attempts by Palestinians to enter Israel through the border fence – disgracefully adding they opened fire “in accordance with the rules of engagement.”

Nothing justifies attacking nonviolent demonstrators with live fire, rubber-coated steel bullets and toxic tear gas. Israel gets away with murder and much more because the world community sits on its hands and does nothing.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres disgraced himself like earlier, saying

“I particularly urge Israel to exercise extreme caution with the use of force in order to avoid casualties.”

Arab-Israeli Knesset member Haneen Zoabi demanded accountability “for (Israeli) crimes against Palestinians,” adding:

“Popular resistance is the only way that the Palestinians can free themselves” from repressive occupation.

She urged “millions of Palestinians to march to Jerusalem,” adding “we cannot do this because the Israelis will kill them.”

“I am a Palestinian. I am expected to be loyal to Zionism while the only meaning of Zionism is to deny my rights and to deny my identity.”

“…Israel transform(ed) (itself) from a racist situation to a fascist situation.”

Like the previous Friday, demonstrators were several hundred meters from Israel’s border. IDF snipers killed and wounded Gazans threatening no one in cold blood.

The world’s self-styled “most moral army” is the most vicious. Given dire shortages of vital medicines and supplies in Gaza, its health ministry called on the world community to help.

Without it, greater suffering and more deaths are certain. Gaza’s health system under siege has inadequate fuel, medicines, supplies and equipment.

It exhausted its supply of over 200 essential medicines. Others are inadequate to treat the sick and wounded.

Without urgently needed world community help, Gaza’s healthcare system faces possible collapse, a dire situation gone unaddressed.

For the second time in two weeks, Washington alone blocked a Security Council statement, calling for an independent investigation of carnage in Gaza.

Palestinian ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour called Washington’s veto a “green light (for Israel) to continue (its) onslaught against the civilian population.”

On Friday evening, an IDF statement turned truth on its head, saying:

“Rioters have attempted to damage and cross the security fence under the cover of smoke from their burning tires.”

“They also attempted to carry out terror attacks and hurl explosive devices and firebombs. Our forces prevented breaches” of the fence.

All of the above is willful disinformation, Israel attempting to justify what’s flagrantly unjustifiable and illegal.

Excessive force, brutal repression, and cold-blooded murder are longstanding Israeli policies.

The world community yawns and does nothing – encouraging carnage to continue by inaction.

How many more Palestinians will die under brutal occupation? How many are too many?

*

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

The latest case pertains to Russia’s double agent spy’s Black Persian Cat that was secretly put down together with two guinea pigs found dead at Sergei Skripal’s home after the alleged poison attack.

Below is the statement of the Russian Embassy: 

“Shortly after the Russian Embassy in London posed the question on what happened to the animals that Sergey Skripal kept in his Salisbury house, the British side said, first in an unnamed leak and then as a DEFRA comment [Her Majesty’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]: 

“when a vet was able to access the property, two guinea pigs had sadly died. A cat was also found in a distressed state and a decision was taken by a veterinary surgeon to euthanize the animal to alleviate its suffering”. 

This is, however, the sort of answer that brings about still more questions. Regarding the dead guinea pigs and the malnourished cat, it is said unofficially that they were taken to the Porton Down facility and incinerated there.

But it remains unclear if their remains were ever tested for toxic substances, which would constitute useful evidence, and if not, why such a decision was made. The fact that the animals were locked inside the house for several days suggests that the police did not access the alleged crime scene, which would be very unusual for such a high profile investigation. Such treatment of pets is also hardly consistent with UK laws on animal cruelty and comes as a blatant disregard for Mr. Skripal’s rights as the owner and companion of the animals. Overall it has been difficult to avoid the impression that the animals have been disposed of as an inconvenient piece of evidence. It is also to be noted that according to Mr. Skripal’s niece there were 2 cats not one in the house — and the whereabouts of the second are still unknown.” (emphasis added)  (see complete Russian Embassy statement in screenshot below)

Scan of Russian Embassy Press Release

Below are the results of a public opinion poll. People from all around the world have commented the situation with Skripal’s pets and the results are quite interesting. The style and spelling of the original are kept.

• It seems that the British Security services did with a black Persian cat and with the two guinea pigs the same as they did with the Skripals after Sergey and Yulia’s reviving. They have just been through some stressful things lately and ‘merciful’ MI6 had to put them down in order to help to alleviate their suffering. 
• It’s as clear as day. The cat got rid of the guinea pigs and the special services did the same getting rid of the cat. The same is true for the owners of the cat and the guinea pigs. Russia banished Skripal with a shame, and the British special services poisoned him as Skripal’s life was deemed unnecessary.
• MI6 catch Skripal’s black cat. It reports that the mission completed and it pissed in the buckwheat of col. Skripal. Maybe it also questioned MI6 of being promoted. Instead, British special services put their agent, Persian cat, down telling it that the cat knows too much. But what if the cat was the very GRU agent who poisoned Skripal’s family?
• British security services cover their tracks! With all the questions and the pressure, sometimes maybe a little something slips out and the Black Persian cat was no exception. So maybe the cat will let something slip.
• Well, there are only two real explanations in the case of two guinea pigs dead and one black Persian cat deeply stressed. If they survived they hadn’t licked this notorious door handle.
• Well, that means that it was the hosts who were really licking the door handle. Maybe the guinea pigs had being caged and the cat hadn’t managed to open it. Anybody will be placed under serious stress when you are hungry; the food is before your eyes, and you unable to take it! No one could survive that! The guinea pigs, in this case, have died of fright as they couldn’t help fearing that one might eat the other.  Where are the hell all the Societies for the Protection of Animals?
• Eventually, the two guinea pigs have starved to death of natural causes.  The one cat was put down. All of them were burned down in the end. Sergey Skripal is in a coma. Yulia Skripal is recovering. “Novichok” gas has a very low performance. The British medicine has proved to be a most effective deterrent with one recovered and one put down. What are compassionate Britons! God forbid, you get under stress in London!

Featured image: The former US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (Source: Shutterstock)

The former US Ambassador to Ukraine during EuroMaidan and present chief diplomat in Greece Geoffrey Pyatt predicted that Turkey’s ties with both the US and Greece will go through what he described as “turbulence” ahead of President Erdogan’s reelection vote next year.

This ambiguous warning can be interpreted in one of two ways. The decontextualized understanding is to think that he’s hinting that President Erdogan will cynically stage various highly-publicized provocations against them in order to galvanize the electorate and appeal to nationalists, while an informed reading would be that the US plans to use Greece as a Hybrid War destabilization tool against Turkey during this sensitive time while hiding behind the “plausible deniability” of the Mainstream Media’s messaging that President Erdogan is really to blame. The second interpretation is probably the most accurate because Pyatt has proven himself to be a false flag and perception management master after his ‘success’ during EuroMaidan, so his words shouldn’t ever be taken at their face value or in ‘good faith’.

That said, there are plenty of preexisting problems between Greece and Turkey, and all that the US has to do is subtly manipulate this tense situation so that each party engages in a self-sustaining cycle of escalation in order to promote what they believe to be their own interests. This strategy aligns with the classic third-party intelligence goal of “scenario superiority”, or provoking mutually disastrous divide-and-rule conflicts like what the US has a track record of doing with the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet-Afghan one, for example. The incentivizing catalyst in this case could easily be access to energy resources such as the ones that are disputed between Turkish-controlled Northern Cyprus and the rest of pro-Greek “rump” Cyprus.

Any exacerbation of this “frozen conflict” could provoke a third intra-NATO crisis with Turkey such as the ones that the US and France already have with Ankara over their support of Kurdish militants in northern Syria, thus furthering Ankara’s fears that it’s being strategically encircled by its former allies as punishment for its developing post-coup multipolar pivot. In addition, worsening Turkish-Greek tensions could have profound energy consequences for Europe, too. The Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) being built from Azerbaijan to Italy across Turkey, Greece, and Albania could potentially have its supplies disrupted if Ankara decides to wield energy as an instrument of pressure in this dispute, thus making its competitor project of the Turkish/Balkan Stream much more attractive by comparison because of its possible Bulgarian route.

Any serious speculation over Turkey’s reliability as TAP’s transit state to the EU through Greece could be taken advantage of by the US in order to sell its relatively costlier LNG to the bloc instead. Likewise, Turkish/Balkan Stream would have to forgo any prospective plans for transiting through Greece and instead be forced to use Bulgaria as its entry point to the EU, once again making the Balkan state a pivotal energy player and returning the strategic situation back to its South Stream days when Sofia commanded an irreplaceable role in facilitating the Russian-EU energy trade. Conclusively, when bearing in mind these interconnected strategic factors, Pyatt’s warning can be interpreted more as a threat in conveying America’s intentions to provoke another Greek-Turkish crisis in order to return Russia to its erstwhile pipeline transit dependence on pro-American Bulgaria and improve the appeal of costly US LNG exports to Europe.

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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.

Fifty years has flown by for many baby boomers.

So much has transpired, and yet, the first six months in 1968 were the foundation of my current political awareness.

I was a freshman in college then, doing my best to survive in a much more demanding scholastic environment. Brooklyn College at that time was a tough school to not only get into, but to stay in. The transition from high school to college, for me, was not easy. Maybe it was the fact that for the first time, academically, the students weren’t  just ‘ walked through ‘ the curriculum. Now we had to grasp the assignments that were literally thrown at us by five different instructors. We seemed to be ‘ left to our own devices’ for the first time educationally. Ironically, this was a parallel to how I reacted to what was gnawing at me culturally. Dylan’s words were so appropriate ( weren’t they always?) that ” The times they are a changin!”

Here I was, a small fish in a college bowl of over 30,000 students. All I seemed to care about in January  ’68 was A) to get through the curriculum with passing grades, B) to play for the freshman baseball team, and C) meet girls. As an aside to this story, let me say that a few months earlier I actually decided to join the Marine Reserves as a way to delay this new college drama. Why not? I knew that the Reserves and National Guard were the last ones to ever be sent to that dreaded place called Vietnam. My neighbor across the street had a new boyfriend who just returned from what he referred to as ‘ The Nam’ and his stories scared the shit out of me! He painted a picture that was 180 degrees from the recruitment commercials and posters floating around. I figured that the Marine Reserves could make a man out of me while keeping me from having to slosh through what many called ‘ The shit’. After completing the written and medical tests  I was given my instructions to report on a Sunday morning for deployment to the  Parris Island boot camp. They told me what to pack ( not much ) and what time to report etc. On the Sunday  morning in question my dad was making me breakfast at around 6 AM when the phone rang. It was the recruiting Sergeant. He read from a communiqué from the President of the United States stating that “Effective immediately all new reserve units are hereby cancelled until further notice… Sorry son.”

Later in the month of January into early February the Viet Cong began their Tet offensive in South Vietnam. They rattled the shit out of our military as they attacked deep inside Saigon and other supposedly secure areas. Then Walter Cronkite, America’s ‘Voice of reason’ newscaster (THE most trusted media news figure at that time ) gave his famous closing statement saying in effect that the war was unwinnable. Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Democrat,  was running for president in opposition to President  Johnson and of course the war. When McCarthy, who had attracted tens of thousands of young people to his campaign, almost defeated Johnson in the New Hampshire Primary, this marked the end of LBJ’s reign. Soon after that, Robert Kennedy entered the race as well. Johnson knew that Kennedy would most likely get the nomination from him, so he gave his March 31st famous “I shall not seek or accept the nomination of my party for president…” speech. Things were changing so fast in just a few short months. Well, that was nothing…

In early April Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis to support the sanitation strike by the predominately black workers there. He then gave his famous speech that actually foreshadowed his murder, by saying that he did not know if HE would make it to the ‘Promised Land’ with them.  Shortly after that, MLK was slain while standing on the balcony of his Memphis motel. The blend of sadness and rage resonated throughout our country and most of the world. I was now just beginning to open myself up to things outside of my orbit of self interest. What in the hell was going on!? Within a little over two months, Bobby Kennedy (as we young folks referred to him) was then murdered after winning what many believed was his ‘ticket’ to the White House, the California Primary. On my FM radio station that morning they played Jackie DeShannon’s ‘What the world needs now is love as I greeted the stifling heat of late spring NYC as somber as ever. Thank goodness that I had read Jim Garrison’s Oct ’67 Playboy interview on the JFK assassination and was open to the idea of conspiracy theories. I surmised that the two killings, MLK and RFK, had to be connected to what Garrison had been investigating: what we now refer to as The Deep State’. My 18 years of political virginity had its cherry broken.

Over the years, with some pauses for business, divorce and assorted craziness, I slowly reached the plateau of understanding where I stand now. Again, to reiterate, it was those six months in 1968 that opened my eyes to what I now hold so evident: We live in a Military Industrial Empire that takes NO prisoners… only ENEMY Combatants!

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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].

Russia’s UN envoy blasted the UK’s attempt to blame the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on Moscow, describing the entire hoax as a “theater of the absurd.”

The extraordinary UN Security Council meeting was requested by Russia, following the announcement made by the secretive British Porton Down chemical laboratory, that it had not established that the Novichok nerve agent used in the poisoning was of Russian origin.

According to RT, top British officials explicitly cited the Porton Down laboratory when pinning the blame on Moscow, so following this revelation their theory started to fall apart, said Vasily Nebenzia, noting that the UK’s secret agencies rushed to help the government, producing new claims based on some “intelligence data.”

Nebenzia asked a series of questions pointing to inconsistencies of the UK’s narrative.

“I don’t even know how to comment on this. It’s some sort of the theater of absurd. You couldn’t have come up with better fake story?”

“Why did we have to wait eight years and [then] decided to [attack the Skripals] two weeks before the elections and several weeks before the world cup? Why did we release him from the country in the first place? Why do that in extremely public and dangerous fashion.”

RT reports…

The fact that the victims of the nerve agent, which is believed to be among the deadliest, managed to survive the attack has also raised serious questions, Nebenzia said. It could be explained only if an antidote had been administered to them immediately after the exposure. British officials, however, insisted that no antidote was used, since none existed in the first place. The Skripals managed to walk around for four hours after the exposure, according to the version by the British authorities, yet the police officer who found them lost consciousness immediately.

There are also different versions of how the poison was delivered, leaked and speculated in the British media.

“There are so many versions in wake of the lack of facts and evidence. House of Skripal, the door knob, flowers, buckwheat, or, in fact, the bay leaf?” Nebenzia said.

As the cornerstone allegation that the nerve agent originated from Russia turned out to be without merit, the whole narrative fell apart, Nebenzia said. Arguments that the Novichok nerve agent family originates from Russia, and therefore it was Moscow to blame do not hold water either, the diplomat added.

“We want to state urbi et orbi, Novichok is not copyrighted by Russia,” he stressed.

While the British authorities try to make fun of different theories expressed by Russia-based experts and media, Nebenzia said, Moscow does not have any version of the events due to glaring lack of facts available.

The Russian diplomat stated that the level of intellectual justification used by the UK authorities, namely by the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, “does not invoke even a smile.”

“Boris Johnson, who constantly proclaims his Russophile [nature], produces an absurd, to use the nicest word I can, absurd and immoral premise that the incident was necessary for Moscow to bring the people together before the [presidential] elections,” Nebenzia stated.

“His comparison of Russia’s Football World Cup with the Berlin Olympics of 1936 was equally immoral,” he continued, adding that unlike the Soviet Union, a large British delegation took part in those Games.

UK envoy Karen Pierce stood by her government’s firm belief that there is “no plausible alternative explanation” and that that Russia was “highly likely” behind the Salisbury incident. She called it part of a “wider pattern of irresponsible Russian behavior” and accused Moscow of constant “aggression” over the recent years.

“Russia seeks to undermine the international institutions which have kept us safe since the end of the Second World War,” Pierce said.

The two envoys also resorted to literary references in sparring with each other, with Nebenzia illustrating the British position by quoting the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who demanded “sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

Pierce retorted that another quote from the same book, about “believing six impossible things before breakfast,” suited her Russian colleague better, though it matched her own government’s case built on assertions and rhetoric.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has assessed that 15 Palestinians were killed and 1,416 injured by Israeli forces in Gaza on Friday 30 March. Out of the injured, 1,010 were transferred to hospital for treatment, including 179 children. As many as 758 people received gun shot wounds, many of these to lower limbs.

These casualties resulted from a violent response by Israeli forces to mass peaceful protests along the border on ‘Land Day’, where Palestinian refugees – which comprise approximately 70% of Gaza’s population – were demanding the realisation of their right to return, as enshrined in international law. Israeli forces used live ammunition, as well as rubber bullets and teargas against unarmed protesters who had gathered near the border in several locations across Gaza. Footage shared on social media appeared to show unarmed Palestinians being shot while walking, running away from the border, and even while praying. [Warning: graphic content]. A further 49 injuries were reported by the Ministry of Health in Gaza on the second day of protests.

No casualties were reported among the Israeli armed forces and neither does there appear to have been any threat to them or to others that could have justified the resort to widespread use of lethal force.

UN Secretary General António Guterres has called for an “independent and transparent investigation” into the killing and injuring of Palestinians. This call was echoed by the European Union’s Foreign Affairs representative, Federica Mogherini, who said

 “the use of live ammunition should, in particular, be part of an independent and transparent investigation.”

MAP supports international demands for credible investigation into the killing and injuring of Palestinians in Gaza during the protests, and where breaches of international law are identified for those responsible to be held to account. MAP echoes in particular the UN’s independent Commission of Inquiry into the 2014 Gaza offensive’s conclusion that

“Israel must break with its lamentable track record in holding wrong doers accountable.”

MAP also calls on the international community to take action to end a decade of closure in Gaza, which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has termed “collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.”

MAP CEO Aimee Shalan said:

 “This influx of casualties has occurred in the context of a health system that was already on the verge of collapse after a decade of illegal closure and de-development. MAP is doing all it can to support the provision of vital medical care in Gaza, but the international community must do more to save lives. Simply expressing sorrow or concern for lives lost is not enough – Palestinians need countries like the UK to take action to ensure international law is adhered to and the rights due to them are finally granted.”

In February, the WHO reported that 42% of essential medicines were completely out-of-stock. Electricity shortages and limited fuel for backup generators has led to services in hospitals and clinics being severely reduced, and electricity fluctuations have damaged sensitive medical equipment. More than 6,000 Ministry of Health employees have not received their regular salaries since July 2014.

MAP responded immediately to the influx of casualties, releasing prepositioned emergency medicines and consumables, including antibiotics and analgesics to local hospitals. MAP has also provided limb reconstruction surgical equipment, vital for treating the large number of lower-limb injuries resulting from the use of live ammunition. Many of these patients will need support for years to come. MAP staff and partners in Gaza will continue to monitor and respond to the immediate priorities and unmet needs.

MAP’s limb reconstruction programme is playing a critical role in the treatment of injuries. Through regular visits from a team of orthopaedic surgeons from King’s College Hospital since 2014, MAP and IDEALS have been supporting the development of Gaza’s first dedicated Limb Reconstruction Unit and the training of specialised medical staff.

The protests in Gaza are intended to continue for 45 days, leading up to the 70^th anniversary of the Nakba on 15 May. As of Sunday 1 April, protesters continued to be present close to the border.

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Featured image is from MAP.

There is no gainsaying that Afghanistan’s road to peace after 17 years of war with the US is not going to be an easy one. For one thing, the war is not over yet. For another, the invader’s agenda is not finished yet, and therefore, it continues to use different means to deny peace.

While the US, the invader, has supposedly upped its efforts to engage in peace talks with the Afghan Taliban through the (US-backed) regime in Kabul, enough evidence exists to prove that these efforts are spurious and deceptive, hiding the US’ un-finished agenda of turning Afghanistan into a permanent strategic outpost in the region, watching over the Central Asia, Russia and China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI); hence, the US’ ‘game of accusations’ , a game that previously focused solely on Pakistan but now includes Russia as well. Whereas it appears to be a coincident that the US officials had started to accuse Russia of arming the Taliban just when Russia started participating in and inviting regional stake-holders to peace talks and conferences, the ‘game of accusations’ has intensified to an extent whereby even the US sponsored talks on Afghanistan have started to fall a prey to this game. This became pretty evident before and during the recently held conference in Tashkent.

As such, while the Tashkent conference, where a number of countries were participating, had been convened to build a sort of ‘regional consensus’ on the ways and means to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, the US, which was itself the primary mover behind the conference, had effectively blocked any possibility of developing such a consensus well before the Conference took place.

It was only few days before the conference that the head of the US forces in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, gave an interview to the BBC and blatantly accused—once again— Russia of ‘arming the Taliban’ to undermine the US efforts to control the insurgency and bring the war to an end.

“We know that the Russians are involved” and are smuggling weapons into Afghanistan through the border with Tajikistan, said Nicholson in his interview. And, just when diplomats from the regional countries, including Russia, were preparing for the conference to build consensus, Nicholson went to describe Afghanistan as a template of the new Cold War between the West and Russia, nipping effectively all hopes of consensus deep in the bud, and leaving the conference just another stand-alone event of no significance.

Linking Russia’s increasing involvement in Afghanistan, which, in reality, has been primarily motivated by its assessment of the increasing presence of ISIS in its backyard, Nicholson said that Russian “activity really picked up in the last 18 to 24 months. Prior to that we had not seen this kind of destabilizing activity by Russia here. When you look at the timing it roughly correlates to when things started to heat up in Syria. So it’s interesting to note the timing of the whole thing.”

With this level of accusations being leveled on Russia by the invader itself, there remains little to believe that the invader sincerely wants to offer peace. But the question still is: was the US, with this anti-Russia mindset, really going for peace when it convened the Tashkent conference? Or was it hoping to construct a kind of consensus in the region that would support ending the war but would equally support a long-term, open-ended, US military presence as well?

It is the open-ended military presence in Afghanistan that the US is after, a presence that it can no longer impose without support from key regional players. And, within the key regional players, there are hardly any states, except India, which might support the US; hence, the US efforts to shore it up its diplomatic activity in Central Asia to not only to find support for its presence in Afghanistan but also to establish an alternative route, not depending upon Pakistan and Russia, for its military supplies to Afghanistan.

This has been recently seen with regard to considerably upped co-operation between Central Asia and the European Union, and between Central Asia and the US with regard to sponsoring new regional groupings in what has been called a “5+1” format. And even before the Tashkent Conference on Afghanistan, the EU and Central Asian representative had a meeting, which had been held four months after the most recent formal EU-Central Asia Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Samarkand in November 2017, and two weeks after an informal meeting of Central Asian Heads of State in Astana. Unsurprisingly, one of the agenda of this most recent meeting was the “role” that these states could play in bringing “stability” to Afghanistan.

However, within the US calculation, it is Russia which is engaged in a destabilizing activity in Afghanistan. Therefore, if the US and EU are trying to up the Central Asian states’ role in Afghanistan to bring the US version of stability, it logically means that the US and EU are wooing the CAS into anti-Russian regional grouping and thus build the so-called regional consensus and find an alternative supply route as well. This, in turn, is a part of sustained US diplomatic effort to lure the CAS out of the Russian and Chinese orbit.

But the US is unlikely to achieve these objectives. For one thing, Russia has a very strong presence in CAS, and out of its frustration, the US has also accused Tajikistan of smuggling Russian weapons into Afghanistan, reflecting the difficulty of cracking Russia-CAS relations. For another, the CAS states are themselves weary of the increasing presence of ISIS in Afghanistan, known as Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), which, unlike the Taliban, does want to spread into Central Asia and has also established links with the CAS-based Islamist movements such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Thirdly, co-operation with the US would mean having to bear a long-term and open-ended military presence in Afghanistan and an un-ending conflict in their backyard, likely to have strong spill-over effects.

For Central Asia States, co-operation with the US is, therefore, likely to cost a lot more than co-operation with Russia and China in bringing the war to a negotiated end. The US doesn’t want such an end, which means that it wants to prolong the war and keep Russia and China at bay, and which also means the Central Asian states becoming a party to the conflict they should not be directly involved in.

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

Featured image is from the author.

Is the Russian Foreign Ministry so brainwashed that it believes the US is a democracy?! A country in which 90%, if not more, of the people are dispossessed is a democracy?!  A country ruled by a handful of private interest groups is a democracy?!  The success of Washington’s propaganda is extraordinary. Even the Russian government believes it.

Does the Russian Foreign Ministry not understand that the always delayed, always weak, and always complaining Russian response to the latest provocation from Washington simply convinces Washington that Russia is so desperate to be accepted as part of the West that the Russian government will put up with every insult?

All the Russian government has achieved is to convince Washington that the Atlanticist Integrationists in the Russian elite will sell out Russian sovereignty in order to be part of the West.  This is why Washington’s provocations, every more absurd and insulting, keep coming. Raise the pressure on the Western-infatuated Atlanticist Integrationists, and they will move Putin aside. This is Washington’s strategy, a strategy vindicated by the Russian government’s lack of a meaningful response.

Is there no one in the Russian leadership who realizes that Russia must ignore the provocations, completely disengage from the West, and turn her attention to where the world is rising, which is in the East, not in the West, which is falling apart.  

The Russian love affair with the West is truly amazing.  The spurned lover, turned away again, again, and yet again, still persists.  The US Ambassador to the United Nations can tell the assembled body that “Russia will never be America’s friend” and that America will “slap them [Russia] when we need to,” and RT sees in these hostile, contemptuous statements hope for improvement in US-Russian relations. 

God help Russia.

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

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

The White Helmets[1], accepted and embraced by Canadian politicians, seek to convey the illusion that Western-supported terrorists[2] are “humanitarian”.  Nothing could be further from the truth, but Canadian politicians propagate the lie.

Canadian politicians accept and amplify terrorist-supporting narratives despite the absence of corroborating evidence.

Consequently, the “humanitarian intervention” lie is reinforced with a view to increasing Canada’s criminal “intervention” in Syria, which will necessarily bring more war and terrorism to Syria.

With these words, MP Iqra Khalid extols the virtues of al Qaeda’s PR front, the White Helmets:

“Mr. Speaker, I watched footage of a small boy, covered in dust, face streaked with blood, eyes baring hopelessness, being pulled out of rubble and into an ambulance. The brave people who saved this boy’s life, along with tens of thousands like him, wore white helmets, and belonged to the Syrian civil defence. It is a team of 3,700 civilian volunteers who devote their lives to helping vulnerable Syrians in conflict areas. Since 2013, 243 white helmets have lost their lives. They are in Ottawa today so MPs can learn first-hand the brave work they do in Syria, and what our Liberal government support has meant for them on the ground. Support from our government has helped them increase women volunteers in their organization and provide more services for women and children, including access to first aid. I ask my colleagues to join me in commending their bravery, their dedication, and their commitment to saving lives. They are the heroes of our time.”[3]

Similarly, with these words, MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj[4] makes the case for increased Canadian “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, presumably based upon the testimonies of visiting White Helmets members:

Unfortunately, Canadian politicians are not interested in independent evidence, which includes testimonies from Syrians recently liberated (by the SAA and its allies) from the captivity and tyranny of Western-supported terrorists in East Ghouta Syria.  This is one such testimony[5]:

Prior to the West’s criminal, dirty war on Syria, Syria was one the world’s safest countries in terms of personal safety.[6]

Instead of amplifying al Qaeda narratives, Canadian politicians should be amplifying evidence-based narratives of truth, justice, and peace.

Independent investigative journalist Eva Bartlett[7], in an interview with Lee Camp, gives an evidence-based explanation of what is really happening in Syria here:

We the people need to amplify voices of truth, justice, and peace.  Canadian politicians will not do so.

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

Notes

[1] “White Helmets/ It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” 27 February, 2017. (https://clarityofsignal.com/2017/02/27/massive-white-helmets-photo-cache-proves-hollywood-gave-oscar-to-terrorist-group/) Accessed 6 April, 2018.

[2] Tony Cartalucci, “Time to End Western Support for Terrorists in Syria: ‘Opposition’ is Entirely Run by Al Qaeda

NYT: ‘Nowhere in Rebel-Controlled Syria is There a Secular Fighting Force to Speak Of.’ “ Global Research/Land Destroyer, 28 April, 2013.(http://www.globalresearch.ca/time-to-end-western-support-for-terrorists-in-syria-opposition-is-entirely-run-by-al-qaeda/5333204?fb_action_ids=717708921601845&fb_action_types=og.likes) Accessed 6 April, 2018.

[3] Iqra Khalid, MP, Mississauga-Erin Mills,ON 29 March, 2018.(https://openparliament.ca/debates/2018/3/29/iqra-khalid-1/) Accessed 6 April, 2018.

[4] MP Boris Wrzesnewskyj, MP Etobicoke Centre, ON Subcommittee on Human Rights: Briefing on Human Rights situation in Syria. 29 March, 2018.  (https://www.facebook.com/BorysWrz/videos/10155813193413558/) Accessed 6 April, 2018.

[5] ” A woman from KafrBatna in Eastern #Ghouta recounts the suffering, fear & anxiety living under control of the terrorists.” 3 April, 2018. ( https://www.facebook.com/handsoffsyria/videos/1688592367920831/) Accessed 6 April, 2018.

[6] Mark Taliano. “Before the US-NATO Sponsored Dirty War, Syria was an Oasis of Civilization, a Secular Pluralist Nation/ Syria’s victory will be everyone’s victory.” Global Research. 25 September, 2016.

(https://www.globalresearch.ca/before-the-us-nato-sponsored-dirty-war-syria-was-an-oasis-of-civilization-a-secular-pluralist-nation/5547693) Accessed 6 April, 2018.

[7] “REDACTED TONIGHT with Lee Camp” 6 April, 2018. (https://www.facebook.com/chadi.youssef.739/videos/368224003664054/) Accessed 6 April, 2018.

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

Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and three years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes.

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

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

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“People like me are not good for big business, like for animal business, medicine business and for many other businesses.  That’s why they are discriminating and censoring us.” – Nasim Najafi Aghdam discussing YouTube

She claimed to have detested it, issuing fiery calls on her social media outlets, and asserting that this creature was demonic in its effort to limit talent, expression and the profits of others.  Nasim Najafi Aghdam of San Diego spoke with a steely confidence that certitude brings, a self-perceived clarity of thought on such topics as veganism, the right to protest and animal rights.

“For me,” she stridently told the San Diego Union-Tribune at a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protest in 2009 outside Camp Pendleton, “animal rights equals human rights.”  In Iran, she came to be known as Green Nasim, commanding a certain degree of social media heft.

On Tuesday, that mind of screened clarity manifested itself in a shooting spree at YouTube headquarters.  Three were wounded, with the sole death being Aghdam, who took her life after the bloody spray.  On Wednesday, San Bruno’s police chief Ed Barberini claimed rather laconically that the suspect was expressing her anger at “the policies and practices of YouTube.”

Prior to that, a point confirmed by a Mountain View police representative, Aghdam had been found sleeping in a car on Tuesday morning.

“Our officers made contact with the woman after the licence plate of her vehicle matched that of a missing person out of Southern California.  The woman confirmed her identity to us and answered subsequent questions.”

Nothing, according to the officers conducting the interview, suggested future intentions.

The attack showed no evident discrimination. There were no set agendas against specific employees, nor was it even clear at first instance whether those wounded were, in fact, employees.  What the alleged shooter seemed to see was a ruthless target in the abstract, a brutal tech giant that had betrayed its mission.  Aghdam’s father, Ismail Aghdam, warned police that she might well be paying the technology company a visit, so disgruntled was she.

Her personal website spoke of there being “no equal growth opportunity on YouTube or any other video sharing site”. Growth would only take place “if they want you to.”  That particular point was stimulated by a change in YouTube policies requiring that individual channels have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 “watch hours” over the previous twelve months before qualifying to run advertisements.  One of Aghdam’s channels sported 1,579 subscribers, but in failing to meet the other threshold requirements, the account was demonetised.

Other restrictions were also the subject of Aghdam’s opprobrium, who attempted over time to build up the image of the technology company as an arbitrary censor.  One video she posted received an age restriction. She railed against those “new close-minded YouTube employees [who] got control of my Farsi YouTube last year in 2016 & began filtering my videos to reduce views & suppress & discourage [sic] me from making videos!”  The result of imposing such a limit precluded the video from receiving moneys.

So we return to that same problem: the digital frontier, far from flat in its egalitarian access, is vertical, hierarchical in its hold.  Power only devolved to the mass community of users in an artificial sense, giving that charming impression that the plebs controlled the production and creation of content.

Community standards are always cited, but these are ultimately set and determined by the particular provider, cajoled in parts, reviled in others.  In YouTube’s case, such policies zero in on vulgar language, violence or disturbing imagery, nudity and sexually suggestive content, or videos portraying harmful or dangerous activities.

YouTube, as a provider of content generated by individual users, has found itself in a brutal middle, harried by a range of groups keen to limit or advance particular platforms.  The morally righteous and surveillance-minded take issue with its permissiveness, seeking controls over such content as “hate speech”; other individuals find it unduly controlling, limiting engagement, debate and speech.

Last year, its “restricted mode” setting designed to permit libraries, schools and parents filter out content deemed inappropriate to children invariably screened other sources.  The videos of gay pop duo Tegan and Sara, fell foul of the provision. Vlogger Calum McSwiggan’s video featuring his coming out display to his grandmother also became the object of digital filtering, while Rowan Ellis would suggest a “bias somewhere within that process of equating LGBT+ with ‘not family friendly’.”

YouTube’s initial response contained a steadfast denial.

“The intention of Restricted Mode is to filter out mature content for the tiny subset of users who want a more limited experience.  LGBTQ+ videos are available on Restricted Mode, but videos that discuss more sensitive issues may not be.”

Experiments by various users testing this claim suggested otherwise.

It its subsequent and hurried note was the tone of a servant to numerous lords, seeking to placate and improve upon previous erring.

“We recognise that some videos are incorrectly labelled by our automated system and we realise it’s very important to get this right.  We’re working hard to make some improvements.”

These provide cold comforts to those recipients of bullet wounds, and certainly did nothing to calm the disturbed an impassioned Aghdam, self-proclaimed as “the first Persian female vegan bodybuilder.”  But again, where the gun is a logical extension of frustrated rights and social impotence, furious redress has come to be an almost reasonable, if predictable expectation.

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

There was nothing of the Siddhartha about her.  Modest and sombre middle ways are not the stuff of revolutionary ardour.  Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s mark on history was always going to render the violent normal, the blood stain a perceived, even psychopathic necessity.  If society itself was prone to sanguinary realisations, she would oblige and flourish within its confines. 

Everyone has their take on the Madikizela-Mandela legacy, and a few are compiled in the publication The Penguin Dictionary of South African Quotations (1999).  These observations point to a terrifyingly colourful variety, a figure part saint and part gargoyle.  She was “a political figure of almost Shakespearean tragic proportions,” opined Judge Dennis Davis.  Her hands dripped with the blood of South Africa’s people, went a reflective Xoliswa Falati, who formerly knew her and claimed to have gone to prison for her.

As for those defenders of the apartheid state?  “Whenever her name was mentioned in security circles,” came that rueful assassin and former commander of the Vlakpaas counterinsurgency unit, Eugene de Kock, “a shudder went through the ranks.”

The problem with such assessments of ecstatic violence, if it be a problem, is its circular hopelessness. Is the circle ever broken to enable an escape to be forged for the peace makers?  To place her in dramatic pose and see her as Shakespearean leaves the mistaken sense that she is more dramatic than volitional, bound by destiny and text rather than consciousness and will.  It ignores another point she could be charged with: indulgence.

The biography by Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob focuses on that staple view of “women’s ability to face difficulties and misfortune with grace, tenacity and humour, and still embrace life with delight”.  Du Preez Bezdrob engages in a tendency typical in one strand of Madikizela-Mandela hagiography.  Her politics are considered secondary, even if her status is not.  Her claim, made in 2003, was that “her community involvement was not an extension of her role as a politician, but a result of the fact that she still saw herself primarily as a social worker and mother.”  Winnie, suggests du Preez Bezdrob, can be counted among “the millions of nameless women who chose to confront oppression and injustice when it is safer to turn and look the other way.”

With her passing, various South African figures insisted that she be remembered as a monumental female role model.  Consider the words of South African Airways CEO Vuyani Jarana:

“She would have loved to see young women being at the forefront of that struggle for development, building the country, building the economy.”

In the ethical spring cleaning and catharsis that was the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Madikizela-Mandela did not fare well.  Members concluded in 1998 that she was “politically and morally responsible” for various “gross violations of human rights” committed by her fashioned weapons in the form of the Mandela United Football Club. These youthful, often brutal supporters were not averse to inflicting appalling cruelties.  In the words of the TRC, she was “implicated directly in a range of incidents – including assaults, abduction and the murder and attempted murder of at least a dozen individuals.”

Activists and campaigners against the apartheid regime also found her methods hard to stomach.  Paul Trewhela, a veteran underground journalist, communist and former political prisoner in Pretoria and the Johannesburg Fort, acknowledged the crushing difficulties she faced, even as her husband of growing legend remained confined on Robben Island.

She worked with activists in Soweto prior to the school student uprising of June 16, 1976.  For eighteen months, she was a resident of Pretoria Central Prison, where she suffered spells of torture.  Then came those eight years of exile in the “little Siberia” of Brandfort.

“There is no question,” he writes sympathetically, “that she provided inspiration across those decades under the apartheid regime.  All praise to Winnie Mandela for her outstanding, exceptional courage and daring, her unrelenting defiance.”

All that said, prison, confinement and surveillance transformed her.  In Trewhela’s words, courage and defiance are never enough – even those inclined to brutality can have them.  On her return to Soweto in 1985, she busied herself with terrorising “an already terrorised people. She returned as a psychopath.”

Her exploits came back to haunt her, though she proved dismissive of them.  The child figure of Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, kidnapped along with three other youths from the Soweto Methodist Manse, featured in all its gore in the Rand Supreme Court in 1991.

Winnie’s vicious charges certainly loved their work, though some would suggest that part of their dedication was inspired by raw fear.  Stompie was murdered; Katiza Cebukhulu, another victim of abduction, was scalded by boiling water and rendered to Zambia three days prior to the trial and held for two years in Lusaka.  Cebukhulu suggested that Stompie was finished “off with a sharp, tiny object”, the coup de grace administered by Madikizela-Mandela herself.  Jerry Richardson, the “coach” of the Mandela United Football Club, supplied a different account, claiming in 1997 before the TRC that he had “slaughtered [Seipei] like a goat” under the instructions of “Mami” with shears.

Her reading of post-apartheid South Africa was a repudiation of Nelson Mandela’s softly-softly approach.  Much of this was evident in her London Evening Standard interview in 2010.  The Truth and Reconciliation Committee, designed to neutralise vengefulness in the post-apartheid trauma, was a “charade”; Mandela erred in going to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with his “jailer” De Klerk. “He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside.  The economy is very much ‘white’.”

To remember Madikizela-Mandela, then, is to remember the blight of cruelty in South Africa, the hideous distortions of a system marked by race, the barbarism of an order that feeds trauma rather than abates it.  It is also to note those jottings of courage and defiance.  It will be a difficult reckoning, for with her came a vision less of reconciliation than revenge, the spirit of which still persists with tenacity.

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

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The Good Friday Massacre: World…We Are All Palestinians, Now! 

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, April 06, 2018

Eighteen more Palestinians were unapologetically murdered this past “Good Friday”  by the Israeli military. They were unarmed. They were on their own land. They were desperate.  They screamed their desperation as they marched. Then, they shouted their daily reality of personal horrors too close to Israel’s attention. So, they were killed.

What Did Israel Bomb in the Syrian Desert in 2007?

By Ted Snider, April 06, 2018

Israel last month admitted that it was responsible for bombing a building in Syria in 2007 that it says was a nuclear reactor under construction but there are strong doubts about what the building was for, argues Ted Snider.

Israel’s “Security”: The Official Mantra to Defend Israel’s Crimes against Palestinians

By Rima Najjar, April 06, 2018

For Israel, the word “security” means the security to exist as a Zionist Jewish state on part or all of historic Palestine — to exist as a state meant to be populated by as many Jews from around the world as it could entice to immigrate there, on land and property acquired by a combination of force, subterfuge and purchase from their rightful owners, all of which to be dedicated to Jews “in perpetuity”.

“First Responder” White Helmets Reemerge as Experts in Defusing Explosives in Syria’s Afrin

By Whitney Webb, April 06, 2018

Defusing explosives and mines, as the White Helmets say they’ve done in Afrin, is normally performed by specialized military experts, not paramedic first-responders who have claimed – falsely – to have been trained by the Red Cross.

The Truth About Martin Luther King’s Assassination Peeks Through

By Edward Curtin, April 06, 2018

 A smear campaign ensued that has continued to the present day and then the fact that a trial ever occurred disappeared down the memory hole so that today most people never heard of it and assume MLK was killed by a crazy white racist, James Earl Ray, if they know even that.

The Skripal Affair: Smearing “Evidence” on a Door Handle

By Craig Murray, April 06, 2018

The second problem is that the Novichok family of nerve agents are instant acting. There is no such thing as a delayed reaction nerve agent. Remember we have been specifically told by Theresa May that this nerve agent is up to ten times more powerful than VX, the Porton Down developed nerve agent that killed Kim’s brother in 15 minutes.

On this day fifty years ago, on Thursday the 4th of April, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was brutally murdered.

He was murdered one year to the day after giving his historic speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam,” delivered on Tuesday the 4th of April, 1967. You can hear the speech in a video here.

On December 8th, 1999, a jury reached a unanimous verdict in a civil trial which commenced on November 15 of that same year.

The unanimous verdict was that certain parties, including governmental agencies, participated in a conspiracy to murder Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The entire transcript of this momentous and tremendously important trial can be read online here. The evidence that is presented in the 2,735 pages of that historic document is absolutely shocking. Every man and woman around the world should take the time to become aware of what was revealed in that trial.

Additional transcripts and interviews of witnesses, as well as other post-trial evidence and analysis, can be found in the 2016 book by the attorney for the King Family in that case (who spent decades researching and investigating the case), Dr. William F. Pepper, Esquire, entitled The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

As William Pepper explains in one summary of what he calls “the broader conspiracy”:

the conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King, Jr. extended well beyond Memphis, Tennessee, and, in fact, reached into the echelons of power at the nation’s capitol. 179.

The extent of the operation, which included the deployment of military surveillance units, sniper units, photographers, and federal task forces, in addition to other official agencies below the federal level (including law enforcement) is staggering. The evidence of a well-coordinated cover-up, which included the murder of eye-witnesses after the assassination itself, is also stomach-turning.

Equally staggering are the implications of that multi-level conspiracy to murder Dr. King, and of the coordinated and ruthless cover-up.

If one takes the time to think about what this evidence means, the implications are enormous, for every man and woman on the planet (not only in the United States).

Just as revealing is the astonishing lack of attention that this evidence — presented in a court and declared by unanimous decision to indicate a conspiracy by governmental agencies to kill Martin Luther King, Jr. — has received in the eighteen years since that verdict was reached.

To this day, the majority of the people of the united states are completely unaware of the evidence which came to light in that trial. The annual commemorations of the life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr. continue to repeat the standard narrative which blames the assassination on patsy James Earl Ray, despite the fact that the evidence presented in the trial, and additional evidence and confessions which came to light after the trial — as well as the unanimous verdict of the trial itself — completely demolishes the standard or “official” narrative.

All of this evidence — and the verdict itself — are conveniently and deliberately ignored by the media. This fact is evidence of yet another conspiracy: the control of the media. The evidence for the control of the media — and the willingness of the media to participate in what can only be labeled as outright propaganda — is made completely clear by this case of the murder of Dr. King, and the persistent refusal of the media to report on the evidence from a case that took place in 1999 which absolutely destroys the narrative which the media continue to obediently present to the public.

Dr. William Pepper, the attorney who represented the King Family in the 1999 trial, explained how the media actively began suppressing and “spinning” the result of the trial almost as soon as the verdict was reached:

A leading publicist of the government’s position and the official line, Gerald Posner, was everywhere at once. On one television show after another and with a nationally syndicated op piece, he insisted that the King family had been duped and that the trial was a farce. I was able to publish a strong rebuttal of his banal generalizations only in the Washington Post. The New York Times allowed me two hundred words to respond to a one-thousand-word piece by a former US attorney general.

What was ludicrous about all of the criticism was that none of the critics had attended the trial or heard the evidence. Of all the media professionals commenting on the case, only Wendell Stacey, the local Memphis anchorman, at the risk of his job, attended court every day. At the end, he repeatedly said he was totally convinced that the jury was right and that he had never been so ashamed of his profession.

You can read the court testimony of William Schaap for yourself, beginning on page 1,558 of the linked transcript above. Mr. Schaap’s credentials are presented for the court record on page 1,559 and include being a practicing lawyer and graduate of University of Chicago Law School, practicing law since 1964, specializing since the 1970s in military law, practicing military law in Asia and Europe and serving as editor in chief of the Military Law Reporter in Washington, as well as acting as staff counsel for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, and as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of CUNY.

William Pepper summarizes some of what William Schaap revealed in his testimony:

Half a day was occupied with the testimony of attorney William Schaap, who we qualified as an expert on government use of the media for disinformation and propaganda purposes. After providing the jury with a survey of these practices by governments throughout history in a detailed question and answer exchange, Schaap introduced the court to these practices of the United States government in other cases, or issues, where intelligence and/or national security interest were believed to be involved. A number of examples were cited. One, for example, involved a CIA propaganda story that was spread all over the world and widely believed for four years [ . . . ]. In fact none of the above was true. The story was revealed by the agent who promulgated it to be false and to have been totally concocted at the CIA station in Zaire and disseminated through the extensive worldwide agency network. Schaap revealed that his research clearly indicated that the agency alone — not to mention its counterparts in the rest of the American intelligence community — owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it had its people, ranging from stringers to highly viable journalists and editors, in virtually every major media organization. As we had seen and were indeed experiencing every day of the trial, this inevitably resulted in the suppression or distortion of sensitive stories and the planting and dissemination of disinformation. 185 – 186.

Everyone should take the time to read that summary several times until its implications can be absorbed. Indeed, it might even be best to copy it out by hand, in order to prevent the brain from skimming over it in order to avoid the implications of what is being explained. Then, take the time to read Mr. Schaap’s testimony in the 1999 trial. The fact that the media has completely suppressed and refused to report on the evidence presented in that trial, and the verdict that was reached, is very powerful evidence indeed that exactly what is being alleged above (“the suppression or distortion of sensitive stories and the planting and dissemination of disinformation”) is taking place to this day.

Nevertheless, the majority of the men and women in the U.S (and perhaps in other countries as well) continue to believe that nothing is true unless it is repeated to them by the authority-figures in the media.

I highly recommend that everyone who has not yet done so also take the time to listen to some of the interviews that Dr. William Pepper has given since the publication of the above-linked book, which are available on YouTube and on numerous podcasts. Two of those are linked in this previous post. Others can be found by searching for William Pepper on YouTube or on podcast directories such as iTunes and others.

In his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” delivered on this day fifty-one years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King said these famous words, which point to the reason that he titled the speech beyond Vietnam, because the issues he addressed went even beyond the issue of that particular war:

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past 10 years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of US military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. [ . . . ]

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Fifty-one years later, we can all see how perceptive Dr. King’s words were in that speech delivered in 1967, and how applicable they remain to this day (in part because Martin Luther King was deliberately silenced by forces who did not want that “far deeper malady within the American spirit” to be addressed in the way that Dr. King was addressing it).

One day after the verdict was delivered on December the 8th, 1999, the late Coretta Scott King and her children gave statements regarding the momentous trial and the evidence that was presented and the decision that was reached. Their statements deserve to be read in full, not only for their own sake but also because the controlled media has been allowed to use all its considerable powers to try to drown out the real message of what that verdict and that trial really tell us.

Coretta Scott King and her children gave their statements regarding the message of that trial and the evidence it presented and the verdict that was delivered. Trasncripts of those statements can be found, in their entirety, online here.

Coretta Scott King said, in part:

As we pursued this case, some wondered why we would spend the time and energy addressing such a painful part of the past. For both our family and the nation, the short answer is that we had to get involved because the system did not work. Those who are responsible for the assassination were not held to account for their involvement. This verdict, therefore, is a great victory for justice and truth. It has been a difficult and painful experience to revisit this tragedy, but we felt we had an obligation to do everything in tour power to seek the truth. Not only for the peace of mind of our family but also bring closure and healing to the nation. We have done what we can to reveal the truth, and we now urge you as members of the media, and we call upon elected officials, and other persons of influence to do what they can to share the revelation of this case to the widest possible audience.

She also said:

My husband once said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Those who continue to suppress the truth of what took place on this day in 1968 — and to suppress the truths that came to light in the 1999 trial — are placing themselves on the wrong side of that moral arc of the universe, and on the wrong side of the justice of which Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King spoke and for which they fought.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (and many others) fearlessly pursued aggressive nonviolent action in service to justice and truth and the inherent human dignity possessed as a birthright by each and every man, woman and child. It is our responsibility to continue their struggle, knowing that these principles are indeed aligned with the justice which originates from a realm beyond this material realm, and that this justice cannot be delayed forever.

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David W. Mathisen is the author of seven books about the connections of the world’s ancient myths to the stars. His website can be found at www.starmythworld.com.

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. This audacious claim was made by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in March 1991, only two months after NATO forces had rained explosives on Iraq, shedding the blood of more than a hundred thousand people.

To understand Cambridge Analytica and its parent firm, Strategic Communication Laboratories, we need to get our heads round what Baudrillard meant, and what has happened since: how military propaganda has changed with technology, how war has been privatised, and how imperialism is coming home.

Baudrillard’s argument centred on the fact that NATO’s action in the Gulf was the first time audiences in Western countries had been able to watch a war live, on rolling TV news – CNN had become the first 24-hour news channel in 1980. Because camera crews were embedded with American troops, by whom they were effectively censored, the coverage had little resemblance to the reality of the bombardment of Iraq and Kuwait. The events known to Western audiences as “The Gulf War” – symbolised by camera footage from ‘precision’ missiles and footage of military hardware – are more accurately understood as a movie directed from the Pentagon. They were so removed from the gore-splattered reality that it’s an abuse of language to call them the same thing. Hence, the “Gulf War” did not take place.

Watch | Desert Storm’s First Apache Strikes

Not long after Baudrillard’s iconic essay was published, Strategic Communications Laboratories was founded.

“SCL Group provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organisations worldwide” reads the first line of its website. “For over 25 years, we have conducted behavioural change programmes in over 60 countries & have been formally recognised for our work in defence and social change.”

Of course, military propaganda was nothing new. And nor is the extent to which it has evolved alongside changes in media technology and economics. The film Citizen Kane tells a fictionalised version of the first tabloid (or, as Americans call it, ‘yellow journalism’) war: how the circulation battle between William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World arguably drove the US into the 1889 Spanish American War. It was during this affair that Hearst reportedly told his correspondent, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”, as parodied in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. But after the propaganda disaster of the Tet offensive in Vietnam softened domestic support for the war, the military planners began to devise new ways to control media reporting.

As a result, when Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falklands in 1982, they pioneered a new technique for media control: embedding journalists with troops. And, as former BBC war reporter Caroline Wyatt blogged, “The lessons from embedding journalists with the Royal Navy during the Falklands war were taken up enthusiastically by military planners in both Washington and London for the First Gulf War in 1991.”

The UK defence secretary during the Falklands War when the use of embedded journalists was pioneered was John Nott (who backed Brexit). As my colleague Caroline Molloy pointed out to me, his son-in-law is Tory MP Hugo Swire, former minister in both the Northern Ireland Office and the Foreign Office. Swire’s cousin – with whom he overlapped at Eton – is Nigel Oakes, founder of Strategic Communications Laboratories. It’s not a conspiracy, just that the ruling class are all related.

But back to our history: by the time of the 2003 Iraq War, communications technology had moved on again. As the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt explains in the same blog, “satellite communications are now much more sophisticated, meaning we almost always have our own means of communicating with London. That offers a crucial measure of independence, even if reports still have to be cleared for ‘op sec’ [operational security]. The almost total control by the military of the means of reporting in the Falklands would be unthinkable in most warzones today.”

In February 2004, another major disruption in communications technology began: Facebook was founded. And with it came a whole new propaganda nightmare.

As the same time as this history was unfolding, though, something else vital was happening: neoliberalism.

Looked at one way, neoliberalism is the successor to geographical imperialism as the “most extreme form of capitalism”. It used to be that someone with a small fortune to invest could secure the biggest return by paying someone else to sail overseas, subjugate or kill people (usually people of colour) and steal them and/or their stuff. But they couldn’t keep expanding forever – the world is only so big. And so eventually, wealthy Western investors started to shift much of their focus from opening new markets in ‘far off lands’ to marketising new parts of life at home. Neoliberalism is also therefore this process of marketisation: of shifting decisions from one person one vote, to one pound (or dollar or Yen or Euro) one vote. Or, as Will Davies puts it: “the disenchantment of politics by economics”.

The first Iraq War – the one that “did not take place” – coincided with a key stage in this process: the rapid marketisation (read ‘asset stripping’) of the collapsing Soviet Union, and so the successful encirclement of the globe by Western capital. The second Iraq War was notable for the acceleration of another key stage: the encroachment of market forces into the deepest corner of the state. During the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to War on Want, private military companies “burst onto the scene”.

The privatisation of war

An Afghan National Police officer meets a British security contractor during a engagement between U.S. Marines of 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment and Nawa District officials in the Nawa District Bazaar, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, July 22, 2009. (Photo: U.S. Marine Corps/William Greeson)

In a 2016 report, the campaign group War on Want describes how the UK became the world centre for this mercenary industry. You might know G4S as the company which checks your gas meter, but they are primarily the world’s largest mercenary firm, involved in providing ‘security’ in war zones across the planet (don’t miss my colleagues Clare Sambrook and Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi’s excellent investigations of their work in the UK).

In Hereford alone, near the SAS headquarters, there are 14 mercenary firms, according to War on Want’s report. At the height of the Iraq war, around 80 private companies were involved in the occupation. In 2003, when UK and US forces unleashed “shock and awe” both on the Iraqi people and on their own populations down cable TV wires, the Foreign Office spent £12.6m on British private security firms, according to official figures highlighted by the Guardian. By 2012, that figure had risen to £48.9m. In 2015, G4S alone secured a £100m contract to provide security for the British embassy in Afghanistan.

And just as the fighting was privatised, so too was the propaganda. In 2016, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that the Pentagon had paid around half a billion dollars to the British PR firm Bell Pottinger to deliver propaganda during the Iraq war. Bell Pottinger, famous for shaping Thatcher’s image, included among its clients Asma Al Assad, wife of the Syrian president. Part of their work was making fake Al Qaeda propaganda films. (The firm was forced to close last year because they made the mistake of deploying their tactics against white people).

Journalist Liam O’Hare has revealed that Mark Turnbull, the SCL and Cambridge Analytica director who was filmed alongside Alexander Nix in the Channel4 sting, was employed by Bell Pottinger in Iraq in this period.

The psychological operations wing of our privatised military: a mercenary propaganda agency.

Like Bell Pottinger, SCL saw the opportunity of the increasing privatisation of war. In his 2006 book “Britain’s Power Elites: The Rebirth of the Ruling Class”, Hywel Williams wrote “It therefore seems only natural that a political communications consultancy, Strategic Communications Laboratories, should have now launched itself as the first private company to provide ‘psyops’ to the military.”

While much of what SCL has done for the military is secret, we do know (thanks, again, to O’Hare) that it’s had contracts from the UK and US departments of defence amounting to (at the very least) hundreds of thousands of dollars. And a document from the National Defence Academy of Latvia that I managed to dig out, entitled “NATO strategic communication: more to be done?” tells us that they were operating in Afghanistan in 2010, and gives some clues about what they were up to:

“more detailed qualitative data gathering operation was being conducted in Maiwand Province by a British company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) is almost unique in the international contractor community in that it has a dedicated, and funded, behavioural research arm located in the prestigious home of British Science and research, The Royal Institute, London.”

In simple terms, the SCL Group – Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm – is the psychological operations wing of our privatised military: a mercenary propaganda agency.

The skills they developed in the context of warzones shouldn’t be overplayed, but nor should they be underplayed. As far as we can tell, just as the Pentagon used simple tools like choosing where to embed journalists during the Gulf War to spin its version of events, so they mastered the tools of modern communication: Facebook, online videos, data gathering and microtargeting. Such tools aren’t magic (and Anthony Barnett writes well about the risks of implying that they are). They don’t on their own explain either Brexit or Trump (I wrote a plea last year that Remainers in the UK don’t use our investigations as an excuse for failing to engage with the real reasons for the Leave vote). I wouldn’t even use the word “rigging” to describe the impact of these propaganda firms. But they are important.

As the Channel 4 undercover investigation revealed, this work has often been carried out alongside more traditional smear tactics, and – as Chris Wylie explained – in partnership with another nexus in this world: Israel’s conurbation of private intelligence firms, a part of a burgeoning military industrial complex in the country which Israeli activist and writer Jeff Halper argues is a key part of the country’s “parallel diplomacy” drive.

(Of course, this isn’t unique to the UK and Israel. Until Cambridge Analytica achieved global infamy last week, the most prominent mercenary propaganda firm in the world was Peter Theil’s company Palantir (named after the all-seeing eye in Lord of the Rings). Theil, founder of PayPal (with Elon Musk) and an executive of Facebook, wrote a notorious essay in 2009 arguing that female enfranchisement had made democracy untenable and that someone should therefore invent the technology to destroy it. Palantir’s most prominent clients are the United States Intelligence Community, and the US Department of Defence. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie claimed this week that his firm had worked with Palantir. It’s also noteworthy that one of Palantir’s shareholders is Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, former head of the British Army, and adviser to Veterans for Britain, one of the groups which funnelled money to AggregateIQ ahead of the European referendum. Guthrie also works for Acanum, one of the leading private intelligence agencies, who, in common with Cambridge Analytica’s partners Black Cube, listed Meyer Dagam, the former head of Mossad, as one of their advisers, until he died in 2016. Again, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just that these guys all know each other. But I digress.)

Back to SCL: why are NATO’s mercenary propagandists getting involved in the US presidential election and – if the growing body of evidence about the link between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ is to be believed – Brexit?

The obvious answer is surely partly true. They could make money doing so, and so they did. If you privatise war, don’t be surprised if military firms start using the tools of war on ‘their own’ side. When Eisenhower warned of the Military Industrial Complex, he was thinking about physical weapons. But, just as unregulated semi-automatics invented for soldiers end up going off in American schools, it shouldn’t be any kind of surprise that the weapons of information war are going off in Anglo-American votes.

But in a more general sense, this whole history is exactly what Brexit was about for many of the powerful people who pushed for it. As we’ve been investigating the secret donation which paid for the DUP Brexit campaign, we keep coming across this web of connections. Priti Patel worked for Bell Pottinger in Bahrain. Richard Cook, the front man for the secret donation to the DUP, set up a business in 2013 with the former head of Saudi intelligence and a Danish man involved in running guns to Hindu radicals who told us he was a spy. David Banks, who ran Veterans for Britain, worked in PR in the Middle East for four years – and Veterans for Britain more generally is full of these contacts.

I could go on. My suspicion is that this isn’t because there’s some kind of conspiracy revolving around a group of ex-spooks. It’s about the fact that power comes from networks of people, and the wing of the British ruling class which was in and around the military is moving rapidly into the world of privatised war. And those people have a strong ideological and material interest in radical right politics.

“The most corrupt country on Earth”

Another way to see it is like this: Britain has lost most of its geographical empire. And most of our modern politics is about the ways in which different groups struggle to come to terms with that fact. For a large portion of the ruling establishment, this involves attempting to reprise the glory days by placing the country at the centre of two of the nexuses which define the modern era.

The UK and its Overseas Territories have already become by far the most significant network of tax havens and secrecy areas in the world, making us the global centre for money laundering and therefore, as Roberto Saviano, the leading expert on the mafia argues, the most corrupt country on earth. And just as countries with major oil industries have major oil lobbies, the UK has a major money laundry-lobby.

Pesky EU regulations have long frustrated the dreams of these people, who wish our island nation to move even further offshore and become even more of a tax haven. And so for some Brexiteers – this money laundry lobby – there was always strong incentive to back a Leave vote: European Research Group statements going back 25 years show as much.

But what the Cambridge Analytica affair reminds us of is that this is not just about the money laundry lobby (nor the agrochemical lobby). Another group with a strong interest in pushing such deregulation, dimming transparency, hyping Islamophobia in America and turning peoples against each other is our flourishing mercenary complex – one of the only other industries in which Britain leads the world. And so it’s no surprise that its propaganda wing has turned the skills it’s learned in towards its desired political outcomes.

In his essay, Baudrillard argued that his observations about the changes in military propaganda told us something about the then new post-Cold War era. Only two years after Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, he wrote a sentence which, for me, teaches us more about the Cambridge Analytica story than much of the punditry that we’ve seen since: “just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of capital, so war is not measured by being unleashed but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space.”

Cambridge Analytica is what happens when you privatise your military propaganda operation. It walked into the space created when social media killed journalism. It is yet another example of tools developed to subjugate people elsewhere in the world being used on the domestic populations of the Western countries in which they were built. It marks the point at which neoliberal capitalism reaches its zenith, and ascends to surveillance capitalism. And the best possible response is to create a democratic media which can’t be bought by propagandists.

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Adam Ramsay is the Co-Editor of openDemocracyUK and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full time campaigner with People & Planet. You can follow him at @adamramsay.

How preposterous! Peace Prize Laureate former Pres. Jimmy Carter publicly warns Americans (and maybe the world), “I think John Bolton is a disaster for our country,”  “Maybe one of the worst mistakes that President Trump has made … is the appointment of John Bolton…. . a “war-like figure, been advocating a war with North Korea for a long time and even promoting an attack on Iran, and who was one of the leading figures in orchestrating the decision to invade Iraq.” 

Well, let’s see. Yes, what Carter said about John Bolton is absolutely true, however Carter’s warning just reinforces the continual focus the CIA fed criminal mainstream media constantly puts on government officials to the detriment of public understanding that it is the insane investors in war whose investment interests these war provoking government officials represent.  Powerful investors in high tech weapons of mass destruction and ever more sophisticated delivery systems forced the appointments of their willing hatchet-men Bolton, Brzezinski, and Kissinger in the first place. 

Carter Appointed the Devil Himself 

Given the horrific history of Carter’s own Presidential Advisor and Carter’s silence about it, his warning against the John Bolton appointment seems hypocritical to say the least. Jimmy Carter once elected president, to some important degree for the financial efforts of infamous war profiteer David Rockefeller, appointed Rockefeller’s right hand associate, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as Presidential Advisor, who, in 1979, ‘advised’ Carter to order a CIA operation with allied secret services of both the US backed governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to arm, fund and train a hillbilly warlord Islamic terrorist army in Afghanistan to overthrown the then very popular new women liberating socialist government in Kabul.These warlords had already been ordering executions of teachers sent out to teach girl students. How did peaceful Carter feel presenting Brzezinski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom two years later. (In 1998, Brzezinski would brag openly in a French magazine interview that it was his intention to scare the Soviet Union into sending in its military help to its neighbor nation, and become entrapped.) [Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76, translated from the original French by William Blum]

Brzezinski called call for a holy war of Islam against the Soviets and the Kabul government and invite Muslim fighters into Afghanistan from everywhere and especially from Saudi Arabia, an invite which would include the CIA funding Osama bin Ladin’s participation.

After the Soviet military withdrawal and the terrorist defeat of the Kabul socialist government two years later, the most brutally savage second civil war between the American backed warlords brought even greater destruction and utter social disintegration until the restoration of peace by the arise of the Taliban (“Students” in Arabic), which founded the Islamic State of Afghanistan.  In 2001, after the 9/11 attack suicide attack by Saudi Arabians in New York and Washington, came the US invasion of Afghanistan, the murderous overthrow of its government, and seventeen years of occupation war by a coalition that has included every single nation of Caucasian population in the world.

Now back to the point of the title of this tract. Was it Brzezinski’s idea or his boss, David Rockefeller’s idea to ‘advise’ President Carter to commit the crime of attacking the government of a friendly nation, and did Carter have the option of saying ‘no, I will not commit the crime you are advising me to commit?’ We can’t ask Brzezinski, he died in 2017.

Are National Security Advisors Advised Crimes by Otherwise Peaceful Presidents Committed Consensually?

Though the cat is long out of the bag, Peace Prized Jimmy Carter, originator of thirty-nine years of death and destruction in Afghanistan, has kept an unforgivable silence. Does Jimmy really want to keep silent, when speaking out could help bring an end to the continual loss of lives. Or must Jimmy keep silent in the same way he felt he had to commit the crime, even though a President is thought to be in charge of his own conscience as well as the whole nation?

South Korean troops clampdown on citizens during the Kwangju Uprising, May 1980 (Source: iapss)

Ordering a secret attack on a friendly and smaller nation of people was surely not Carter’s own personal wish, as probably neither were the other crimes he signed his name to. Can one imagine peace loving Jimmy Carter himself wanting to give the go ahead for the Kwangiu Massacre of the student led popular uprising against military rule of General Chun Doo Hwan Chun in Korea? Chun was later was tried and condemned to death (Of course Carter wasn’t condemned to death – Carter got the Nobel Peace Prize). Or do we think it was by his own free will that Carter facilitated the weaponry used in the brutal Indonesian government’s exterminating war on the Timorese? Do we see Carter by his own free will answering the Vietnamese requesting the two billion in reparations promised them in the negative with the cruel words, “The destruction was mutual.” Carter can be his own ‘nice guy’ self now that he is not in office only up to the point of not making waves for the ruling investors. Would an any ex-US president be free to confess regret for crimes the Deep State had made him commit in the name of all Americans while in office?

‘A Financial Element in the Centers of Power has Owned the Government Since the Early 1830s,’  FDR in 1932

Like the magician who keeps his audience’s attention on one hand, while his other hand prepares the magical deception, USA’s criminal media cartel keeps viewer, listener and reader attention focused on US presidents, their appointees, the whole corruption that is Congress and the courts of the Justice department, while nearly continuous genocidal illegal military action keeps going forward at the nod of USA’s real rulers, namely, that ‘financial element in the centers of power, [which] has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson’  to quote the last wealthy aristocrat insider American President, Franklin Roosevelt. [“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”Letter to Col. Edward House (21 November 1933); as quoted in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945, edited by Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), pg. 373]

Ike’s Conscience Bitten Last Words Warn of the Military Industrial Complex He Served and Made $ For

Perhaps the best example of a president being ruled by his appointees representing what some are now calling the ‘Deep State’ (but up to now without reference to FDR’s “financial element”), is President Eisenhower. This likable ‘Ike,’ out of character ordered the bloody overthrow of democratically elected popular governments of Iran, Guatemala and Congo; ordered the brutal bombing of little Laos; blocked an already agreed upon all-Vietnam election because everyone knew hero Ho Chi Minh would win; ordered a CIA prepared invasion of Cuba and threatened North Korea with nuclear destruction (the real Ike had earlier denounced the A-bombing of Japanese cities as unnecessary and unwarranted). But in the last hour of his eight years in office, the perhaps conscience bitten real Eisenhower warned the nation and world of the military industrial complex he himself had collaborated with in giving criminal orders, very often committing genocidal crimes. 

Were Ike’s genocidal decisions thought through, or was he convinced and conned by the notorious Dulles brothers, John Foster his Secretary of State and Allan, heading up the newly founded CIA, an insidiously criminal secret government agency war profiteer David Rockefeller nurtured?

David Rockefeller 

David Rockefeller

A Dangerous Hawk is Media Made

Back again to John Bolton representing investors in WMD. At the moment, Bolton is not a heavily connected person of influence like David Rockefeller’s men, the Dulles brothers, Brzezinski and Kissinger were. If criminal mainstream media did not treat him seriously, Bolton would be seen as a silly man yelling Wolf into the wind. But for argument’s sake, and because he has wars-supporting-criminal-media behind him, let’s assume for the moment that Bolton will be blown up to serious hawk stature. Then we might ask, was Bolton Trump’s own choice or a ‘choice’ mandated by the investors in WMD and war?

This is all to question whether President Trump knew it would be safer for him to appoint the most hawkish representative of the powers that be, loud mouth John Bolton, or whether it is a ploy for him to have a hawk as National Security Advisor to throw the Deep State off and give him the chance to do his own thing in the opposite direction of the military conflicts that are desired by the most powerful on Wall Street. 

Your author has always suggested that Trump has some serious backing on Wall Street from investors whose portfolios are not weighted in the manufacture of WMD and high tech delivery systems, investors who see it in their long range interests to forego the immense profits from cheap overseas’ labor, turn the ship around and invest in the USA before they becomes swamped economically by the rise of China and soon after by the economic rise of the massively populated nations of the Southern hemisphere. However, it seems for sure that the more substantial amount of powerful investors ruling the US and the world have their investments so heavily weighted in the super lucrative military industrial complex, that they must desperately count on the West’s overkill military dominance to assure Western control of the world far into the foreseeable future. A glance at our vastly over militarized world, continuing massively destructive wars and steady impoverishment of half of mankind would seem to be sufficient to assume the primacy of investments in the profitable but criminal use of Armed Forces and CIA.

It seems likely that Trump feels forced to act, in part, according to the demands of the military industrial complex establishment, which was supposed to have been captained by Hillary Clinton, butcher of the Middle East regime change invasions, bombings and false flag incidents to promote them. So are all Trumps theatrics meant to keep the situation fluid enough for two factions on Wall Street?  And how serious does Trump take the threat of assassination which was openly discussed in mainstream criminal media, amazingly immediately after his election with stories of Trump keeping his own body guards, etc. Once elected, Trump has been careful not to criticize past US foreign policy, and a year after his election, met with Deep State representatives Condoleeza Rice, who was Secretary of State during the Iraq genocide and recently, the evil genius of genocide, Henry Kissinger.

When Only a Candidate, Trump Was Able to be his own man 

Wars promoting CIA fed mainstream media has done its best to make sure few Americans remember that Trump, since early in the election campaign, had been maintaining, among other things, that the US should seek friendship with China and Russia; that he likes Xi Jinping and Putin, (America’s perennial and sacrosanct mortal enemies!) and that he would probably get along fine with them,  that NATO is obsolete; that the five trillion dollars spent on wars for regime change in the Middle East should have been spent in the US rebuilding its infrastructure;  Trump had called two term fellow Republican President, George Bush, a liar for having lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and has voiced suspicion about the 9/11 attack that happened so easily on Bush’s watch. Trump had disputed hailing former presidential candidate Senator John McCain, 2008 Republican presidential candidate, a hero for having been shot down while bombing Vietnam. Trump had asked, “why must the United States lead the world everywhere on the globe and play the role of the world’s policeman, now for example in Ukraine? ” Trump had asked, “why does the United States always pursue regime changes — Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and now it wants a regime change in Syria, Damascus, when the result is disaster.” He had stated that his opponent “brought death and disaster” outside the US.

At a campaign rally Trump had cried out, “Obama is the founder of ISIS! The founder! Crooked Hillary is the co-founder!” (British tabloids headlines already four years earlier had claimed that USA was behind the Islamic terrorists entering Syria – and in 1915, the Guardian, UK, headlined see “Now the truth emerges: how the US fueled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq”. Where would ISIS have otherwise have gotten that constant supply of brand new white Toyota trucks and an endless supply of heavy weapons and ammunition?

Most importantly, Trump had condemned and still ridicules eighty percent of US media’s reporters and commentators as pathetic liars, which comes close to the what is in reality that one hundred percent who are willing to preposterously describe America’s running crimes against humanity as heroic deeds in defense of American freedom. It seems the abomination that is the US criminal cartel of giant entertainment news and information corporations has indeed managed to have its captive audience, even most critical independent journalists, ‘forget’ what Trump said during the 2016 election campaign.

The height of Trump’s ‘dangerous unpredictability’ saw Trump defending his respect of President Putin. When challenged by his interviewer Bill O’Reily on his Feb. 5, 2017 show, “But Putin is a killer!” Trump answered, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump later added, “I was against the invasion of Iraq – a lot of people were killed.” “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” In December of 2015, Trump had told MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ “I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, a lot of killing, a lot of stupidity.” 

During the campaigning, media just ignored what candidate Trump was saying about peace with Russia and China and concentrated on keeping the public’s attention on sex scandals and Trump’s personal brash behavior. Policy makers within the Deep State must have been concerned that if this maverick candidate for the presidency didn’t shut up, the public might begin to suspect that all the regime change death and destruction starting with Korea and Vietnam was wrong.  

This week, Trump appointed hawkish John Bolton National Security Advisor, called Putin to congratulate him on his reelection, and following NATO’s example, kicked out 60 Russian diplomats. 

How to Distinguish Between When the Person Is Acting on His or Her own and When the Person Is Acting As a Representative of WMD Investments:  

Plausible answer: Peace instead of conflict between Russia and China is intelligent, so that must have been the real Trump talking.  Conflict with Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela is unintelligent, so that must be the acquiescent-to-malevolent-power Trump talking. Attacking Iran to protect himself from the Israelis, Cuba to keep the Florida vote, Venezuela for US business, and North Korea for the CIA and Pentagon.

Criminal media TV commentators and interviewers all keep harping on about a crazy, unstable, unpredictable Trump. But everyone should know that media’s job is to keep the public focused on the president and everything around him, so no one asks if there isn’t something at the bottom of it all. Remember what the most decorated ever Marine General Smedley Buttler wrote in his book War Is A Racket, “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

Why was there a First World War, at a time when the European empires were enjoying a bonanza of incoming wealth plundered from Asia, Africa and the Americas? A more than plausible answer is: the investment in weaponry and munitions became so consummate, so overwhelmingly intense, that investor control of the press dictated the war that would bring a handsome return on these monstrous investments – for example,  profits to wealthy Nobel of Nobel Prizes, the inventor of dynamite. In 1934, the US Senate’s Nye Committee investigative report found that the US was pushed into war for the benefit of huge corporate earnings. The press even managed to rile up socialist majority legislators in Germany and France to vote for war against each other. The public at large seemed caught up in the fascinating technical progress of the time, machine guns able to fire through a propeller, monstrous tank vehicles, ever larger cannons and so on. How many people watching the European empires’ arms race  worried that the weapons would be so massively used? 

In the 1930s, the world watched America’s corporations invest in, and joint venture with, a prostate Nazi Germany to bring Hitler’s Wehrmacht up to the strongest military in the world and able to destroy the socialist Soviet Union.[see 27 Million Died in Russia Because Wall Street Built Up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to Knock Out Soviet Union, OpEdNews, 8/11/2017] Best investment ever made, the Second World War made Wall Street owned USA the wealthiest of nations and the single world superpower. Investor controlled media had long backed Fascism against Communism before selling the war as a good war against Fascism. (FDR seems to have been forced to mostly stand by and watch, as his friends and business cronies wildly invested in and joint ventured with the Nazis.) [see Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler ,1976, 13 editions]

Right now, why is Deep State having its CIA managed cartel of entertainment/information/news conglomerates prime the public to hate Russians, if not to soon win a return on investments in WMD and perhaps more importantly, to avoid a loss of economic and military hegemony in an eventual multi-polar world in which the Chinese will have the most economic power and thus most influence in world affairs. Perhaps even more ominous for the Anglo-American West, is the economic rise of the whole populous Southern hemisphere.  

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Your archival research peoples historian, writing with permission to use Attorney Ramsey Clark’s name in support if this tract ends with two reminders of the precariousness of our present situation of helplessly watching the nuclear weapons race, the TV watching majority engrossed in listening in fascination to prattle of the hirelings of our real rulers, the insane and unhinged investors in WMD and war. The citizens of the world united can stop this insane expenditure, with genocide in mind.

1. On November 9, 1979, Presidential Advisor Brzezinski was woken at 3 am by a phone call with a startling message: The Soviets had just launched 250 nuclear weapons at the United States. Minutes later, Brzezinski received another call: The early-warning system actually showed 2,000 missiles heading toward the United States. As Brzezinski prepared to phone President Jimmy Carter to plan a full-scale response, he received a third call: It was a false alarm. An early warning training tape generating indications of a large-scale Soviet nuclear attack had somehow transferred to the actual early warning network, which triggered an all-too-real scramble.[ “The 3 A.M. Phone Call”. National Security Archive]

2. The greatest mind of the past century warned humankind in 1950, well before the CIA had completed its Operation Mockingbird that oversees, feeds and tightly controls the gigantic news and entertainment media corporations that produce an estimated 98% of all sources of information available to the American public. Einstein described why our civilization continues to be “like an axe in the had of the pathological criminal,” [* ]“Under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.” — [Albert Einstein, Essays in Humanism]

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In a Dec 1917 letter to Zangger, Einstein wrote

“How is it at all possible that this culture-loving era could be so monstrously amoral? More and more I come to value charity and love of one’s fellow being above everything else. … All our lauded technological progress—our very civilization—is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.”

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Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC.

Revelations last month that Google was designing software for the US military’s illegal drone warfare program have sparked outrage among employees. More than 3,000 Google workers have signed a letter to executives demanding that it end its involvement with the Pentagon.

The program, known as “Project Maven,” involves the use of artificial intelligence systems to analyze drone footage, potentially assisting the Pentagon in identifying targets for drone assassinations, which have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, most of them bystanders, across the Middle East and North Africa. Google’s involvement in the program was reported by Gizmodo last month.

The letter, addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai, declares,

“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war. Therefore we ask that Project Maven be cancelled, and that Google draft, publicize and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”

Responding to earlier criticism by Google employees last month, Diane Greene, CEO of the company’s cloud business, said the software would not “operate or fly drones” and “will not be used to launch weapons.”

The letter dismisses these feeble pretexts, declaring,

“While this eliminates a narrow set of direct applications, the technology is being built for the military, and once it’s delivered it could easily be used to assist in these tasks.”

The US government’s drone murder program, involving the assassination of people without trial, violates both the US Constitution and international law, implicating Google in activity that could lead to criminal prosecution.

The letter warns that the company’s actions “will irreparably damage Google’s brand,” and that “by entering into this contract, Google will join the ranks of companies like Palantir, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are participating doesn’t make this any less risky for Google. Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users sets it apart.”

In concludes,

“Building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance—and potentially lethal outcomes—is not acceptable.”

Google’s relationship with the military is in fact not new. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman for Google from 2001 to 2017, has a position on the Pentagon’s Defense Advisory Board, along with Google Vice President Milo Medin.

The letter points to the growing divide between the employees of technology companies, among the most highly-skilled workers anywhere in the world—many of whom have imbibed an ethos of opposition to concentrated power, surveillance, and the military—and leading executives determined to integrate Google, Facebook, and Twitter into the military/intelligence apparatus.

While workers at technology companies are some of the best-paid in the United States, nearly all of them are compelled to work grueling schedules, regularly involving workweeks of at least 60 hours, making raising a family nearly impossible. Much of their salary is taken up by housing costs. Rents have shot up by more than 50 percent in the San Francisco Bay area, the most expensive real estate market in America. The average one-bedroom apartment rent is $3,390 per month, forcing some workers to live in their cars.

Amid a growing nationwide strike wave that has led to walkouts by teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma, technology workers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the United States, and the world no doubt increasingly feel themselves at odds with their employers, who lured many away from careers in the sciences with promises of “changing the world” for the better.

Now, these workers are being told by these same executives to create systems for mass murder, surveillance, and censorship.

The New York Times, which first reported the letter, wrote that it could not get a single employee to speak on the record, no doubt testifying to the climate of intimidation and repression within the company.

Google’s relationship with the military is connected to its involvement, along with Facebook and other technology companies, in the effort to censor the Internet. Beginning in April of 2017, Google modified its search algorithms “to surface more authoritative content,” claiming that this was aimed at countering “the phenomenon of ‘fake news.’”

As the WSWS documented in an open letter to Google sent in August, the aim of these changes was “to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites.” The consequences of the changes included a nearly 70 percent (now more than 75 percent) drop in Google referrals to the WSWS.

At the time, the WSWS noted that Google’s moves to align itself with the demands of the military/intelligence apparatus would inevitably engender opposition within the company. These warnings have been confirmed.

Google’s actions last year were followed by similar moves by Facebook in January, when it announced changes to its News Feed to rely on material from “broadly trusted and high-quality sources,” a euphemism for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other corporate news publications.

Last month, Google also announced a new “News Initiative” aimed at elevating “authoritative content” in its widely used Google News section.

The involvement of Google with the military and its collaboration with intelligence agencies in censoring information online are two sides of the same process. As the ruling class prepares for an immense expansion of war and domestic repression, it is seeking to utilize the services of the giant technology companies.

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Featured image is from TheFreeThoughtProject.com.

The statements made by the Russian and Pakistani Defense Ministers after their interaction at this year’s Moscow Conference on International Security show that the military relations between the two Great Powers are on the right track and moving them closer to clinching a long-awaited strategic partnership.

Russia and Pakistan have been engaged in a fast-moving and comprehensive rapprochement across the past couple of years that’s put their relations on the trajectory of a strategic partnership, with the statements made by their Defense Ministers after their interaction at this year’s Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS) showing that their military ties in particular on definitely on the right track.

TASS reported that Sergey Shoigu had this to say when speaking with his Pakistani counterpart Khurram Dastgir Khan:

“Over the past few years, bilateral meetings have contributed to building up contacts between the Armed Forces of Russia and Pakistan in such areas as the joint drills of land troops and the navies, and also the strengthening of ties between the General Staffs. This year, our defense ministries also have an intense program of measures.

We support Pakistan’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a full-fledged member. We expect that SCO interaction will contribute to developing and strengthening friendly ties between our defense ministries.

 We are grateful to the Pakistani side for regular participation in the Moscow conference on international security. From year to year, the forum is increasingly turning into a venue for an open and professional dialogue on a wide range of present-day problems.

I had warm and comradely relations with your predecessor. On his invitation, I visited Pakistan for the first time.”

That same day, Mr. Khan spoke at the venue and was on record as saying the following about Russian-Pakistani relations:

“Both countries have, I believe, been able to transcend their history and to have a fresh beginning.

 …

 It is a beginning because, of course, that history of mistrust and essentially standing on two opposite sides is there; but, both countries, because of many geo-strategic reasons, now find it a more optimal path to be cooperating with each other.

 …

 I want to emphasize that this need not be in any way a zero-sum relationship with the United States. It is just that Pakistan has done a regional recalibration of its foreign and security policies.”

Pakistani Defense Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan speaking at the Moscow Conference on International Security in April 2018

Without a doubt, ties between the two Old Cold War-era rivals have remarkably thawed to the point where they’re now close partners in the New Cold War, though with Pakistan indirectly declaring its membership in a new Non-Aligned Movement (Neo-NAM) when describing the win-win recalibration of its policies in light of recent events. Russia’s “military diplomacy” is slated to play a crucial role in helping Moscow and Islamabad “balance” the tumultuous transition from unipolarity to multipolarity, and it’s expected that further cooperation  between their armed forces will be forthcoming with time.

There’s no better chance than now for Russia and Pakistan to clinch an official military partnership especially after Vice President Pence’s hostility towards Pakistan at the end of last year and President Trump’s aggressive tweets that marked the beginning of this one. Both point to the inevitable deterioration of the erstwhile strong US-Pakistani military partnership, while the positive interaction between the Russian and Pakistani Defense Ministers earlier this week evidently shows that the two sides are working on their own multipolar military partnership in response.

It should be reminded that this isn’t aimed against any third-party such as the US or India but is designed to advance win-win outcomes that promote regional peace and stability, to which end the “Holy Grail” of the Rus-Pak military partnership would be if Moscow sells its defensive S-400 anti-air missile systems to Islamabad. It’s still far too early to talk about the likelihood of that happening, but it would nevertheless be the crowning moment of their partnership if such a development occurred or even if credible reports emerged about prospective talks on this topic.

Curiously, the long-awaited S-400 deal between Russia and India has once again been delayed and wasn’t agreed to at the MCIS like earlier media reports wrongly predicted, and while a source told TASS that this is just because of a pricing dispute and that the contract will be signed in October, one can’t help but wonder whether New Delhi’s intransigence on this issue is due to its indignation at Moscow’s growing closeness with Islamabad and its fear of US sanctions. After all, India is trying to play Russia off against the US in order to get the best and most affordable military deals possible, so such a Chanakya-like scenario can’t be precluded.

Irrespective of Russia’s historical ties with India, Moscow is moving forward in forming a Multipolar Trilateral between itself, Beijing, and Islamabad in order to safeguard security in the vulnerable Eurasian Heartland that’s at a greater threat of US-instigated Hybrid War than ever before due to the dangerous introduction of Daesh to the Afghan battlespace. The grand strategic vision is the formation of a Golden Ring of Multipolar Great Powers, of which Pakistan is the most geostrategically important, and this explains one of the driving motivations behind the Rus-Pak military partnership that was on full display earlier this week in Moscow.

The US and India will likely try to convince the other that this emerging Eurasian institution is aimed against them, shrewdly predicting that this misleading infowar narrative will get their counterpart to commit even more to their planned 100-year strategic partnership by providing a “defensive justification” of it to their respective domestic audiences and the global public at large. The fait accompli that’s forming per the US’ “scenario superiority” of the situation is the division of Greater Eurasia into the two blocs of the Heartland-centric Golden Circle and the Rimland-based NATO-“Quint”, with everything in between them in West and Southeastern Asia falling under the Neo-NAM and reaping the benefits of “competitive connectivity”.

It may already be too late to reverse this trend, and there’s no telling whether the pivot state of India even has any sincere desire to do so, but in any case, the developing Russian-Pakistani Strategic Partnership and the two sides’ strengthening military relations that have come about because of their fast-moving rapprochement in recent years will form an axis of stability in Eurasia during these turbulent times, with these two Great Powers interestingly interacting with one another for the greater collective good in the New Cold War unlike their previous pattern of behavior during the Old Cold War.

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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.

As many governments across the Western world begin to exile their Russian diplomats back east, the most fundamental questions relating to the Skripal case remain not only unanswered, but the faintest sniff of any real evidence is yet to make an appearance before the public.

There is no doubt that Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Amber Rudd, et al, have worked hard to achieve a consensus amongst NATO and EU states, and has had some success in persuading other leaders to condemn and react to the unproven Russian involvement.

Many of these leaders, perhaps, have reasons of their own for latching on to such a flimsy agreement. France, Germany, Italy, and Holland are among a number of nations reeling from their own domestic political turbulence. Collapsing centrist parties have watched their traditional voter bases divide and file off to the left and right, as all over Europe the political polarisation hardens. Being seen to be part of a new unified front will, they hope, strengthen their domestic positions. It is a familiar response from desperate neoliberal administrations; instead of taking responsibility for the declining interest in their policies, they would rather fall back on the policy of fear in a dangerous attempt to appear ‘strong and stable’.

Manipulating fear of a common enemy of the West, brings with it certain benefits for the ruling classes. Not only does it present a superficial ‘toughness’ that leaders can exploit at home, it also makes large sections of the public easier to control and susceptible to further misinformation. Chomsky suggested:

“Democratic societies can’t force people [to go to war, in this case]. Therefore, they have to control what they think.”

You could also finish that sentence, “Therefore, democracy must be undermined.”

With the Skripal case we have seen the UK mass media swing into action in order to ramp up public fear, obliterate individual analysis and control the narrative of how Brits, loyal to their country, should respond. The BBC, ITN and Channel4 News outlets have each backed Theresa May’s assumptions and reactionary behaviour towards Russia. Jeremy Corbyn’s perspective, that the government needs to wait until real facts emerge about who is responsible, has been purposefully vilified and distorted by these networks, to echo George Bush’s infamous, “You’re either with us, or against us,” mentality. The BBC, for their flagship political debate programme, Newsnight, even went so far as to alter Jeremy Corbyn’s flat-cap to look more like a Russian bearskin, before pasting the doctored image onto a deep red backdrop of the Kremlin.

Heightening hysteria of a Russian threat is win-win politics for many hawkish MPs, who will gain increases in their arms industry share profits, and political leverage to turn up Defence spending. Simultaneously, the shrill is loud enough to drown out domestic criticism of such scandalous acts as cutting free school meals for a million kids from struggling families.

Of course, the main driver of much of this remains ideology. The golden rule of the British establishment has long been to stamp out any sign of socialism long before it can develop into anything meaningful; and it has done an excellent job since destroying Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto.

It has been a long 35 years for the principled socialist. But in that time, things have changed radically. The commercial scraps from military technology found their way into public homes in the form of computers around the same time. Within 10 years, the world-wide-web had organised the internet into something accessible by the new generation, for whom computers were as everyday as television. In 2005, one of this generation, began hooking up Ivy League universities to his social media software, Facebook. The use of social media data by companies such as Cambridge Analytica to subvert global democratic processes is a negative outcome of the growth of ICT. Whilst big-data is a worrying aspect of the growth in digital industry, the ongoing rush by both Google and the Chinese government to bring about the singularity in artificial intelligence, where machines are equal in intellectual ability with human beings, is even more worrying for those of us concerned about the future of militarism. We are told that there are great social benefits that flow from AI, but the thought of autonomous weaponry making decisions on who lives and dies in the many so-called theatres of war is truly scary, and no longer just the dystopian rambling of science-fiction writers.

Whatever the truth behind the Salisbury Incident, we have witnessed the UK establishment’s completely cynical exercise in ramping up public fear of war, through the demonization of a major state. This behaviour is nothing new and has been used unsparingly since the end of the second world war; however, since 2001 and the commencement of the War on Terror, this fear and war mongering has intensified and become more frequent. These are the desperate actions of an ideologically bankrupt set of inept politicians; and, they are not exclusive to the Tory Party.

However, the establishment’s persistent use of its mainstream media arm to concuss the public into consensus, appears to be losing some of its punching power. This has been in no small part due to Jeremy Corbyn’s consistent message of doing the right thing, as in this case where he urged restraint before rushing to judgement. Nevertheless, the governments in NATO, will continue to use the threat of war to justify increasing expenditure on more and more technologically sophisticated methods of arm’s length killing, mostly of the dispossessed, in countries that don’t, or seem unlikely to, conform to Western hegemonic ideology.

Prevailing facts surrounding incidents such as the Salisbury poisoning, become almost irrelevant once the narrative has been set out; the public simply needs to choose between loyalty to, or betrayal of, Britain. Manipulation of public opinion in this way will no doubt carry on until it is either fully exposed for what it is, or until a genuine anti-war government can turn us away from the ‘unavoidable’ conflicts we are purposefully being steered towards.

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Johnny Charles and Harry Rogers are both members of the Labour Party and Ceredigion Stop the War. On 28^th April, the panel event, “Why the UK needs a new Foreign Policy” will take place in Aberystwyth, and will feature talks from Mark Serwotka, Lindsey German, Adam Joannes & Ayla Gol.

One could forgive the average reader for thinking reporters covering bots had been replaced by bots. The formula is something we’ve seen a million times now: After a controversial story breaks, media outlets insist that “Russian bots” used the controversy to “sow discord” or “exploit tensions”; a “Russian bot dashboard” is offered as proof. (These “dashboards” let one see what Russian bots—automated online persona controlled by the Kremlin—are allegedly  “pushing” on social media.)

The substance of the concern or discord is underreported or ignored altogether. Online conflict is neatly dismissed as a Kremlin psyop, the narrative of Russia interference in every aspect of our lives is reinforced, and one is reminded to be “aware” of Russian trolls online.

Note the latest iteration of this story:

• Russian Bots Are Rallying Behind Embattled Fox News Host Laura Ingraham as Advertisers Dump Her Show (Business Insider, 4/1/16)
• Russian Bots Defend Fox News Pundit Laura Ingraham as Advertisers Leave Following David Hogg Tweet (Newsweek, 4/2/18)
• Russian Bots Are Tweeting Their Support of Embattled Fox News Host Laura Ingraham (Washington Post, 4/2/18)
• Russian Bots Flock to Laura Ingraham Feud With Parkland Student: Report (The Hill, 4/2/18)
• Russian Bots Rush to Laura Ingraham’s Defense in David Hogg Feud (Washington Times, 4/2/18)

Not to be confused with the Russian bots that were heard from after the Austin bombings from last month:

• Russian Social Accounts Adding to Complaints That Austin Bombings Aren’t Being Covered (NPR, 3/19/18)
• Fallout of Austin Bombings Exposes Racial Tensions, Russian Bots and Media Distrust (France 24, 4/1/18)
• Russian Bots Were Sowing Discord During Hunt for Austin Bomber, Group Says (Houston Chronicle, 3/20/18)

Or the bots from Russia that were seen in the wake of the Parkland massacre:

• After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced (New York Times, 2/19/18)
• After the Parkland Shooting, Pro-Russian Bots Are Pushing False-Flag Allegations Again (Washington Post, 2/16/18)
• How Russian Trolls Exploited Parkland Mass Shooting on Social Media (Politifact, 2/22/18)

One problem, though: The “Russian bot dashboard” reporters generally cite as their primary source, Hamilton 68, effectively told reporters to stop writing these pieces six weeks ago. According to a report from Buzzfeed (2/28/18)—hardly a fan of the Kremlin—Russian bot stories are “bullshit”:

By now you know the drill: massive news event happens, journalists scramble to figure out what’s going on, and within a couple hours the culprit is found — Russian bots.

Russian bots were blamed for driving attention to the Nunes memo, a Republican-authored document on the Trump-Russia probe. They were blamed for pushing for Roy Moore to win in Alabama’s special election. And here they are wading into the gun debate following the Parkland shooting. “[T]he messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult,” wrotethe New York Times in a story following the shooting, citing little more than “Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia.”

This is, not to mince words, total bullshit.

The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund.

But even some of the people who popularized that metric now acknowledge it’s become totally overblown.

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots.

Watts, the media’s most cited expert on so-called “Russian bots” and co-founder of Hamilton 68, says the narrative is “overdone.” The three primary problems, as Buzzfeed, reported, are:

1. The bots on the Hamilton 68 dashboard are not necessarily connected to Russia: “They are not all in Russia,” Watts told Buzzfeed. “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia—at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.”  (Hamilton 68 doesn’t specify which accounts are viewed as Russian bots; that’s a trade secret.)
2. Twitter is clogged with bots, so telling which are Russian and which aren’t is impossible. Bots naturally follow trending or popular stories, like all the stories cited above; how does one distinguish “Russian bot” activity versus normal online trend-chasing?
3. Tons of bots are run out of the United States, in totally routine partisan marketing efforts; the singular obsession with Russia lets these shady players off the hook. And, again, it’s almost impossible to distinguish between simply partisan GOP bots and “Russian” ones.

Put another way: These stories are of virtually no news value, other than smearing whichever side the “Russian bots” happened to support, and reinforcing in the public mind that one cannot trust unsanctioned social media accounts. Also that the Russians are hiding in every shadow, waiting to pounce.

Another benefit of the “Russian bots agitate the American public” stories is they prevent us from asking hard questions about our society. After a flurry of African-American Twitter users alleged a racist double standard in the coverage of the Austin bombings in March (which killed two people, both of them black), how did NPR address these concerns? Did it investigate their underlying merit? Did it do media analysis to see if there was, in fact, a dearth of coverage due to the victims’ race? No, it ran a story on how Russia bots were fueling these concerns: “Russian Social Accounts Adding to Complaints That Austin Bombings Aren’t Being Covered” (All Things Considered, 3/19/18):

NPR’s Philip Ewing: Well, there’s two things taking place right now. Some of this is black users on Twitter saying that because some of the victims in this story were not white, this isn’t getting as much attention as another story about bombings, or a series of bombings in the United States, would or should, in this view.

This seems like a pretty serious charge, and would have a lotof historical precedent! Does NPR interrogate this thread further? Does it interview any of these “black users”? No, they move on to the dastardly Russians:

Ewing: But there’s also additional activity taking place on Twitter which appears initially to be connected with the Russian social media agitation that we’ve sort of gotten used to since the 2016 presidential race. There are dashboards and online tools that let us know which accounts are focusing on which hashtags from the Russian influence-mongers who’ve been targeting the United States since 2016, and they, too, have been tweeting about Austin bombings today.

NPR host Ailsa Chang: The theory being that these Russian bots are being used to drive a wedge between groups of people here in the United States about this issue, about the coverage being potentially racist.

Ewing: That’s right.

Nothing to see here! There’s a problem in our society—systemic racism in American media—and rather than an examination of whether it’s affecting coverage here, what the listener gets is yet another boilerplate story about “Russian bots,” the degree, scope and impact of which is wholly unknown, and likely inconsequential. Hesitant to cite Hamilton 68 by name (perhaps because its co-founder mocked this very kind of story a few weeks prior), NPR reporter Ewing simply cites “dashboards and online tools” as his source.

Which ones? It doesn’t really matter, because “Russian bots support X” reports are a conditioning exercise more than a story. The fact that this paint-by-numbers formula is still being applied weeks after the primary source’s co-founder declared himself “not convinced on this bot thing” and called the story “overdone” demonstrates this. The goal is not to convey information or give the reader tools to better understand the world, it’s to give the impression all unrest is artificially contrived by a foreign entity, and that the status quo would otherwise be rainbows and sunshine. And to remind us that the Enemy lurks everywhere, and that no one online without a blue checkmark can be trusted.

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Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org.

Featured image is from the author.